A Handful of Hell: Classic War and Adventure Stories

A HANDFUL OF HELL

BY ROBERT F. DORR selected bibliography

CRIME SCENE: FAIRFAX COUNTY (novel)

AIR POWER ABANDONED

HITLER’S TIME MACHINE (novel)

FIGHTING HITLER’S JETS

MISSION TO TOKYO

MISSION TO BERLIN

HELL HAWKS! (with Tom Jones)

MARINE AIR

BY ROBERT DEIS

BARBARIANS ON BIKES

(Editor, with Wyatt Doyle)

CRYPTOZOOLOGY ANTHOLOGY

(Editor, with David Coleman and Wyatt Doyle)

HE-MEN, BAG MEN & NYMPHOS

(Editor, with Wyatt Doyle)

WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH!

(Editor, with Josh Alan Friedman & Wyatt Doyle)

BY WYATT DOYLE

I NEED REAL TUXEDO AND A TOP HAT!

BARBARIANS ON BIKES

(Editor, with Robert Deis)

DOLLAR HALLOWEEN

CRYPTOZOOLOGY ANTHOLOGY

(Editor, with Robert Deis and David Coleman)

HE-MEN, BAG MEN & NYMPHOS

(Editor, with Robert Deis)

WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH!

(Editor, with Robert Deis and Josh Alan Friedman)

STOP REQUESTED Illustrated by Stanley Zappa

A New Texture book

Copyright © 2016 Subtropic Productions LLC

All Rights Reserved.

Stories copyright © 1962, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1969, 1970, 1972 Robert F. Dorr. All stories reprinted by arrangement with, and permission of, the Author. All rights reserved.

Editorial Consultant: Sandee Curry/SandeeCurry.com

Book design and layout by Wyatt Doyle

MensAdventureLibrary.com

MensPulpMags.com         NewTexture.com

Booksellers: A Handful of Hell and other New Texture books are available through Ingram Book Co.

eBook ISBN 978-1-943444-09-0

First New Texture electronic edition: April 2016

Also available in softcover and limited edition hardcover editions

CONTENTS

Robert Deis

Preface

Robert F. Dorr

My Plan Was To Be a Writer and an Adventurer. …

Handful of Hell [CLIMAX, October 1962]

The Bloodiest Single Mission in Air Force History [BLUEBOOK, November 1962]

Rammed Over Berlin [STAG, August 1963]

Yank Ace Who Battled the Japs Over Pearl Harbor [STAG, December 1965]

The ‘Impossible’ Raid [STAG, January 1966]

The POW General Who Tried to Kill Himself [MAN’S, November 1965]

I’m Going to Ram That Nazi Plane! [MAN’S, November 1966]

Fish Him Out—Or Else! [MAN’S, December 1966]

5 Downed GIs Who Gutted Ambush Alley [MEN, June 1967]

Yank Ace Who Saved the Anzio Invasion [MAN’S, December 1967]

The Day the Boondocks Ran With Yankee Blood [BLUEBOOK, August 1969]

Borneo Longshot [MALE, March 1970]

I Fought Castro’s Cutthroat Guerrilla Squad [FOR MEN ONLY, April 1970]

The Incredible Glory Saga of the Boondock Padre [MAN’S ILLUSTRATED, October 1970]

I Fought Burma’s ‘Red Flag’ Terrorist Killers [BLUEBOOK, March 1972]

PREFACE

IN NOVEMBER 2009, I received a short email from author Robert F. Dorr regarding my then recently-launched blog about vintage men’s adventure magazines, MensPulpMags.com:

I stumbled upon your blog more or less by accident, he wrote. I wrote hundreds of articles for the men’s pulp adventure magazines. I still have a small collection of those mags in the basement. I didn’t know anyone else was interested in them!

