The design was
simple. A straight line with a bald egg-shaped half head with two
pinpoint eyes on the top, a long nose resembling a load of French
bread hanging down below the line like a flaccid phallus, and four
fingers hanging down over the line as well on either side. That was
all. Scrawled on the side were the words “Kilroy Was Here.”
During World War II this simple graffito appears in theaters of war
all across rhe world. It mostly came to be associated with the
American military, though in actuality it was scrawled on walls by
soldiers from all the countries of the allied powers. No one knows
who, where or why Kilroy began appearing but most likely this famous
graffiti did not originate in America.
So what could
be the possible origins of Kilroy? England is the most plausible
answer. The English people themselves do not call Kilroy by his
American name but actually refer to him as Chad, among other names.
If we were to trace the simple figure of Chad back a few thousand
years, we could plausibly note its resemblance to the Greek letter
omega, a symbol used by Great
Britain’s Corps
of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers; they used the omega
symbol as shorthand for an alternating current which can also be
written as a straight line with a sine wave through it. It is rumored
that engineers at that particular institution used to draw the omega
letter with plus and minus signs for eyes, indicating a positive and
negative charge. This would sometimes be drawn with the words “Wot
no leave?’ beside its head. The
Chad figure also resembles Alice the Goon, a cartoon character in
the Popeye comics of the 1930s, drawn by a comic artist named George
Edward Chatterton; people called him “Chat” for short and this
nickname could possibly have transmuted
into “Chad.”
The
link that takes Chad into the heart of World War II goes directly
into Britain during the time of food rationing. The round-headed and
long-nosed figure began appearing on walls throughout London with the
caption saying “Wot no bread?” or other gripes against the
insufficient diets being forced on the English people.
At
some point American servicemen, as well as troops from other nations,
took on the practice of leaving their territorial mark of graffiti
wherever they went. The figure of Chad began appearing on bathroom
walls, sides of ships, public buildings and anywhere else you might
imagine. As a symbol taken on by Americans, the captioned complaint
written besides the man’s head was replaced by the phrase “Kilroy
Was Here.” What was especially perplexing was the way the drawing
appeared in places before American troops actually arrived as if some
joker snuck off the ship and scrawled the doodle on something to
greet them. It was as if the
artist wanted to prank the fighters by saying “look I got here
before you did.” One notorious sighting located Kilroy on a giant
rock on Bikini Island; the air force arrived there to test their
nuclear bombs before moving on to Nagasaki and Hiroshima and there it
was to welcome them ashore. Kilroy
also showed up in other inaccessible places like inside sealed off
sections of ships’ hulls, inside air ducts, or on the bodies of
airplanes which were only accessible to people with high security
clearances. During the Potsdam conference of 1945, Joseph Stalin came
out of
the bathroom and asked who Kilroy was; apprently someone had written
a Kilroy Was Here in the stall of the VIP men’s room, giving the
dictator something to wonder about while he sat on the toilet.
Historians
of the war have tracked down the name of “Kilroy” and come up
with two possibilities as to who he was. An American shipyard
inspector named James J. Kilroy is one culprit. The all-too-obvious
conclusion is that he wrote the words and symbol on the sides of
ships to indicate that he had completed his inspection and the boat
was ready to go. Another suspect is one Sgt. Francis J. Kilroy who
came down with the flu when he was scheduled to arrive at an air
force base in Florida. To indicate his delayed arrival, somebody
wrote “Kilroy will be here next week’ on the barracks wall.
Kilroy later died in the hospital and his grief stricken friend from
the bed beside him was sent
off to sea on a warship.
He began writing “Kilroy was here” with chalk on walls to
commemorate the death of his comrade. Then
the graffiti spread like wildfire, probably
being written by people who had no idea what it meant.
Historians
appear not to have every found anybody who claims to have drawn the
symbol during wartime.
Did
it mean anything? Adolf Hitler convinced himself that the Kilroy/Chad
figure was being used as code by spies since
it kept showing up on the allies’ equipment seized by the Germans.
He sent a couple too many men to search out information about what
message it intended to send, only to have them come back without any
useful theories. Maybe that is why the graffiti
caught
on; the human mind has an unrelenting capacity to see patterns where
they do not actually exist. Many hard thinkers have spent countless
hours of time pursuing the meanings of fruitless mysteries that lead
them to dead-ends, the tortured logic of conspiracy theories or goofy
conclusions that do not make any sense to anyone but themselves.
Reisner, Robert.
Graffiti: Two Thousand Years of Wall Writing. H.
Regnery Co., 1971.
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