By Garth Ennis, Chris Weston, Christian Alamy & Russ Heath, with Robert Kanigher & Joe Kubert (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-56389-982-9
Enemy Ace first appeared as a back-up in issue #151 of DC’s flagship war comic Our Army at War (cover-dated February 1965): home of the already legendary Sergeant Rock. Produced by the dream team of Robert Kanigher & Joe Kubert during a period when the ongoing Vietnam conflict was beginning to tear American society apart, the series told bitter tales of valour and honour from the point of view of German WWI fighter pilot Hans Von Hammer: a noble warrior fighting for his country in a conflict that was swiftly excising all trace of such outmoded concepts from the increasingly industrialised business of mass-killing.
The sagas – loosely based on the life of “Red Baron†Manfred von Richthofen – were a magnificent tribute to the profession of soldiering whilst condemning the madness of war, produced during those turbulent days of foreign conflicts and intense home front unrest. They are still moving and powerful beyond belief, as is George Pratt’s seminal 1989 sequel, Enemy Ace: War Idyll.
In 2001, Garth Ennis – no stranger to combat fiction – took another look at the flyer on the other side in a 2-issue miniseries that extended his martial longevity by transplanting him to World War II and a far less defensible ethical position…
Bavaria, 1942 and forty-six-year-old Baron Hans von Hammer is visited by an old flying comrade who desperately urges him to come out of retirement and serve his country. No lover of Nazism, the old ace has kept himself isolated until now, but Germany’s attack on Russia has proven a disastrous blunder, and this last plea is as much warning as request…
The neophyte pilots on the Eastern Front need his experience and leadership, whereas Hitler’s goons and zealots don’t need much excuse to remove a dissident thorn…
Based loosely on the lives of such German pilots as Adolf Galland, book I of War in Heaven (illustrated by Chris Weston) finds von Hammer as indomitable as ever in the Eastern killer skies but unable to come to terms with the increasing horror and stupidity of the conflict and its instigators.
The phrase “My Country, Right or Wrong†leaves an increasingly sour taste in his mouth as the last of his nation’s young men die above Soviet fields…
Book II is set in 1945 and witnesses Germany on the brink of defeat with von Hammer flying an experimental early jet fighter (a Messerschmitt 262, if you’re interested); shooting down not nearly enough Allied bombers to make a difference and still annoying the wrong people at Nazi High Command.
He knows the war is over but his sense of duty and personal honour won’t let him quit. He is resigned to die in the bloody skies that have been his second home, but then he is shot down and parachutes into a concentration camp named Dachau…
With art from comics legend Russ Heath, this stirring tale ends with a triumph of integrity over patriotism: a perfect end to the war record of a true soldier.
This slim paperback volume (still findable, despite being incomprehensibly out of print and unavailable digitally) is supplemented by a classic anti-war tale of WWI by Kanigher & Kubert, taken from Star-Spangled War Stories #139.
‘Death Whispers… Death Screams!’ explores the Enemy Ace’s childhood and noble lineage as he endures the daily atrocities of being one of the world’s last warrior knights in a mechanised, conveyor-belt conflict. Just another day above the trenches but never away from them…
Here is another gripping, compelling, deeply incisive exploration of war, its repercussions, both good and bad, and the effects that combat has on singular men. This should be mandatory reading for every child who wants to be a soldier…
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