This is the discovery of a great satire that addresses us on despotism, grief and the borderlines between humour and art in turbulent times. A practical unknown, Mario Armengol Torrella (St. Joan de les Abadesses, 1909 – Nottingham, 1995) was the Catalan and Spanish artist who contributed most vigorously to allied propaganda during World War II. Born into a family of industrialists from Terrassa, his story was that of the Catalan literary classic, L’auca del senyor Esteve: he wanted to be an artist, not a manufacturer. A disenchanted republican, at the height of the Spanish Civil War he joined the French Foreign Legion. He fought the Nazis in Norway and in 1941 ended up in the United Kingdom, subsequently to be hired by Churchill’s Ministry of Information. He became one of the most outstanding caricaturists in the world’s worst-ever conflict, although he had never worked as a cartoonist either before or after.

Until 1945 he produced around two thousand cartoons against Hitler and his allies, which were published in papers all over the globe, from New Zealand to Chile via Haiti. A fresco in which all fronts and protagonists appeared, depicted with a humour that the British acknowledged as “sharp, bitter and caustic, typically Catalan”, and with a versatility of style that heralded present-day comics.

Before combatting Nazism with ink and humour, Armengol did so with a rifle. Having joined the French Foreign Legion in November 1938 in Paris, he was posted first to the Sahara and, when war broke out, he fought in the Norwegian fiords of Narvik, alongside French, British, Polish, Catalan and republican Spanish soldiers in an effort to halt German expansion towards the Arctic. All this he drew as cartoons in the United Kingdom, having just arrived there from the 1940 battles in Norway and from the allied retreat from France.

The twentieth century’s darkest times were summarised in a moustache: Hitler. Seen from a distance he might even seem comical, as portrayed by Charles Chaplin in The great dictator, but close up one senses the violence he transmits. To laugh at him is to mock his total power. And this was the assignment Armengol received from Churchill’s Government: to shatter the strength of the myth with ink. And the tyrant would thus be transformed into a caricature, in which the cartoonist reached the highest level in the sphere where the young Hitler failed: in art.

Hitler’s moustache, which so many men imitated in Germany and across Europe, is the principal cartoon in Armengol’s oeuvre: his mission was to throw it to the ground and drag it, defeated, across the floor so that it would lose its capacity to cause fear and create fascination.

How many graves, beneath its shadow, were filled with corpses? How many countries were conquered with that banner as insignia?

The meaning of the swastika –a millennial eastern symbol– was turned upside-down in 1935 when the Nazi regime converted it into the emblem of the Third Reich. They held it up as the icon of a new religion that flooded the German people’s public and private spheres and, progressively, those of most Europeans. The butchers interpreted it as the symbol of a utopia to be attained and their victims, as the worst of all possible nightmares. When Armengol began to draw caricatures for the British Government, the swastika was raised as the cross to be defeated, as the symbol of an idolatry that had to be weakened to the point of extinction. And the cartoonist set eagerly to his task.

Satire will never alter any military strategies, but it does serve to make fun of them. While London resisted, from the British capital presumed Prussian military genius, the legacy of general Clausewitz, had to be ridiculed and the news spread that it would be inevitably overpowered. This was Armengol’s infinite strength: he could melt cannons while Hitler shouted victory or destroy U-boots beneath the icy waters of the Atlantic while the Nazis claimed that they had more and more of them. This was the real battle, waged by the cartoonist on newsprint and the pages of magazines under orders from the Ministry of Information. Perhaps the directions he received were accurate portraits of true military circumstances, or perhaps not entirely, but in his drawings the Germans invariably lost their battles and made fools of themselves.

War is also cultural. No aspect of societies in confrontation stands remote from hostilities. Opera, painting, novels, animated cartoons … Armengol used culture to ridicule the Third Reich. Here we see Mussolini characterised as the Duke of Mantua’s jester in Verdi’s Rigoletto or Millet’s The Angelus evoking the sky of future victory. We see Roosevelt as a gigantic Gulliver pulling the US Navy to the Japanese “paradise”, Germanic mythology ridiculed in Wagner’s Nibelungs or Mickey Mouse, from Fantasia, transformed into a Hitler who hypnotises the German people transformed into brooms. And on Prague’s bloody cobblestones, the cartoonist anticipated today’s black comics.

When the Second World War broke out, only twenty years had passed since the end of the First. The protagonists and battles of 1914-1918, along with the traumatic peace treaty negotiations, were present in the collective memory and in Armengol’s humour. Satirising German ambitions of the past meant satirising those of the present, and from his pencil flowed Kaiser Wilhelm II’s moustache and the grave of Marshal Paul Von Hindenburg, the battle of the Marne and the man who founded the Second Reich in 1871, the iron chancellor Otto von Bismarck. There are glorious German figures, but above all victims of defeat, as Hitler himself would soon be.

