How Walt Disney Used Cartoons to Support the War Effort

Walt Disney was a proud patriot who never hesitated to serve his country. At 16, he was accepted as a Red Cross volunteer and spent 10 months in France as a driver at the end of World War I. Twenty years later, he unhesitatingly offered the services of his studio to the U.S. War Department as World War II was festering overseas.

Over the course of the war, Disney produced scores of training films for the Army, Navy, and others, as well as several theatrical “propaganda cartoons” illustrating the horrors of Nazi ideology. Disney’s talented artists also created nearly 1,300 combat insignia free of charge. Disney did this, says Disney historian David Lesjak, because he felt he owed it to the men and women in the service who had supported his cartoons when they were kids.

Disney’s involvement with the War Department started in November 1940 when he reached out to the defense committee of the Association of Motion Picture Producers and the National Defense Advisory Commission to see if they would be interested in working with the studio on war-related films. A few months later, Lesjak reports, Disney created the Disney Defense Division, directed by staff writer Robert Carr, who was instructed to secure work from the government and defense industry.

“The first film created by the new department was Four Methods of Flush Riveting, made for Lockheed in March 1941,” notes Lesjak, author of Service with Character: The Disney Studio & World War II. “It was created to train the flood of new Lockheed workers.”

Four Methods of Flush Riveting (Uploaded to YouTube by Walt Disney World War II)

The next month, a presentation by Disney and select members of his studio staff so impressed John Grierson, head of the National Film Board of Canada, that Grierson immediately signed a contract for four war bond films and one military training film. This was followed by a contract from the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, offered the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, to produce 20 training films on aircraft and warship identification.

Pretty soon, Walt Disney had all the military contract work he could handle. The War Department was a notable presence at his studio, even placing guards to check employee ID badges as they arrived for work, Lesjak notes. Many Disney employees were given military deferments so they could work on government projects.

Film historian and critic Leonard Maltin interviewed Disney’s nephew, Roy E. Disney, who as a young boy used to ride his bicycle around the studio lot during the war years. “Roy remembered that suddenly the studio was full of military people,” Maltin recalls. “They moved into the brand-new Burbank studio, which had just opened in 1940. Some of the material they were working on was classified, so there were certain rooms and corridors that Roy wasn’t allowed to enter. It had a dramatic effect on the studio.”

The Disney studio produced around 170 training and educational films over the course of the war, many of which had multiple chapters. A sampling includes Protection Against Chemical Warfare, Aircraft Carrier Landing Qualifications, High Level Precision Bombing, Automotive Electricity for Military Vehicles, Fundamentals of Artillery Weapons, Aerology for Navy, and Rules of the Nautical Road.

Some of the training and educational films featured popular Disney characters. The war bond films created for the National Film Board of Canada, for example, featured the Three Little Pigs, the Seven Dwarfs, and Donald Duck. “A lot of the animation was lifted from previous cartoons and readapted,” Lesjak reports. “New animation was added where needed, but they tried to keep that to a minimum.”

In 1943, Disney also produced five propaganda cartoons for theatrical release: Reason and Emotion, Chicken Little, Education for Death, Victory Through Air Power, and Der Fuehrer’s Face. These cartoons were specifically created to reveal the harsh realities of National Socialism, and they didn’t pull their punches. Education for Death, for example, based on Gregor Zeimer’s 1941 book Education for Death: The Making of a Nazi, is about a German boy who grows up indoctrinated in Nazi ideology and is ultimately killed on the battlefield.

Education for Death (Uploaded to YouTube by Public Domain Remastered)

“These cartoons were part of an effort to explain why our sons and fathers and brothers, and to some degree our mothers and sisters too, were engaged in the war,” observes Maltin, author of Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. “It was about hearts and minds.”

Der Fuehrer’s Face is the funniest of the four propaganda cartoons, and features Donald Duck as a hapless worker in Nazi Germany who toils “48 hours a day for the Fuerhrer” assembling bombs and bullets. Originally titled Donald Duck in Nutziland, the cartoon was changed to Der Fuehrer’s Face to capitalize on a then-popular song by that title written by Disney composer Oliver Wallace and recorded by bandleader Spike Jones. The record sold more than 1.5 million copies, and Der Fuehrer’s Face won the Academy Award for Best Cartoon Short Subject in 1943. “New York radio personality Martin Block offered a free copy of the record to everyone who pledged a $50 war bond, raising around $60,000,” Lesjak notes.

Der Fuehrer’s Face (Uploaded to YouTube by mouselounge)

Disney’s military support during the war years may have kept the lights on and his workers employed, but there were a number of issues that caused significant problems for the company. Most devastating financially was the loss of essential foreign markets as war spread across the globe, ultimately leaving just the United States, Canada, and England.

Some theater owners also added to Disney’s woes. For example, Disney produced two films for the Treasury Department, The New Spirit and The Spirit of ’43, to encourage Americans to pay their taxes on time. The studio lost money on the first film because of the number of Technicolor prints that were required, notes Lesjak. It also lost film bookings of Donald Duck short cartoons because some theater managers replaced the regular Donald Duck short cartoons, for which they would have paid a fee to Disney, with the income tax cartoons, which the owners received for free from the government.

The Spirit of ’43 (Uploaded to YouTube by Coconut Press)

In addition, a misunderstanding with the War Department over production costs caused a few financial headaches. “Walt made the films for cost with no profit,” Lesjak explains. “He actually lost money because his definition of ‘at cost’ was different from the government’s. Walt’s definition was the cost to produce the film plus operating expenses, while the government saw overhead as Walt’s responsibility. Once Walt figured out how the government would pay, there were no further problems.”

According to Lesjak, Walt Disney was even accused of war profiteering by some when it became known that his studio was being compensated for the government films it produced — even though there was literally no profit. The ridiculous accusation hurt Disney tremendously.

Despite these and other challenges, the Disney studio still managed to release a handful of full-length animated features during the war years, including Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), Saludos Amigos (1942), and The Three Caballeros (1944). “To maintain a commercial release schedule like that must have taken herculean effort and planning,” says Maltin.

Disney’s relationship with the War Department ended with the conclusion of the war in August 1945. The military packed up, and Disney went back to doing what he did best: producing entertaining cartoons and features.

“Walt was the embodiment of the American dream,” concludes Lesjak. “He was a patriot and he loved America. In 1963, the Freedoms Foundation honored him with the George Washington Honor Medal, which recognized him as an “Ambassador of Freedom for the United States.” During his acceptance speech, Walt said, ‘If you could see close in my eyes, the American flag is waving in both of them, and up my spine is growing this red, white, and blue stripe.”