I’m writing this on September 11th in 2026. Like most people, the date September 11 makes me think about the deadly 2001 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. But it also brings up another personal reminder on my Google calendar about my late friend, author Robert F. Dorr.
Bob was born on September 11, 1939. He died on June 12, 2016, from glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. During the final year of Bob’s life, I worked with him and my Men’s Adventure Library co-editor Wyatt Doyle to publish a collection of some of the great short stories Bob wrote for men’s adventure magazines in the 1960s and 1970s.
Many fans of Robert F. Dorr primarily know him from his military aviation history books and the hundreds of nonfiction articles he wrote about international affairs, military issues and aviation history. His work appeared in the MILITARY TIMES newspapers and publications such as AEROSPACE AMERICA, AIR POWER HISTORY and WORLD AIR POWER JOURNAL.
I first got to know about Bob from stories I ran across under his byline in men’s adventure mags I collect. He wrote hundreds of stories and articles for them. They include just about every type of story MAMs published, from action-adventure and war stories and military history articles to faux “true stories” and exposés. Many are among the best ever written for the MAM genre.
My publishing partner Wyatt Doyle and I included two of them in the first book in our Men’s Adventure Library series, WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH! That first book—originally published in 2013 and recently republished in a new, expanded full-color edition—is a kind of “all-star” collection of MAM stories. It includes stories by writers like Lawrence Block, Harlan Ellison, Bruce J. Friedman and Robert Silverberg. That’s the league Bob Dorr was in as a writer of stories for MAMs.
In 2014, we started working with Bob on a collection composed entirely of his MAM war and adventure stories. Titled A HANDFUL OF HELL, after one of the stories included, it was published in January 2016. Bob wrote the introduction for it, and I included excerpts from that intro in posts on this blog.
Five months after A HANDFUL OF HELL was published, Bob died. But he got to see it published and read the glowing reviews written about it. For me, it was an incredible honor to have worked with Bob on that book and to have had many fascinating conversations with him by phone and email. So, when his birthday pops up on my calendar, I think of him. Today, that inspired me to repost the excerpts from the introduction he wrote for A HANDFUL OF HELL.
Happy birthday, Bob. I miss having you in the world…
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– Excerpts from ROBERT F. DORR’S Introduction to A HANDFUL OF HELL –
I was born on September 11, 1939. I grew up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. From childhood, I’ve had two main interests: airplanes and writing. I had my first paid magazine piece published in the November 1955 issue of AIR FORCE MAGAZINE, the journal of the Air Force Association, when I was 16.
Even though I couldn’t become a pilot [because of bad eyesight] I was sufficiently interested in the Air Force that I enlisted the day after I graduated from high school, in June 1957. The Korean War was over but it was still a very tense situation. It was like the Korean War without the shooting.
The nation of South Korea I was stationed in from 1958 to 1960 was a very crude, primitive country that bears no resemblance to what it looks like today. Today it is in many respects ahead of us in education and technology. But not then.
Part of what my squadron did was to fly reconnaissance missions in C-47s, In everyday jargon that would be a spy plane, although technically speaking a spy is a civilian. We were part of a massive communications intelligence operation that was going on around the world during the Cold War – and continues today.
I got out of the Air Force in August of 1960, just before my twenty-first birthday. I then spent several years doing various things, mostly in California. I also went to Hong Kong. My goal was to become a writer. The first example of my work in men’s pulp adventure magazines was published in REAL magazine, a story called “The Night Intruders” in REAL, April 1962. [Included in the deluxe hardcover edition of A HANDFUL OF HELL.]
The editors paid me $100 for the story, about a B-26 crew in the Korean War. The Korean War was a popular subject then. That was the first of what became several hundred stories and articles in those magazines. I’m using the word articles somewhat loosely because almost all of them contained a great deal of fiction, though I tried to make them all seem to be as realistic as I could.
