When did the word "snafu" enter the colloquial vernacular?

Question

Roughly when did the word "snafu" enter the colloquial vernacular? It was a military term, but at some point it came into fairly common use among the general population. If you can narrow it down to a decade or so, that's good enough for me.

Additionally, if you could, tell me how you figured out the answer (teaching a man to fish and all...)

Answer 1

According to the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) at BYU, snafu began appearing in popular print in the 1940s; in fact, the 1940s is the decade which has the most citations, at 22. For example, an "Army & Navy: Joe & Joe" column in the November 30, 1942 issue of Time provides the basic definition and a few examples.

This matches the Google Ngram. Appearances prior to 1940 appear to be OCR errors or nonsense words, but by 1943 you can find the term used in publications ranging from Yachting magazine to Life to the University of Michigan alumni magazine.

See Google NGram

A letter to the editor in the same complains:

… [Y]ou use the word "snafu." I find this puzzling because it is not listed in any dictionary, nor does it sound like any slang I have heard before.

to which the editors respond

Snafu is a service slang word compounded out of the initial letters of the words in a phrase politely translated: "Situation normal, all fouled up." Pernicious snafu is somethings called susfu, or "Situation unchanged,still fouled up."

By the end of the war, evidently, editors no longer needed to define the term for their audiences. Either its use in plays, films, and publications of the era or the omnipresence of the phenomenon in wartime had made it singularly useful.

Answer 2

As I have watched many military themed movies, I believe it has been in continual use since WWII's veterans returned to the US. It would be interesting to understand the popularity of a word in relation to box office

SNAFU

1941, U.S. military slang, acronym for situation normal, all fucked up, "an expression conveying the common soldier's laconic acceptance of the disorder of war and the ineptitude of his superiors" ["Oxford English Dictionary"]. As an adjective from 1942. In public explanations the word typically was euphemised to fouled.