'How I Sank Britain's Biggest Battleship'

The cover of the January 1961 edition of Stag pretty much speaks for itself - it represents the US man's magazine in its pomp.  The cover has it all - gun-toting GI, glimpses of semi-naked women, head-hunting natives  and a wartime jungle setting.  The story it illustrates - 'The Amazing GI Who Took Three Head-Hunting Brides' - further hints at primitive sex and wild polygamy.  The rest of the contents are typical of the era - Red baiting, arduous male adventure, alliterative war heroics ('Vengeance Platoon From the Village of Violated Women') and the war at sea.  This latter story, 'How I sank Britain's Biggest Battleship', requires some further explanation,  It is actually a true story, although, even in this title, greatly distorted.  It refers to the 1939 sinking of HMS Royal Oak at her moorings in Scapa Flow by the German submarine U-47.  

In reality, Royal Oak was far from being the Royal Navy's biggest battleship.  In reality, she was an obsolete World War One vintage battleship (she'd served at Jutland), which hadn't been modernised since the 1920s and, by the outbreak of World War Two, was considered unfit for front line service.  The main impact of her sinking was the loss of life involved and the sheer embarrassment for the UK of having a warship sunk in what was meant to be the Royal Navy's impregnable Scottish base.  It represented a major blow for morale so early in the war and a big propaganda victory for Germany.  The Royal Navy subsequently responded with the sinking of one of Germany's most modern battleships, the Graf Spee, a couple of months later.

Stag was an extraordinarily long-lived men's magazine, publishing its first issue in 1949 and continuing into the 1990s at least.  Like many of its contemporaries, Stag transformed into a softcore porn magazine during the early seventies, becoming a down market Playboy or Penthouse, mixing its nudes with male-orientated articles, (many along the same lines as those published in its previous incarnation, but more explicit).