I did the same thing with the first story in REAL that I did with almost all of the later men’s adventure magazine stories and articles. I typed them up on 8½ by 11 typewriter paper on a manual typewriter, using Whiteout, booze and cigarettes.
I also tried to write literary short stories. During that era, Esquire magazine was the pinnacle for men’s magazines. It was publishing some of the great writers. I wrote a fiction story that came back from Esquire with a scribbled little note from the editor that said: “Almost made it.”
I never did succeed in publishing literary short stories. I wrote some but didn’t get them published. But I began writing regularly for the men’s pulp magazines, in their heyday. Writing for the men’s adventure magazines was a learning process in many ways. I think the guys that put out those magazines deserve a lot of credit for helping to teach a whole generation of writers how to write.
In terms of the readers of the men’s adventure magazines I wrote for in the first half of the ‘60s or so, when I did most of my writing for them, almost all of them were veterans. The situation was different then than it is today, when a veteran is perceived as sort of a separate category of human being that’s apart from everybody else. These magazines were read by regular guys. The fact that they happened to be veterans had something to do with shaping the content. But the fact that they were veterans is sort of an added fact to whatever else is true about them, since so many men were veterans back then.
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Between the Air Force and the time I entered the Foreign Service, there was a period of several years when I was going to college part time. I also worked some part-time jobs. But most of the time I was supporting myself with income from the men’s adventure magazines.
I wrote a lot for Magazine Management company, which published STAG, MALE, FOR MEN ONLY, MEN and others, and for Pyramid Publishing, which published MAN’S MAGAZINE and some other men’s adventure magazines.
They usually paid me $350 per article and $350 was pretty good. Not only was it pretty good then, it hasn’t gotten much better. There are plenty of fine, high quality magazines that pay less than that today. For most of that period, I was moving around a lot, so I had a Post Office Box in San Francisco.
I had a couple of Air Force buddies there that I hung around with, guys I had been in the Air Force with. I remember when we’d get together they would say: “Let’s go down to the Post Office today and see if you got a check from Man’s Magazine.” And every once in a while there would be that wonderful moment when there would be a check for $350 in the Post Office Box and we’d be rich.
One of the stories I wrote in 1962 was “Handful of Hell at 20,000 Feet!” It was published in the October issue of CLIMAX, a men’s adventure magazine published by Macfadden Publications. It’s about Air Force Staff Sergeant Henry “Red” Erwin, who received the Medal of Honor in 1945.
I was fascinated by Erwin’s bravery. He was a radio operator aboard a B-29 Superfortress bomber. During a mission over Japan, he suffered grave burns all over his body when he grabbed and disposed of a phosphorus bomb that had detonated prematurely inside his plane. It would have destroyed the aircraft and crew if not for his action.
Erwin’s hands, face and body were severely burned. He was covered with bandages and expected to die when he became one of the very few American enlisted airmen to receive the Medal of Honor, our country’s highest award for valor.
I didn’t do interviews for my men’s adventure stories like I later did for my history books.
I did get to know Red Erwin decades later when I interviewed Air Force veterans for one of my aviation history books, titled B-29 Superfortress Units of World War II, which came out in 2002. I never told him about the CLIMAX story. He died in 2002.
Ten years later, and 50 years after my Climax story about Erwin was published, my more accurate and very real account of his bravery appeared in my book MISSION TO TOKYO.
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Another story I wrote in 1962 that was ultimately titled “The Bloodiest Single Mission in Air Force History.” It was published in BLUEBOOK FOR MEN, December 1962.
I was familiar with North Korean geography, and I imagined an attack on the real industrial city of Sariwon, surrounded by anti-aircraft artillery. I gave my manuscript an Alistair MacLean-style name, “The Guns of Sariwon.”
Here’s a little aviation inside baseball about the name of that bomber. During World War II, the U. S. Army’s standard medium bomber was the Martin B-26 Marauder. Late in the war, the Army introduced a new attack plane, the Douglas A-26 Invader. Both the B-26 and the A-26 had twin engines, tricycle landing gear, and guns protruding all over.
