TODAY we have a story from the highly prolific George Bruce. Bruce, a former pilot, began writing in the 1920’s and became noted for his aerial war stories—several publications even bore his name. In the 1930’s and ’40’s he transitioned into screenwriting for Hollywood action films and then into tv in the 1950’s and ’60’s.

The Fourth Squadron hated Major Powers. That hatred seeped out of the soul of the lowliest of the ground crew exactly as it surged unceasingly in the souls of the pilots.
He never seemed burdened by fatigue. His eyes never lost the half-feverish, half-mocking light—never lost a peculiar brilliancy which seemed to feed upon his soul. His face was never anything but a pale mask, contorted by a never-changing grin which drew his thin lips back over his white teeth—and made every man on the field harbor the insane desire to smash his fist against Powers’ face and drive those wolf-like teeth down the Major’s throat. Yes, The Fourth hated Major Powers—that is, until they got to know him.

The pilots of the Fourth fought black-crossed ships, but they kept their hate for the man who led the way into the sky. They hated his sneer, his jeers, his scorn—but most of all they hated his laugh.

From the December 1931 issue of Aces, it’s “The Laughing Major” by George Bruce!

• Download “The Laughing Major” (December 1931, Aces)

TODAY, for our twelve stories of Christmas 1931, we have an excellent tale by Edgar A. Manley from the pages of the December 1931 Sky Birds magazine!

Destiny had linked Chuck Bland strangely with that mysterious pair on the train from Paris. One a French artillery officer, the other a French flyer—one a murderer, the other a murdered man. And Chuck Bland did not know which was which—until one night, weeks later, in the messroom of a French drome!

From the pages of Sky Birds, it’s “The Devil on Wings” by Edgar A. Manley!

• Download “The Devil on Wings” (December 1931, Sky Birds)

You may recognize the art for this story—it was also used for the Philip Strange story “Hell’s Gateway” (Flying Aces, April 1932)

THIS week we present a cover by Colcord Heurlin! Heurlin worked in the pulps primarily over a ten year period from 1923 to 1933. His work appeared on Adventure, Aces, Complete Stories, Everybody’s Combined with Romance, North-West Stories, The Popular, Short Stories, Flying Aces, Sea Stories, Top-Notch, War Stories, Western Story, and here, the cover of the December 1931 Sky Birds!

Torpedoes for Trouble

IT WAS a far cry from the early days of the war, when aviators were asked to drop bombs on hurriedly constructed Zeppelin hangars in northern Belgium, to the 1918 bomber with its aerial torpedo. In the early days airmen often made their own bombs of petrol cans wrapped with tarred rope which was designed to blast out hangars and then set fire to the remains. From those days bombing went through the 20-pounder stage, automatic racks, and eventually blossomed out with ships carrying single 550-pound missiles designed to fang their way through many feet of solid concrete before exploding. These were known as delayed detonation bombs.

On this month’s cover we show a two-seater bomber of this type. It has just released a 550-pound torpedo over a German airdrome. As in this picture, the pilot usually dived his ship on the target as though he were going to fire his fixed guns, and then released the torpedo-bomb. The spinning projectile did the rest.

“Torpedoes for Trouble”
Sky Birds, December 1931 by Colcord Heurlin

TODAY we have a story from the pen of a prolific pulp author James Perley Hughes! Hughes was a frequent contributor to various genres of pulps, but he seemed to gravitate toward the air-war spy type stories.

Skag, Dinty and Mugs Miller liked to “groom” the fresh recruits to the Game-Cock Squadron. They were case-hardened comedians and had given Major Crossley all kinds of trouble by their weird ideas of what made a joke. The quiet, bashful fledgling was usually let off with a short hazing, but the fresh fish were tormented until the three were satiated. Orders against this hazing had been issued time and again, but they were difficult to enforce. It was time someone taught them a lesson, and who better than someone straight from the school at Issoudun!

If you didn’t like somebody in the Game-Cock Squadron, you just arranged for him to fight a duel with von Steuben, famous German ace. It sounded easy—until those three tough boys from South Boston tried it on a certain replacement!

• Download “Hard-Boiled and Handsome” (December 1931, Sky Birds)

TO START off our twelve stories of Christmas 1931, we have an excellent tale by E.W. Chess from the pages of the December 1931 Aces magazine!

Martin Hale became a man without a country. He had been found guilty of desertion and insubordination. Rather than leave the war, Hale assumes the identity of an American pilot who has been presumed dead after his plane crashes and burns. But just who is Jerrald Hammond? What starts out as a way to stay in the war turns into a tale of espionage and intrigue.

