Women Without Morals

Women Without Morals, by Richard F. Gallagher

No month stated, 1962  Avon Books

Check it out, an entire book devoted to my favorite kind of women! Seriously though, Women Without Morals is yet another vintage men’s adventure magazine anthology, this one featuring stories by Richard Gallagher, whose men’s mag work I’ve reviewed here over the years. Interestingly, the book is copyright Gallagher, implying that at least some of the authors who worked for the men’s magazines retained the copyrights on their work; I was under the impression that all of the stories would be copyright the various publishers (with those copyrights now having expired). 

Gallagher is a good writer, and like the better writers in the field he worked for the so-called Diamond Line of magazines, ie Male and Stag and the like, which is of course where the stories collected here are taken from. Another note: the copyright page lists which issues the stories came from, however as it turns out they are not listed in order. Thus I had to do a bit of research to determine which stories came from which magazines, and I’ve noted this below, as well as their original titles. Also worth noting is that Women Without Morals did well enough to receive a second printing, the cover of which I’ll place below; I prefer the cover of this first edition, with the Nazi She-Devil-esque topless babe wielding a whip…a scene that sort of occurs in the first story collected here. 

And in fact, this first story is the closest we get to a Nazi She-Devil tale in the entire book. This I found perplexing; the Nazi She-Devils were the epitome of “women without morals” in the world of men’s adventure magazines, yet I’m assuming Gallagher didn’t write too many stories in the subgenre. At least, so far I’ve only read one story by him that nearly fits in the category: “G.I. On The Ship Of Lost Frauleins.” The story in this book, though, “Hanne Jaegermann, The Sweatered Fraulein,” is actually more of a Nazi She-Devil yarn than that later one, even though the titular Hanne is not specifically stated as being a Nazi. But really it’s just splitting hairs, as gradually we learn that Hanne has attained her position of power thanks to her casual affair with none other than Goebbels. So I’d say she’s a Nazi She-Devil by default. 

The story first appeared in the February 1959 Stag, where it was titled “Fraulein Barracks.” As with the other stories collected here, it’s fairly long, running to around 40 pages of small, dense print, and it was labelled a “True Book Bonus” in the original magazine edition. Those Diamond Line mags didn’t short-change their readers, that’s for sure. Also, this story, like the others collected in Women Without Morals, is written in third-person. (As usual though the illustrations that graced the original magazine editions are not featured here.) Taking place in the last months of the European theater of WWII, “The Sweatered Fraulein” concerns Sgt. John Leonard, an injured airman who, along with other Allied prisoners, is taken to a prisoner of war camp in an old fortress called Alpenhaus, in the Bavarian Alps. 

Alpenhaus, Leonard soon discovers, now serves as a “cat house,” a rather beaten-down one at that, reserved for Nazi VIPs. It’s patrolled by old guards, most of them vets of the First World War who have little interest in Hitler but are “doing their duty” for Germany. But most importantly it’s overseen by Hanne Jaegermann, a young, beautiful, and built blonde (her hair so blonde it’s almost white, we’re informed) who likes to wear tight sweaters that are always either white or black. And in true “Nazi chic” fashion her apartment in the fortress is decorated solely in black and white. There’s an old vet here who is officially the commandant, but Hanne is clearly in charge, and this puzzles Leonard. He soon runs afoul of the woman, though; when he’s called into her presence because he speaks fluent German, Hanne demands that Leonard act as her official translator for the American prisoners. When Leonard refuses, he soon understands he’s made a powerful enemy, one who will enjoy toying with him. 

So begins a twisted sort of psycho-sexual tale in which Hanne constantly abuses and humiliates Leonard – making him scrub the floor and then dumping the bleach-filled water on his face, having him beaten up by her sadistic henchman, punishing (and killing) other prisoners as a warning to him, and etc. While Hanne toys with Leonard, saving him “for a rainy day,” she is even more brutal with the other prisoners; she has a few people taken down by her Dobermans (one of the victims a young prostitute who refuses to sleep with a certain Nazi official), orders some other people shot, and in the most harrowing example she has one guy stripped and then beats him to death by smashing him in the groin with a sharpened belt buckle! This is his punishment for trying to kiss one of the hookers in the establishment. 

With her ground rules set that this will be the treatment for any prisoner who tries to touch one of the women, Hanne then sets upon toying with Leonard. In another memorable bit she calls him to her apartment, strips nude, and has him read Faust to her – but as Leonard soon learns, she’s really trying to arouse his lust so that he can try to touch her…and then be beaten to death for it. In another bit she calls Leonard once again and both she and some of the establishment girls are all nude or half-nude, and again Leonard does his best to avoid them. Suprisingly though, Leonard never does have his way with Hanne; Gallagher I’ve noticed tries to be relatively realistic in his stories, all things considered. While Hanne is certainly a smokin’ hot babe, Leonard is more concerned about his safety and thus never falls into her trap. 

Overall this was a very good, very fast-moving story, coming off like a twisted take on Hogan’s Heroes. It doesn’t get as wild as you’d like, though, save for the parts where Hanne is dispensing her twisted brand of justice. Even the parts where the Nazi elite come over for an orgy or two are relatively tame, Gallagher focused more on Leonard’s broiling anger than the sleazy fun. Speaking of which the finale is very memorable, as the Americans arrive in April 1945 and Leonard takes the opportunity to get his hands on Hanne and beat the living shit out of her. Certainly one of the few stories I’ve ever read that ended with a male character beating a female character unmerciful, up to and including slamming her face into a brick wall several times. However Hanne manages to live, and in the epilogue we’re told she was sent to prison, then later to a sanitarium for the violently insane. 

Next up is “Meiko Homma, The Japanese Iwasaki Maiden,” which originally appeared as “Imprisoned For Six Months In Japan’s Secret Female Garrison” in the June 1960 Stag. It also appeared in the first Male annual, in 1963, and I reviewed it a few years ago here. This one also stays relatively realistic throughout, despite the giant birdcage the American soldier is kept prisoner in, but a big difference between this story and “The Sweatered Fraulein” is that the hero of this tale scores with the villainous babe. 

The third story is “Bandana Husseini, The Lebanese Guerrilla Girl,” which originally appeared as “Nude Girl Raiders Of Beirut” in the January 1959 Men. This one’s notable in that it’s shorter than the other stories in Women Without Morals, is the only story in the book that doesn’t take place in WWII, and also features a female protagonist. This would be the titular Bandana, a “beautiful Arabic-looking girl” with “hair in pigtails” and “sport clothes from Paris.” It’s early 1957, and Bandana has made waves in Lebanon for her bandit activities – plus the rumor that she carries “a tommygun with a rose-colored cartridge clip.” This is another one that would’ve fit in the Women With Guns anthology, but Gallagher already had another story in that one. At any rate, “The Lebanese Guerrilla Girl” also has a different tone than the other stories here, almost coming off like a fable; there’s no real peek into the mind of Bandana Husseini, as there is with say John Leonard in “The Sweatered Fraulein;” instead the focus is on her wild deeds, with the anti-heroine coming off like a mythical figure at times. 

Bandana is in her early 20s, the daughter of a wealthy Lebanese man and a graduate of an American university, but when we meet her she’s in jail for having stolen to give to the poor. She escapes, finds safe passage with an old merchant who ends up raping her (his two drivers also getting in on the act), and then ultimately falls in with a group of rebels led by a guy named Hulim. From here she gets her own tommygun, painting it red, and begins a series of brazen acts against the establishment. Per the original men’s mag story title, she often does so in the nude, her and her two female accomplices in the group stripping down for their various commando missions. The story’s most memorable scene has Bandana getting revenge on the old rapist, orchestrating his fall off a bridge and waiting patiently for two days for him to die. Otherwise “The Lebanese Guerrilla Girl” doesn’t have the “meat” that the other stories here do, coming off more like a quick, action-packed tale with a wild child protagonist. 

