How Superman Mobilized the WWII Home Front

When Superman first leapt onto comic book pages in the late 1930s, he was more than a fantasy of strength and speed—he was a new kind of hero for a world hurtling toward World War II. As the global conflict escalated, the Man of Steel went from socking stand-ins for Hitler to rescuing Santa from the Nazis to hawking war bonds with the same gusto he used to bend steel bars. Part superhero, part supersalesman, he headlined patriotic plots across comics, radio, newspaper strips and movie screens—becoming a powerful rallying symbol on both the front lines and the home front.

Action Comics issue No. 1 introduced Superman to American readers in the summer of 1938, as the world teetered on the edge of the bloodiest war in history. Nazi Germany had recently taken over Austria and would march on Poland the following year. In the Pacific, Imperial Japan had invaded China and captured its capital, Nanjing. In September 1939, both Great Britain and France would declare war on Germany, marking the official start of World War II.

The United States, however, was still at peace, and it would continue to be until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In the meantime, Americans were split on whether they should enter the war at all. A sizable portion of the population, rallying under the banner of “America First,” believed the U.S. should remain neutral.

Superman’s creators, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, had no such qualms. But with the country so divided, they needed to tread carefully in how they delivered their message. Starting with Action Comics No. 17, dated October 1939—more than two years before Pearl Harbor—Superman appeared on covers battling generic soldiers clad in suspiciously Nazi-like helmets.

In February 1940, still nearly two years pre-Pearl Harbor, the Man of Steel took on an Adolf Hitler lookalike in his syndicated newspaper comic strip. The strip cautiously avoided naming the German dictator, but instead called him Amork and his country Blitzen.

That same month, however, Look magazine ran a special strip Siegel and Shuster created exclusively for its pages. Titled “How Superman Would End the War,” it didn’t shy away from specifics—openly naming Hitler and casting Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin as a fellow villain. In the strip, Superman grabs the Führer by the throat and threatens him with “a strictly non-Aryan sock on your jaw.”

Finally, Action Comics No. 43—released in October 1940 but dated December 1941 (a common practice in comic book publishing)—erased any lingering doubts about where Superman and his creators stood. The cover featured a paratrooper firing at Superman while descending from the sky, a prominent swastika armband clearly marking him as a Nazi. The following month’s cover drove the point home, depicting Superman disabling a Nazi artillery crew by bending their cannon barrel in half.

Before long, Superman’s radio show and animated cartoons for movie theaters had also joined the fight.

The U.S. government didn’t need X-ray vision to see Superman’s potential value to the war effort. It quickly drafted him to sell war bonds and war stamps, promote scrap drives and encourage Americans to plant victory gardens, among other assignments.

But he may have been even more powerful on the propaganda front. The Writers’ War Board (WWB), an organization quietly funded by the federal government, took a particular interest in comic books and worked closely with many of their publishers. “Beginning in April 1943, the WWB used comic books to shape popular perceptions of race and ethnicity as well as to build support for the American war effort,” Paul S. Hirsch writes in his 2021 book Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism.

The WWB recognized that comic books had a uniquely broad reach across American society—appealing to kids and adults, civilians and service members alike. “Nearly half of all soldiers and sailors regularly consumed comic books, and the navy classified comics alongside water, food and ammunition as ‘essential supplies’ for the marines stationed on Midway Island,” Hirsch notes.

And no comic books were more popular than Superman’s—which, as Hirsch points out, “alone sold roughly 10 million copies in 1941.” Who better to spread the message of “truth, justice and the American way”—a slogan that made its debut on The Adventures of Superman radio series in 1942—than this hardworking immigrant from the planet Krypton who’d adopted the U.S. as his homeland?

Krypton’s gift to America wasn’t the only superhero to wield strength—and star power—against the Third Reich and the other Axis powers. Batman and Robin did their share, as did Wonder Woman, Sub-Mariner, the Human Torch, Captain Marvel and the Green Hornet, to name a few. Captain America's debut cover, released in December 1940 (but dated March 1941), famously showed him slugging Hitler on the jaw. That issue reportedly sold a million copies on newsstands around the country. Even the Frankenstein monster took a break from terrorizing Americans to pitch in.

But it was Superman who seemed to provoke the Nazis most. This may have had something to do with the fact that Hitler and his followers had hijacked the term übermensch—sometimes translated as “superman.” They had borrowed the concept from the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche—and twisted it to promote their vision of an Aryan “master race.”

By April 1940, Nazi propagandists were denouncing Jerry Siegel for sowing “hate, dissension, injustice, laziness and crime” among the youth of America. “It is pitiful that American children who must live in this atmosphere of the west don’t even recognize the poison they daily swallow,” the propagandists lamented.

The Nazis hadn’t seen anything yet. Once the U.S. entered the war, Superman expanded his fight to include the Japanese and, on occasion, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Still, he and his fellow superheroes seemed to reserve a particular fury for the Nazis, who remained their most consistent—and symbolically potent—adversaries.

“Although U.S. entry was prompted by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,” Harry Brod writes in his 2012 book Superman Is Jewish?: How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice, and the Jewish-American Way, “superheroes fought against the Germans much more often than against the Japanese, reflecting the comics’ Jewish creators’ preoccupations with Europe and the Holocaust.”

Superman’s invulnerability to everything but kryptonite presented an unusual challenge for his creators. As Larry Tye observes in his 2012 book Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero, “Every kid in America knew that Superman could win any war he fought in five minutes.”

So, aside from the occasional cover illustration, comic books kept him away from the front lines and confined him to the home front, where he could thwart Axis spies and saboteurs. “His creators back then understood they’d be in an awkward spot if they put Superman into intricate plots taking on Hitler and Hirohito, with readers rightfully expecting him to smash the Axis in seconds,” Tye says. “His doing that, when our troops couldn’t at that point, would seem disrespectful, and his not doing it would raise questions about Superman’s powers.”

Believing that fans would want to know why Superman was still flying around in leotards when so many Americans donned military uniforms, the writers devised an explanation. In a February 1942 newspaper strip—barely two months after Pearl Harbor—Clark Kent tries to enlist but is rejected for poor vision. He had, absentmindedly, read the eye chart in the next room using his X-ray vision.

Still, he had plenty of work to keep him busy. In one memorable 1942 newspaper strip, Superman is called on to rescue none other than Santa Claus, who has been kidnapped from the North Pole and imprisoned in Berlin by the Nazis. After real-life propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels announces that there will be no Christmas that year, Superman not only saves Santa but fills in for his reindeer, ensuring that everybody’s presents make it under the tree in time.

After the war, Superman moved on to new adventures, faced fresh villains and maintained a lasting popularity that eluded many of his superhero peers. “With Superman, Siegel and Shuster hit on a perfect combination of action-adventure and human interest for their times, and in the process created a character who is endlessly adaptable to different eras,” Danny Fingeroth, author of Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society, says.

But his service in his country’s greatest hour of need would remain a high point. “From comics to the USO shows for the troops, both military and civilian morale needed to be kept up through entertainment,” Brod writes. “World War II was not won by bullets alone.”