Back filling a few issues of Weird War Tales.
Weird War Tales 1.
There’s an intro piece before the first proper story. A framing device. A US soldier in WW2 is lost and alone. He’s wandering through a darkened wood when a tank appears and shoots its cannon at him. He wakes hours later and wanders up to an isolated house and meets the old man living there. The old man nurses him back to health and tells him a few tales…
Fort Which Did Not Return. WW2. The crew of Mother Hen, a B-17 Flying Fortress, are picked off one by one while on a mission. Each man is killed by enemy fighters until only the bombardier remains. Yet the Fort keeps on flying. Turning and maneuvering to line up the bombing target and, after the bombs are dropped, fly out of harms way. The bombardier is amazed the Fort is still flying despite the rest of the crew dying. He takes a parachute and jumps clear. The Fort keeps on flying.
The Story Behind the Cover. WW2. A German corporal leads a patrol that happens across a US patrol. There’s a firefight and lots of dead soldiers. The corporal runs back to base to report. He’s met with silence. Thinking his countrymen hate him he vows to show them he’s no coward and charges out to meet the enemy. Turns out he died in the fight and is now a ghostly skeleton attacking the US lines.
End of the Sea Wolf. Post WW2. A former U-boat captain is now a salvage captain. He’s recovering one of the ships he sunk as a U-boat captain. He tells the tale of a relentless fight with a Q-boat, a specially designed U-boat destroyer. Shot after shot, she still attacked. Damage enough to sink her, she still attacked. No guns left, she moved to ram the U-boat. The end of the tale is revealed when the wreck is pulled from the sea. The two boats entwined. The Q-boat rammed the U-boat…sinking them both.
Baker’s Dozen. WW2. A 13th man is added to the very superstitious 12-man patrol of Baker company. The poor guy can’t catch a break. He downs a plane strafing them and they’re mad he attracted it in the first place. He smokes out a tank that ambushes them, they’re mad he caught it’s attention. They finally accept him after he drives a car loaded with explosives into a tank and destroys it.
Outro. Still WW2. The wounded soldier thanks the old man for his stories but insists on leaving to report back. He wanders through the forest and fog to find an old woman gathering firewood. She asks where he came from. He points to the house…only it’s a wreck. Weathered and destroyed decades ago on the last day of the Great War (aka WW1 to us).
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Finally got around to watching Sinners. Congrats on the Oscars and all the other awards. Well deserved. I really loved this one. Something new with vampires. Wonderful metaphor for...welll, forum rules and all. Great stuff. We watched it on HBO and the aspect ratio kept changing on us. It was really weird. Didn't see anyone else mention that, so maybe it was a glitch on our end. Not sure because it was for certain scenes not in the middle of something like you'd expect with a glitch.
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Read Ring Shout, a horror novella set in the deep south after WW1. Three women are hunting monsters disguised as KKK. Absolutely loved this one. It's another modern piece that I'd recommend for folks wanting to get into horror RPGs and Call of Cthulhu in particular. Some really great monsters and fight scenes. Oddly thematic with Sinners. Made for a neat double feature.
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Also came across the Encyclopedia of Weird War Stories. Published in 2017, so it's filled to bursting with tons of great films, cartoons, comics, short stories, novellas, and novels that feature various kinds of Weird War. An absolute gold mine for me right now. So good. I can't wait to dig into whatever I can find from there.