Next is “Claire Molyneaux, The Commandant’s Wife,” which originally appeared as “Madame Penal” in the June 1959 Male. This is the longest story in the anthology, coming in at almost 50 pages. It’s another prisoner of war yarn, and a bit too similar to “The Sweatered Fraulein.” While it’s a fine story, I think it was a mistake including this one in Women Without Morals, as it’s inferior to that previous story, mostly because this one lacks the twisted psycho-sexual subtext of “The Sweatered Fraulein,” coming off more like your typical prison camp yarn. But given the theme of the anthology, the sadistic commandant is of course a woman, in this case Claire Molyneaux, young wife of the official commandant of a French prison camp in Latakia, Syria (Latakia being one of the places where Nick Carter gets the tobacco for his special cigarettes, at least in the volumes by Manning Lee Stokes – random factoid alert!). 

It’s 1939, and the brief intro informs us that merchant seaman Joseph Kolinsky, of Chicago, has been arrested in French territory on false chages of being an Axis ally, this being shortly after France and Germany have declared war. Along with other falsely-accused prisoners he’s hauled off to this prison camp in the middle of the desert. Soon enough he encounters Claire Molyneaux, the hotstuff commandant’s wife who is given to wearing a military tunic, shorts, and high boots; curiously though we’re informed she isn’t that hotstuff, but still pretty enough to attract attention. Her husband, the supposed Commandant Molyneaux, is old and enfeebled (we’re informed he married Claire just a few years ago and is desperate to keep her), and Claire runs roughshod over the camp, ruling the soldiers and brutalizing the prisoners. But the focus this time is much more on the hardscrabble life of Kolinsky in the prison, losing all the pulpy nature of “The Sweatered Fraulein.” 

At least, Kolinsky is a bit more of a rugged hero than John Leonard, and spends most of the novel fighting back, whereas Leonard didn’t put up as much of an effort. It’s become clear after reading several stories by Richard Gallagher that his protagonists are for the most part normal guys…perhaps a bit too normal, as they lack the square-jawed, ass-kicking virility one might expect from men’s adventure magazine protagonists. Thus, instead of swinging into action, Gallagher’s characters are more introspective and, while they will initially put up a fight against their tormentors, ultimately they will decide that life is more important than dignity. Indeed there’s a part in “The Sweatered Fraulein” where John Leonard suddenly understands why millions of cowed German Jews obediently allowed the Nazis to cart them off to the death camps: because there was always the promise of living another day. The parallels to today were quite strong, here – the hope that someday, as we continue to give up one individual right after another (all for “our safety,” of course), things will get better…despite the grim certainty that things will only get worse. For, as the stories collected in this book demonstrate, once tyrants get a taste of power they will never give it up. 

And Claire Molyneaux is certainly a tyrant, lacking even the wanton charm of Hanne Jaegermann. Her custom outfitt, you’ll note, is almost identical to the one Sergeant Homma wore in the earlier story, but unlike the previous gals in the anthology Claire doesn’t seem to have much interest in men…other than torturing them. So begins an overly long but still suspenseful tale in which Claire brutalizes Kolinsky in various ways, often humiliating him. She also often has other prisoners shot, and enjoys making them toil endlessly on the construction of a pointless road in the desert. The focus though is on the lot of the prisoners, and the villainess disappears from the narrative too often. But as mentioned Kolinsky has a bit more backbone than the protagonists in the other prison camp stories here, and at one point tries to kill Claire, but of course he fails and is tortured more. Also at one point she strips and offers herself to him – the story’s sole concession to the sleaze men’s mag readers demand – but Kolinsky won’t play because he knows he’ll suffer. Luckily Claire is drunk and passes out, seemingly forgetting her sexual proposition. 

Gallagher takes an interesting direction in the finale, in which the Germans liberate the camp, France having declared defeat and the Nazis move in. Claire Molyneaux is placed under arrest and put on a kangaroo trial for her transgressions against the prisoners. Suddenly the sadistic harlot looks like a scared little girl, and the story ends with her being pulled in front of a firing squad and strapped to a stake. She’s crying and desolate and Gallagher has it that you start to feel sorry for her. Even Kolinsky, who has finally been granted his freedom, seems to be moved by the spectacle. Claire sees him as he is leaving the compound and screams for his help, pleading with him to stop them from shooting her. Kolinsky goes over to her…and then slaps her in the face and leaves her for her execution! This unexpected gutting of the maudlin sap was the highlight of the story, but truth be told “The Commandant’s Wife” was my least favorite story here. 

Last up is “Colette Le Gros, The French Blonde,” which appeared as “The Castaway Fraulein And Her Strange Partners” in the September 1960 Male. Even though this story also features an American prisoner of war as the protagonist, it departs from the prison camp setup of the other stories, featuring the unusual plot of four men and one woman escaping across the Atlantic in a 30-foot whaleboat. It’s November of 1944 and as the story opens Robert Corti, a downed airman who served as navigator on a bomber, is held at gunpoint as he boards a boat on the coast of France. With Corti are SS Captain Wolfgang Klausewitz, Klausewitz’s bookish aid Leitner, a mysterious Frenchman known only as Pierre (I kept picturing him as the Danger 5 guy), and finally Colette Le Gros, a stacked French beauty (the most beautiful woman Corti’s ever seen in person, in fact) who is Klausewitz’s mistress. 

The shaky setup has it that Klausewitz, knowing Germany is about to fall to the Americans, wants to escape to Nazi-friendly Argentina. The commandant of a war camp, he knows he’ll hang from a noose for the brutalities he’s carried out on his prisoners. He’s plotted out his seaborne escape, but has been waiting “months” for a navigator to be shot down. Corti, finally, is that navigator, and thus he’s been drafted into this escape attempt. Leitner is coming along because he too is a Nazi, and Colette is going along because the French natives will cut her hair off and brand her as a Nazi-loving whore. As for Pierre, his background and motives are mysterious; a former member of the Maquis resistance fighters, he’s only here due to Colette, who has insisted Klausewitz bring him along. Colette also has the thoughtful insistence that Corti, Leitner, and Pierre “have a woman” before boarding the boat, to slake their needs before beginning the voyage – she’s not bound to get on a boat with four horny men, even if she does “love to be loved.” 

It’s kind of goofy…I mean they’ve stocked the boat with crates of food and gallons of water, and lots of liquor and all, but someone’s constantly holding a gun on Corti so he won’t try to escape. But you’d think that he’d get a chance at some point during the 50-day voyage to Argentina. However Corti is another Gallagher protagonist in that he’s not super willing to risk his skin. About the only difference is that he dishes out a lot of passive-aggressive backtalk; Klausewitz, for example, he takes to calling “schmuck,” explaining to the buzzcutted Nazi sadist that the word is American slang for “boss.” Gallagher seems to have more fun with this tale than the others in the book, giving each character a memorable personality; Leitner, for example, bides his time reading from a book of quotations, always trying to find the right quote for the right occasion. 

Given the setting, the lurid angle isn’t as much exploited. Corti’s early tumble with the native French gal Colette finds for him, before leaving on the voyage, is so vaguely-described that you wonder if anything even happened. But once the voyage starts the only shenangians that occur feature Klausewitz and Colette…who enjoy going off in the whaleboat’s sole cabin for a little loud lovin,’ even leaving the door open so the others can see. Colette later informs Corti that exhibitionism turns her on. And, true to the vibe of these stories, she’s often sporting a bikini during the voyage. She’s more along the lines of Bandana Husseini than the other three villainesses in Women Without Morals; she’s not a sadistic commandant, but does enjoy a nice killing or two, most notably demonstrated when a Spanish gunship stops them and Claire frags them – hiding a “potato masher” in a bag and passing it over as if it were their papers of transport. 

But what starts out as a promising suspense yarn turns into a sea survival yarn. I mean it’s good and all, with a lot of cool survival tips – like eating plankton, or a part where a hapless albatross lands on the boat and Corti catches it and they cook it (after drinking the blood and eating the uncooked liver for all the iron). But it turns out that this is the story, not the interesting opening material like who Pierre really is, or what Klausewitz hopes to do once they reach Argentina. Rather, it becomes a sea story, with all the expected tropes: a massive storm knocks out their provisions, including Corti’s navigational equipment, followed by a hardscrabble existence as they try to figure out where the hell in the Atlantic they are. And all the while someone keeps holding a damn gun on Corti, even though he’s literally the only one on the boat who knows how to survive at sea. 

