Cartoons of WWII

Years ago I read about an AP history teacher who discovered that his students struggled with understanding and interpreting political cartoons. His approach was to have the daily opening activity being interpreting a cartoon. With the expansion of reading into the content areas, understanding cartoons has become an important and often overlooked topic. Seemingly simple cartoons like Calvin and Hobbes are often written at a high level because the amount of background knowledge and vocabulary use require a lot from the reader. Calvin and Hobbes has the advantage of being contemporary. When it comes to political cartoons, however, the background knowledge to get them is much more challenging.

Tony Husband's collection, Cartoons of World War II, purports to present cartoons from both sides of the conflict. In truth the vast majority of the cartoons are from the Allied view point with a few from the viewpoints of the Axis powers. Captions around the cartoon identify characters, key symbols and topics that the reader may be unfamiliar with. (I did not know that ducks were a German symbol for lies.) He highlights a few of the more prolific cartoonists of the time with short biographies. If you wanted to do a gallery walk of cartoons as an introduction to the WWII unit, you would need to include actual photos of the key players and more from the Axis point of view. This would be an interesting approach to showcasing the war and working on understanding political cartoons. A simple chart like the one below might be helpful to guide the exploration of the cartoons.

Cartoon title	Who are the characters shown?
What symbols are present?	Allies, Axis or Resistance viewpoint
What is the message of the cartoon?	What do you wonder about as a result of the cartoon or about the cartoon?

An interesting book, but fails to deliver on presenting a balanced view of cartoons during the war.