Willy Schulz, Part 14

 

cover art by Sam Glanzman

The next chapter of "The Lonely War of Capt. Willy Schultz" appears in Fightin' Army #90 (March 1970). Will Franz is still the writer and Sam Glanzman continues to provide the excellent artwork.

Willy is still fighting alongside Italian partisans and he's definitely not having an easy time of it. The story opens with Willy and some partisans trapped in a house, with a German tank outside about to blow them into oblivion.

While several wounded men provide covering fire, Willy and the others make a break for it, reaching a ditch with the hope of taking out the tank with grenades and molotov cocktails. This is a desperation tactic and it doesn't look like it will work.

Several men are killed when a molotov cocktail detonates in the trench. Others panic and run only to be machine gunned. In the meantime, the tank has destroyed the house and killed the wounded men there.

Willy's the only one left. He manages to blow a tread off the tank in the nick of time, then hit the tank with another molotov. But when a German crawls from the burning tank, Willy can't make himself shoot the man. He's saved by the arrival of Major Dario, the OSS man in charge of the partisans. Dario shoots the German just before the German shoots Willy.

So far, we've been given an intense battle scene. The story winds down with Willy and Dario discussing the situation. Dario reveals that he doesn't really believe Willy is innocent of the murder he was charged with so long ago. He also wonders why Willy would regret having to kill the Germans who just slaughtered the wounded men in the house. Willy counters this by saying the dead Germans had friends as well. 

And that's it. This chapter is one incident during Willy's time with the partisans. But, aside from the fantastic battle scene, it once again explores the moral uncertainty of war and does so intelligently. 

All the same, as I write these reviews, I do wish the saga had spent more time dealing with why it was necessary to fight the Nazis. We do get some of this in the last chapter of the saga and its obvious that both Will Franz and Sam Glanzman understood the evils of fascism. I think this superb series could have been a little better if that aspect of the war had been in the forefront more often.

On the other hand, the saga has been making the legitimate point that many individual German soldiers were not evil men. And no one work of fiction is obligated to examine every single moral aspect of the story being told. If Franz and Glanzman choose to concentrate on one aspect of war and do so with dramatic power and intelligence, then perhaps there's no reason to complain. This is something that must be left up to each individual reader. 

Also, the last chapter was written years after the original series was cancelled. Perhaps if Franz and Glanzman had been able to continue the series in the early 1970s, they would have spent more time on the evils of fascism. Who knows?