When I sent my story about Douglas B-26 Invader bombers to BLUEBOOK, an editor wrote back and asked if I had photos. I did. I sent him valuable photos that were never returned. They weren’t used, either. BLUEBOOK illustrated the story with photos of the wrong kind of B-26: Marauders, not Invaders. More understandably, BLUEBOOK changed my title for the story to “The Bloodiest Single Mission in Air Force History.”
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On January 1, 1963, equipped with a roundtrip ticket and little cash, I traveled to Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei and Hong Kong, lugging an Olivetti Lettera-22 typewriter. During the trip I used it to write yet another tale about bomber crews in combat. This one was about a B-17 Flying Fortress bombing mission to Berlin.
I sent it to STAG magazine from Hong Kong. Stag editor Noah Sarlat, with whom I later worked regularly but never met, sent me a note saying he liked it but he questioned certain details in the story, such as did American crews really use the term “bomber stream”? In fact, I told him, my background details were accurate. I’d never actually been inside a B-17, but I didn’t tell him that.
The name for the plane in the story is based on a girl I’d hung out with in San Francisco, a Berkeley graduate student whose mother called her by the nickname “Lovie.” My fictional B-17 needed a name so I dubbed the airplane Lovie. My title for the story was “Lovie’s Airborne Ordeal.” I understood the writing style of the men’s adventure magazines better than I grasped their method of determining titles. Noah changed it to “Rammed over Berlin.”
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My story “The P.O.W. General Who Tried to Kill Himself” was published in MAN’S MAGAZINE, November 1965. It’s about a real man, Major General William F. Dean. He fought in Europe in World War II before commanding the 24th Infantry Division at the outbreak of the Korean War.
It was his misfortune to be in charge during the mid-1950 defense of the Pusan Perimeter when North Korean armor and infantry hammered a poorly equipped, under-manned, outnumbered U.S. ground force. Dean was awarded the Medal of Honor for his defense of Taejon, not for his subsequent brave conduct as a prisoner of war.
The Code of Conduct of the United States Fighting Force is a United States Department of Defense directive that took effect during the Eisenhower administration in 1955, two years after the end of the Korean War.
After the Code was adopted, members of the military were required to memorize it. The first of six articles read: “I am an American fighting man. I serve in the forces which guard my country and our way of life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense.” The Code did not exist when Bill Dean was a P.O.W. But he lived up to it and performed heroically in North Korean captivity.
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In 1951, when I was in the sixth grade, local newspapers carried stories about a T-33 Shooting Star trainer — the two seat version of the F-80 fighter then doing battle in Korea. I don’t remember the newspaper stories making much of the fact that the T-33 pilot who lost his life was a decorated World War II fighter ace, Major Don Gentile. Fifteen years later I wrote about Gentile’s wartime exploits for MAN’S MAGAZINE, in a story called “I’m Going to Ram That Nazi Plane!”
It is a true story, but a true story with some manufactured dialogue and a little embellishment. In 2003, I wrote a more straightforward article about Gentile for the magazine WWII HISTORY. Same story, done in different style, 38 years apart.
Another story I told twice, years apart, was about the P-40 Warhawk fighter pilot, 2nd Lt. George Welch. During the attack on Pearl Harbor, he and his buddy 2nd Lt. Ken Taylor were among the few American pilots who managed to take off and fight the Japanese. [The story “Yank Ace Who Battled the Japs over Pearl Harbor.”] Working together, they downed three Aichi D3A Val dive bombers. Welch also downed a Mitsubishi Zero fighter.
Both men were awarded the highest U.S. Air Force medal for their bravery, the Distinguished Service Cross. My story about Welch was the cover story in the December 1965 issue of Stag.
I retold his tale as the cover story in the November 2003 issue of WWII HISTORY magazine. Yes, history magazines are prospering nicely nowadays, thank you, and they owe a huge debt to the men’s adventure genre.