Suprisingly, Gallagher finds the opportunity to include some sleaze; one night Colette comes to Corti and offers herself to him. But once again Gallagher delivers zero in the way of lurid details; indeed, he informs us that, because of the roughness of the wooden deck and the fact that they’re afraid Klausewitz will discover them, the act is “not pleasant.” Furthermore, Gallagher is not an author who tells us much about the ample charms of his female characters. The word “breasts” rarely appears in this book, in fact. For the most part, Gallagher will tell us a woman is pretty, with a nice build, and leave it at that. Even in the supposedly risque scenes – like when Colette strips down, or wears a bikini – he yields no juicy details, just stating the bare fact that the chick’s now in her bra and panties, without any word painting. Perhaps he assumed the artist would handle the T&A and figured his words would just be redundant. 

As I read “The French Blonde” I started to experience déjà vu, and realized that it was similar to another Gallagher story I’d read – “Buried Alive: A Jap Lieutenant, Three Pleasure Girls, An American G.I.” The two stories are pretty similar, despite that one being set underground and this one being set on the sea. Again Gallagher takes a plot rife with exploitative potential – I mean a hot and horny blonde stuck on a boat with five randy guys (one of ‘em a friggin’ SS officer!!) – but ignores the exploitative stuff and goes for a reserved, “realistic” tone. As I say, the writing is fine, and the character touches are great, but the issue is that this “survival” stuff takes over the story and all the promise is ultimately jettisoned. For that matter, the finale is a harried postscript in which we learn that, upon reaching Portugal (once Corti takes the helm…after the others have been incapacitated by the DTs, a shark attack, and a salt water-jammed Luger), Corti split away from the group, recovered for a few months, and returned to England to continue fighting in the war…and he has no idea what happened to Klausewitz, Colette, Leitner, or Pierre! 

And that’s all there is to Women Without Morals, which I picked up some years ago and intended to read at the time. I’m surprised it took me this long to get to it, as it seemed to promise all I could want from a men’s adventure magazine anthology. But as it turns out, Gallagher’s stories are a little too conservative for the men’s mag genre…I mean these particular “women without morals” seem positively saintly when compared to some of the women in, say, Soft Brides For The Beast Of Blood. But on the other hand, as mentioned Gallagher is a very competent writer, providing a lot more character and narrative depth than you’d ever encounter in “the sweats.” Yet personally, if we’re talking of Diamond Line authors, I much prefer the work of Mario Puzo and Emile Schurmacher.

Here is the cover of the second edition:

Danger Patrol

Danger Patrol, edited by Noah Sarlat
January, 1963  Paperback Library

Longtime men’s adventure magazine editor Noah Sarlat returns with another paperback anthology of men’s mag yarns; Danger Patrol, like the Sarlat anthology Women With Guns, is sourced from the various “Diamond Line” of men’s mags Sarlat edited (ie Male, Stag, For Men Only, etc). The four stories reprinted here are novella length, likely featured as “True Book Bonues” in their original magazine printings, and they each run to 40-some pages of small print.

Danger Patrol does not benefit from the strongest of openers. “Bar Maid Decoy for the Soviet’s Fishing Fleet Spies,” written by W.J. Saber and originally appearing in the September 1960 issue of Stag, is frankly a boring, ponderous tale that I ended up abandoning. Sorry! I tried, though. But while Saber’s writing is up to the usual Diamond Line standards, doling out a polished tale with well-crafted characters, the story was just so slow-going that I couldn’t take it. One wonders why it was chosen for inclusion in the book, let alone why it was given first place.

Occuring in March, 1960, “Bar Maid” features WWII vet Andy Balliol, a hulking, 280-pound mass of muscle who has lived in England since after the war. He goes from port to port on the North Coast, selling things to remote fishermen from his boat. The British government has bullied him into assisting MI5. Turns out the Soviets have been sneaking spies into the swarms of Russian fishermen who congregate around the North Coast, with even a submarine or two lurking outside the three-mile limit. Balliol is put aboard a fishing vessel which hides all sorts of fancy sonar gear and weaponry, his assignment to use his knowledge of the area to help out the crew in their search.

While it sounds like an interesting premise, “Bar Maid” is ultimately boring and tedious. Balliol is an aytpical protagonist, married (not that this keeps him from enjoying some illicit, off-page shenanigans with a bar maid or two), and just looking to keep his business running. I’ve never been the biggest fan of naval fiction, and ultimately that’s what “Bar Maid” is, as the crew trawls around the North Coast, daunting the Russian fishermen and trying to lure out the subs. Eventually this becomes a larger plot where the titular bar maid is used to distract the Russian spies, but by that point I’d jumped ship. Saber was a good writer, though, and a men’s mag veteran; his later story, the violent heist thriller “A Bullet For The Enforcer,” was much better.

The second story is a little more along the lines of what we’ve come here for. “The Yank Who Fouled Up Rommel’s Desert Assault” is courtesy Warren J. Shanahan and originally appeared in the October 1961 issue of Stag. What’s crazy is that Warren J. Shanahan and W.J. Saber were one and the same! Shanahan was his real name and “Saber” was one of his pseudonyms. At any rate, his talent is much better displayed in this yarn that takes place in the North African theater of World War II and calls to mind the 1920s desert pulps of Harold Lamb. Our hero is a young lieutenant named Bob Courtney who is plucked out of basic training and put into espionage training in London due to his mastery of the Arabic language, quite a rare knowledge in those days.

Courtney is another atypical protagonist for the genre; he’s untried in combat, more prone to studying Oriental languages (something he’s been interested in since childhood), but he’s still burly and studly, have no fear. In typical men’s mag style the story opens en media res; it’s November, 1942, and Courtney’s in the Sahara with a one-eyed French Foreign Legionaire named Georges Le Brun, their mission to sway the native Tuareg tribes to turn against the Vichy French. The desert warriors have given fealty to that Nazi-aligned branch of the French government, and Courtney is assigned to change their minds.

From here, true to genre staple, we flash back to Courtney’s beginnings and how he ended up here in North Africa. He’s taught Berber (Shanahan seems to think the Tuaregs and Berbers are one and the same, which is not the case) and instructed in the customs of the desert nomad warriors. After several months Courtney is sent to North Africa, where we pick back up with the opening section. Courtney’s secondary objective is to stop a “Nazi anthropologist” named Flaegler who is stirring up the Tuaregs and moving them around the Sahara for some nefarious goal. After much traveling across the desert our heroes find Flaegler and the Tuaregs; so begins a war of wills to win the support of their leader.

The Diamond Line was always sure to add some sex appeal to these yarns; soon enough the strong-willed Tuareg women, who unlike the men do not wear veils, declare a “love fest.” All the single men, including Courtney and Le Brun, must sit with the single women and praise their beauty. Courtney is paired up with foxy Menia, “[whose] beauty is known all over the desert.” But Courtney knows that much trouble can arise from having an affair with a Tuareg woman, so he keeps himself to words only, lifting lines from Shakespeare and further winning the approval of the desert peoples. It works, though, as Menia gives herself to Courtney there on the desert sand – not that we get any juicy details, of course.

The desert life stuff goes on and on, finally culminating in a fight with a jealous would-be suitor of Menia who comes after Courtney. Our hero escapes with Le Brun and Nazi Flaegler and the trio race across the desert with angry Tuaregs in tow. We get another brief action scene as they hold off a group of desert warriors, Flaegler trying to kill Courtney during the action but our hero getting the drop on him. And that’s it – “Whether his mission was successful is not directly known,” Shanahan lamely wraps up Courtney’s tale, thus bringing to end another middling story.

The third tale is courtesy Richard Gallagher, definitely one of my favorite men’s mag authors. “WW II’s Forgotten Sailor and His Desert Shangri-La” originally appeared in the January 1962 issue of Stag. It’s a little too similar to the previous story in the anthology, as once again it concerns an untried but plucky protagonist who is dropped into a hostile desert environment. In this case the desert is the Gobi and the protagonist is Navy Lt. John Mulhare, who when we meet him in May 1942 is the sole operator of “Mongolian Weather Station #1,” a remote radio broadcasting unit from which Mulhare sends weather updates to the Navy fleet.

