Private Snafu Goes to War

[EndtheMadnessNow]

This, once again, was the spring of 1944. At that very moment, grave-looking scientists in remote desert bunkers were smoking cigarettes, poring over blueprints, and ordering shipments of uranium-235. When the powers-that-be got wind of the fact that Warner Bros. had independently invented the atomic bomb, shady departments flew into action. The cartoon was pulled, not to see the light of day until some years after the war, and the filmmakers, who had no clue as to what was happening, suddenly found themselves in the middle of a poorly written spy thriller, complete with intimidating visits from government spooks in homburgs and trench coats. There were no prosecutions, of course. How could there have been? To do so would have meant acknowledging the existence of the Manhattan Project over a year before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not to mention that this was no conspiracy, but rather an accident of ink, paint, and imagination. All the same, this chance unveiling reminds us that cartoons are themselves sites of fusion, crucibles where technology, violence, and creativity combine in ways that collapse the divide between reality and fantasy, leaving us to ponder which is more disturbing: the fact that these comic minds could randomly hit upon the most significant breakthrough in modern warfare, or that the scientists responsible for designing and building the most destructive weapon in human history — a device capable of eradicating all life on Earth in the blink of an eye — seemed to share so much in common with the creator of Wile E. Coyote.

Perhaps the ultimate irony is not that a series of military training films obsessed with maintaining secrecy nearly let the bomb drop, but that the Snafu cartoons, which flirted so promiscuously with subversion as a mode of catharsis, accidentally succeeded in becoming genuinely subversive. Nevertheless, when the reels were shelved after the war, it’s doubtful this was due to their military indiscretions, but more likely out of fear that their racial caricatures would offend a newly rehabilitated Germany and Japan. Now declassified and available in the public domain, the films offer a glimpse of a time before enemies became friends and friends enemies, before the Cold War ushered in a new situation, even more fouled up, in which Snafu’s “secret weapon” threatened — and continues to threaten — an ending with no merry melody, no curtain drawn, and no Porky Pig to stammer “That’s all, folks!”




Mark David Kaufman received his Ph.D. in English literature from Tufts University. He has published critical essays in Hypermedia Joyce Studies and Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. Currently, he is at work on a book project, tentatively titled Secret States: Modernism, Espionage, and the Official Secrets Act. For more information, please visit his website: www.markdavidkaufman.com.