| Original caption: “Keep’em Rolling – M3 Three-Inch (Seventy-Five Millimeter Anti-Aircraft Guns.” The United States Office of War Information employed a large staff of book and magazine designers during World War II to design cautionary and patriotic posters, survival manuals, news magazines for overseas distribution, and hundreds of other pieces of wartime propaganda. Young American Modernists had a unique opportunity to prove the viability of the new design, specifically as contrasted to the Heroic Realism of other countries’ graphics. American advertising agency N. W. Ayer and Son’s Art Director, Leo Lionni (May 5, 1910 – October 11, 1999), created a series of dynamic posters intended to motivate defense plant workers. The same photo is reproduced in the poster 4 times. The canton of stars is replaced with a photograph of a man calibrating the gun. The M3 3-inch (75 millimeter) anti-aircraft gun was an American anti-aircraft gun that served throughout the 1930s and into early World War II. Developed from the earlier 3-inch M1917 and 3-inch M1918 guns, it was in the process of being replaced by the time of the American entry into World War II, but was subsequently adapted into an anti-tank gun role, both free-standing (as the 3-inch M5) and in a self-propelled tank destroyer, the M10. Married to an Italian Communist, Lionni left Fascist Italy for the United States in 1939. He went on to become a successful children’s book author after World War II. | |
| Image Filename | wwii2423.jpg |
| Image Size | 767.09 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 1500 x 2022 |
| Photographer | Leo Lionni |
| Photographer Title | Office of Emergency Management |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | January 1, 1941 |
| Location | |
| City | Washington |
| State or Province | District of Columbia |
| Country | United States |
| Archive | University of North Texas Digital Library |
| Record Number | Posters WW2 Lionni 2 |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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