One pilot passed to the tune of tapping drums, another fell with crimson flame to mark his end. But behind the Front was a strange rendezvous for the ghosts that walked the war night.

From the pages of Aces, it’s “Dual Control” by E.W. Chess!

• Download “Dual Control” (December 1931, Aces)

Pulpflakes posted an excellent post about the life of “Elliot Chess—Fighter pilot, Author” last year. You can check it out here!

WHILE browsing through eBay a couple months ago, I came upon these two snapshots from a family’s Christmas in Memphis 1931. What caught my eye was the little boy all dressed up as a WWI ace with leather jacket, aviator’s cap with goggles, and some sort of tall leather boots(?)! It got me thinking about what stories that boy could have been reading that rather mild, snowless December in Memphis.

So this month we’ll be featuring stories published in the December 1931 issues of Aces, Sky Birds, War Aces and War Birds, by some of our favorite authors—Arch Whitehouse, O.B. Myers, Frederick C. Painton, Frederick C. Davis, Donald E. Keyhoe, and George Bruce—as well as a couple new or seldom seen authors to our site—Elliot W. Chess, Edgar L. Cooper, and Robert Sidney Bowen.

Looking at that impressive list, you may be wondering where a few of our most often posted authors are. Authors like Ralph Oppenheim, Harold F. Cruickshank, Lester Dent and Joe Archibald. That’s a bit of good news/bad news. The good news, we’ve already posted the stories Ralph Oppenheim (“Lazy Wings”) and Lester Dent (“Bat Trap”) had in the December 1931 War Aces; the bad, I don’t have the December 1931 issues of Wings featuring George Bruce, F.E. Rechnitzer and Edwin C. Parsons or Flying Aces with Keyhoe, Archibald, George Fielding Eliot, Alexis Rossoff, and William E. Poindexter. And as for Cruickshank—he didn’t have a story in any of the air pulps that month.

With that in mind—and since it’s Monday, let’s get the ball rolling with the covers of Christmas 1931!

Come back on Wednesdays and Fridays this month for some of the great fiction from these issues!

THIS November we’re celebrating William E. Barrett’s Birthday with one of his pulp stories each Friday.

Before he became renown for such classics as The Left Hand of God and Lilies of The Field, Barrett honed his craft across the pages of the pulp magazines—and nowhere more so than in War Birds and it’s companion magazine War Aces where he contributed smashing novels and novelettes, True tales of the Aces of the Great War, encyclopedic articles on the great war planes as well as other factual features. Here at Age of Aces Books he’s best known for his nine Iron Ace stories which ran in Sky Birds in the mid ’30s!

On Easter Sunday, April 9 , 1917, the greatest British offensive of the war got under way. A blazing line of steel whipped across France and into Belgium; from Croiselles to Loos, from Ypres to the Nieuport Canal and to the sea. Under the greatest artillery barrage in the history of the world a grim horde of muddy infantry hit the Hindenburg Line.

April ninth was also the day on which Second Lieutenant Teddy Campbell, R.F.C., reported for duty to the headquarters of Fifth Wing at Albert. He came up jauntily with the pinkest breeches in the entire, air force, with his monkey hat at the correct angle and with the glow of training-camp victories still upon him. His heart raced madly but he strove to capture in his expression an attitude of casual indifference to everything. Like all of his breed he succeeded merely in looking like a raw kid.

However, by the next day he was a veteran and suspected of murdering his flight leader! From the August 1931 War Aces, it’s William E. Barrett’s “Black Flight!”

Every man but one in that flight hated their commander. When they pulled a murderous blade from his heart all were forced to shoulder the guilt, until the Reaper’s Scythe hacked the secret from one man’s wings.

• Download “Black Flight” (August 1931, War Aces)

Editor’s Note: The story is referred to as “The Raiders” on the cover which does not seem to be applicable to this story at all. A more apt title than “Black Flight” would have been “The Murder Flight!”

THIS November we’re celebrating William E. Barrett’s Birthday with one of his pulp stories each Friday.

Before he became renown for such classics as The Left Hand of God and Lilies of The Field, Barrett honed his craft across the pages of the pulp magazines—and nowhere more so than in War Birds and it’s companion magazine War Aces where he contributed smashing novels and novelettes, True tales of the Aces of the Great War, encyclopedic articles on the great war planes as well as other factual features. Here at Age of Aces Books he’s best known for his nine Iron Ace stories which ran in Sky Birds in the mid ’30s!

