Front view of the Hyperion studios building

Walt outside the Burbank studios

Donald gets Drafted

The army moves in

Guards provide strict control at the gate

Walt sketching an idea to an army official

Cartoon in funny animal style

Cartoon in Calgary EyeOpener style

The picketers outside the main gate

LFC7/1 Pluto Saves the Ship

The chicken farm outside San Jacinto

Garé in 1940

THE WAR STARTS

When Barks joined the Disney Corporation in 1935 the studios were spread over a wide area but were primarily at 2719 Hyperion Avenue, east of downtown Los Angeles, but all activities moved to Burbank and work started on January 1st, 1941 (see more HERE). During the Hyperion period Barks and his second wife, Clara Balken, had stayed in an apartment within walking distance of the studios, but when Disney's moved to 500 Buena Vista Boulevard in Burbank, they moved as well. When the Second World War broke out on September 1st, 1939, nothing much changed in Barks' life. It was business as usual to most Americans. At the time Barks was heavily involved in the story department where he served as idea and gagman on the animated shorts and at times he was even Story Director (see more HERE).
But all Disney's planned feature films and short cartoons came to an abrupt halt immediately after the USA had declared war on the major Axis Powers (Germany, Japan and Italy) on December 8th, 1941, following the infamous attack by the Japanese empire at the American fleet base Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The very same day 500 army soldiers moved onto the premises seizing a large part of the buildings for their own purposes. Military units were confined to a barrack-like life in a number of the buildings, the parking sheds were used for ammunition storage, and the largest sound stage was used for repair of weapons and vehicles. Furthermore, fences were erected around the whole studio area, everybody had to wear visible identity cards, and armed guards patrolled the gate.

WAR WORK

Shortly after, the armed forces approached Walt Disney and began ordering all sorts of instruction films (primarily in the format of short cartoons) to be used to educate the troops in an easily understandable way, and Disney was happy to comply. Although he had to take a severe plunge in income, he was glad that he was not shut down completely, and he jumped at the opportunity of doing his bit for his country (during the war years Disney's made a staggering 93% of its total footage for the armed forces). Soon orders from other companies followed; the neighbouring Lockheed Aircraft Company ordered special educational films to be shown to their workers, and the films proved so efficient that the rate of errors diminished and the production of airplanes increased.
Furthermore, numerous shorts were churned out to be showed all over the American continent. They were highly educational and bore titles such as Food Will Win the War (on how to grow healthy produce), The New Spirit (on the importance of paying income tax), and The Winged Scourge (on how mosquitos that carried diseases could be avoided). Several of the films in that category starred Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, and The Seven Dwarfs.

But in the story department where Barks worked, all work had to start over again from scratch. Disney asked his employees to churn out short morale boosting cartoons. Donald Duck and Pluto usually took the starring roles. Here is one example:
In Donald Gets Drafted Barks lets Donald be recruited to the army, but he also satirizes the American military propaganda by showing Donald passing a series of recruiting posters on his way to the induction office. One shows a smiling general captioned Everybody Is Pals In The Army, another shows a private being served breakfast in bed by an accommodating sergeant, and a third one shows pretty air hostesses walking arm in arm with a happy soldier. But while in the barracks Donald is trained in a much more down-to-earth decisive manner. His drill sergeant turns out to be the overpowering and sadistic Black Pete and Donald has a tough time hanging on.
More Barksian Donald films with the same basic theme (Donald learning the ropes and trying to tackle Black Pete) emerged, and a few featuring Pluto in the role of military guard dog were made as well (see more HERE and HERE).

Barks' attitude towards the war was pretty clear: The war was a very unpopular subject with me. I had seen one generation of young men march off to war (the First World War 1914-1918 - Editor's remark) and I was stupid enough that I wanted to get into it, but I was a little too young. And then comes this Second World War, and I had learned my lesson in the meantime. When I saw how little we had accomplished with the first, I thought, why in the devil kill off another whole generation of young men to accomplish the same result?
Although being an admitted pacifist for all of his life Barks would have had no possibility of joining the armed forces anyway: When his country entered the First World War he was too young (16 years) and when it entered the Second World War he was too old (40 years).

MOONLIGHTING

When Barks worked at the Hyperion studios he and his wife had an apartment at 1847 Silver Lake Boulevard about 1 mile (1,6 kilometres) away, and when Barks worked at the Burbank studios they moved to 4928 Riverton Avenue in North Hollywood, which was 3 miles (appr. 5 kilometres) away.
Barks was able to follow a fraction of his country's war efforts to and from work every day. When he walked to the new Disney Studios in Burbank, he would get the occasional glimpses of gold stars in the windows of some of the houses. They symbolized that someone in the household was actively engaged in the war overseas. As time went by, more and more stars emerged in the windows.
Barks spent most of his leisure time drawing. The motifs were non-Disney although some of the drawings were clearly influenced by the Disneyish looking funny animal characters, while others were reminiscent of the cartoons he drew when he was working for the Calgary EyeOpener (see more HERE). Barks sold some of the drawings, while others - mostly sketches - remained with him only to emerge after his death.

