Joe Archibald also did the illustrations for the humorous Phineas Pinkham stories that appeared in Flying Aces every month for 13 years.

• Download “The Spider and the Flyer” (June 1938, Flying Aces)

Here is the second of The Three Mosquitoes stories that were set in pre-WWII China. There isn’t much actual Air War in this one but there is still plenty of action as the Mosquitoes try to rescue a Chinese warlord’s son from the invading Japanese.

• Download “Blood on the Sun” (November 1938, Sky Fighters)

Lieutenant Jim Davison, a Yank serving with the Royal Flying Corps in the Caucasus, is caught between the Russians and the Germans as he tries to help Prince David of Georgia recover a lost treasure.

• Download “The Falcon Strikes” (June 1935, Lone Eagle)

Here is another early adventure of The Three Mosquitoes by Ralph Oppenheim. This one tells the story of the Mosquitoes daring raid deep behind the lines to rescue an Allied spy.

• Download “Roaring Motors” (May 24, 1928, War Stories)

This full length novel tells the tale of Lieutenant Colonel “Stormy” Lake, who never met a rule he couldn’t break, an officer he couldn’t insult, or a German plane he couldn’t shoot down. So when the Allies formed the “Blackbird” squadron to take on the unorthodox, daring, and seemingly invincible “Red Devils Staffel”, Stormy Lake was the logical choice to command it. But Stormy would soon find that the Red Devils were not like any Germans he had fought before.

Although this story is credited to Robert “Bob” Byrd, who is also cedited with the Ka-Zar novels, the author’s real name is Thomson Burtis. This story is a reprint of Flying Blackbirds, a Burtis book published in 1932.

• Download “Scourge of the Sky Hellions” (October 1939, Sky Devils)

The Three Mosquitoes spent most of their time in Europe fighting the Kaiser’s worst in WWI. But this and one other of their exploits took place in pre-WWII China where they helped fight the invading Japanese. Author Ralph Oppenheim managed to update the trio for these stories and still keep the spirit of the Mosquitoes intact. An odd fact, Oppenheim wrote all these air tales having never flown.

• Download “Stars for China” (January 1939, Sky Fighters)

Another exciting Three Mosquitoes adventure!
Out went the bombing squadron into that shell-filled night—straight for the enemy drome. It was against orders, but the famous “Three Mosquitoes” followed in swift pursuit, led by the daring Kirby. Suddenly, they found themselves headed right into a large Boche formation…

• Download “Hawks of the Night” (March 15, 1928, War Stories)

A Bancroft and Leadbeater Adventure.
It wasn’t that anything untoward had happened that made Todd Bancroft and Larry Leadbeater cringe. Practically nothing had happened, and you can‟t take a punch at nothing…

• Download “Savoias Out of Sapporo” (January 1940, Sky Fighters)

The Adventures of the Griffon
In those dark waters off Point Judith drifted the battered wreckage of a proud foreign fighting plane bearing the bullet-riddled body of a noted pilot. Propped on the instrument board before that stark form was a compass card which carried on its back a cryptic message. Upon that message depended the naval safety of America. Yet that dead pilot had never known that penciled scrawl existed; the person who had scribbled it had not understood what he had written there—and the man to whom it was addressed could not understand what he read there…

• Download “Sea Hanger Snare” (November 1936, Flying Aces)

An exciting Three Mosquitoes adventure!

To the Three Mosquitoes:
     I turn to you three gallants as stand in the shadow of death. For my crime I must die. But before I die there is information I dare convey only to you three, in whose hands alone it may serve to expiate the damage my honesty, rather than my treachery, has caused.
     If this reaches you in time, and if you are moved by a doomed man’s last prayer, speed to Vincennes and enable me to speak with you before they execute me at dawn.
                                                              - Emil Rodet.

• Download “Secret of the Hell Hawks” (November 1935, Flying aces)

The Casket Crew blaze into action!
The Casket Crew was trapped—and they knew it! Instinctively, every man aboard first looked over his shoulder and searched that section of dural and oil-spattered steel near him for an answer. Wherever they looked, a blast of German machine-gun fire slapped through the panels and secondary covering from still another angle…

• Download “Bye Bye Blizkrieg” (Fall 1940, Wings)

A Buzz Benson Mystery!
When the Japanese Foreign Minister addressed that closed session of the Diet at Tokyo on July 27th, stringent measures were exercised to keep his words secret. In fact, so thorough were those measures that the world at large never learned the exact content of that speech until 1940 when Baron Okia Kawamura finally set it down in print in his noted history of the Japanese-American conflict…

• Download “Death Spans the Pacific” (August 1936, Flying Aces)

And now an exciting tale of The Devildog Squadron!
Lucky Lane swore as he realized he had lost his formation in the billowing gray clouds. He leveled off between two layers of leaden mist and peered about him. The other three of the “Four Lunatics” had been behind his Spad not thirty seconds past. But now he was alone. Not only that, but his gas was running low and he was not even sure of his location.
The bullet-scarred Spad ripped on through the cloud. Lucky eased back on the stick as he saw the mists begin to thin. He was down to three thousand feet—and there was a good chance that he was still over German soil…

• Download “Lucky’s Day” (August 1932, Sky Birds)

An exciting Buzz Benson Adventure!
“There’s something devilish going on. They intend to bomb an important point somewhere on the western coast of the United States. Don’t ask me how they intend to do it. I‟ve seen enough of these Japs to know that they can do anything once they set their minds to it. I don‟t believe in ghosts, spirits or the black art, but I‟ve seen some queer things happen out here in the Orient. If we got a wire this minute, saying that San Francisco had been raided or bombed by Japanese planes, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised…

• Download “Nippon Nemesis” (August 1932, Sky Birds)

“Shut up and get a shovel!” Such was the impudent retort that Crash Carringer flung at old F.S.F. Winters, C.O. of No. 609, Britain’s brave little air post in the wilds of India’s Afridi-ridden North West Frontier. And that retort tartly expressed the nervy nature of the hard-shooting Yank warplane salesman. For Crash was tough. He needed all his toughness, too. For he was roaring’ off to a “date with Death” in the nullahs to prove that blood is thicker than— tobacco!

• Download “Hellion Hunch” (August 1938, Flying Aces)