The World War II memorial in DC is imposing and serious.
And it should be.
But it would be a mistake to forget the joke that helped keep GIs going.
It was amazingly similar to a modern meme. And his name was Kilroy.
Soldiers scrawled this face and “Kilroy Was Here” all around the world.
The joke was that Kilroy, peeking out, had been everywhere before the GIs got there.
He greeted them in Okinawa and Casablanca, and in Sicily he cheered them in Berlin.
Everywhere soldiers went, seeing unfamiliar landmarks and reading signs in languages they
couldn’t speak, they graffitied the same picture and signed the same name on every
available surface.
He was a joke, but he was also a kind of assurance, a hero who’d been there before and still
made it out OK.
We don’t really know where Kilroy came from.
The picture showed up around the world — in England, he was Mr. Chad, where he complained
about skimpy rations.
At some point, that guy was mashed up with the phrase “Kilroy Was Here.” Who was
Kilroy?
The legend’s that a shipyard inspector named James J. Kilroy wrote “Kilroy Was Here”
on all of his inspected work.
Soldiers saw it and turned it into a joke that showed up on bomber wings and became
latrine literature.
James Kilroy won a contest for supposedly being the real Kilroy, but - eh - Kilroy was
bigger than him.
There were rumors Stalin was spooked by Kilroy graffiti at Potsdam, and after the war he
popped up in movies, whiskey ads, and really weird novelty songs.
“Kilroy was here. We want Kilroy. And even Edgar Hoover admits he’s quite a mover — Kilroy
was here. Ha, I’m Kilroy!”
Today, Kilroy’s faded from bathroom walls, but if you go to the World War II Memorial,
past a fountain you can’t make wishes in, near an area that’s closed for construction,
you can peer through a fence and see that even in this place Kilroy got here before you.