Coca-Cola advertisement, “Have a ‘Coke’= Good winds have blown you here”, magazine leaf, 1943

The objectphotographed as held, uncropped

Catalogue description

A painted group beneath the overhead structure of an aircraft. Six American figures surround a single Chinese soldier: three at the left, two at the right, and a sixth seen only from behind at the lower right, the back of his head and his shoulders filling the corner. Three of the six wear leather flying helmets and goggles; the man at the far left is bareheaded in an open-collar khaki shirt, and the man at the right is bareheaded in an olive field jacket. The Chinese soldier stands at the centre in a peaked field cap with a small pale round cap badge, a khaki tunic with two collar patches carrying pale horizontal bars — three on the patch turned toward the viewer; the second patch is foreshortened and its bars are not countable — and a leather cross-belt with a rectangular buckle. He is smiling broadly and holding a bottle of Coca-Cola; the flyer facing him holds out a second bottle. The far-left figure’s hand points across at him, and the flyer behind that one raises an open palm. Behind the group run the white teeth and red mouth of shark-mouth nose art, with a reddish disc marking on the surface above and blue-and-white striping near the nose; a broad propeller blade and a blue-painted band fill the right of the picture. The flyer holding out the bottle wears a white scarf marked with short red brush strokes that resolve to no readable text. A small dark brushed mark sits in the shadowed lower left corner of the picture and is not legible.

This is a full-page advertisement of The Coca-Cola Company, carrying the imprint “COPYRIGHT 1943, THE COCA-COLA COMPANY” at the foot of the page; the yellow spine strip lying along the right edge of the photograph carries the issue line “December, 1943 | THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE | Vol LXXXIV, No. 6”, and whether that strip belongs to this leaf is not established here. The trademark disc at the foot of the page is overprinted on a globe showing the Americas and carries the line “·the global high-sign”, and the headline is built as an equation that expands the slogan into a phrase of greeting: “Have a “Coke”= Good winds have blown you here”. The sub-headline says it outright: “. . . a way to say “We are friends” to the Chinese”.

The headline is written as something Americans say to a Chinese man, not as something two allies say to each other, and the picture is composed the same way: the Americans are a group of six, the Chinese soldier is one man, and what passes between them is a bottle handed from the group to the individual. The copy calls the Americans “our fighting men” and the other party “the Chinese”. It also converts the alliance into a market — the body text runs the claim “China knew Coca-Cola from Tientsin to Shanghai, from Hong Kong to Tsingtao” straight into the assertion that the drink “has become a symbol of good will among the friendly-minded”. Friendship, in this page’s grammar, is a distribution network.

One figure on the page is the advertiser’s claim rather than an established fact: “Coca-Cola today is being bottled right on the spot in over 35 allied and neutral nations”. The Coca-Cola Company’s own published history gives a different, later-counted figure for the war as a whole — 64 bottling plants dispatched abroad — so the two are not comparable, and the archive has not verified the 35-nation figure against an independent source.

Nothing on this copy records an owner or a reader: no stamps, accession numbers, subscriber label or pencil notes appear on the photographed face, and the margins are blank.

Transcriptiontext on the object, as printed

HEADLINE:
Have a “Coke”= Good winds have blown you here
[the equals sign is set tight against the closing quotation mark; “Have a “Coke”” is not italic here]

[Colour illustration filling the upper two-thirds. No lettering is legible anywhere within it: no unit code, serial or inscription. On the white scarf of one of the flyers, three or four short red brush strokes, not legible as text. In the shadowed lower left corner of the picture, a small dark brushed mark in the conventional signature position, not legible.]

SUB-HEADLINE [italic]:
. . . a way to say “We are friends” to the Chinese

LEFT COLUMN:
In far-off places, when Coca-Cola is on hand, you find it cementing friendships for our fighting men. China knew Coca-Cola from Tientsin to Shanghai, from Hong Kong to Tsingtao. To Chinese and Yank alike, Have a “Coke” [italic] are welcome words. They belong with friendliness and freedom. From Atlanta to the Seven Seas, Coca-Cola stands for the pause that refreshes [italic]—has become a symbol of good will among the friendly-minded.

*     *     *
[three printed star ornaments, centred]

[second paragraph, set entirely in italic:]
Our fighting men are delighted to meet up with Coca-Cola many places overseas. Coca-Cola has been a globe-trotter “since way back when”. Even with war, Coca-Cola today is being bottled right on the spot in over 35 allied and neutral nations.

RIGHT-HAND COLUMN:
“Coke” = Coca-Cola
It’s natural for popular names to acquire friendly abbreviations. That’s why you hear Coca-Cola called “Coke”.

