The Lighter Side of Aviation Medicine during World War 2: Aero Medical Training Cartoons

The air war of 1939‐1945 was the world’s first high‐speed, high‐altitude air war. The limiting factor in aerial combat was no longer the warplane’s performance, but rather, the aviator’s limited tolerances for exposure to the rarefied, anoxic, subzero atmosphere. Aviators flew unpressurized planes to altitudes of 20,000‐35,000 feet during reconnaissance and bombing missions to evade enemy interceptors and anti‐aircraft fire. At altitude, warfighter performance could be impaired by anoxia, decompression sickness, hypothermia & frostbite. Escaping from a disabled aircraft at high‐altitude also presented physiological challenges, including anoxia, frostbite, and parachute opening shock G‐forces. High‐performance fighter aircraft also subjected pilots to G‐forces during violent dogfighting maneuvers that left them temporarily blinded and unconscious from reduced brain blood flow. One of the challenges for the “medical men” was teaching young airmen, from all walks of life, the fundamentals of aviation physiology and how to use their oxygen equipment in this new physiological air war. This task fell in large part to the physiologists of the U. S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) and U. S. Navy (USN). The USAAF used training cartoons known as Thought Pictures to illustrate conceptually difficult topics in anatomy, physiology, and the physics of the atmosphere (Figs. 1 & 2). Thought Pictures, drawn by the artist/author Eric Sloane (1905‐1985), were combined with concisely written text in the popular training manual, Your Body in Flight (1943, 1944), which was published by the Aero Medical Laboratory at Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio. The USAAF also published aero medical training cartoons in Air Force Magazine.In the USN, a popular training cartoon character was the accident prone, bumbling airman, Dilbert Groundloop,drawn by satirist Robert C. Osborn (1904–1994). The USN Bureau of Medicine also highlighted important aero medical issues using comical illustrations in the widely distributed Senseseries; e.g. Oxygen Sense, High Altitude Sense, “G” Sense& Parachute Sense. Likewise, the School of Aviation Medicine, U. S. Naval Air Station, Pensacola, FL, published altitude training cartoons in CONTACTmagazine. Even Boeing and Lockheed aircraft manufacturing companies published humorous cartoons in Boeing News Magazine and Hangar Flying to reinforce the medical dangers of altitude flying to their test pilots and flight engineers. Finally, those mischievous pixies of the air, the Aero Medical Gremlins, proved to be another valuable training tool (see author's Aviation Gremlins abstract). Together, these humorous illustrations enabled America’s aviation physiologists and flight surgeons to drive home the serious nature of the physiological challenges of combat flying to aviators, while at the same time, presenting difficult material in an easily remembered format that was also amusing and entertaining for airmen soon to be facing life or death on every mission. Aero medical cartoons worked so well as a training tool that interrogation of German aviation physiologists at the end of the war revealed a professional admiration by them for the depth of understanding that American aviators had regarding the physiological effects of high‐altitude and the physiologic principles underlying their protective flight gear.