How Snoopy Reflected Changing Attitudes on the Vietnam War

Since he first appeared October 4, 1950, Snoopy has become one of the most enduring characters in comic strip history. Over the years, the beloved cartoon beagle from the “Peanuts” comic adopted a host of playful alter egos—Joe Cool, the World Famous Writer, the Easter Beagle—each a sly outlet for creator Charles M. Schulz to comment on America’s cultural tensions. Through a dog’s antics, Schulz could explore subjects as weighty as racism, school prayer and abortion without ever seeming heavy-handed.

By the mid-1960s—just as the Vietnam War dominated American politics—Snoopy took on his most famous persona: the World War I Flying Ace. The character arrived in the fall of 1965, just as U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia had significantly escalated. Intended as comic relief, Snoopy’s aviator quickly became both an emblem of hope for the hundreds of thousands of Americans serving in Vietnam—and eventually, a mirror for a nation struggling with its place in a controversial war.

Schulz got the idea for the brave and daring pilot while watching his son Monte play with a model of biplanes flown in the global conflict that raged between 1914 and 1918.

“It was a play on the aerial dogfight,” says Blake Scott Ball, associate professor of history at the University of North Alabama and author of Charlie Brown’s America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts. “Schulz thought, ‘Oh, how funny would that be if Snoopy the dog was in a dogfight.’”

The first appearance of the Flying Ace, published October 10, 1965, featured Snoopy wearing a leather helmet with goggles and piloting his doghouse as an imaginary Sopwith Camel—the name given to fighter biplanes flown by British and American pilots in the latter part of World War I. “It’s the Dawn Patrol,” exclaimed Snoopy. “We’re out to hunt down the Red Baron!” In real life, the Red Baron was the nickname of German fighter pilot Manfred von Richthofen, the deadliest flying ace of World War I.

Schulz, who served in combat as a sergeant in the U.S. Army during World War II and remained deeply patriotic, wanted to show his support for the military—something American GIs quickly internalized. Snoopy the World War I Flying Ace soon became an intrepid mascot and cheerful good-luck charm for hundreds of thousands of Americans serving in Vietnam.

Images of Snoopy appeared on helmets, shoulder patches, cigarette lighters, tanks, trucks and even on the sides of airplanes. The song “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron,” released by a band called the Royal Guardsmen in 1967, became a major hit on the American Forces Vietnam Network (AFVN), as troops took inspiration from the victorious final chorus: “Snoopy fired once / And he fired twice / And that Bloody Red Baron went spinning out of sight."

Michael Breen enlisted in the U.S. Army fresh out of high school in Dorchester, Massachusetts, serving in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969. He was a member of the 281st Assault Helicopter Company attached to the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne).

Breen was well known to the Green Berets and other soldiers at Nha Trang Air Base because of an image of Snoopy on his flight helmet. The door gunner on a Bell UH-1H Iroquois “Huey” assault helicopter enjoyed the attention he received from displaying the “Peanuts” character, though he didn’t fully understand its importance at the time. “I was 19 and it was cool,” he recalled. “I was the only one with Snoopy, so I stood out. I was recognizable to everyone.”

For his part, Marine Staff Sergeant Thomas F. Wolf recalls how a small stuffed Snoopy accompanied his company into every one of their Vietnam battles—and featured prominently in their pre-mission prayers. “Snoopy has a bald spot on his leather cap from where we had rubbed his head for luck," Wolf later recounted.

Schulz’s own military service gave the Flying Ace a deeper emotional charge. By 1965, the successful cartoonist was suffering from severe depression and anxiety, writes Michael Keane, a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and author of Charlie Brown’s Christmas Miracle. The humorist, who gently alluded in his autobiography to suffering from mental health struggles, later connected them, in part, to his time at war. Both Keane and David Michaelis, author of the 2007 biography Schulz and Peanuts, argue that Schulz likely carried undiagnosed PTSD from the war, which shaped his bouts of emotional withdrawal, anxiety and melancholy. Relentless media coverage of Vietnam didn’t help.

“They would broadcast every night footage from the war,” says Keane, adjunct faculty for the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. “Some of it was violent stuff that really shook the American public.” Scenes of American soldiers destroying Vietnamese villages may have been especially difficult for Schulz to take in. During World War II, his unit was ordered to burn a German town as a reprisal for a sniper attack. The cartoonist later recalled the image of a “hysterical woman standing in the front yard while her house was on fire.”

Like most of the country, Schulz became deeply conflicted by the Vietnam War. “Schulz was incredibly proud of his World War II service,” says Keane. Like many Americans, he supported the troops, but “saw violence without victory as just senseless brutality.”

Over the next few years, Schulz drew Snoopy as the World War I Flying Ace in various adventures, often being shot down by the Red Baron. One panel showed him becoming a prisoner of war while being hauled away by his owner, Charlie Brown—an allusion to the fate of a growing number of POWs in Vietnam.

On January 9, 1966, Schulz got a little more graphic, sketching bullet holes across Snoopy’s Sopwith Camel—aka doghouse—for the first time. While humorous, the strip channeled the ever-present danger faced by American combat troops.

As the war dragged on, Schulz grew increasingly frustrated by the lack of progress and the growing death toll. Snoopy, too, began lamenting the carnage while sipping root beer in imaginary French cafés between dogfights. On June 1, 1969, the popular comic-strip character uttered the phrase, “Curse this stupid war!” and essentially deserted from active duty. The World War I Flying Ace was effectively grounded until after Americans came home from Vietnam.

“In 1970, a journalist asks Schulz what happened,” says Ball. “He says in effect, ‘The war is too real.’ It was not an arena that he wanted to put the characters in. It had been this slow sinking into the quagmire of war for Snoopy.”

In Vietnam, Snoopy’s desperate exclamation became a rallying cry for service members who felt trapped in a conflict with no clear end. Many started incorporating “Curse this stupid war!” into commemorative patches and images.

By the early 1970s, Snoopy’s Flying Ace had already become part of America’s cultural memory of Vietnam. The strips were lighthearted yet layered, reflecting both Schulz’s wartime scars and the nation’s discomfort. For readers at home, the character provided a humorous but poignant commentary. For troops abroad, he became a symbol of both exasperation and hope.

Even decades after Schulz’s death in 2000, Snoopy remains among the most popular comic-strip figures of all time. His alter egos still entertain new generations, but it is the Flying Ace who carries special weight—a reminder of a beagle who fought imaginary dogfights while a real war raged overseas.

“Schulz was sneaky good at making a point,” says Ball. “It’s so simple on the surface but went much deeper than most people realized. He had a way of expressing what many people felt without them even knowing it.”