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I entered the Foreign Service in 1964. My first overseas assignment was in Madagascar from 1965 to 1967.
I spent quite a bit of my spare time at my typewriter during those years. Among other things, that led to two stories I wrote about American bomber pilots on lone-wolf missions into enemy territory to destroy vital enemy targets: “The ‘Impossible’ Raid” for STAG and “Yank Ace Who Saved the Anzio Invasion” which appeared in MAN’S MAGAZINE.
The idea of one man, or a small force, attacking a vital target was the kind of thing men’s adventure magazine readers loved. It has also always been good stuff for novels and movies. I used it decades later in my novel HITLER’S TIME MACHINE. The closest thing in air warfare in real life was the “Doolittle Raid” on Tokyo on April 18, 1942—eighty men in sixteen bombers led by James “Jimmy” Doolittle, a Lieutenant Colonel in what was then called the U.S. Army Air Forces, before the Air Force became a separate branch.
In the real world, when America could send thousands of planes on missions, as I later wrote about in books like Mission to Berlin and Mission to Tokyo, lone-wolf air attacks just didn’t happen. The “Yank Ace Who Saved the Anzio Invasion” is a story about a guy who flew the “other” bomber. The B-24 Liberator has never received as much attention as the B-17 Flying Fortress, even though there were more of them and they served everywhere during World War II.
The same is true of the P-47 Thunderbolt Fighter, which was the most numerous American fighter manufactured during that war. My book HELL HAWKS! covers the pilots, crew chiefs, armorers, repairmen and maintainers who worked on the P-47 Thunderbolts. And the book is a direct descendant of the work I did for the men’s adventure magazines.
W
hen I look at “Yank Ace Who Saved the Anzio Invasion” now I see the beginnings of a career writing articles and books about the experiences of wartime veterans in the Air Force, and I’ve been fortunate to be able to continue to do it. Some of my men’s adventure magazine stories from the mid-1960s depict everyday Americans in uniform, facing dire situations and doing spectacular things in the midst of war.
A fictional example is my story about Captain Sidney Curtiss, the hero of “Fish Him Out—Or Else” from MAN’S MAGAZINE, December 1966. He is an imaginary composite of several real F-105 Thunderchief pilots who were shot down and rescued during the air campaign against North Vietnam.
The portrait photo used to represent him in the story is a photo of a friend of mine. It was one of a number of tales of air warfare I wrote that involve flying into the enemy guns and surviving—usually.
A similar example is my tale of besieged helicopter crews and GIs in the June 1967 issue of MEN magazine, “5 Downed GIs Who Gutted Ambush Alley.” Two of the stories I wrote about five years into my Foreign Service career, when I was stationed in Japan, featured Medal of Honor recipients.
One was about U.S. Army Sergeant Tom Baker.
He died in a point-blank firefight with Japanese troops on Saipan, in the Mariana Islands in 1944, when a small number of American soldiers were overrun by several thousand Japanese troops.
Of course, there was no Internet when I wrote my story about him, published as “The Day the Boondocks Ran with Yankee Blood” in BLUEBOOK FOR MEN in 1969. Today, with a quick search online, you can easily find and read the official Medal of Honor citation for “Baker, Thomas A.” on the website of the U.S. Army Center of Military History. If you do, you’ll discover an account of Baker’s heroism that is less embellished than mine but awe-inspiring in its own laconic way.
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Another Medal of Honor recipient I wrote a story about that year was Angelo James Liteky, who later changed his name to Charles James Liteky.
He’s a priest who served as a military chaplain during the Vietnam War. For his heroic efforts to save wounded American soldiers in 1967, he received the Medal of Honor. After the war, he continued to be a man of indomitable courage and strong convictions.
He opposed the Catholic Church’s celibacy requirements for priests and left the church to marry. In 1986, he renounced and returned his Medal of Honor in protest over U.S. training of military personnel who served the interests of dictators in Central America, at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia.
