There's one hero, one icon who stood before all others during World War II.
An icon named Donald Duck.
(News Clips)
I need to do an unboxing. Here it is — this is a replica of a World War II patch for the USS Laub, and as you can see it features
Donald Fauntleroy Duck looking very very "Warry." Gonna wear this right here right over my heart.
There were at least 200 World War II insignia representing service branches, divisions,
and other military groups that starred Donald Duck. I want to figure out how Disney got
involved in the first place, how these insignia got made, and maybe most importantly...why Donald?
I think the answer says something important about how it really felt to serve during World War II.
Okay let's wait a second before we get to Nazi Donald Duck. Though that was a thing — I'll explain
it in a second. How did Disney get involved in the first place? A couple weeks ago i took a field trip
to read a book that i could only get at a college library. Really hard to find.
I'm a man on YouTube in my 30s, you didn't think you'd see me on an electric vehicle?
So a lot of this info is from "Donald Duck Joins Up" which is all about Disney
and war. So Disney was kind of broke at the end of the 1930s and then they had this existential
threat in the form of World War II to the entire movie industry, so they were kind of willing to
take any work that they could get, and that included lending a hand to various different
governments that needed animation services. By the time of Pearl Harbor Day, December 7th,
1941, Disney basically knew war was coming. And the very next day they get a contract
from the U.S. military to animate 20 different training films for aircraft like this one.
"This riveting technique is fairly simple." Well, that's riveting. It can just be so hard to make friends.
The finished rivet should have a formed head." Outside of instructional films, one
of their first experiments was a tax education film called "The New Spirit"
in which Donald Duck filled out his income taxes. You thought things couldn't get more exciting!
And i haven't even mentioned the Canadian War Bond movie! All this pushed Disney and Donald Duck into
a World War II association. 32 million people in 11,800 theaters saw "The New Spirit" and they even got
a thrilling save for your taxes sequel. "You must save for victory." That led to the aforementioned
Nazi Donald in "Der Fuehrer's Face." It's not as bad as it looks. Basically, Donald has a
nightmare that he's a Nazi and then he wakes up to find out he's just a good old American duck
once again. So that establishes that during World War II, Donald Duck was a big movie
star and he was associated with wartime stuff. But how did they get to the patches?
In 1942, the New York Times profiled all these insignia. Today, eBay is so good for browsing these.
All of these are different Donald Duck patches that you can find on eBay.
The gunnery school in Arizona. There's your Donald! Whoa this is cool. Landing school Donald Duck.
So in 1939, well before Pearl Harbor and the movies, Walt Disney got the first request for an
insignia. "Walt Disney orders his famous cartoon characters into battle dress." Next March, they
made an insignia for the Navy's Mosquito Fleet, a bunch of torpedo boats. This started a trend.
Disney kind of had a little business out of these, but really it was just a wartime
service thing. The studio eventually put five men on the task including this guy.
"Roy!"
This is him when he was the adult Mouseketeer in the Mickey Mouse Club. Here he is drawing for the gang in a slightly more dignified role. More than a thousand insignia ended up on bombers patches and pretty much everywhere.
So all these artists were working really hard on these insignia, but one character stood out.
According to that book, Donald was by far the most popular character, almost double second place. Why
him? Here's the question I've got: why was Donald Duck the beloved avatar of American servicemen?
Now i have caveats — other characters, they were in World War II propaganda movies
and Donald was already a big star at the time, so it makes sense that he was pretty popular.
But there's something bigger going on here.
Why was Donald the biggest of all? Why did so many people request him as their symbol? I think I
have an idea. Mickey was an everyman, but he was an everyman who was always heroic, always aggressive.
Donald Duck sits somewhere in the middle. He has a unique character that a lot of people responded to.
Even today, after years of deconstruction by movies like "Saving Private Ryan" and "Dunkirk,"
we think of World War II soldiers as eager heroes, as the winners. But they didn't know they were the
winners at the time. They just knew they had to fight. In the short "Donald Gets Drafted," you can see
a distillation of Donald Duck's uniquely appealing persona. He is ornery, and a screw-up, and vain,
but he has to serve, even if it means he ends up peeling potatoes the entire war.
That spoke to a group of soldiers who were ornery, and screw-ups, and vain, and ready to serve even if
it meant they had to peel potatoes the entire war. In 1939, film critic Lewis Jacobs wrote, "Of late it
has been said that Donald Duck of the inflammable temper and vicious tongue is gradually usurping
the popularity of Mickey. Is this happening because Donald's desperation is closer to the time's
spirit than Mickey's triumphant aggressiveness? And later, during the war, in 1942, E.B. White wrote:
"Look at Donald Duck, he was fixed in his ways, but when this thing hit him he gave up his regular
line of work to make a propaganda film...and there are dozens like him (although nobody is quite like
Donald) who have pulled up their roots, mad with love for the beautiful United States,
only to find that she is a difficult lady to squire." Donald Duck didn't become a World War II
hero because he was already heroic. That wouldn't have spoken to the millions of Americans who had
a war thrust upon them. World War II soldiers were obsessed with Donald Duck because, just
like everyone else in America, he didn't start out a hero. He had to rise to the occasion.
Okay that is it for this one. Thank you for joining me. Uh, if you haven't been here before
this is a personal channel where I do history, personal videos, and I tape things to myself. Uh,
I would love it if you subscribed, if you aren't already subscribed already.
Or if you left me a comment — let me know what you think of these shorts or if you have any
questions or opinions about it. Um, I didn't even know, like, what Donald Duck was like
honestly before this video, so I learned a lot researching it and i'm sure there's a lot more
out there that i don't know about. Uh yeah, that's it for this one. Thank you for joining me, and
until then i'm gonna have this taped right here right over my heart. All right. See ya.