Gallagher proves why he’s one of the better authors with a tale that featuers more sex and action than the previous two stories combined. In true men’s mag style it opens with both, as Mulhare is being bathed by his Mongolian consort, Numdah (whom we learn Mulhare had to force to bathe initially, Mongolian women being infamously dirty and unwashed), when “the Japs” launch an air raid on the village. The brief action scene also sees Japanese paratroopers dropping in just in time to get gunned down by Mulhare and the Mongol warriors.

But from there it’s to the inevitable flashback, where we see that Mulhare was dropped into the Gobi in January and had to become friendly with this tribe, led by Otan-shu, while setting up his station. Gallagher I’ve found is known for starting his stories out about one thing before veering unexpectedly in another direction. So is the case here. After the Japanese attack in May, Otan-shu orders the Mongols off, and now Mulhare is all alone. The story becomes a desert survival epic, and stays that way for the duration, as Mulhare makes his miserable way across the desert.

Mulhare eventually hooks up with another horde of Mongols, but these ones are mean and treat him like a “guest,” ie a prisoner. It’s all eerily similar to the previous tale as Mulhare engages in various pissing contests with the Mongol warriors to prove his manly mettle. He even takes another Mongol babe (off-page), not caring this time whether she’s bathed or not – Gallagher also has a strange fondness for often reminding us how dirty and smelly his characters are, particular the ladies. Unlike the previous story, though, Gallagher doesn’t even give us a big finale; instead we have the briefest of sword fights between the Mongols and some Japanese, and then Mulhare is turned safely over to the Nationalist Chinese.

Gallagher also delivers the final tale, “Blow The German Sub Pens at Adriatic Harbor,” from the August 1962 issue of Male. Not only is this the best story in the anthology, it’s also the only story that captures the theme of the book, with a misfit commando squad venturing into Axis territory to blow up the titular submarine pens. It’s my favorite story by Gallagher yet, and brings to mind his tale “Five Greek Girls to Istanbul,” which was collected in Women With Guns. And for once he opens with a storyline and sticks with it for the duration of the tale.

It’s August 1942 and Sgt. Max Jeremy is in charge of a five-man commando squad tasked with destroying the subs that are wreaking havoc on Allied convoys that supply Malta. The sub pens are located in Bari, Italy, on the Adriactic coast, built into the grottoes of a cliff base; “three hundred feet of granite armor plate covered them.” For the mission Jeremy leads Sgt. Running Horse Smith, aka “Pawnee,” who runs the radio; Dino, a demolitions guy; Gino, a mountain man; and finally Biji Salvato, “a dark-haired sweet-meat of a girl” who has somehow gotten assigned to this particular mission, mostly due to having grown up in Bari.

Gallagher puts the focus on action this time; the story opens with a lone fighter plane attack on Jeremy’s squad, in which poor Dino buys it. Even after the customary flashback, to a few months previously, Gallagher keeps the action moving, skipping over the squad’s training in London and sending them posthaste to Italy, where they first take on a German radio-directional truck. Gallagher also remembers the sex factor; however when Biji makes the expected advances on Jeremy he turns her away, fearing that her sleeping with him would cause jealousy in the group. Jeremy does get lucky later, when a nubile 18 year-old girl gives herself to him in the village the squad hides in.

But once again Gallagher dwells on how dirty and grimy our heroes are; Jeremy even encounteres the girl, Sophia, because he’s hoping to take a nighttime swim to get the stink off him. When he asks Sophia for some soap, she laughs that there hasn’t been any soap in the village for three years. But there’s more action on the way, Gallagher again well capturing the plight of a small group of commandos in enemy territory, as our heroes take on a platoon of Italian soldiers near a cemetary. By the time they get to those sub pens, Jeremy’s squad has been whittled down to three people: himself, Biji, and constantly-worrying Pawnee.

Armed with 300 pounds of airdopped nitrostarch and an 88mm artillery shell, which they steal from the Germans in another action sequence, Jeremy and team ply through the foggy harbor on a motor boat, evading the “cornstalk-thick” mines. We don’t get a big climactic shootout, though; when the Germans and Italians spot our heroes, they jump from the boat, which is used as an explosive battering ram. In the chaos of escape Jeremy and Biji are separated, but Gallagher – who arbitrarily drops into first-person narration here and there, the idea being that he is “friends” with Jeremy or something – informs us that the two were married in ’46, and indeed Gallagher even just recently visited them in New York!

Saved by a last story that redeems the anthology, Danger Patrol really doesn’t display the best material the Diamond Line had to offer. I’m certain there were much better stories Sarlat could’ve chosen. The stories here, other than the last one, are too ponderous and lack the rugged heroism expected from vintage men’s mag yarns. However the book’s still recommended for the sole fact that it actually features such yarns – it’s sure as hell a cheaper alternative than hunting down the original magazines.

Men's Mag Roundup: More Nazi She-Devils

Since the last batch of Nazi She-Devil stories I read were mostly subpar, I thought I’d take a look at similar stories published by the Diamond line of men’s adventure magazines. Unfortunately it appears there wasn’t too many of them – while the Diamond line offered very pulpy tales, it looks like they never really exploited the Nazi She-Devil subgenre. A shame, really, as the stories in these mags are all better than those I reviewed in the previous batch.

However the first story, from the November 1960 Male, is misadvertising of the worst sort. The “true book bonus” is the promisingly-titled “Prisoner in Fraulein Anna’s Private Compound,” by Eugene Heimler, and the title has you expecting one lurid read. And check out the splashpage art by Charles Copeland, which makes the story come off like the ultimate piece of Nazi She-Devil pulp:

And yet…there is no such scene in this story. There’s no “private compound.” There’s no “man-hungry Nazi prison mistress.” There isn’t even a “Fraulein Anna!!” In short, nothing in this illustration or its captions takes place in the actual story – which in fact is an excerpt from Heimler’s book The Night of Mist (later reprinted as Concentration Camp), a nonfiction book about Heimer’s life in a concentration camp. It’s actually pretty despicable that editor Bruce J. Friedman would put such a sensational, lurid splash illustration on what is a true account of the unimaginable horrors of a Nazi camp…not to mention that the rest of the story is graced with grisly photos of corpses in the camps.

Anyway Heimler’s account is as expected harrowing and depressing and comes off very strange placed here in a pulp magazine filled with pulp fiction. “Fraulein Anna” in reality turns out to be a young gypsy girl named Anna who is the daughter of one of Heimler’s fellow prisoners in the camp, and the story details the horrors of the camp and how ordinary people were faced with the ultimate evil. It’s hard to realize the magnitude of what the Nazis did, and I feel that publishing this excerpt in a pulp mag with misleading captions and art cheapens it. I wonder how editor Friedman could stoop to such a thing.

Luckily the other stories are the more-expected pulpy and fun tales. “The G.I. Who Holed Up with a Cossack Brigade” by Peter Lee takes place in 1918 during the Russian civil war and is about an American, Corporal Leon Vonsky, who is sent to help a battalion of Cossacks fight the Reds. It turns out this is an all-female battalion, the balshiye svitski, aka the “big-bosom brigade,” made up of sturdy Cossack women. The story follows the expected path with the chief of the women, Dayra, making advances on Vonsky as soon as he arrives, with other women following suit as he stays with them for a protracted time. It builds up to a climactic assault on Communist forces, but overall the story was a bit underwhelming.

“There’s A Psycho at the Controls of the Lazy Lil” by Glenn Infield is an unintentionally funny piece about a bomber pilot who goes nuts after a crash landing during heavy fighting in WWII; he breaks out of his asylum and steals a B-17, heading for Germany. His brother, also a bomber pilot, goes after him, trying to call him back. Goofy stuff, with the sane brother calling to the insane one over the radio, and the insane one has no idea where he is or what’s going on as he takes on German planes.

