What was the first Sgt. Rock-type war comic book? By this, I mean one with no sci-fi or fantasy elements, one where the heroes were ordinary men with real world-type ordnance who fought other soldiers, not super-villains. Spy Smasher is out, so is Blackhawk. I don’t know enough about Johnny Canuck to know if he was a contender.
Dunno what the first was. Here are ones I recall: Star-Spangled War Stories debuted in 1952
Our Army at War also started in 1952. It’s the one that featured Sgt. Rock – but not until 1959.
Added later:
The Wikipedia article on War Comics , after noting ones the OP dismisses like “Blackhawk”, says they started in the early 1950s, giving the two I listed above, and others.
By the way, you shouldn’t dismiss Blackhawk. Although it got heavily sci-fi in the 1950s and 60s, it wasa a straight airplane war stories comic when it started during WWII. Its schtick was the multinational force that made it up, but they were straightforward pilots, with no fantastic elements
EC’s Frontline Combat debuted in 1951, a spinoff from the successful war stories featured in their ‘Two Fisted Tales’ (1950). In the Golden Age of comics, most titles were anthologies featuring several short stories, so any one issue of, say, Pep or Crack or what have you might feature a masked adventure story, a spy story, a detective story, and a war story. Some titles like “True Comics” featured a factual and relatively contemporaneous WWII story in every issue.
Captain America started in March, 1941.
The Shield started in Pep Comics in January, 1940. (Cap was a ripoff.)
Blackhawk (Military Comics) started in August, 1941.
Boy Commandos started in 1942 (month unknown).
But pulp fiction already had given us G-8 and His Battle Aces, starting in 1933 and taking place during WWI.
There were no sci-fi or fantasy elements in THE PHANTOM’s comic, where he was an ordinary man with real-world weapons fighting soldiers instead of supervillains during WWII: he just snuck around like an athletic killer out to destroy the occasional ammo depot, because that’s what he was; the evidence is here.
(And, yeah, that was the newspaper comic strip instead of a comic book – but it got reprinted in comic-book form during WWII, because of course it did; there was a war on, who wouldn’t want to see our hero patiently stalking through the tall grass with his gun at the ready as he prepares to rescue an Allied POW?)
I guess what I’m looking for is the first comic book to realistically depict uniformed military personnel, weapons, uniforms and procedures. I thought there were some actually during WWII like “Don Winslow of the Navy” and “Johnny Canuck.” (I don’t know how realistic either was.) Strictly speaking, “Two-Fisted Tales” may be the first.
Given that Harvey Kurtzman was a freak for historical accuracy, in a situation where he really didn’t have to be, I think this would be the best candidate.