Welcome back! If this is your first time on my blog, welcome! I’m Zoe, and I write things here sometimes. This particular post is part of a series of weekly reflection posts! It’s my eighth week doing these, and I think, for the most part, they are getting better as time goes on. 

This week in humanities 10, we’ve been continuing our studies on World War Two. It’s a super interesting unit! Our final product is going to be a podcast telling a story that occurred during the war, with the help of an interviewee. I’m extremely excited to see what improvements I can make on this project as opposed to our last project. 

As part of our research, we’ve been learning about the Battle of Dunkirk. We did some really interesting things to build our knowledge, and at the end of this sub-topic, we watched the trailer for Dunkirk. One thing stood out to me while watching. With in the first few moments, we see soldier Harry Styles reach into the sky and grasp a Nazi propaganda poster. See if you can catch it here,

The recreation of the original poster says, “WE SURROUND YOU”. This is a horrifying thing to see falling from the sky, dropped from German Luftwaffe planes. The recreated poster can be see down below. 

Below this text, you can see the original. 

The two posters have some stark similarities. The message is obviously the same, the Germans surround you, there is no hope for the allies, surrender or loose many more men to the superior German army. They also have some similar design elements, such as the map, and the message emboldened on the poster.

The differences, however, show much more about the War than the similarities. On the original poster from Dunkirk, it has both French and English writing. This is inevitably because both the French and the English had soldiers in Dunkirk, fighting the Nazis. Double the languages, double the terror. 

These posters were a great example of how effective the Germans were at warfare. Where combat is most commonly thought of as physical, mental combat can be just as deadly. Destroying the hope and morale of the allies would cause damage much less visible than the bombings. 

In the end, the German’s combat skills would be beat by the allies, but not without claiming the lives of countless men, and mentally damaging those who survived. 

I hope you learned a little bit from this post, and I’ll see you back here next week, for another post!

-Zo