Another long story is “TheYank Who Flew 20 Partygirls Out Of Red-Held Soochow,” by Martin Fass – this one is about Joe Haskell, a pilot who after the Korean War stuck around in Asia to fly his own plane service. His old airplane is a waste, though, and he’s offered a job by Shanghai crook Pei, who tells Haskell that if he can get into China and take back Pei’s old plane, returning with it and Pei’s brother to Shanghai, then the plane will be Haskell’s. But it turns out that the “brother” is really infamous Red Chinese VIP General Soo, and in addition there are twenty convent girls: pretty young things who, in exchange for being smuggled out of China, will work for a year in one of Pei’s brothels.

The story instead becomes a survival epic, as the plane crashes due to enemy fire and Haskell takes it in on an idyllic, deserted island – one complete with streams and beaches and basically anything a person could want. They build huts to live in and in between warding off the increasingly-insane Soo, Haskell develops a thing for one of the girls, Dora. But eventually the other girls get sick of Dora hogging all of the lovin’, so Dora asks if Haskell wouldn’t mind spending time with a different girl every night? Finally Haskell’s able to get the plane off the island, but the girls want to stay, and we’re told that now each year Haskell finds the time to “leave civilization” and spend a few months with them on their island!

“The Day Big Murphy Became God of Tiera Del Fuego” by Martin Sol is another goofy piece, this one about a redheaded Bostonian in the 1920s who shipwrecks off an island where his red hair makes the natives think he is a representative of their god. The expected stuff, with Murphy getting in some quality time with the native beauties who worship him, while meanwhile the old chief begins to hate Murphy and plots to feed him to “the fire god,” aka the island’s live volcano.

The December 1960 Male is much better. And the Nazi She-Devil story here is the best one I’ve yet read: “Baron Klugge’s Strange Fraulein Cult,” by Gregory Patrick. Whoever Patrick is, he has a great sense of humor and delivers a long story that doesn’t take itself seriously in the least. It’s 1945, four months after the German surrender, and Corporal Peter Decker is picked up by an attractive fraulein in Stuttgart. The lady, Helga, tells Decker she’s taking him to a wild party, but instead takes him to Castle Doomsday, the domain of insane Otto von Klugge, a former Gestapo sadist who has sworn to continue the war against the Allies despite Hitler’s death.

Decker becomes the prisoner of Klugge and his five “daughters;” in addition to Helga (a former actress in Nazi Germany), there’s Therese and Bertha (a pair of twins), Erna (a “busty” dancer) and Lisa (a former concentration camp guard). All five of them are of course gorgeous and devoted Nazis – save for Erna, who is only in it because Klugge has given her the opportunity to dance for a paycheck again, whereas in the previous months of German hardship she’s had to sell herself just for a Hershey bar. Also each of the girls wear revealing outfits emblazoned with swastikas, like Nazi superheroines or something.

Klugge’s method of guerrilla warfare however is pretty nutty. His castle doubles as a bar and once a week he hosts a live theater for secret Nazi loyalists where he puts up a straw dummy “prisoner,” hands out whips, and allows the patrons to whack on them as if they are back in the concentration camps! Then later he’ll go out with his five girls and one of them will get the interest of a horny American G.I.; another girl will sneak up and knock the guy out cold, and then Klugge will paint a Hitler moustache on the guy! Meanwhile Decker is trussed up throughout, made to watch and still unsure why he’s here.

Klugge’s attempts at “breaking” Decker are also goofy, making him drink endless pitchers of “good German beer.” (This is when Lisa isn’t rolling cannonballs at a bound Decker or the other girls aren’t making him play horsey and carry them across streams!) Along the way Erna develops a thing for Decker, as he’s the first man to be nice to her in forever, so of course she eventually starts coming to him at night. Finally Decker learns that he’s been kidnapped because he has access to a prison where a former SS officer is being held, and Klugge wants the man freed. Instead with Erna’s help Decker gets loose, blows off Klugge’s head with a Luger, and we learn that the “daughters” were eventually tracked down and served a few years in jail.

The “true booklength” piece is “Buried Alive: A Jap Lieutenant, Three Pleasure Girls, An American G.I.” by Richard Gallagher, who is one of my favorite men’s mag authors. And this story really lives up to its “booklength” tag…I mean, this story goes and on and on. But unfortunately it’s for the most part a snoozer. Sgt George Trumbull is a prisoner in Hiroshima on the morning of August 6th, 1945 when the atom bomb hits; Trumbull, the Japanese overseer of the POW camp, and three members of the Iwasaki Women’s Labor Battalion manage to find shelter in a massive underground bunker.

Due to the massive amounts of rubble the quintet are stranded below, in what is otherwise a great shelter, complete with a few years’ worth of food. Gallagher chooses to play it all on the level, though, delivering a mostly-serious tale of survival, with Trumbull and the “Jap,” Lt. Hirata, in an endless battle of wills, while meanwhile the three women (Toshiko, Helen, and Mary – and yes they are Japanese despite their names) give their support to whichever of the two men they think is the strongest.

The problem here is Trumbull himself, who is basically a square and who takes too much of Hirata’s shit. Also you would figure that Gallagher would really play up on the “three pleasure girls” angle of the title, but Trumbull continuously spurns Toshiko’s advances, to the point where you start to go hmmm. (Another curious tenor arises when we learn that Helen and Mary develop a lesbian bond when neither Trumbull or Hirata will give it to them!) Finally though Trumbull “violently takes” Toshiko…but it’s a quick scene and not a fun one because by this point Gallagher has constantly reminded us how filthy everyone is, as Trumbull has banned anyone from “wasting” their precious water on baths.

It all just keeps grinding on, with only the occasional fun bit, like when Hirata and the gals go temporarily goofball, chasing each other around like idiots while Trumbull watches on in confusion. There’s also a fairly epic sewer rat attack. But for the most part it’s a tepid tale, monstrously blown out of proportion; it would’ve been so much better if “Baron Klugge’s Strange Fraulein Cult” had been the true booklength and this story had just been a regular extra-length tale. But anyway it all of course ends with Trumbull finally killing Hirata after yet another of the Lt’s insane attacks, and finally he and the gals reach freedom, two months after being stranded below.

“The Yank Who Escaped From Mussolini’s Secret Stockade” by Walter Kaylin is a little better; there’s an interview with Mario Puzo in the book It’s A Man’s World where Puzo states that Kaylin was his favorite of all the men’s mag writers. But this piece here treads the line a bit too much into fact-based or at least potted history, about a guy named Tony Frank who runs afoul of the fascists in Italy in 1925 and is thrown in the infamous Lipari stockade. It comes off as too much of an article and isn’t as pulpy as I would’ve preferred.

“Sgt Ivarson’s Harem of Fighting Aleut Girls” by Martin Fass is more like it. Another long story, one that actually lives up to its title. I wonder why it wasn’t included in the Noah Sarlat-edited anthology Women With Guns, as it also lives up to that anthology’s title and theme moreso than any of the actual stories in the collection. Anyway it’s August 1942 and native Alaskan Sgt. Ivarson has spent the past two months training an indiginous group of guerrillas in the Aleutian islands, stemming the Japanese invasion.

However Ivarson’s guerrilla force is actually just five teenaged girls, all that was left on Amchitka island after the initial “Jap” assault. Ivarson, along with old Eskimo guide Cumjak, trains the girls into a fierce team, and pretty soon they are pulling raids on Japanese encampments and blowing them away. And the “harem” stuff really comes into play when the lead girl, Mae, tells Ivarson that the girls have planned a celebration before their initial assault…a celebration which includes copious sake intake, dancing, disrobing, and a mass orgy, Ivarson handling all five of the gals by himself!

The pulp thrills continue with a climatic assault by the Japanese and Ivarson and the girls hiding in a mummy-filled cave; Ivarson begins hurling the mummies down at the “superstitious” Japanese, who promptly run away in fright! This was a very fun, very pulpy tale. But Martin Luray’s “The Daring Daylight Raid on Germany’s Mile-High Fortress” takes us back to the potted history route, a factual piece on a December 1943 special forces raid on La Difensa, an impregnable Nazi fortress in the Italian mountains. This campaign was also the basis for the 1968 film The Devil’s Brigade, which I’ve never seen.

