In 1914 the home front in all countries greeted the war with an outpouring of patriotic support, but only Germany saw significant support for war before it was declared. Everywhere the advocates of peace were quickly overwhelmed, in particular the Marxist Socialist movement, which struggled to balance the coordination of international pacifism with hopes for political revolution, as reflected in a conference at Zimmerwald in neutral Switzerland in 1915. By then, the early rush to volunteer in Britain and the Dominions, where no military service requirements existed, had begun to dissipate. The home fronts were forced to respond when the anticipated short war dragged on into a second year. When heavy casualties created an ongoing need for fresh manpower, and the exhaustion of the initial stockpiles of munitions placed unprecedented demands on industry, women assumed an increasingly important role either as workers or as noncombatant volunteers, including under the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations. The war revolutionized labor relations as well as gender relations. As the war entered a third year, censorship and propaganda assumed a growing role in sustaining the home fronts, especially for the Central Powers once the Allied naval blockade began to affect food supplies.

The first months of World War I set the tone for most of the rest of the conflict, as each of the countries involved endured unprecedented casualties by the spring of 1915, without suffering a serious breach of discipline among the troops or a collapse of will on the home front. The massive bloodletting did not deter the belligerents from carrying on or other countries from joining the war later, starting with Italy in May 1915. As early as August 22, 1914, France suffered 27,000 battle deaths on a single day, almost half again more than the bloodiest day for Britain and its empire, July 1, 1916, when more than 19,000 died on the first day of the Somme; in contrast, total Allied combat deaths in World War II on D-Day, June 6, 1944, numbered just over 4,400. Even after British and Imperial forces, in the summer of 1918, figured out the keys to restoring mobility to the Western front – the combination of an infantry assault under a well-coordinated creeping barrage, supported by tanks, with aircraft disrupting enemy communications, reinforcement efforts, and artillery spotting – they and their Allies continued to resort, more often than not, to brute force in pushing the Germans out of France and western Belgium that autumn. The Germans, likewise, by 1917–18 discovered that their infiltration tactics using storm troopers against enemy strong points effectively cleared the battlefield for general advances by infantry, yet they, too, continued to resort to unimaginative frontal assaults as soon as battles bogged down. In the final analysis, the willingness of most troops to continue to obey their commanders no matter what, and the conviction on the part of most civilians that their leaders should pursue the war to a victorious conclusion, provides the best explanation for the unprecedented carnage.

After the British swept the seas of German cruisers by early 1915, the naval war shifted to European waters, where the Allied navies adopted a strategy of “distant blockade” against Germany (on a line between Scotland and Norway) and against Austria-Hungary (across the Otranto Straits). At Dogger Bank (24 January 1915) Beatty’s battle cruiser squadron defeated its German counterpart, prompting William II to order his capital ships to remain in port for an entire year. At Jutland (31 May-1 June 1916), the war’s only fleet-scale battle, Scheer’s High Sea Fleet won a tactical victory over Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet but failed to break the blockade; afterward Scheer advocated resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, attempted during 1915 but abandoned under pressure from the United States. After unrestricted submarine warfare brought the United States into the war in April 1917, the British and Americans devised a convoy system to ensure the flow of US troops and supplies to Europe. In 1917–18 the blockaded fleets of Germany and Austria-Hungary (along with Russia, whose Baltic and Black Sea fleets were similarly idled) experienced serious mutinies. For Germany, a prewar net importer of food, the inability to trade by sea arguably was the single most important factor in its ultimate defeat.

The assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, by a Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, on June 28, 1914, touched off the series of events known as the July Crisis, which by early August resulted in five of Europe’s six great powers exchanging declarations of war. Austria-Hungary lacked specific knowledge of the Black Hand, the terrorist group to which Princip belonged, but correctly suspected he had ties to the Serbian army. After securing a pledge of support from its ally, Germany, Austria-Hungary gave an ultimatum to Serbia; under the influence of Conrad von Hötzendorf, chief of the general staff, the political leadership of Austria-Hungary had decided on war and crafted terms Serbia would be unable to accept. Serbia stood firm, supported by Russia, which responded to the demands on Serbia by becoming the first of the great powers to order a general mobilization. This decision triggered Germany’s Schlieffen Plan, which assumed victory against a combination including France and Russia could only be achieved if France were crushed first, with some of the invasion passing via Belgium. Amid the final ultimata and declarations of war, Germany’s invasion of Belgium ensured Britain would stand by its Triple Entente partners.

The war entered 1915 with Germany in possession of most of Belgium and firmly entrenched in northeastern France, Serbia holding its own in the Balkans, and Russia in occupation of Austrian Galicia and Turkish territory along the Caucasus front. On the Western front the British Empire provided much of the manpower in Flanders and the Artois sector, but the Germans successfully stood on the defensive against them, and against the French in the Champagne, making the first effective use of poison gas on the battlefield. In the east, Germany joined Austria-Hungary in liberating Galicia, then conquering Russian Poland, only to have Tsar Nicholas II refuse to consider a separate peace. The Western Allies anticipated the pressure on Russia and tried to force the Dardanelles, an ill-fated campaign that left British and Imperial forces focusing for much of the year on Gallipoli, where Mustafa Kemal became hero of the Turkish effort to repel them. In the spring Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary, opening up a front in the Alps and along the Isonzo River which soon became as stalemated as the Western front. On the Balkan front, Bulgaria entered the war in the autumn, joining the Central Powers in overrunning Serbia.

