All December 2014, we will be celebrating a Silver Age Christmas, with great Silver Age comics about Christmas. For the sake of this endeavor, "Silver Age" will be defined as 1956-1970 (the annoying part about that is that 1951-1955 sort of fall into no man's land, as it is not yet Silver Age but also seems to be a bit late for Golden Age).

We continue with a short war story from All-American Men of War #80 by Bob Haney and Jack Abel.

The concept is a simple one. A U.S. submarine has been playing a game of cat and mouse (with each taking turns as the cat and the mouse) with a Japanese destroyer for over a year now, with each one trying to blow each other up. Morale is low at the lack of success on their mission. The captain of the sub decides to improve morale by listening to his men's requests for a Christmas tree for the sub. They stop off at a small Japanese island to get a tree. However, someone on the island spots them and informs the Japanese Navy who take this opportunity to attack the submarine while it is loading the tree on to the submarine. We pick up the action from that point, where the sub is in an emergency dive...









It's a bit disappointing to see a 1960 comic book still rocking the Japanese caricatures pretty hard (I omitted the more over the top stuff from earlier in the story), but otherwise, this was a fine comic book tale.