The Nazi She-Devil tale in the May 1961 Male is another one that just barely qualifies – the Nazi She-Devils in Richard Gallagher’s True Book Bonus “G.I. On the Ship of Lost Frauleins” are in actuality members of the German Navy’s female auxiliary battalion. Anyway it’s September 1944 and Lt. Jesse Marcher is one of twenty Allied POWs who have been put on the SS Brunhilde, a German ship under the drunken command of Captain Voightlander. All of the POWs are airmen, but due to incorrect info on their records the Germans believe they are marine repairmen, and thus Voightlander claims that the men must be so, because German records could never be wrong.

Also on the ship are fourteen attractive German women – never expressly referred to as Nazi gals, but again the story falls into the subgenre by default. They helm various things on the ship, like the radio; the most attractive of them, Lena Schaatz, tells Marcher that she “greases Captain Voightlander’s driveshaft,” after which Marcher nicknames her “Fraulein Driveshaft.” The POWs are put to work shoveling coal in the bowels of the ship, punishment for not “admitting” they are really repairmen. This takes up a goodly portion of the narrative, Marcher coming off like a union rep as he bickers with Voightlander, who truth be told doesn’t come off as evil at all, just a guy who enjoys running a tight ship.

However this does lead to more inerraction with the gals; Voightlander keeps Lena as his personal mistress and, during one of their bicker sessions, Voightlander passes out from overdrinking and Lena takes March into the captain’s bedroom where they have sex just a few feet from Voightlander’s slumbering form. Eventually March sets it up so that the POWs sneak over to the women’s quarters each night, taking turns with the randy women. As for Lena she is up for anything, gamely sleeping with Voightlander, Marcher, and any other guy on the ship – “Germany is going to lose, and I’m just wild, wild, wild about men.”

As with the Gallagher story above it just grinds on and on with little pizzaz. Again rather than taking advantage of the salacious nature of the story’s concept and title, Gallagher instead focues on the squabblings among the men as Marcher continues to piss off Voightlander and the Germans. It all culminates with Marcher and a pal strapped as punishment to a boom mast during a heavy storm, but they survive the night, and the next day the POWs launch an assault, which itself goes on and on, the ship finally running into a Russian vessel that saves the day – and meanwhile Lena has already latched on to the Russians.

Speaking of Russians, there’s also “The Russian Spy Wore Black Lace Panties,” by Arnold Alexander. This long story is about Irma Schmidt and takes place in 1958, detailing how she got into the espionage game, sleeping with a variety of VIPs and getting information from them. “The Doomed 500 in Rommel’s Prison without Guards” is by Owen Truex and is fiction posing as a true story; Truex narrates how he was a captured POW and was sent to Stalag 353 near Tubruk in Africa, a hellish place where the commandant played games with the prisoners, letting them think they were able to escape but then cutting them down.

“The Angry Vets who Massacred a Crooked City Hall Gang” is by none other than Peter McCurtin, and it’s a very long but unfortunately tepid story about how a few hundred WWII vets banded together in Athens, TN in 1946 to wage war on a corrupt city hall regime that was ruling the populace with an iron fist. Finally “The Extraordinary Survival of James Kipness in Red China” by Martin Fass is another long tale about a Korean War vet in Tungchow province and his escape from the Reds, holing up with native Alice Kwok and waging a guerrilla war as he makes his way to safety. Okay but nothing spectacular, which pretty much sums up the majority of the tales in this review roundup.

Men's Mag Roundup: Call-Girl Temples and Amazon Queens

This is another men’s mag story I’ve wanted to read for a while – “Hitler’s Call-Girl Temple” by Hans Felix Albrecht, originally published in 1962 in A-Ok For Men but reprinted in this January 1970 issue of Adventure For Men. (In fact I suspect that most of the stories in this issue are reprints.) This story is masterful pulp, the sort of “fake history” these men’s mags excelled at. We are informed that prior to the war years the Nazis set up a Temple of Aryan Motherhood in Berlin, a four-floor structure overseen by “The Hindu:” an incense-filled abode of gorgeous German women who willingly gave themselves to the men of the Third Reich, all to propagate the Aryan seed.

Once again though the story title and captions mislead: we’re told that none of these women were call-girls, as there were too many regular women who wanted to give themselves to the cause. So the floors were always filled with visitors and their women, but the most special chamber of all was The Grand Celestial Couch of Aryan Blessedness, where highest members of the Reich were treated. One day in 1937 the Temple received a very special guest – Hitler himself, who brought along his own bedmate: a gorgeous young thing whose father disagreed with Hitler’s political views.

Albrecht informs us that Hitler could only get off on abuse, and thus is sexually excited as the girl struggles against him. But when she wisens up and starts to act like she wants him, Hitler wilts. He stands there like a bufoon as the girl ridicules him, then finally he grabs from the Hindu “the dagger of honor,” which we’re told men would use to carve a swastika on the bosoms of women they’d just had on the Celestial Couch. Hitler uses it to slice up the girl, then orders his men to kill her. Albrecht then flashes back to an earlier point, where we’re told that Hitler once had a thing for a pretty young Jewish girl named Sarah, and wanted to ask her out(!).

The story approaches slapstick as Hitler’s pals urge him to ask Sarah on a date…and when later Hitler tries to sleep with her, she resists. He again gets excited during the struggle, but again wilts when Sarah turns the tables. After this Hitler once again calls in his blackshirts, forcing Sarah to perform “unnatural sex acts” on each of them while Hitler watches. Hitler then clubs the girl on the chin with the butt of a revolver…the end! My friends, this particular men’s mag is the first I’ve read that seems to have an intentional sense of humor, and the following stories are just further indication.

“African Harem Beauties Turned Free!” by Charles V. Nemo is a psuedo-factual article about 800 wives who are now free in the Congo, filled with photos probably stolen from National Geographic. Then there’s “All You Can Eat and Drink – For Free” by Loy Warwick, a “funny” how-to on crashing parties and whatnot; the story seems like it would’ve been more appropriate in The New Yorker. “The Colonel Who Made $600 Million Queer” by Carl Sifakis is another humorous piece, about a Russian counterfeiter hired by the Nazis to help destroy England’s economy with fake pounds sterling.

“Assert Your Masculinity” by Betsy Compton is another inentionally humorous piece (at least I hope it is), about how “if a girl’s a tease – slap her in the face!” It’s filled with anecdotes about how teasing girls just need some light smacking to learn that a man’s in charge! “A Look Through the Window” by James D. Lee is a first-person piece about a drunk college sophomore who panty-raids the girls dorm; he’s careful not to wake up “old maid Miss Huff,” the girls dorm monitor. He gets in a first-floor window and the gal inside is already awake, and tells him to get in bed with her; after having stolen the nameplate on the door and stumbling home he discovers he’s just slept with Miss Huff herself! “Lusty Mistresses of Stud Island” by Gus Farrell is about black magic women on Bay Island who ravish men, and the narrator went their once, got used, and now wants to go back – he ends the story by asking if anyone wants to go along with him!

Then there’s “I Sold Girls to the Arab Slave Traders” by Rene Plankin, a very misleadingly-titled story recounted by the fictional Plankin, who we learn is an investigator hired to find a missing French girl who apparently is being sold on the Arab slave market. The short tale is all suspense, with Plankin meeting up with slavetraders and discussing terms before he is found out and must fight his way to freedom. There’s no slave-girl scene or slavemarket scene, so again we have a writer not capitalizing on the story’s lurid potential. The longest tale here is “My 20 Years with Moscow’s Secret Police” by Mikhail Antonov, straight-up torture porn as Antonov recounts various sadistic means he’d use on prisoners; the author also insinuates that the Communists actually carried out the Holocaust and leaked the photos as a smear campaign against the Nazis. More intentional humor: the editors compare the importance of this story to the publication of Dr. Zhivago!