I was thrilled. I had read some of Bob’s men’s adventure magazine stories. I was aware, though not nearly as aware as I would become, that he was among the best and most prolific of the many great writers who once worked for the genre during its lifespan from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s: writers such as Mario Puzo, Bruce Jay Friedman, Lawrence Block, Walter Wager, Robert Silverberg, Martin Cruz Smith and Walter Kaylin.

That brief email led to an ongoing correspondence with Bob Dorr; to a series of phone interviews and posts I wrote about him on my blog; to the creation, at Bob’s suggestion, of the Men’s Adventure Magazines group on Facebook, which now has many members from all over the world; to the inclusion of two of his classic men’s adventure magazine stories in our first anthology of men’s pulp mag stories; and now to this collection, comprised solely of his stories from those magazines.

It also led to a long-distance friendship that spans the 1,200 miles between his home in Oakton, Virginia and mine near Key West, Florida.

Almost exactly six years later, in November 2015, I received another short email from Bob with shocking news. He had been diagnosed with a brain tumor, specifically a glioblastoma, the most common type of brain tumor—and the most aggressive.

When I called Bob to get more information, what he said to me that day was heartrending but also inspiring. He started by saying he was happy to be able to enjoy a beautiful fall day in Virginia with his beloved wife Young Soon and their Labrador retriever, Autumn. He was looking forward to going out to lunch with them and having a big, juicy hamburger.

He went on to tell me about other things he was grateful he’d been able to do in the 76 years he’d lived so far. He frequently made me laugh with his characteristically wry sense of humor.

A few days later he sent out an email to followers of his own blog. It publicly broke the news about his brain tumor and reiterated things he’d told me on the phone, with the same sense of grace and humor. It read, in part:

I’m still able to talk, including talking on the phone, but the tumor is near the speech center and my ability to speak, to type, and to add and subtract is deteriorating rapidly …

I’m in good spirits amidst these gorgeous autumn days with wonderful support from family, friends, and readers.

Well, okay, not every reader. One reader mailed me a package of Preparation H. That’s genuinely thoughtful but maybe not the work of an adoring fan.

My first paid publication was in the November 1955 issue of Air Force magazine when I was in high school. I got to be in the Air Force in Korea and to spend 60 years writing about those who fly and fight. A current example is the cover story on the B-24 Liberator in the January 2016 Aviation History magazine.

Hey, I got to invade Panama, fly with the Air Force in Somalia and in Sarajevo, cover Desert Shield, make friends with senior leaders and everyday airmen, fly in a F-15E Strike Eagle (several times) and write. I went with the Air Force to far above the Arctic Circle and to the tropics. I also wrote for the men’s adventure magazines, the women’s confession magazines, the supermarket tabloids and the History Channel. It just doesn’t get better. …

Thanks to my family, friends, and readers for a great time.

—Bob Dorr

In late November 2015, Bob had successful surgery to remove his brain tumor. He has explained to me that there is no cure for the type of cancer he has. But the surgery bought him more time, and he’s happy about that.

Bob’s mind is as sharp as ever. So is his sense of humor. And, although the tumor did affect his fine motor skills, making typing a slow process, he’s back to writing again. He posts regularly on his blog, in the Facebook groups he created for his books, and in the Men’s Adventure Magazines group.

In late December, he completed and self-published a new novel, Crime Scene: Fairfax County, a murder mystery set in 1947 that features characters from his alternate history novel, Hitler’s Time Machine.

Earlier that month, I sent Bob a proof copy of the anthology you now hold in your hands. In several phone calls we’ve had since then, he’s told me he loves it. I am immensely pleased by that. I have come to love Bob and his stories and books. I’m very grateful that he has allowed us to reprint some of his classic men’s adventure stories.

Above all, I’m deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to get to know Robert Francis Dorr. He’s an inspiration and a role model to me as a writer and publisher, as a keeper and teller of part of America’s cultural history—and as a human being.

Robert Deis

Somewhere Near Key West

January 2016

MY PLAN WAS TO BE A WRITER AND AN ADVENTURER. …

ROBERT F. DORR

FROM childhood, I’ve had two main interests: the Air Force and writing.

