"Speaking of Annihilation": Mobilizing for War Against Human and Insect Enemies, 1914- 1945 Author(s): Edmund P. Russell Source:The Journal of American History, Vol. 82, No. 4 (Mar., 1996), pp. 1505-1529 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Organization of American Historians Stable URL: Accessed: 13-10-2016 01:38 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at Organization of American Historians, Oxford University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of American History This content downloaded from 169.228.79.88 on Thu, 13 Oct 2016 01:38:13 UTC All use subject to

"Speaking of Annihilation": Mobilizing for War against Human and Insect Enemies, 1914-1945 Edmund P. Russell III In 1944 and 1945, two periodicals with very different audiences published sim images. Both showed half-human, half-insect creatures, talked of the "annihila of these vermin, and touted modern technology as the means to accomplish th end. One piece, a cartoon in the United States Marines' magazine Leatherneck, showed a creature labeled "Louseous Japanicas" and said its "breeding grounds around the Tokyo area . . . must be completely annihilated." (See figure 1.) A month after the cartoon appeared, the United States began mass incendiary bomb- ings of Japanese cities, followed by the atomic blasts that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although the Leatherneck cartoon was surely intended to be humorous and hyperbolic, calls for annihilation of human enemies had, by the end of the war, become realistic. So too with insect enemies. The second cartoon, an advertisement in a chemical industry journal, promoted perfumes to eliminate insecticide odors. (See figure 2.) Tapping the rhetoric that pervaded World War II, the text began, "Speaking of annihilation." The accompanying image showed three creatures with insect bodies, each with a stereotypical head representing a national enemy. The Italian creature lay on its back, an allusion to Allied victory over the Italian army. The German and Japanese creatures remained standing, as guns blasted all three with chemical clouds. Like human enemies, the advertisement implied, insect enemies could and should be annihilated. That possibility, too, had come within reach by the end of World War II. The Allies killed disease-bearing lice and mosquitoes over wide areas using a powerful new insecticide called DDT (dichlorodiphenyltri- chloroethane), and entomologists called for the extermination of entire species.