 

Now we’re back into quality (and long) men’s mag tales – the “Diamond” line was probably the highest-quality of these magazines, all of them edited by Noah Sarlat, who gave us Women With Guns. This first Male annual, from 1963, is massive, well over 100 pages and packed with long, fully-developed stories and great art. However I tracked it down for a story that isn’t even mentioned on the cover: “The Amazon Queen Who Ruled An Experimental Sex Outpost,” by Martin Faas. I mean, what a title!! I discovered this gem via the fantastic Lynn Munroe Books site, where a scan of the story’s splashpage is posted:

But here once again we have a story that doesn’t match (or live up to) its title or captions. It’s my sad duty to inform you that the “experimental sex outpost” angle isn’t even mentioned in Faas’s story, and the Amazon queen, Ilse Todt, is nowhere mentioned as once having been a “Nazi love camp doctor.” Indeed it is her brother Otto who was a doctor, in a concentration camp! Our hero is Harry Remick, an engineer exploring the Mato Grosso region of Brazil in 1947. He encounters Otto and Ilse Todt; Ilse comes to Remick’s bed that night and some good lovin’ ensues. Ilse is sort of a proto-hippie girl, very free-spirited and fun loving; she is in fact the exact opposite of the Nazi She-Devil I expected.

Otto however is a stone cold Nazi and, a few months later, Remick stumbles upon the kingdom he has erected deep in the Mato Grosso. It’s a full Nazi compound with giant swastika, concentration camps, and an army of Calapolo Indians, each of whom is armed with submachine guns and who have swastikas etched onto their metal armbands! (The bit about Ilse using them to “create a new master race” is another element that only exists in the captions and not the story itself.) Ilse is happy to see Remick, goofing around with her playful sense of humor and then later screwing him while a few native girls watch – Ilse wanting to show them how it’s really done.

But Remick is sickened by Otto, who apparently plans to use the Indians as live test subjects. Turns out Otto arranged for Ilse to sleep with Remick so as to ensnare him – Otto knew that eventually Remick would come down here looking for her, as he’d want her again. And so Remick has fallen into his trap: Otto needs Remick’s help to melt gold or something. Remick is kept imprisoned and is even given his own Calapolo bride – after Otto has had ceremonial sex with her in front of the congregation.

Once Remick discovers that the Indians had a ruler whom Otto kicked out, he tracks the man down and works it so that he can return in triumph to the people, who then turn on Otto and kill him. Ilse is spared, and the two part ways, Ilse returning to Germany – again, there’s no indication that she’s “evil” per se, other than going along with Otto’s whims. The story by the way is adorned with “actual photos” of Remick and Ilse – obviously misappropriated shots of random people. Sounds like the sort of thing you could get sued for these days.

The feature story is “Imprisoned For Six Months in Japan’s Secret Female Garrison” by Richard Gallagher, who gave us “Five Greek Girls to Istanbul” in Women With Guns, my favorite story in that anthology. And here too his writing is masterful and fun. This is an extra-long tale, longer even than the typical “true booklength” Male stories, and originally appeared in the June 1960 issue of Stag.

Lt. Amos Brennan crashes his one-man sub during a naval assault on Okinawa in April 1945, and washes up on Kori Shima island, which it turns out is home to the “secret female garrison” that is the Iwasaki women’s contingent. One of the women stabs Brennan in the arm with her bayonet, and she’s about to use him for further practice when her superior pulls her away. (Brennan later dubs the girl “Bayonet Betty,” as she’s always chomping at the bit to further slice him up.) Brennan discovers that the island is filled solely with women – and per men’s mag tradition, we are informed that they’re “ample-breasted for Japanese girls.”

In charge of the garrison is the beautiful Sergeant Homma, a refined type who speaks English and enjoys conversing with Brennan; we’re informed that she likes to wear boots, shorts, and “a tunic too tight and too open to be considered military.” She is somehow related to the General Homma who ordered the infamous Bataan Death March, but won’t elaborate. Gallagher treads the line between pulp and reality; Brennan’s life doesn’t become an orgiastic excess of one ample-breasted Japanese gal after another. Instead the women construct a cage for him, one that is hoisted up off the ground each night. During the day his allotted task is to saw wood while one of the women stands guard, her rifle trained on him.

Only gradually does the pulpier stuff come into play. As expected, Homma comes to Brennan one afternoon and tells him she wants him to wash her back. Homma is very military and professional and in the same matter-of-fact tones she then informs Brennan that she wants him to make love to her. Brennan, sensing that he is in a contest of wills with her, takes Homma roughly, which she appears to enjoy. After which she gives Brennan the rest of the day off! After that it’s back into Brennan’s human-sized birdcage, with the occasional run-in with one of the guards – Gallagher provides an entertaining fight between Brennan and Bayonet Betty, who basically beats the shit out of him with judo and akido.

Gallagher’s style is great, as is all of the writing I’ve so far read in the Diamond line of magazines. No POV-hopping, good characterization, good dialog, good action. When the Americans finally show up on Kori Shima Gallagher provides another entertaining action sequence, though as expected per men’s mag tradition the Japanese ladies can’t fight for a damn, some of them shooting in the wrong direction – but then, Homma informs Brennan that the Iwasaki contingent is made up of common women, not soldiers; a last-ditch Japanese attempt to bolster the army. Also, this is another story graced with photos of random people who are supposed to be our characters!

The other WWII stories in the mag are very air warfare-focused, which admittedly isn’t much my thing. There’s “Destroy Cologne at Midnight” by Len Guttridge, about the RAF strike on that German city, and also “Deadly Twins” by Martin Sol, about a pair of ace pilots who have a running bet on who can shoot down the most Germans. There’s also “The Strange Navy Flyer Who Carried His Gunner Across New Guinea,” by Frederic Wakeman, the unwiedly title of which aptly sums up the (very long) story – which in fact turns out to be an excerpt from Wakeman’s 1960 novel A Free Agent.

On a non-war angle there’s “Border Nymph” by Nick Quarry, the narrative of a private eye as he hunts down an elusive “Indian” girl; this one’s an excerpt from Quarry’s 1960 novel No Chance In Hell. Finally we have some various articles and cheesecake layouts; one of the articles is titled “Those Single Girls Who Like To Fool Around With Married Men,” another one whose title aptly sums up the article, which is filled with a psychologist’s comments on why certain girls go for married men…an informative article which unfortunately fails to answer one very important question: Where can these girls be found??

Women With Guns

Women With Guns, edited by Noah Sarlat
April, 1962  Paperback Library

Noah Sarlat was the editor for several men’s adventure magazines, among them For Men Only and Male, the magazines in which the five stories collected in this paperback originally appeared. Sarlat appears to have been a genius in that he realized that "girls + guns = guaranteed sales," and this collection focuses on such stories. Unfortunately though the “girls with guns” motif is not the main focus of any of the stories, so the title is pretty misleading. On the plus side, all of the stories here offer up quality writing, with strong characters and plotting.

First up is “Warrior Women of Viet Nam” by Emile C. Schurmacher, which originally saw print in the March 1959 For Men Only. Like the other stories in the book this is a long one, nearly 40 pages of small print – the Sarlat-edited mags always ran a “True Booklength” feature in each issue, ie extra-length short stories (which of course were passed off as “true stories”), and this story as well as the other four were such features, hence the length. Anyway this story is unusual because it was written before the US involvement in ‘Nam, and occurs a few years after the French withdrawal.

Our hero is Sam Dallas, a square-jawed adventurer type who makes his living flying a cargo plane in Southeast Asia. He’s become friendly with a Eurasian prostitute named Nan Luke, who has told Dallas that there’s a lost cache of gold in the jungle. Dallas and his partner and Nan Luke head into the jungle and get the gold – the story opens after they’ve already snatched it and are flying away. Dallas’s plane breaks down midair and they crash into the jungles of ‘Nam. The story plays out here; after their crash Dallas and company are surrounded by pretty ladies who emerge from the jungle; they are the Hoa Hao, a legendary band of all-female warriors who live in the mountains and wage war on both the Communists and French.

Their leader, Repan Sirik, holds Nan Luke captive so that Dallas can help her distract a local warrior Repan and her warrior-sisters want to kill. Schurmacher doesn’t much play up the “women with guns” angle; Repan and her ladies hack up a few of their enemies with knives, but otherwise only one of them carries around a Sten gun, which she casually holds on Dallas to ensure he doesn’t bolt. Repan makes the expected advance on Dallas, who spurns her – he’s dedicated to Nan Luke – and Repan disappears from the narrative. Her comrades return Nan Luke to Dallas, and they escape into the jungle, the rest of the story playing out in summary as Dallas is only able to collect a small portion of the gold. All told, a sort of middling story, but the writing is good.

