Remembering recent contributions of mine in Dover Tidings some readers may well say, “Enough WWI, let’s move on”.  Indeed, I am moving on with one last article commenting on a remarkable piece of artwork.  The Sawin Museum is fortunate to own a series of WWI posters exhorting Americans in the most graphic manner to hate the enemy and purchase war bonds.  Some of these were the work of Joseph (signed “Ioseph”) Pennell (1857-1926), in his time one of the most talented and famous etchers who documented the conflict with a series of lithographs created in Britain, France and the USA.  One poster of his that stands out, to me at least, as a remarkably accurate and terrifying premonition of what was to come.  It shows swarms of bombers (mostly biplanes!) attack-ing a New York City in flames.  The Statue of Liberty is front central with her crowned head stuck at her feet in the Hudson River mud and her torch, shorn from her shattered arm, lying on the ground.  A submarine cruises up stream and a merchantman burns on the river bank.  Amongst the flames consuming the city, church spires reach helplessly for the sky, making the point that places of worship know no respite.

An apocalyptic scene indeed and one that foreshadowed what warfare would look like a mere 19 years later at Guernica, Spain, the first city to be ravaged by aerial bombing which was depicted so powerfully by Pablo Picasso.  Had Liberty stood on the banks of the Thames, she could have been shown in the iconic 1940 photograph by Herbert Mason of London during the “Blitz” with the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral rising amongst the smoke of the burning city. Later, in retaliation, Dresden, Berlin and, more devastatingly still, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were to suffer the same fate.

These events are but names to many, but to me their aftermath is real, because I remember vividly as  a child in the late 1940s the huge mounds of building rubble rising above many a London street and being told that “the Germans did that”.  I could not understand why anyone would want to destroy people’s homes, but realized that terrible things had happened and that now all was well and safe.  That was a child’s simplistic and optimistic perception indeed, which tragically since then was to be shattered for many a child elsewhere in the world.

by Stuart Swiny

This special article, by Stuart Swiny, was originally published in the Winter, 2018, Dover Tidings.  It concluded an impactful WWI temporary exhibit on our Main Level.