“In peacetime Americans open, discard, and replace an average of 45 million tin cans daily. Today, as part of of America’s industrial might, those tin cans are helping to win the war. They are cans filled with food and explosives, and and an amazing variety of necessities for the fighting fronts. Nothing is more American than the tin can…[and] the campaign to get housewives to turn in every tin can to the salvage depot has been intensified and yet it is reported that a third of the cans New Yorkers use are being thrown away. These cans are badly needed today to make morphine holders for wounded soldiers on the battlefronts. They are also needed to carry blood plasma.”
The attached article first appeared within the stapled bindings of a 1945 issue of Click Magazine in order to show the need for full civilian participation in the tin recycling programs along the home front (in that era, recycling was called “salvaging”). In order to guarantee that this message would get out to everyone, magazine editors would have been provided with these photographs and an assortment facts by a government agency called the Office of War Information.
Pictured above is the Salvage Queen of 1943.
Click here food rationing at U.S. POW camps.
Click here to learn more about the American W.W. II home front…
