The Express cartoonist on Hitler's 'death list'

CARTOONIST Carl Giles refined his craft during the biggest conflict in modern history, the Second World War. His wartime experiences were rendered into his daily drawings, helping to raise a chuckle or two both at home and among those fighting overseas.

- By Tim Benson

As the comedian Spike Milligan once said: “During the war, Giles’s cartoons played no little part in boosting my morale.”

Giles mocked the Nazis as a bunch of harmless fools whilst undermining Hitler by portraying him as a comic devil rather than as a wicked or frightening monster. This proved so effective that Giles was later told his name had been put on a Nazi hitlist for those to be rounded up by the Gestapo and shot after a successful German invasion of Britain.

In March 1940, Giles — being of conscription age — received his call-up papers but was found to be unfit for military service due to a motorbike accident in his youth that had left him without sight in one eye and hearing in one ear. Instead, he volunteered for his local Home Guard unit.

His experiences with them provided plenty of material for his war-time cartoons. And when Giles married his first cousin Joan Clarke on March 14, 1942, his Home Guard colleagues lined up outside the church, using their bayonets to give him a guard of honour.

Apart from his duties as a cartoonist, Giles took up animation work for the Ministry of Information from his small Ipswich studio, with six animators to assist him.