I was born on September 11, 1939. I grew up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC and went to Suitland High School. I frequently would skip school to go to Andrews Air Force Base and look at airplanes.

The genre of aviation pulp fiction magazines with flying aces stories were gone by the time I was 12 years old. I did read magazines about airplanes and aviation. In addition, I read the men’s adventure magazines, because they described an adventurous life and included a lot of great stories about pilots and war heroes by writers I admired, like Glenn Infield.

I was about 12 when I used the money from my newspaper delivery route to pay for an Underwood portable typewriter. I used it to write a letter to Air Trails magazine telling them they identified an airplane incorrectly. They published my letter, and I thought, Gee, my name is in print. That’s really exciting. I’m still excited by that today.

I had my first paid magazine piece published in the November 1955 issue of Air Force Magazine, the journal of the Air Force Association, when I was 16.

Another thing happened at about that point in my life: We discovered that I had been born with a hearing impairment. So my other dream, which was to go to the new Air Force Academy they were building in Colorado and fly the F-86 Sabre jet and be a great fighter pilot, was not available to me, because I couldn’t pass the hearing requirement to become a fighter pilot. But I did end up joining the Air Force and flying in hundreds of different planes. I also became a writer.

EVEN though I couldn’t become a pilot, I was sufficiently interested in the Air Force that I enlisted the day after I graduated from high school, in June 1957. I had the idea that I was going to be a jet engine mechanic and was going to work on the latest jets. If I couldn’t fly them, at least I could be on the flight line. Then the Air Force gave me aptitude tests and discovered that I had an aptitude for learning languages.

Based on that, they sent me to study the Korean language at the Army Language School in Monterey, California (since that time, it’s been renamed the Defense Language Institute). I took the longest Korean language class the Air Force ever gave, which ran about 20 months. Then I was sent to Korea and given a job listening to the bad guys, the North Koreans, on the radio. It was ironic, since I’m the guy who couldn’t pass the hearing test to become a pilot.

The Korean War was over, but it was still a very tense situation. It was like the Korean War without the shooting. The nation of South Korea I was stationed in from 1958 to 1960 was a very crude, primitive country that bears no resemblance to what it looks like today. Today, it is in many respects ahead of us in education and technology. But not then. The village outside of the main gate of the air base was like the Wild West, with the dusty streets, and the saloon, and the drinking, and the prostitutes in their white satin garb. All of that is gone today. It’s a different world there now, but that’s what it was like then.

Part of what my squadron did was to fly reconnaissance missions in C-47s. In everyday jargon, that would be a spy plane, although technically speaking, a spy is a civilian. We were part of a massive communications intelligence operation that was going on around the world during the Cold War and continues today.

Anyway, that’s how I, as a very young man, still a teenager, had the experience of seeing how knowledge of a foreign language and living in a foreign country could make life look very different.

I was still in love with the old Terry and the Pirates comic strip exotic vision of the Far East, including the women. And so, a combination of an aptitude for language, and an interest in the Orient, plus the exotic, plus women, all led eventually to my subsequent career in the Foreign Service.

I GOT out of the Air Force in August of 1960, just before my 21st birthday. I then spent several years doing various things, mostly in California. I also went to Hong Kong.

My plan was to be a writer and an adventurer.

I wanted to become the next great American writer. I studied Ernest Hemingway and pretended to care about André Gide. I wanted to write the Great American Novel.

The problem with that idea was that I didn’t really have the Great American Novel in me. I didn’t have this great American story that I felt compelled to tell. I just liked writing words. And, I liked other people seeing I had written words and that they were in print.

The first example of my work in men’s pulp adventure magazines was published in Real magazine, a story called The Night Intruders in Real, April 1962 (included as a bonus story in the hardcover edition of this collection). The editors paid me $100 for the story, about a B-26 crew in the Korean War. The Korean War was a popular subject then.