“Memphis” Mason is a synthetic ace, probably the only one of his kind in existence. Accidental aces there were aplenty in that big he war, but there was nothing accidental about Memphis Mason’s accomplishment. It was planned with an attention to detail that would do credit to a brigadier and it was attested by five of the finest fighters in the R.A.F. Those signatures are at the root of Mason’s secret sorrow to-day. At the foot of a square sheet of note-paper they bear flourishing witness to the fact that the signers witnessed the bringing down of five German planes by one Memphis Mason. Not one of those signers would have lied for anyone. They were officers and gentlemen and they saw what they said they saw. Yet, strangely enough, Memphis Mason never reached France. Therein lies a tale; one of the oddest tales to come out of the war and one that has never been told until this telling.

There was a new breed of angel in the sky one that used Vickers instead of a flaming sword; and the tracer stream of his vengeance spelled death to Prussians!

From the February 1931 War Aces, it’s William E. Barrett’s “Synthetic Ace!”

• Download “Synthetic Ace” (April 1931, War Aces)

THIS week we have a story by Syl MacDowell! MacDowell is probably best known for his westerns. This time, MacDowell gives us brief tale of the mysterious Black Bat—is he man or beast? From the November 1931 issue of Aces, it’s “The Black Bat.”

Behind the curtain of night Weird wings hovered over the Yank tarmac. A ship crashed with no hand at the stick. . . . And the priceless eye of the army was missing.

• Download “The Black Bat” (November 1931, Aces)

LESTER DENT is best remembered as the man behind Doc Savage. But he wrote all number of other stories before he started chronicling the adventures of everyone’s favorite bronze giant. Here we have an action-packed tale of war time intrigue from the pages of the April 1932 issue of War Birds—”Sea Bats!”

A flying ship without a pilot; a murder without a murderer; a base without a hangar—Squeak knew something was haywire. It took double-crossed wings to throw the shadow of black crosses where they belonged.

• Download “Sea Bats” (April 1932, War Birds)

And as a bonus, here’s another newspaper article about Lester Dent! This time it’s an article of Lester planning on touring the west retracing the route he had taken as a kid in a covered wagon. From The La Plata Home Press, it’s “Magazine Writer To Tour West!”

Magazine Writer To Tour West

La Plata Home Press, La Plata, MO • 13 AUGUST 1931

Doing Farm Work Here Occupied Part of Vacation

THIRTY years ago, Bern Dent of LaPlata, then a rancher in the West, trailed cattle herds over a route thru the Northwest. The country was then sparsely settled. Today, his son, Lester Dent, New York fiction writer and author of western stories, starts from his LaPlata farm home to cover this same territory and on to the coast, not in a slow-moving van, but in a high-powered motor car.

Crossing the Big Horn mountains, Mr. Dent will also retrace the course of a trip he, as a small boy, made in company with his parents in a covered wagon, before the era of motor cars and good roads. On this trip, there were no bridges and they camped three weeks on the banks of Big Powder river, waiting for that fast-flowing stream to subside until it could be forded.

After helping put up hay, and wielding a hoe on his father’s farm here, Lester Dent went to Carrollton, Mo., Thursday, where he plans to join his wife for a motor trip through the Black Hills, the Yellowstone and Jackson Hole country, Oregon, Utah and Colorado. A sister-in-law, Miss Corrine Gerling, of Carrollton, will accompany them.

Mr. Dent will obtain material to be used in a series of western stories he is writing. He will return to LaPlata in three weeks or a month, and in October will return to New York for the winter.

The story of Lester Dent and his development as a fiction writer is as interesting as any story he has written. On the cover page of such magazines as All-Fiction, Popular, Western Trail, War Brides, War Aces, you will find the name of Lester Dent, and now, after writing all kinds of adventure stories, his name is found in Scotland Yard and other such magazines, as a writer of detective stories.

• Download “Magazine Writer To Tour Wes”
  (13 August 1931, The La Plata Home Pressn)

THIS week we present another cover by Colcord Heurlin! Heurlin worked in the pulps primarily over a ten year period from 1923 to 1933. His work appeared on Adventure, Aces, Complete Stories, Everybody’s Combined with Romance, North-West Stories, The Popular, Short Stories, Sky Birds, Sea Stories, Top-Notch, War Stories, Western Story, and here, the cover of the September 1931 Flying Aces!

