True War

The title might be True War, but if you were to take this July 1958 cover at face value you'd be forgiven for thinking that it was mostly about sex.  Indeed, it gives the impression that the US Army shagged its way through multiple conflicts, (Brits who experienced their sojourn in the UK during WW2 might well agree with this assessment: 'Over paid, over sexed and over here').  According to this edition of True War, the Second World War was 'The Sex Best Years of Your Lives - A Thousand Nights of Beds and Booze', while the Korean War didn't just have spies, but the 'Sex Spies of Yonchon'.  Lest you thought that all the WW2 fun was on the Western front, over in the Far East the US could be proud of the 'Shack-Up Heroes of Bambang City'.  But hey, war is a serious business, as the cover reminds us with 'Death March: 1853' and the grim sounding 'They Ate My Buddies' Flesh!' (A tale of how starving Japanese soldiers ate dead GIs).

To be fair, the contents of the magazine overall have a somewhat less sex obsessed focus, with articles about the Battle of the Bulge, the Rhineland campaign and how Nazi secret weapons helped the soviets develop their post-war missile programme.  There's also 'Why I Fought For the Nazis', a title so sensational that it really should have been a cover story.  The lesson to be learned from this is that, by the fifties, if you wanted to compete on the newsstands, then you had to sell your men's magazine on the basis of sex, regardless of its actual subject matter.  For a war magazine, tales of battles, cannibalism and whacky Nazi secret weapons just weren't enough to guarantee sales.  Of course, the men's general adventure magazines perfected the union of sex and war with their lurid covers illustrating stories of Nazi depravities being visited upon chained up semi-naked women.  Perhaps not surprisingly, this was to be the last of True War's eleven issues, its cover's emphasis on sex one last desperate throw of the dice to try and generate sales.