My story about Liteky is limited to the combat action for which President Lyndon Johnson presented him with the Medal of Honor in a White House ceremony. He wasn’t controversial then. But for some reason it wasn’t an easy story to sell.
In April 1969, I submitted it to Editor Phil Hirsch at MAN’S MAGAZINE, using letterhead from the Hotel Akahane in Tokyo. Phil decided not to use my Liteky story, but he sent me a nice rejection note.
In May 1969, I sent the story to Editor Carl Sifakis at MALE magazine. Carl sent back a handwritten note: “Sorry, we’ve done Liteky.” So, I submitted it to B. R. Ampolsk. He owned and edited the publishing companies Q.M.G., Reese and EmTee, which published many men’s adventure magazines of varying quality.
My Liteky story finally appeared in MAN’S ILLUSTRATED, October 1970 under the title “The Incredible Glory Saga of the Boondock Padre.”
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The collection of character-driven, narrative stories that editors Bob Deis and Wyatt Doyle chose for this book reflect a different era, the 1960s and early 1970s. In that era, American men who were not anti-war protesters or egghead intellectuals saw war and action stories in strange-sounding, exotic foreign lands as interesting, entertaining and manly.
The readers of men’s adventure magazines certainly liked them. And the men’s adventure magazines gave their readers what they wanted. So did I. Some of the adventurers in stories I wrote for them evoke Indiana Jones, who hadn’t been invented yet but must have been inspired by the men’s pulp adventure mag genre.
Indy’s kind of adventurer would have fought those dirty commies in Guatemala, like my character in “I Fought Castro’s Cutthroat Guerrilla Squad” from FOR MEN ONLY, April 1970.
Indy could also have crossed paths with the evil sheik in the fictional Arab kingdom of Maraq, which I created for my story in a 1971 issue of FOR MEN ONLY about a Yank soldier of fortune who uses a cross-dressing ploy, wonderfully depicted by artist Earl Norem. Indiana Jones could also have encountered nefarious commies in Burma, like those I depicted in a story in BLUEBOOK, March 1972.
Then there’s my character Bud Prather, in “Borneo Longshot” from MALE, March 1970. Bud parachutes into Borneo on a perilous search mission in territory ruled by Nalao headhunters.
When I wrote it, literacy rates in the United States were higher than today, many men were veterans who’d done service and many could find Borneo on a map. But in civilian life, few had any realistic hope of ever traveling to such exotic places. [Editor’s note: The photo of the character Bud Prather in the “Borneo Longshot” story is actually a photo of author Robert F. Dorr.]
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For the men’s adventure magazines I wrote some articles about well-known American heroes, like Medal of Honor recipients. But generally they were war and adventure stories with a realistic-sounding factual type background. Those were the most common thing I wrote for the men’s pulp magazines until the magazines started changing in the late 1960s.
As they evolved to compete with magazines like PLAYBOY and HUSTLER, they had covers with photos showing fully exposed female nipples instead of painted covers and the types of stories changed. So then I also began writing sex stories. Most were sex exposé stories like the “Sex Life of Our GI’s in Germany” [included in the hardcover edition of A HANDFUL OF HELL] and “Behind the Scenes of Budapest’s Sex Revolt” and “The Erotic Stewardess Tapes.”
I think people often do too much over-analyzing of such stories. I wrote many for the men’s pulp magazines and it would involve too much analyzing for me to say a great deal about them. But I can tell you there was no first hand research involved.
If you want to read Robert F. Dorr’s entire introduction to A HANDFUL OF HELL, you can get a copy of the book in softcover, deluxe hardcover and Kindle editions on Amazon or buy either print edition via the MensPulpMags.com bookstore. I think Bob’s full introduction alone makes it worth reading.
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Comments? Corrections? You can email them to me, or join the Men’s Adventure Magazines & Books Facebook Group or the MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY BRIGADE group and post them there.
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