The High Sign

SURRENDER in the air! It often happened when some one got the breaks. And often it was planned for when the Allies wanted a special type of German machine.
On the occasion depicted on our cover this month, a German two-seater of new design has had its prop shattered and its crew is helpless over Allied territory. It would have been easy for the man in the Allied scout plane to shoot them down, but he preferred to take them whole.
He signaled to the enemy airmen to land and the observer indicated that he had seen, by holding his hands high and well away from his gun. The rest was easy—a complete German ship to study and a clear confirmation for the victorious pilot.
This cover is a reproduction of an actual incident. A photograph owned by one of our authors will confirm it.

“The High Sign”
Flying Aces, September 1931 by Colcord Heurlin

THIS week we present a cover by Colcord Heurlin! Heurlin worked in the pulps primarily over a ten year period from 1923 to 1933. His work appeared on Adventure, Aces, Complete Stories, Everybody’s Combined with Romance, North-West Stories, The Popular, Short Stories, Sky Birds, Sea Stories, Top-Notch, War Stories, Western Story, and here, the cover of the August 1931 Flying Aces!

His Last Salute

THE chivalry of the clouds—the code that persisted even in moments of grim tragedy—is depicted on this month’s cover. The German plane, riddled by Allied bullets, is going down—a flaming coffin. Its pilot, about to take the leap that means death, turns to make one last gesture—a salute to the Allied pilot who has sent him down—and his conqueror answers the salute. Fighting for different causes though they were, those two airmen, like all the true knights of the air, held one thing highest—Courage, in life or in death!

“His Last Salute”
Flying Aces, August 1931 by Colcord Heurlin

THIS week we present a cover by Arnold Lorne Hicks! Hicks worked in the pulps primarily from the late ’20’s to the mid 30’s, producing covers for such magazines as North-West Stories, Navy Stories, Police Stories, Detective Dragnet, Sky Birds, Golden West, Western Trails, Love Adventures, and a couple covers for Flying Aces!

Creased!

THE deadliest wound possible to receive in the air, outside of a bullet through the heart, is the “creaser.” Many an airman has gone west in a crash as the result of a bullet wound across the head that stuns him long enough to allow the plane to get completely out of control. The same wound, received on the ground, would result in nothing more uncomfortable than a numbing headache after a surgeon had attended it. Hundreds of aviators have received serious wounds in the stomach, lungs or limbs and have been able to bring their ships down in safety, but a “creaser” leaves the pilot unconscious and unable to save himself. Captain Ball, who fell after winning the Victoria Cross, and Major Hawker, another British ace with a long list of victories, both went down to their deaths after receiving slight head wounds—wounds that, compared to their actual deaths, were mere pin scratches. Our cover this month shows us a war pilot in a similar difficulty.

“Creased!”
Flying Aces, June 1931 by Arnold Lorne Hicks

THIS week we present another cover by Arnold Lorne Hicks! Hicks worked in the pulps primarily from the late ’20’s to the mid 30’s, producing covers for such magazines as North-West Stories, Navy Stories, Police Stories, Detective Dragnet, Sky Birds, Golden West, Western Trails, Love Adventures, and a couple covers for Flying Aces!

Creased!

AN ALLIED scout was struck by one of the bombs from the Allied machine it was escorting! It actually happened because the scout pilot, in fighting an enemy ship that was bent on destroying the bomber, got out of formation and flew into the danger zone below his own bombers. What really saved him was the fact that the bomb, set with a delayed-time detonation—so that it would fall well into the hangars before explosion—did not explode until it had fallen more than 600 feet below the battered scout. There was a time when seconds counted!

“Out of Formation!”
Flying Aces, July 1931 by Arnold Lorne Hicks

THIS week we have a story from the pen of the Navy’s own Allan R. Bosworth. Being a Navy man, Bosworth’s stories primarily dealt with the Navy. In this week’s story from the pages of War Aces, Bosworth gives us something different—the story of The Slasher!

Old-timers told of Boche pilots who flew low over marching infantry during the first year of the war, and tossed out handful after handful of these steel darts. Needle sharp, weighted at the lower portion before tapering to a deadly point, they would plummet downward to strike the helpless foot-sloggers. Now The slasher had revived the flechettes and was making hell in the heavens for the Umpty-third. Six fine men lost, four of them down over the trenches or enemy soil. Two others who managed to land their planes near the home tarmac, with cruel steel flechettes piercing their bodies, dying before they could tell how it had happened! From the pages of the April 1931 issue of War Aces, it’s “Hell in the Heavens!”

The “Slasher” scorned guns! His victims felt the deadly bite of steel darts. The hands of all men were against him but only one dared to attack.

• Download “Hell in the Heavens” (April 1931, War Aces)