National Comics #18 (1941)

One morning in late 1941, Guam is attacked by "oriental" dive bombers, and Pearl Harbor is attacked with cannon fire by "enemy" warships. Another "hostile" fleet moves from a Mediterranean port toward North Africa. Congress directs the Navy to send the entire Atlantic Fleet to the Pacific. Uncle Sam scolds Congress about this idiocy, then he and Buddy Smith travel from Washington DC to Portland Maine in an open outboard motorboat. The town is very quiet until a mob of wharfside thugs attacks them. Uncle Sam punches out a few of them but the rest manage to throw a big fishing net over Sam and Buddy, who are then stashed in the hold of a suspiciously-large, steel-hulled trawler, which then puts to sea. They escape from the net, and are unguarded. Uncle Sam detects a radio transmission coming from the trawler, which confirms his suspicion that these "fishermen" are spies. Then he punches a hole in the hull, and departs, with Buddy riding his shoulders, by sprinting across the surface of the ocean. The bad guys fire a torpedo at them; Uncle Sam surfs to shore on that torpedo, then flips it around and sends it back to the trawler, where it explodes. Then Unc and Buddy go looking for a telephone. An enemy fleet, with air cover, is moving toward the New England coast, and aboard it, the German-looking officers are laughing it up about how clever their ally is, to have pulled away all the defenses from America's eastern coast. Uncle Sam and Buddy are on the scene at an Army sound detector station on the Maine coast, when it detects the "alien" attackers, Sam telephones the Secretary of War, who tells him that less than a dozen bombers are available. These, plus some cargo planes, plus some minelayers and destroyers, plus Uncle Sam, all advance and engage the enemy. A large number of enemy bombers attack Portland. Young Buddy has an idea, and he persuades the members of a private flying club, and the president of a large piano company, to go along with it. A piano-wire cable, towing other cables, could be carried below a pair of ordinary airplanes, to tangle the invaders' propellors. Five enemy bombers are taken out by this tactic. Buddy directs the counterattack from the cockpit of one of these planes. Enemy battleships begin shelling Portland. Out in Portland Bay, Uncle Sam encounters the forty-foot-tall ghost of John Paul Jones. Two historic frigates are anchored there, the and . Jones gives Sam an idea, then disappears. Uncle Sam recruits most or all of the town's fishermen and mariners to load the old warships with drums of oil, then that night to silently sail all the way around the enemy fleet, leaving a trail of oil, then ignite it. A large number of transport planes attack Boston, dropping German-looking paratroopers. Buddy's two planes with their tangling cables attack the planes, and destroy all of them. They fly back to Portland, off the coast of which they see nine large warships, "completely helpless" because of the surrounding ring of burning oil. One catches fire, causing its ammunition supply to explode; it sinks. The American bombers come back and bomb the warships some more, until they sail into the harbor and surrender. The townspeople cheer for Uncle Sam who in turn cheers for John Paul Jones.