Original Item: Only One Available. This is a fantastic condition (for its age) WWI recruitment poster showing the image of a US Navy Sailor riding a torpedo in a rodeo style manner. There is wear and tear present but nothing the detracts from the beauty of the poster.

During the First World War the United States Navy commissioned artist Richard Fayerweather Babcock to produce the poster ‘Join the Navy - The Service for Fighting Men’. The poster depicts a sailor riding a brass torpedo speeding through water with the statement of ‘Join the navy the service for fighting men’ to encourage men to sign up to the navy.

A lovely, worn poster that still retains beautiful color, comes more than ready to be framed and displayed!

United States Navy operations during World War I began on April 6, 1917, after the formal declaration of war on the German Empire. The American navy focused on countering enemy U-boats in the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea while convoying men and supplies to France and Italy. Because of the United States's late entry into the war, her capital ships never engaged the German fleet and few decisive submarine actions occurred.

At 1057:30 on 11 November 1918, Battery 4 of the U.S. Navy Railway Gun Unit fired a 14-inch shell timed to hit a German target over 20 miles away seconds before the cease-fire went into effect at 1100 that same day, thus bringing an end to what had been hitherto, the bloodiest, most costly, and destructive war in human history. Between the time the Armistice was signed—around 0500 that morning—and when the cease-fire went into effect at 1100, over 3,000 more soldiers on both sides were killed and over 8,000 wounded as bitter fighting continued.

The exact number of people killed and wounded in World War I will never be known, particularly those who were killed on the Eastern Front before Czarist Russia collapsed and the Bolshevik government sued for peace. Estimates vary widely depending on the source, but somewhere on the order of nine to ten million military personnel died during the war and another seven to eight million civilians perished. France, Germany, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire all lost more than a million soldiers, and the United Kingdom and its dominions lost more than a million. The United States suffered 53,402 combat deaths, the vast majority of them U.S. Army personnel killed in the final three months of the war; in terms of casualties per month, this was the bloodiest period in U.S. military history. Of the U.S. battle losses among the country’s sea services, the Marine Corps suffered 2,461 killed and 9,520 wounded, and the Navy suffered 431 killed and 819 wounded. The U.S. Coast Guard, which was attached to the Navy during the war, lost over 121 men in action, thereby suffering proportionately the greatest loss of any U.S. service. The Navy would lose an armored cruiser (to a submarine-laid mine), a destroyer (to a submarine torpedo), and a number of armed transports and smaller vessels to enemy action during the war. Of the 178 German submarines lost during the conflict, only one was confirmed sunk by the U.S. Navy, although numerous others were damaged or, more importantly, driven away from convoys of troops and critical war materiel by U.S. destroyers, submarine chasers, and, late in the war, aircraft.

The most significant contribution of the U.S. Navy during the Great War was the escort and transport of two million U.S. soldiers to France, the great majority in the last six months of the war, with almost no loss to German submarines. This was accomplished with the significant assistance of the British Royal Navy. By July 1918, U.S. troops were arriving in France at a rate of about 10,000 per day, roughly half in U.S. shipping and half in other Allied shipping. Although the U.S. Army had significant success on the battlefield against the now-diminished German forces, it was the German High Command's realization that there was nothing it could do to stem the tide of an overwhelming number of U.S. troops that caused the Germans to sue for an armistice.