Armengol’s cartoons fired unrelentingly away at the friends of the Third Reich. First, with extreme vibrancy, against the French collaborationists led by the decrepit Marshal Pétain and his president of the government, Laval, whom –and here he bordered on racism– he caricatures with features resembling those of a gypsy. On the other side of the Alps, he depicted the Italian dictator, Mussolini, as a simple-minded child playing war games in a fantasy world which the Germans scorned. And the Japanese? He derided their doubts and their physical features seen from the Western viewpoint.

Neutrality has different intensities, like the satire that Armengol applies to those countries that sought non-commitment to the war. The most difficult task was to parody the complexity of each case; to manage to convey the role played by those who perhaps made money out of death or who avoided the conflict due to the fact that neither side wanted them involved. Diplomacy and realpolitik would provide the keys to interpreting each situation. Finland, for example: a democracy attacked by the Soviets first, subsequently allied to the Nazis and, at the end of the day, joining the side of the victors.

While executing the thousands of cartoons that Armengol produced for the British authorities, the Catalan artist rediscovered the origin of his life’s expedition, his dictator, who led him to that drawing board and to that ink: Francisco Franco. How was he to portray  him? With rage or with disdain? The Generalísimo made things easy for the cartoonist, who drew him as a little puppet. A shoe shiner in the clutches of that Hitler thanks to whom he had risen to power in Spain, or as a little soldier who betrays his “teacher of German” and bows down to the British when he sees the Third Reich begin to totter. A Franco whom both the British –and the Americans– and the Germans sought to lure to their side and who, whoever would eventually win, would manage to survive the denouement of 1945.

A war is won with bullets and morale, with shrapnel and conviction. You have to wear down the enemy and shore up your own spirit. Thus, Armengol’s satire became imbued with the collapse of the Third Reich. The columns of German morale were tottering, causing the Nazi discourse asserted by the minister of Propaganda, Goebbels, to cave in, a discourse that defined Germany as thoroughly invincible. And the cartoonist delighted in the sight of German arrogance brought to its knees, the desperate last-minute decorations and the inability to accept defeat. In the sight of a people who could not understand why their Reich was losing the war: “Weren’t we a superior race?”

May we parody bombed cities with tens of thousands of victims? May we portray our enemy as mince for making sausages? Or depict him as an ape? Where lies the limit to what we may draw to convince ourselves that our side is the right one? The first paradox is visual. When Armengol draws humans crucified on a swastika, his intention is not to make us laugh but to make us reflect. But he draws this as if it were a caricature: we pick up the paper with our gaze prepared to be amused, but the impact makes us doubt. And an infinite number of paradoxes follows because nuances and grief were infinite, but he was paid to make us laugh. His cartoons are fertile ground for a debate in which we are still engaged today: where does irony end and cruelty begin?

Having been hired by the British Government, Armengol was required overnight to invent a style of sharp war satire for readers from distant countries with ways of understanding the world that differed from his own. Furthermore, he had never worked as a cartoonist. When he got down to engaging in his task, initially he was influenced by two cartoonists with whom he had struck up a friendship, David Low and Stephen Roth. Even so, he carried inside the potent legacy of highly cutting Catalan graphic humour he would have seen and appreciated on the pages of En Patufet, L’Esquella de la Torratxa, Papitu and El Be Negre. He himself acknowledged this legacy in London when he spoke of Feliu Elias, Apa. An unfettered form of humour that he applied to the World War: the Ministry of Information imposed limits on humour against the enemy; consequently it is astonishing that they should have allowed Armengol such a free hand.

Hitler’s dreams and his propaganda machine proclaimed a “Reich for One Thousand Years”, Germanic supremacy over Europe that would last for centuries. But real circumstances shortened its existence to a mere twelve years, although the suffering it caused was certainly millennial. This was the counter-victory depicted in a single opera movement: German soldiers –more cartoon figures than ever– crossing the Parisian Arc de Triomphe in terror. History had re-winded and what in 1940 had been a demonstration of Germanic arrogance now, in 1944, had become the graphic rendering of the collapse of the Third Reich. Hitler’s soldiers no longer had any strength, or conviction... or teeth. All the Führer could do was appeal to miracles, to the magic weapons he believed would alter the course of the war.

First, resistance. Then, offensive. And finally, victory, the V that Churchill had displayed from the very outset. In Armengol’s drawings everything is self-conviction and positive messages to be sent out to readers from America to Oceania. Only our side can win. History has proven them right and the Allies –Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union– will be victorious. The Nazi myth has been stripped bare and the first signs have been perceived of the Cold War. This is the end of a combat of propagandas, a clash between powers that have mobilised all their capacity for persuasion. The end is approaching and everyone is knocking at the door of the nascent United Nations.