Military Comics '61: This Didn't Even Age Well at the Time
G.I. Combat was one of DC's many military and war themed comics, and largely dealt with straightforward - but heightened - military stories, with little to no supernatural or superheroic elements. This issue, #87, is a major exception. Welcome to the Gutters!
This story has a lot of baggage to unpack, so we're just going to get right into it. The Haunted Tank is a recurring military comics feature about a WWII tank haunted by the ghost of a Confederate general. The tank would go into battle flying the Confederate flag and blaring Dixie like this was a prequel to The Dukes of Hazzard. The tank commander was the direct descendant of the Confederate general haunting the tank, he's the only one who can see or hear the ghost, and he treats this racist poltergeist with an almost holy reverence. The series does very little to examine the lingering specter of the Confederacy in American history, and just pits the CSA against the Nazis in the most "Both Mangled And Killed" alternate history scenario that you or I have ever seen. All of this is still canon. Batman has teamed up with the ghost of a Confederate general. This ghost of an 1800s racist showed up on Cartoon Network. A dead slaveholder haunting a weapon of war met Scooby-Doo.
How the fuck did any of this...?
Sometimes, comics make me sad.
So, one thing we have to remember is that this comic came out in 1961. However racist America is at time of reading, it was way more racist in 1961. Unless things have gone horribly wrong in the time since I wrote this, for which I would like to say, sorry about that. I regret that I'm not in any way qualified to discuss the history of the Civil Rights movement, but suffice to say that America was heavily racially segregated, Jim Crow was the law of the land, and most states still had laws against interracial marriage.
The American South had an outsized grip on popular media at this time. Typically, in the South, Black characters would only be allowed to appear in movies or TV in stereotypical roles as criminals or servants. If they appeared in roles outside this remit, they would be edited out. If they couldn't be edited out, they simply would refuse to run it in their territory. The entertainment industry was happy to tailor their material to the southern standard if it meant not losing out on their ticket sales. This kind of thing by no means stopped in the 1960s, by the way. The Dukes of Hazzard aired from 1979-1985, the year I was born, and was one of the most popular shows in the country.
The story features an American M3 "Stuart" tank, named after confederate general James Ewell Brown "Jeb" Stuart, famous loyal american patriot general good guy. This kind of thing was depressingly common in WWII. The Stuart was a light tank intended for reconnaissance and infantry support, and here it's going up against a German "Tiger" heavy tank, which was design to wreck absolute shit on anything short of a reinforced bunker. In reality, it was an overdesigned deathtrap, but still, a Stuart taking on a Tiger is something akin to an Imperial Guardsman trying to wrestle a Space Marine, if you'll excuse the unfuckability of that sentence.
With the crew knocked unconscious by the assault, we hear the after-action report of the tank commander, who is also named Jeb Stuart. In early stories, he was named Jeb Stuart Smith, but eventually he was renamed to just Jeb Stuart, and established as the grandson of the historical J.E.B. Stuart. Despite the incapacitated crew, the tank turret moves by itself and fires off a point-blank shot into the Tiger's undercarriage, blasting it to death with a decisive blow. The crew is glad to be alive, but absolutely baffled that they survived.
We get a potted history of Jeb Stuart's life, and we see that he is absolutely autistically hyperfixated on his confederate general ancestor. Like, even when he sees the tank's guns, he can only conceptualize them as cavalry weapons. He's also hearing ghostly laughter whenever he so much as mentions J.E.B. Stuart, and even imagines the ghost of this dead racist watching over him. This first story leaves the situation somewhat ambiguous, but later stories would establish that this ghost is absolutely real, and that tank is absolutely haunted.
The rest of the story doesn't really make use of the tank's haunted status. Instead, almost the entire second and third act are other tank units laughing at the M3 Stuart for being a little weenie baby tank for sick little three-legged puppies and not a big manly macho tank for real men with big giant 88 millimeter penises. And yeah, the Stuart Tank's penis was less than half that of all the other tanks, but the whole point of a combined arms doctrine is that different units are better at different... why am I even talking about this?
The historical J.E.B. Stuart was pretty much everything you think of when you picture a Confederate general. He was born on a plantation in Virginia. His family were southern Democrats who owned slaves. He was personal friends with Robert E. Lee. He fought in Bleeding Kansas. He opposed John Brown. He was an enthusiastic supporter of secession and expressed a desire to hang any Virginian who remained loyal to the Union. He was a scholar of the kind of brash, daring tactics that led the South to win dramatic battles but still lose the war.
One thing that's not obvious is that despite his impressive rank and even more impressive beard, General J.E.B. Stuart was actually a relatively young man. He became a General at 28 and got murked by a sharpshooter in a battle outside of Richmond at the age of 31. He was like his era's Charlie Kirk, if Kirk had the ability to grow facial hair. The comics would instead portray him as a crotchety old man, which is the least of what it does to his image. While I acknowledge that history is almost never black-and-white, I can safely say that Jebediah Ebediah Bebediah Stuart was a historical bastard, and didn't deserve a posthumous re-evaluation as a nazi-fighting tank ghost!
But while I've got you here, I want to look at another story from the same year, from Our Army at War #113. This story is the first appearance of Jackie Johnson, the only Black member of Sgt. Rock's Easy Company. In real life, the US Army was heavily segregated and African-American soldiers restricted to non-combat roles, but if that happened we wouldn't have a story. Jackie is introduced along with Harold "Wildman" Shapiro, and the story makes the bold move of just brushing past any white dude/black dude conflict and has them already be friends with a solid working relationship.
In fact, reading this story, Jackie's race is never directly commented on. He just is a Black man, and it's treated matter-of-factly, the same way it treats Wildman's giant red beard. He's a soldier first, and an equal to any of the other men in the squad, with his race just being an incidental part of his character. Throughout the story, he and Wildman are treated as equal partners, two halves of one whole, and the metaphor becomes clear in the climax, where Jackie is blinded and Wildman's hands are injured, meaning they have to rely on each other to stop a Nazi advance. They treat it like the most natural thing in the world.
Jackie Johnson is significant because he is quite possibly the first Black character in mainstream comics to not be depicted as an offensive stereotype. Black characters in the golden age were absurd racist caricatures like Ebony White, or Whitewash Jones, whom I will NOT be posting here, you're going to have to look for that on your own. Suffice to say they're about one step removed from the goddamn Golliwog. Jackie Johnson isn't a cornerstone of the Black experience, but it overshoots the bar by miles just for being less racist than H.P. Lovecraft's cat. You're gonna have to look that one up too.
And I bring these two stories up together not just to show the contrast in DC's output, but because these two stories were both written by the same man: Robert Kanigher, who created most of DC's military output. He created one of the first positive depictions of a Black man in DC comics—in the military, no less—and the Adventures of the Racism Ghostmobile. And... that's just wild, isn't it? I'd like to come up with some pithy statement about human nature but I just can't. Like, I don't believe Kanigher was racist or a Confederate sympathizer, he was a Jewish guy who was born, raised, lived, and died in New York. The man had a lot of ideas, and maybe the cultural climate he lived in allowed some concepts to flourish that might have been better off left behind. Or maybe people are always weirder than they look. Until next time!