The second story is the weakest of the collection, despite having the best title: “Hitler’s Hustlers of Bremen,” by George Mandel (which I believe was a psuedonym of Neil Pritchie, or vice versa). This one originally appeared in the September 1959 issue of For Men Only and takes place in post-war Germany, in the summer of 1947 to be exact. Jim Wilbur of the CID goes undercover as an arms supplier to root out a smuggling and black market operation which is apparently funding a neo-Nazi movement.

The plot and title are good, but Mandel writes this thing like it’s a piece of literature, spending more time on description and character, so that it comes off as very plodding. Suspense and subterfuge play a bigger factor than action or adventure. Only a late development where we meet a widow who oversees a group of pretty gals who are all still Nazis has any of the sensationalism hinted at on the back cover of the book. But this sequence is over quick and besides once again it’s the men doing all the fighting – this story doesn’t live up to the anthology theme at all, and I’m certain Noah Sarlat could’ve found a more fitting story to put here.

The third story is the strongest, and of them all most lives up to the book’s theme: “Five Greek Girls to Istanbul,” by Richard F. Gallagher, from the April 1960 issue of Male. It’s 1940 and the Nazis have just invaded Greece. Morgan Farrell, a young American civil engineer living in Athens, is approached by some VIP local citizens; these rich families want Farrell to escort their daughters to Istanbul, where they can escape the Germans and move on to safer locales. Farrell takes the job, setting off through Greece with his five female charges, all of whom as you would expect are pretty, in particular two of them: Katina, who seems game to do whatever Farrell orders, and Persephone, a fiery beauty who is just as headstrong as her father.

This story exudes a machismo long since vanished from popular fiction: Farrell is, in our modern era, pretty much a dick, bossing the girls around and slapping them when he feels it necessary. For example, Persephone disagrees with him early in the journey. Farrell puts her over his knee and paddles her ass! And you won’t be surprised to learn that, after this, Persephone starts to see Farrell a whole lot differently…and in fact turns out to become Farrell’s girl, instead of the more-expected Katina. (Who herself has a run-in with Farrell…asking him one night which girl he’ll sleep with first, then kissing him, then pushing him away, and then Farrell slapping her twice. To which she replies, “I deserved that.” Imagine how it would play out in a movie, people!)

Gallagher, who it appears churned out a plethora of men’s adventure stories, really captures the vibe of a group of freedom fighters going up against Nazi bastards. Also this tale lives up to the anthology’s title, with the girls getting hold of weapons after Farrell kills a few Germans. There’s a fun scene where they are escaping from an SS patrol across an empty festival grounds; the girls appropriate a chariot and take off in it, firing at the Germans with Schmeisser submachine guns. After this though the girls fade into the background as Gallagher hooks up with Planko and his rebel army on the outskirts of Greece, and the story becomes a pissing contest between the two men as they try to outmatch one another in killng Germans. Still though, this was a fun story and offered pretty much all you could want in WWII pulp.

“Slaughter and the Sexton’s Daughter” is the next tale, courtesy Burton Shean. It originally appeared in the February 1960 Male and is another early WWII story, occuring in Denmark in 1940, just as the Germans have invaded. Dennis Norden, an American-born Dane, is returning home from Sweden, to which he fled five years ago after knocking up a sexton’s daughter. Word came to Norden that his aunt and uncle ran afoul of the Nazis and were killed for it, so he’s coming back to dish out a little revenge. And he gets off on the right foot, wasting a Nazi mere moments after arriving.

Norden runs into his old flame, Minerva, the sexton’s daughter. (The sexton by the way never even appears in the story!) She slaps Norden for running out on her, informs him that their child was given up for adoption, and says to hell with it anyway, she’ll join him in his war against the Nazis. Norden puts together a team of locals, dubbed the Norden Liberators, and they wage smallscale warfare on the Germans in that pulp fiction way that makes it all come off like fun – using the gals as bait to snare officers, sneaking toilet paper into German HQ with Hitler’s face on it, stealing a printing press and writing up news advances about their terrorist activities, etc.

Things get real when Minerva is killed by the Germans – once again a “woman with a gun” is quickly removed from the story. From there it continues on apace with Norden becoming increasingly vicious, even gunning down a parachutist who claims to be a British agent sent here to help the cause. (We learn at the very end of course that the dude really was a damn Nazi.) There’s also a memorable bit – one that the back-cover copyists surprisingly didn’t capitalize on in their misleading sensationalistic blurbs – where Norden gets some plastique that a comrade fashions into fake bosoms. The female members wear them on their way to work inside a German plant, then strip them off and set them to blow. So anyway, overall a fun story even though again it was another one that didn’t live up to the book’s theme.

The final tale takes us back to Southeast Asia: “The Violent Virgins of Laos,” by James Collier, originally from the November 1961 For Men Only. This one goes back to the pulpy adventure feel of the opening tale, but it’s a lot better, featuring more sadism and violence. As for the sex, it’s there, too, but like all of the sex scenes in the stories collected here they are over before they start, merely alluded to in an ellipsesed sentence, no doubt due to the years when these were written.

Anyway our hero this time is Sgt. Philip Jackson, a veteran of Korea who is here in Laos training locals how to fight against the Pathet Lao. The story opens with Jackson and his corporal Tuli already imprisoned and watching as the Pathet Lao leader executes some locals for Jackson’s “enjoyment.” (Humorously, the back cover incorrectly states that Tuli is the “woman with a gun” in this story!) Jackson is strung up to be eaten by a tiger unless he tells the Pathet Lao he will help them, but as these things happen a lovely female warrior emerges from the jungle and kills the Pathet Lao guard. She is from a “Meo village” and is against the Commies; she further helps Jackson free Tuli and together the three of them make off into the jungle.

The pulp stuff really comes to the fore when we learn there is a “sacred grove of virgins” where Meo women will go when they have a hankering, shall we say. Jackson gets wind of this and sneaks on a boat filled with the latest voyagers to the grove, and Collier intimates that Jackson and the Meo warrior-woman, Hak Soun, get friendly themselves. (Though again, it’s kind of hard to tell what with the bowdlerized writing). The Pathet Lao catch them, though, only for Tuli to show up to the rescue astride an elephant. He manages to knock over a temple in the process, and there follows a goofy but fun scene where an old monk keeps following the trio as they move on through the jungle – Tuli is certain the old man is casting a spell on them for destroying his temple.

The pulpy thrills continue as the monks force the trio up into the Tower of Silence, a tower prison alongisde a cliff with only one way out: a forty foot drop. As usual our hero’s resourcefulness saves the day; everyone strips, using their clothes to weave a rope. From there the tale becomes more standard, with the three of them constantly evading Commie patrols and getting in skirmishes, finally commandeering a boat and escaping. Hak Soun is used throughout as bait for traps – as are all of the other women in these stories, in fact. If there’s one thing I learned from Women with Guns, it’s that if you’re ever part of an invading army you should never follow after a pretty native woman, as more than likely she’ll be leading you into a death trap.

But it’s interesting really how the women are used throughout the book…other than a few instances where they gun down their opponents, the girls here are instead forced to use their looks and bodies to ensnare some horny enemy soldier, after which the men will do the dirty work of killing. This actually serves to put the women in more danger, as they are the ones who have to lure out the enemy; Hak Soun in particular has to do this for four different Pathet Lao soldiers in this story, and you know it’s only a matter of time before they get wise.

Another interesting thing here is that the male protagonists never end up with these native women; in each case we are informed at the end of the story that the dude headed back to America and never heard from the native woman again. I wonder if this is due to the traditional “man who can’t be domesticated” vibe of pulp fiction or if it’s more of a matter that these white American males can’t sully themselves with foreign women…at least not permanently. Anyway, it’s an interesting question, or at least seemed to be as I typed this paragraph.

Noah Sarlat edited several other anthologies of men’s adventure magazine stories, and I have picked up most of them, as well as others published under the names of various authors, so I look forward to reading more. I usually don’t like short stories and I much prefer novels, but these stories were long enough to provide sufficient plots and characterizations, so I really had an enjoyable time reading the book.