In addition to masquerading, the hospital staff performed a “parody in pantomime” (think Chaplin’s The Great Dictator) celebrating the Third Anniversary Mardi Gras Carnival of the Mystic Krewe of Snafu. The play was co-written by Captain Weiss and the cast were various members of the 24th General Hospital. Characters included Mussolini (“Benito the man who is Finito”), multiple Hitlers, Hirohito (“the Imperial Mosquito”), the Roosevelts, Chiang Kai-shek and wife, Churchill, Stalin and the Court of Snafu. The skit is introduced as:

Images from the Thomas Weiss collection can be seen online here in our Digital Collections. For more on Wartime Carnival see our flickr set and a previous blog post. “Long Live SNAFU, the King of Merriment!”