To the best of my knowledge Lil’ Abner never mentioned the war.
I remember when Lt Flap (the first black character in the series) was introduced in 1970. It was stated he had been serving in Vietnam.
It took me a bit but I actually found a Beetle Bailey strip from 10 years ago that acknowledges the US at war and has Bailey in fact fire his rifle at someone, but the exact conflict is left unstated.
IIRC, it had nothing to do with the draft or getting Superman to Europe because he couldn’t fly. We were moving tens of thousands of men to Europe all during the war, not to mention all the ships with cargo. Putting Superman on a ship would have been child’s play.
What kept most superheroes away from Europe was that Hitler had the Spear of Destiny (the spear that killed Christ) which had magical properties and would bring anyone within distance of it under Hitler’s control. Still a lame excuse, but it explained why most DC characters didn’t fight in WWII.
Good thing it didn’t work on Marvel heroes, Captain America and Wolverine both had WWII stories. I’m sure there were others.
The Spear of Destiny schtick was a 1980s retcon. During the 1940s, the editors simply decided that it would be bad taste to have Superman single-handedly beating the bad guys while thousands of G.I.s were bleeding and dying in the real world. So they had Clark Kent flunk his physical, and Superman spent the war fighting spies, saboteurs, and mad scientists on the home front.
That’s what I was thinking too; there were quite a few extras in immediately pre-war Army uniforms which were quite a bit different than the post-war ones. So 1940 is probably spot-on for “A Christmas Story”
I always think of this as the “Gomer Pyle” syndrome; the show ran from 1964-1969, centered around the US Marine Corps, yet AFAIK made no mention of Vietnam whatsoever.
Lord of the Flies [the book] seems to be set in a fictional 1950s hot war, but when I studied it at school we assumed it was World War II.
The late (and unpublished for decades) Sayers story, Talboys is very clearly set in 1942, and is a rural idyll featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, Harriet, and their three sons, with nothing nastier going on than some purloined peaches.
I’ve known this fact for 40 or 50 years, and this only occurred to me today: Were eye charts not standardized c. 1940? Aren’t all of today’s Snellen charts identical?
Wasn’t memorizing the wrong eye chart a plot point in Pearl Harbor? If it’s a mistake surely someone on the web can be found via google protesting it 
Probably were. But it’s not important.
Well, yeah. I never said it was important.
Harry Truman memorized the eye chart to get into the National Guard/Army during WWI.
In The War Between Men and Women Jack Lemon plays a cartoonist and author (loosely based on James Thurber) who’s slowly losing his eye sight. One of the opening gags in the movie, he’s trying to “prove” that his eye sight is fine by memorizing the eye chart phonetically (“Doc, how do you spell QXZKM?”), and halfway through his doctor tells him he changed the chart since his last visit.