Bazooka Blondes

Back in the world of US men's magazine. This is Man's Book from November 1963, peddling the usual mix of violence, misogyny and sex.  The cover story -'The Wild Assault of Scott's Bazooka Babes' - is typical of the kind of supposedly true war stories popular in such publications: manly US GI recruits a bevy of scantily clad babes from somewhere to complete a vital mission after the rest of his unit is wiped out.  Surprise, surprise - they turn out to be just as good as killing Nazis/Japs/Commies as his late buddies.  More often than not, he recruits them from a local bordello (where they've been abused by the bad guys, of course), or from a prison camp (usually one of those SS experimental torture camps, where crazed Nazis cover underwear clad women with molten gold, when they're not freezing them into ice cubes or mating them with gorillas, that is).  Here, obviously, the hero uses them to load his bazooka, (the phallic imagery is too obvious to warrant comment), as he blasts Nazi tanks in the desert.  Except that they look more like British Matilda MkII tanks than any Panzer I've ever seen.

This issue seems to have a second story in a similar ilk, judging by the headline story title: 'Sgt Platnick's Love 'em Up Patrol'.  Although Platnick could be a police sargeant, I suppose, who spends his time out on patrol shagging local the housewives on his beat.  Perhaps he's working undercover to expose 'Sex and Savagery - Blackmail Babes in Action', presumably another of those stories playing upon the adolescent insecurities of the average reader of these magazines - young men in their late teens who still lived at home and had never met an adult woman they weren't related to.  The title is clearly playing with the whole idea of women being predatory, just waiting to entrap unwary men.  'The Truth About Your Desires - Are They Abnormal?' is another obvious play upon male insecurities and anxieties, designed to get readers furtively turning to the article to find out if their particular sexual fantasies make them a pervert.  (If they involve girls and bazookas, no, they are merely puerile).  Not to worry, though.  The swinging sixties and all that permissiveness was just around the corner - fantasising about women and just about any heavy infantry weapon would soon be de rigeur.