That was the first of what became several hundred stories and articles in those magazines. I’m using the word articles somewhat loosely because almost all of them contained a great deal of fiction, though I tried to make them all seem as realistic as I could.

I did the same thing with the first story in Real that I did with almost all of the later men’s adventure magazine stories and articles: I typed them up on 8½ by 11 typewriter paper on a manual typewriter, using white-out, booze, and cigarettes.

I also tried to write literary short stories. During that era, Esquire magazine was the pinnacle for men’s magazines. It was publishing some of the great writers. I wrote a fiction story that came back from Esquire with a scribbled little note from the editor that said: Almost made it.

I never did succeed in publishing literary short stories. I wrote some, but didn’t get them published. But I began writing regularly for the men’s pulp magazines, in their heyday.

BETWEEN the Air Force and the time I entered the Foreign Service, there was a period of several years when I was going to college part time. I also worked some part-time jobs. But most of the time I was supporting myself with income from the men’s adventure magazines. I wrote a lot for Magazine Management company, which published Stag, Male, For Men Only, Men and others, and for Pyramid Publishing, which published Man’s Magazine and some other men’s adventure magazines. They usually paid me $350 per article, and $350 was pretty good. Not only was it pretty good then, it hasn’t gotten much better. There are plenty of fine, high-quality magazines that pay less than that today.

For most of that period, I was moving around a lot, so I had a post office box in San Francisco. I had a couple of buddies there that I hung around with, guys I had been in the Air Force with. I remember when we’d get together they would say, "Let’s go down to the post office today and see if you got a check from Man’s Magazine." And every once in a while, there would be that wonderful moment when there would be a check for $350 in the post office box, and we’d be rich.

Magazine Management had sort of two tiers of men’s adventure magazines. Magazines like Stag and Male were the better ones, if that’s the right word, but they had many others, and I was published in almost all of them.

Another company I wrote for published Man to Man magazine and Escape to Adventure, which was another pulp adventure mag. They also produced Sir! magazine, which was more like a girlie magazine. I can’t remember the editors anymore, but I was published in all of those. The umbrella company for them was Volitant.

I had virtually no real communication with the editors. I knew their names, but I didn’t talk to them. My fifteen years of communication with Noah Sarlat, who edited Stag and other magazines for Magazine Management, consisted of little notes that contained three or four words. (I did eventually have some telephone communications and one personal meeting with Pyramid’s Phil Hirsch, the editor of Man’s Magazine.) Basically, I typed up a story, sent it to one of the editors, and either they used it or they didn’t. If they used it, they sent me a check. If they didn’t, they sent me a rejection note—then I’d often send it to another editor.

Since I had almost no communications with the editors, I had no idea if they knew that many of my stories that they were publishing were fake. They didn’t ask if they were true or not.

With one exception involving one article out of hundreds, no editor ever suggested a topic to me. I simply looked at what the magazines were publishing and tried to write similar stories.

The exception was when I got a phone call out of the blue from Mel Shestack, Art Director for Magazine Management.

Mel had this elaborate idea for a completely phony story involving a hero, a woman, bad guys, and the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. He had the painting already and wanted me to write the words that would go with it. That was the first time I realized that the editors knew we were making most of this stuff up. (Mel also told me in detail how he asked artists to design illustrations that had phallic images, meaning that in some, the positioning of a club or gun is no accident.)

For the men’s adventure magazines, particularly those published by the Magazine Management company, I wrote stories that were typically presented to the reader as factual articles about things that really happened.

In some cases, they actually were non-fiction. In many cases they included a great deal of imagination. That was typical of the genre.

But to write for the men’s adventure magazines, it was necessary to have some knowledge of history. If you were going to write about World War II, you needed to know something about World War II. You could use your imagination for the story, but you had to have some of the key details right to please the editors and the readers.