THE STRIKE

On May 28th, 1941, began a bitter strike following general discontentment for several months. The strike started because of a number of reasons, but two of the main triggers were that some of the employees wanted to be unionized, while others were unsatisfied with their pay. The first was only a natural extension of unionizing of the whole film industry which had not been attached to unions before, and the latter was due to the fact that Disney's employees received extremely varied wages (for instance, a star animator would easily earn 500 dollars a week, while a cel painter only took in 12 dollars a week). Besides, the employees had been expecting promised bonuses since the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Walt Disney soon proved unable to understand the seriousness of the strike: I’ve created this great environment. Why would anyone want to turn on me after I created this great environment? Why would anybody want to spoil this place? A few days before the strike began he had fired several employees for union activities during working hours, among which was one of the leading animators, Arthur Harold Babitsky better known as Art Babbitt, who immediately became a personal, uncompromising adversary to Disney.

As the weeks dragged on, the picket line became contentious carrying picket signs saying One Genius vs. 600 Guinea Pigs, Snow White and 700 Dwarfs, and Are We Mice or Men? The studio employees were deeply divided. Only one third of the employees - who totalled 1,200 people - were picketing outside the studio gate (the figures of 600 and 700 mentioned above were just 'wishful thinking'), while most of them tried to lead a normal working life inside.
Among those was Barks: Well, I was in the story department and we didn't strike. The animators and in-betweeners were the ones on strike. We in the story department went through the picket line every morning. I was against the strike. I had the feeling that something was being destroyed. The Disney studios were a place where there were no time clocks - we were able to come to work whenever we wanted to. If you went to work, did a good job and had something to show for your efforts, you got paid damn well. If you were shirking and complaining all the time you didn't get a raise, and it was these shirkers and complainers who had organized this strike. Disney was fair - of course, he could have been more considerate and humane to his employees, but those were hard times. He brought a bunch of us, who, if we were lucky, could earn 10 dollars a week doing whatever job - and he gave us twenty. I know many who were not grateful to him for that. They thought that if a Disney film brings in 100, 000 dollars, they should get half of it. But Walt invested the entire amount in order to make a new film.

The situation worsened day by day between the two groups; in the beginning the picketers were merely pushing and shoving the non-strikers, but soon the whole affair escalated to a point, when people spat on each other, fistfights broke out, and cars were destroyed.
The strike dragged on until September 15th when it was settled by intermediaries. This was partly due to the fact that Disney had taken his first of several promotional trips to South America in order to test the possibilities for films and cartoons, and when he finally returned, all employees had been unionized. Still, things never returned to 'the good old days' when Disney himself inspired and supervised his staff, and there was a cheerful tone in the studios. After the strike Disney gradually withdrew from personal contact with his employees and the tone had changed irrevocably for the worse.

COMIC BOOK WORK

Barks was never interested in working on war theme films, and in 1942 he decided to leave Disney's: We were working on a film about medicine, and the way germs invade the body. They were getting lined up for some war picture on gun barrels or something like that. I couldn't see myself getting tied up with that sort of thing. A contributing reason for Barks' decision was that the Burbank studios had air conditioning in all the rooms unlike those in Hyperion Avenue, and Barks' sinuses suffered from the dry air.

Before leaving Disney's and plunging into comic book work, Barks had actually participated in a story with the ongoing war as the main topic: 'Pluto Saves the Ship' was written by Jack Hannah, Nick George, and I in 1942 in our evening hours. It was not an adaptation of a cartoon story. Eleanor Packer of Whitman Publishing may have dreamed up the basic plot. It was only a one-shot special designed to take advantage of the wartime jitters. Anyway, we three did the final draft in rough sketch form in my den room in North Hollywood. The post-Pearl Harbor blackouts were in effect, and we had all window blinds closed and taped shut. It was hot and stuffy, and we consumed many beers. The story shows the effects. One of Disney's layout men with a flair for drawing panel after panel of shipyard scaffolding did the artwork. I can't recall his name.

Although Barks detested the war he actually made two more war-themed stories, but they were partly dictated from his publisher; the first was his very first Donald Duck 10-pager known as WDCS031 'Victory Garden' and the second one was FC0029 Too Many Pets. Both main story lines came from his new employer, Western Publishing, but Barks reworked them. From then on he made his own stories, and they were not connected to the war.
Apart from the opuses FC009 Donald Duck finds Pirate Gold (see more HERE) and FC0029 The Mummy's Ring Barks churned out 10-pagers for the rest of the war from his new home, a chicken farm (which he had actually bought two years earlier) outside San Jacinto. The stories were all heavily influenced by his time at Disney's; they had little dialogue, and gag followed gag without much coherence just as in the cartoons he was so familiar with. Later on, Barks began to produce very rich and highly innovative material, but that is another story...

In 1942 the couple moved to San Jacinto, and Clara worked with Carl when he began his comic book career: I taught her to black in my stuff, that is, put in the solid blacks with the brush, and she did that for me for several years (she also inked the borders around the panels - Editor's remark). But as she became more and more of an alcoholic, she got to where she would get on belligerent spells and try to tear up a bunch of my drawings.

GARÉ

Margaret Williams, nicknamed Garé (see more HERE), was to become Barks' third wife much later, but they actually met during the war: That was about 1945, no, about 1944 or even earlier (they actually met in 1942 when Barks had moved to the chicken farm - Editor's remark), because shortly after that she got a job down at McDonnell Douglas, where they were building airplanes. The war was on, and she was in the drafting department, lettering the drafting pages.
One day Garé saw a newspaper article about a nearby chicken farmer who dabbled with the drawing of some comic books and she went out there to see if he might have any work for her. Little did she know that she met her future husband that day because the farmer was Carl Barks. But he did not have any work for her and that was that. For the time being...