This map was published by Louis Emile Manche, a Dutch Nazi, for the propaganda section of the Department of Illustration and Popular Arts of the Netherlands under Nazi occupation in 1942.
In the illustration, the United States is represented by a greedy octopus with a total of eleven tentacles reaching out in all directions and bearing different years:
- 1876 – A tentacle reaching Alaska. The incorrect year, as the purchase of Alaska took place in 1867.
- 1898 – A tentacle reaches Hawaii, the year this territory was annexed by the United States.
- 1848 – A tentacle embracing California, New Mexico and Texas, the year in which the annexation of Mexican territories was completed.
- 1898 – A tentacle reaching the Philippines, the year it passed from the Spanish Empire to the United States.
- 1941 – Two tentacles reach South America.
- 1898 – A tentacle reaching Cuba and Puerto Rico, the year they passed from Spanish rule to the United States.
- 1941 – A tentacle reaching Curaçao and Suriname, the year in which American troops were deployed in the area to prevent the Nazi landing.
- 1940 – A tentacle reaches Bermuda, the year in which the creation of two American bases on the island was approved.
- 1940 – A tentacle embracing Newfoundland, the year Canada took over the defence of the island after the fall of France.
- 1941 – A tentacle reaches Iceland, the year in which the country's defence passed from the United Kingdom to the United States.
The map also shows the tentacle reaching the Philippines cut off by a Japanese katana, symbolising the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbour by the Japanese Empire and how this was beginning to limit American imperialism. In addition, the illustration includes a multitude of Japanese planes and ships in the Pacific Ocean, as well as two American ships sunk in the Atlantic Ocean and many other German ships sailing.
The text accompanying the map in the upper left corner, written in Dutch, is a translation of a quote from Henry Luce, founder of Life, Time, and Fortune magazines. In it, Luce advocates for American interventionism in domestic politics:
In 1919, we had a golden opportunity, an opportunity unprecedented in history, to assume world leadership – an opportunity that was handed to us on a silver platter. We did not understand that opportunity. Wilson squandered it. We rejected it. The opportunity persisted. We squandered it in the 1920s and killed it in the turmoil of the 1930s. Leading the world has never been an easy task. Rekindling the hope of that lost opportunity makes the task infinitely more difficult than it would have been before. In any case, with everyone's help, Roosevelt must succeed where Wilson failed.
Henry Luce
The rest of the text delves into anti-American propaganda, mentioning how the United States has been behaving for decades with an imperialist attitude, in which its best weapon has been the dollars spent to control multiple territories. Finally, the article itself points out that the US government has miscalculated on this occasion and, as a result, Japan and Germany have it under control in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, meaning that the tentacles of the American octopus will be cut off.
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