Walt Disney's political credentials are well known: using scab labour to produce Dumbo, retelling the history of colonialism through the myth of Pocahontas, appearing at the House Un-American Activities Committee informing on ‘security threats’, being the only Hollywood celebrity to receive Nazi film-maker Leni Riefenstahl, and being himself received by Mussolini. Less well known amid this political posturing and ideological work is a cartoon film released by the company in 1943 called Victory Through Air Power. Based on a book of the same title written by Major Alexander P. De Seversky published a year before and selling in the hundreds of thousands through the Book-of-the-Month Club, the film opens with an old newsreel clip of leading air power theorist Billy Mitchell outlining the doctrine of strategic bombing which was by then all the rage. Following the dedication of the film to Mitchell, the film then covers the history of airplanes, moving quickly to their use in battle and superiority to warships, and to the bombing of the Japanese octopus (‘think of Japan as a great octopus’, Seversky had suggested in his book).