[red disc device, printed over a darker globe showing the Americas:]
Coca-Cola [script logotype]
[illegible line of very small type directly beneath the script]
·the global
high-sign
[the mark before “the” reads as a short dash or a dot; which is not resolvable]

[painted Coca-Cola bottle standing immediately to the right of the disc:]
Coca-Cola [script logotype on the bottle]
[illegible line of small lettering beneath the script on the bottle]

[imprint, bottom right:]
COPYRIGHT 1943, THE COCA-COLA COMPANY

[printed yellow spine strip of the issue, at the right edge, reading bottom-to-top in three groups:]
December, 1943
THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE
Vol LXXXIV, No. 6

[No Chinese text appears in legible form anywhere on the object.]

Historical context

The Coca-Cola Company’s own published history records that in 1941 its head, Robert Woodruff, directed the company “to see that every man in uniform gets a bottle of Coca-Cola for 5 cents, wherever he is and whatever it costs the Company”; that 64 bottling plants were dispatched abroad during the war, the first at Algiers, opened within six months of a cablegram of 29 June 1943 from General Eisenhower’s Allied Headquarters in North Africa asking for ten plants; and that service personnel drank more than 5 billion bottles. Every one of those figures is the advertiser’s own account of its own wartime record, published by the company decades later; the archive lists them because this object is a Coca-Cola advertisement and they are the ground the page stands on, and it has not checked any of them against an independent source. The printed copy places the encounter in China. The shark-mouth nose art painted behind the group was carried by American fighter aircraft in China, and was not peculiar to them: the American Volunteer Group’s pilots copied it from a photograph of a P-40 of No. 112 Squadron RAF in North Africa, which had itself taken the shark face from Luftwaffe ZG 76 crews, and the successor American units in China kept the nose art on the left-over P-40s. The American Volunteer Group, the “Flying Tigers”, was recruited and organised in 1941 before American entry into the war, but flew its first combat on 20 December 1941 — twelve days after Pearl Harbor and after the United States and Japan had declared war — and was disbanded on 4 July 1942, when it was replaced by the 23rd Fighter Group. Claire Chennault, who had commanded the AVG, went on to command the China Air Task Force and then the Fourteenth Air Force, and American airmen and the press went on calling USAAF units in China “Flying Tigers” to the end of the war. This advertisement carries a 1943 copyright imprint, more than a year after the AVG was disbanded; it names no unit, service or formation, and the archive attributes none.

What is not known

• Whether this is a complete bound issue photographed face up with its spine showing — in which case this advertisement is the back cover — or a detached leaf lying against the spine strip is not established from a single face-on photograph of a flat, sleeved object. A printed yellow spine strip carrying the issue line lies along the right edge, separated from the page edge by a band of cream paper; that is as far as the photograph goes. The month and volume of the issue therefore rest on that adjacency, not on anything printed on the advertisement itself, whose imprint gives only the year 1943. The page number and the advertisement’s placement within the issue are likewise not established.
• The artist is not identified. A small dark brushed mark sits in the conventional signature position at the lower left of the illustration; at 5–8x, contrast-stretched, it resolves to no letters, and the editor cannot confirm that it is a signature rather than a brushstroke of the composition. Searches for the artist of this 1943 Coca-Cola China advertisement returned nothing.
• The small line of type beneath the script logotype inside the red disc, and the line of lettering beneath the script on the painted bottle beside it, are illegible at every available magnification. The standard trademark line of the period is “TRADE-MARK REG. U. S. PAT. OFF.”, but nothing in this image supports reading those words, and they are transcribed as [illegible].
• The red brush strokes on the flyer’s white scarf are not resolvable as characters; whether they are meant as a blood chit, as Chinese writing, or as decoration is not established, and the archive does not read them as text.
• The aircraft is not identified. “Shark-mouth nose art”, the propeller blade and the blue-painted band are readings of painted forms; no type, unit, serial or code is legible in the illustration. The shark mouth is not by itself evidence of the American Volunteer Group: it originated with No. 112 Squadron RAF, was carried by American units in China after the AVG was disbanded in July 1942, and this advertisement carries a 1943 imprint. The archive makes no unit attribution, and the subject headings do not index the object under any service or formation.
• The Chinese soldier’s cap badge, collar bars and cross-belt are described as seen. The badge is a pale round form, too coarse to identify, and no rank, unit or service is established from the painting; the figure is an illustrator’s rendering, not a portrait of an identified person.
• The advertisement’s own claims — that Coca-Cola was known in Tientsin, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tsingtao before the war, and that it was being bottled in over 35 allied and neutral nations in 1943 — are the advertiser’s, and the archive has verified neither.
• The wartime figures in historical_context (the 1941 Woodruff directive, 64 plants abroad, the Algiers plant, more than 5 billion bottles) rest solely on The Coca-Cola Company’s own history page. The archive did not find an independent source for them within its research budget.
• The archive did not establish, within its research budget, what place China held in United States public messaging in 1943; an earlier draft asserted this and the claim has been cut rather than left standing unsourced.
• Only this one face of the object is photographed. Nothing is established about the reverse of the leaf or about the rest of the issue.
• The geographic coordinates are a centroid for China, the country the advertisement names; no locality is named on the page.