'Help Your Uncle Sam Win the War'

A unique collection of propaganda posters which were designed to encourage Americans to support their troops in the First World War is going up for sale this week.

The patriotic posters are full of stirring words and patriotic images of Uncle Sam, the Stars and Stripes and ‘our boys’ in the trenches and at sea, which inspired Americans back home to buy war bonds and help the war effort in other ways.

The United States was initially pursuing an isolationist policy in 1914 when the war broke out between Britain, France, Italy and Russia on one side and Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Turkey on the other.

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The Emergency Fleet Corporation was formed in April 1917 to acquire and build more merchant ships, to help bring food and military supplies across the Atlantic to Britain, France and to a lesser extent Russia

America only joined the war in 1917, shortly after the infamous Zimmerman Telegram, in which Germany secretly tried to encourage Mexico to declare war on the US in a bid to recover territory lost since 1848.

Stock market historian and analyst David Schwartz amassed the posters over a number of years and he took them with him when he moved from New York to England in the early 1980s.

Another recurring theme is not to waste food.

One poster shows a convoy of food trucks to the front line and says: ‘Keep it coming, we must not only feed our soldiers at the front but the millions of women and children behind our lines’.

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