Notes: American planes bomb Ikuowo. "Death grabbed a thousand reds with bloody hands, but the bomber crews didn't see it. All they saw was a target! A city called Ikuowo, which had to be mashed into the ground." So it's not the bomber crews who are cruel, but the communist high command. "The officers waited for evacuation orders! But the orders never came! What did it matter to the communist high command that the rubble of dirt and wood and rock also contained the pulverised rubbish of men?!" Instead they send their own bombers "to blast any and all U.N. targets south of Ikuowo". These are cruel men, like Captain Tichi. They strafe American troops. This time the people dying have faces. The Korean fighters are shot down in flames. More deaths, but this time it's deserved retribution. Only Captain Tichi escapes. But he is shot down by his own troops, the doomed men in Ikuowo. He jumps from his plane but 'the ground troops had been tought to machine down US parachuters'. The dead body of Captain Tichi drifts "earthward, gently, slowly, quietly towards a funeral pyre befitting a hero!" - Ger A.

Notes: The splash page drawn by Dave Berg shows people dying in four panels. Most of them are Koreans, but some may be Americans. The chilling intro goes like this: "The soldiers in Korea died in a hundred different ways! Some step on land mines... others get rammed with bayonets (we see one bayonet up close and behind that the shadows of an American stabbing a red on the wall) ... some get sawed in two wth machine gun bullets... and many get completely erased by machine gun shells. And those who survuve, come back to tell incidents such as the one which folllows..." Lieutenant Nelson tells his men that the only thing that will save them from dying in Korea is luck. He has stories of bad luck, including the one about Captain Banner, a guy from my hometown... he stumbled during an assult and one of the grenades on his belt went of when he fell on it..." All of which is shown, by the way. In the end Lieutenant Nelson survives the war.. only to get run over by a truck just as he is leaving for rotation. Cheery stuff. The lighter side of dying. - Ger A.

Notes: A glimmer of hope here. A rookie marine learns that only when he almost gets blown up he can overcome his fear of dying. - Ger A.

Notes: The story of a combat patrol, who sneak behind enemy lines at night, stab the sentries with their bayonets not to alert anyone and leave the bodies to bleed to death as "you know the effect that sight will have on the other reds as they find the bodies next morning". They then blow up a stack of explosives to lure out the enemy, sneak into their camp to "plant some booby traps, wire their phones to explode when they are picked up, put delayed action bombs into their bunkers, bury landmines into their foxholes and pollute the drinking water". The twist of this funfilled story? They almost can't sleep for fear that the reds will send their own Combat Patrol. - Ger A.

Notes: But we end on a more positive note, as newspaper man Barry Morton learns that the Korean war isn't a small war as he has been writing in his column when his brother dies in one of the 'unimportant' war actions. This is pure propaganda. "I have called the war in Korea a small war! I was wrong! There are no small wars, no small victories, no small defeats... whenever men fight and die for a principle and for the dignity of mankind, there on that soil is greatness." I guess Chapman is talking about the American soldiers, of course.

These propaganda books should be tought in school. - Ger A.