Meet Private SNAFU,

the character that let slip the greatest secret of World War II,       

 back in the days of the Second World War, real life actors of the age were donning uniforms to help the war effort, like Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable, and in fantasy life studios from Walt Disney to Warner Brothers, animation studios were letting slip the dogs and ducks of war, Donald, of course, was a natural recruit (he’s a sailor, after all), and into the fray came Daffy, Popeye, Superman and Bugs Bunny who did his bit by peddled war bonds, and in this climate the army’s secret mascot was born, Private Snafu, who is portrayed as a short, bald, motor-mouthed Brooklynite with a penchant for catching tropical diseases, leaking classified information, and accidentally blowing himself up, He is, in fact, a shining example of what a soldier should not be, and he made immortal the army’s favourite phrase, above is the family rated acronym, 

and here he is, 

the first, Coming!! Snafu!!,

 the studio made many films on many subjects like keeping secrets, as shown in the Spies cartoon,

when it came down to finding a group of animators willing to take on Private Snafu, Disney proved too expensive and too dictatorial, and so the contract went to Leon Schlesinger’s Warner Bros cartoons studio, just a few of the names that went into making the films were Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett, Frank Tashlin, and the “Man of a Thousand Voices” himself, Mel Blanc, then add Theodor Geisel (a.k.a. “Dr. Seuss”), with so many dangerous minds on the job, it’s little wonder that work on the cartoons was carried out in the utmost secrecy, the security measures, which divided up production duties among different departments whose individual workers were not permitted to see the finished films, which made the Warner Brothers operation look like a division of the secret service with so many secrets, but in spite of the hush-hush atmosphere, the subject matter seems harmless enough on the surface, all twenty-six surviving episodes, all black-and-white, run through all aspects of military safety topics, everything from how to maintain proper hygiene in the field, to what to do when faced with a squadron of malarial mosquitoes, to why it’s simply not a good idea to go skipping through a mine field,

 then it happened, in May of 1944, Jones and his team produced Going Home, the cartoon was intended as yet another warning against loose lips on leave, upon arriving back in his hometown, Snafu proceeds to regale a succession of family members, girlfriends, bartenders, and gas station attendants with tales of Allied manoeuvres, new landing field designs, and other “restricted stuff.” then in one of those stranger in than life coincidences Snafu brings a date to the local movie theatre, where a newsreel flashes: “U. S. SECRET WEAPON BLASTS JAPS.”

and this is the secret weapon, as in the cartoon, what none of the cartoonist knew was that there were at the same time hundreds of scientist working in a dessert far, far away working on exactly that, the Manhattan Project! 

when the top brass got wind of the fact that Warner Brothers had independently invented the atomic bomb, the cloak and dagger brigade went into high gear, 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, as far as is known there were no prosecutions, how could there have been? to do so would have meant acknowledging the existence of the Manhattan Project, and there you have it, how the worst recruit in the army dropped the bomb!