As the war plans of the great powers unfolded, few foresaw the stalemate that would set in by the end of 1914. Under Germany’s Schlieffen Plan, seven of its eight field armies were to attack France and achieve victory within six weeks, after which most of the troops would be withdrawn for action against Russia. In the meantime, Russia would have to be checked by Austria-Hungary, which Germany expected to abandon its own priority of crushing Serbia. The French, with the help of the British Expeditionary Force, won at the Marne against the Germans, who then dug in to consolidate their conquests. In “the Race to the Sea,” a series of failed flanking maneuvers by both sides established trench lines north to Flanders. By December 1914 a continuous Western front existed from the English Channel to Switzerland. Meanwhile, in the east, Germany’s Eighth Army, under Hindenburg and Ludendorff, defeated two Russian armies at Tannenberg, but Austro-Hungarian forces divided between Serbian and Russian objectives failed to conquer Serbia, were defeated by the Russians at Lemberg, and ultimately held the line of the Carpathians in a bloody winter campaign. The Ottoman Empire entered the war, creating another front against Russia in the Caucasus.

Adventure magazines constructed a version of World War II and Korea that depicted heroic men as warriors, protectors, and sexual conquerors. Here was both a friendly genre for veterans and a way for curious young men to get a glimpse of what war might be like. Many of these wartime stories were written by veterans themselves. Some wrote to honor their fallen comrades, others to deal with the traumas of war by sharing their experiences, still others to advocate for veterans’ rights and opportunities in an increasingly consumer-oriented society. The narratives were simple in construction, stories of good versus evil revolving around individual men or small groups of heroes. A militarized version of masculinity seemed an antidote to Cold War emasculation. In these storylines, tough men survived the worst of war and proved that democracy could still produce the best soldiers. Adventure magazines also demonstrated that war was meritocratic – anyone could be a hero. Yet the magazines’ stories and the vibrant artwork skirted the harsh realities of war, focusing on individual triumphs rather than the horrors of combat. By avoiding the truths of war’s ugly side, adventure mags constructed a battlefield memory that relied mostly on an imagined reality.

The macho pulps’ portrayal of women, especially non-European foreign women, left young male readers with the impression that American dominance overseas allowed them to engage in a form of sexual oppression. Still, contemporary anxieties remained. Thus, the magazines highlighted the “red seductress,” the communist femme fatale who used her body to lure good men astray. In these storylines, women were both beautiful and deceitful, depictions which could be particularly unnerving for young men inexperienced in sex. The magazines also portrayed “exotic Orientals,” women of “darker races,” as sexually available, desirous of Americans, and a counter to stifling wives at home. As in storylines on German Frauleins or communist spies, however, Asian women could be just as deceitful, using their bodies as weapons of war. Thus, the objectification of women was perpetuated by adventure magazines, especially concerning those women who weren’t American or European. In large sense, men’s adventure magazines created a fantasy world where young men easily could find sex in almost any wartime environment. And even when women did fight alongside men, as they did in some storylines, sexualized versions of women – Amazonian tropes were common – helped leave readers with the impression that strong male warriors were also sexual conquerors.

It seemed that men faced two threats in the post-World War II era: one from global communism with its tentacles spreading into US society and the other from postwar consumerism which inspired fears of losing one’s masculinity in a cold, corporate world. The contours of these Cold War anxieties were expressed clearly in adventure magazines. Working-class readers confronted changing sexual norms, fears of being left behind as the US economy grew, and, it appeared, the boredom of suburban life. Thus, the magazines sold images of a “new American man,” one that was muscular, sexually aware, and able to overcome his working-class limits by following through on advertisements that promised easy money. Still, a sense of deep anxiety pervaded these magazine stories – and, arguably, Cold War America as a whole. The “Red” menace was cultivating unseen enemies capable of invading the body politic, even the US military according to some accounts. Fears of nuclear Armageddon were just as prevalent. And, just as importantly, men’s magazines painted a dark picture of a sexual menace being unleashed by postwar American society. Thus, these wide-ranging fears appeared to leave many American men in an uneasy state despite the victory of World War II.

According to many Vietnam veterans’ memoirs, John Wayne set the standard for what it meant to be a man. Yet for many young adults in Cold War America, there were other models for masculinity far from Hollywood, and among the most popular were men’s adventure magazines. Throughout the 1950s and into the mid 1960s, these magazines proved a popular cultural venue for war stories illustrating the exploits of courageous soldiers, fighting against the “savage” other in foreign lands, and defending democracy in a harsh world where the threat from evil actors always seemed lurking. Sex underscored nearly all of these tales, with pulp heroes rewarded with beautiful, seductive women as a kind of payoff for the combat victories. The magazines offered a masculine ideal to their readers, warrior heroes who were physically fit, mentally strong, and resolutely heterosexual. They also targeted a working-class white readership, the same communities that disproportionately sent their young men off to fight a long and bloody war in South Vietnam. Pulp Vietnam argues that men’s adventure magazines from the post-World War II era crafted a particular version of martial masculinity that helped establish and then normalize GIs’ expectations and perceptions of war in Vietnam.

How did the fantasy world depicted in men’s adventure magazines compare with the reality of Vietnam? While magazine stories about the US war in Vietnam suggested that this was a new kind of war, more unconventional in nature than that of World War II or Korea, storylines remained stuck in earlier conceptions of warfare. The vast majority of US soldiers serving in Vietnam did so in combat support or service support units, yet the magazines continued to focus on the exploits of combat infantrymen. Moreover, portrayals of the enemy continued the long tradition of racism against non-white combatants. Thus, storylines not only illustrated the evils of Vietnamese communists, but also highlighted the corruption and ineptitude of America’s South Vietnamese allies. Narratives extolled the courage of a new generation of heroes who, like their fathers in World War II, could best their enemies on the field of battle. Yet, Vietnam offered few chances to prove one’s manhood in battle. Combat was immensely frustrating for American soldiers, who more often than not fought a war of surprise ambushes against an elusive enemy. And in a war without front lines, few of them could demonstrate that progress was being made toward ultimate victory.