Propaganda posters played a huge role in World War II, providing morale-boosting

messages, instilling the need for silence and secrecy, and bringing home the importance
of what each soldier and worker did.

This poster belongs to the category

of military propaganda. It was used
to warn against careless talk which
could provide useful information to
the enemy.
The ad consists of two illustrations,
a headline and a subhead, on a
bright red background.
The first illustration is a drawing of
a rat-trap that has already
snapped. The bait is a piece of
newspaper that is still in the trap.
The second illustration is a
caricature of the Axis’s
leaders; Hirohito, Hitler and
Mussolini.
The headline is divided into two
parts, above and below the rat-trap.
It says “Keep your….(mouth)…
shut!”, where the word “mouth” has
been replaced by the drawing of
the trap, meaning that the mouth
can be as dangerous as a trap. The
subhead says “Don’t give the rats
any information!”.

This ad uses imperative tense in

order to stress the importance of
keeping military information secret.
The whole message is a metaphor.
The dictators are compared to rats. This linguistic device makes them disgusting, dirty and
mean.
The bait shows the dictators want information people might know. Moreover the trap has
already snapped but the bait is still there. This means the dictators failed because the
citizens protected the information with the rat-trap, that symbolizes the silence of the
American population.
 This poster was typical of the fear-based
campaign designed to keep people from
accidentally blabbing about naval movements.

The ad consists of an illustration, a headline

and a subhead. The illustration shows a war
ship that is sinking. The background is red
and the stylized sea is blue. The text of the
headline and the word “might” are written in
capital letters, while “Sink Ships” is in small
letters. The headline says “Loose Lips” that
means careless talk. The subhead says
“might Sink Ships”, so it refers to the
possibility of interceptions of
communications by the Axis that could end
in revealing the positions of war ships.

The message is short and striking. The

bright colors of the ad attract the reader’s
attention and its simplicity makes it easy to
understand.

The ad uses strong sound devices. It has

two alliterations, one in the headline and
one in the subhead. There is also a rhyme between the words “lips” and “ships”.

The ad makes use of a rhetorical figure : a metonymy. The careless talk of “Loose Lips”
brings to the destruction of the ship, but the ad says it is the talk that sinks the ships.