Another author who wrote a lot for the men’s adventure magazines, Mario Puzo, once said something to the effect that you could create a whole vast battle involving tens of thousands of troops and just completely make it up out of whole cloth, and readers would accept it as fact. But if you got the muzzle velocity of an M-1 Garand wrong, the readers would be all over you.

In terms of the readers of the men’s adventure magazines I wrote for in the first half of the ’60s or so, when I did most of my writing for them, almost all of them were veterans. The situation was different than it is today, when a veteran is perceived as sort of a separate category of human being that’s apart from everybody else.

"One of my favorite titles for one of my completely made-up works that appeared in Escape to Adventure magazine, September 1964: ‘Captain Bob Winthrop’s Jap-Fighting Jungle Girl Decoy.’ The cover shows women in minimal clothing with their breasts almost hanging out, tied to poles and being tortured by fiendish Nazis." Cover by Syd Shores.

These magazines were read by regular guys. The fact that they happened to be veterans had something to do with shaping the content. But the fact that they were veterans is sort of an added fact to whatever else is true about them, since so many men were veterans back then.

These stories were being read by men who’d had similar experiences themselves. They had been there, done that, and when I wrote about warfare for them, I had to have the personalities and the details right and avoid puffery. They wouldn’t tolerate having men like themselves overly glorified or to have war made glamorous, so I didn’t do those things.

But the fact that men’s pulp magazines had titles like Escape to Adventure is not without meaning. The reader wanted to snuggle up in a corner and escape to adventure. One of the closest comparisons to the men’s pulp magazines I can think of is the women’s confession magazines, which I also wrote for during those years.

For them, I wrote articles like I was Broken-Hearted When He Left Me for My Sister’s Husband and things like that—in the first person, as if it really happened, from a female viewpoint, even though I really know nothing about women. I’ve spent over 70 years trying to figure them out and still know nothing. But I wrote the articles anyway.

I used different byline names for each, because the name was the name of the woman in the article. They paid less well than the men’s adventure magazines, so I only did a handful of those.

I learned a lot about writing later in other ways. But the men’s adventure magazines were a good training ground, and you could see some practical results from your efforts.

Writing for the men’s adventure magazines was a learning process in many ways. I think the guys that put out those magazines deserve a lot of credit for helping teach a whole generation of writers how to write.

RE-READING the stories included in this book brings back many memories. I remember I loved a fiction account of a B-26 Invader bombing mission I read in a small literary magazine in San Francisco in 1960. I also met Robert C. Mikesh, who’d flown B-26s in the Korean War, and was later a museum curator and author.

Maybe that’s why the first story I wrote for men’s adventure magazines was about B-26 bombers.

I first sent it to Argosy and Saga and had it rejected by both. Then I sent it to another men’s adventure magazine, Real.

Around that time, my friend Larry Harry, who’d been in Korea with me, suggested that we hitchhike across the country to get into position to find work in East Asia. Larry and I hitched across the country, getting 52 rides, ranging in length from 800 feet to 1,200 miles.

Two strong memories persist from crossing America that hectic, hot summer of 1961:

An Ivy League kid who reeked of money, older than us but still a kid, gave us a lift in his new car and proclaimed, with some arrogance, I’m a New Frontier Democrat.

The second memory is of listening to Russian cosmonaut Gherman Stepanovich Titov, who was in the news for being the second human to orbit the Earth, in the Vostok 2. The first was cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in the Vostok 1. I am eagle! cosmonaut Titov proclaimed on the car radios of people who were giving us rides, asserting Soviet supremacy.

Upon returning to San Francisco, neither Larry nor I found a way to get to Asia. But my father telephoned from the other coast to tell me that something had come in the mail from Real magazine about my B-26 story, The Night Intruders.

They want to pay you a hundred dollars for it, Dad said.

Soon, I was living in a San Francisco boarding house called Baker Acres, writing more stories for men’s adventure magazines.

One of the stories I wrote in 1962