I opened this one up and swear I could hear the Schmatterhorn music.

Yes, I do have cartoons on an awful lot. From 1982, Unknown Soldier #264, featuring "Hell is a Cold Place!" Written by Bob Haney, pencils by Dick Ayers, inks by Gerry Talaoc; "Killers of the Sky! Chapter Three: A Coffin for Aces!" Written by Robert Kanigher, art by Dan Spiegle; and "George Washington Died Here!" Written by Bob Haney, pencils by José Delbo, inks by Andy Mushynsky. This is another one from late in the run, and I'm not sure if the back-up features were burning off war stories as DC sunsetted those titles, or if there was the hope that collectively they'd be enough of a draw to continue. In the opener, an Allied plane had crashed in Switzerland, on the treacherous mountain called "the Needle." The plane had been carrying a new, advanced bomb sight; and the Unknown Soldier was in a race with the Nazi "Black Knight" Von Stauffen. (Stauffen? Instead of potatoes--oh, never mind.) But, Stauffen wasn't even aware of the plane; this was more personal: he was lugging the corpse of his father up there, who had previously failed to conquer the mountain, and whose frozen corpsicle had recently been found in a glacier. (Found frozen in a block of ice and he didn't revive? R.I.P. to him but Americans are built different.) An American had beat the elder Von Stauffen to the top and died there; now the younger was going to toss the American's carcass and replace it with dad's, for a propaganda victory. With a little help from Von Stauffen getting tripped up by the American climber's bones, the Unknown Soldier beats him, but is too nice to leave him to die on the mountain. He returns to Switzerland with the bomb sight and the captured Von Stauffen (although I don't think he gets to keep him there!) as well as the American climber's diary, proof of Nazi lies.

"Killers of the Sky!" was a Balloon Buster feature, although his more-popular rival Enemy Ace also appears: they would keep fighting it out until the second-to-last issue. But, to save a young boy's sight, he had turned over a small child to Enemy Ace, to get him treatment in Berlin. The Buster, Steve Savage, had an almost pathological obsession with not being seen as "pore white trash" and is generally looked down upon by his elitist fellow pilots, although he was probably the best of them. He also seemed to get in trouble a lot, as he nearly catches the rope for letting Von Hammer escape after he returned the cured child; but Savage had a general that was pretty much his "guardian angel," keeping his direct C.O. from coming down on him.

Finally, a Tomahawk story--possibly the last Tomahawk story? His series had run from 1950 to 1972, but aside from the requisite Crisis on Infinite Earths cameos and such, he might not have appeared again until his Vertigo Visions in 1998. I think that one tied in more to Native American spiritualism but was still more "realistic" than Tomahawk's book usually ran: it was set during the Revolutionary War, but rather a more out-there version of it? In the vein of the Blackhawk books of the time. Previously, Tomahawk and his crew had been framed by the traitorous Lord Shilling, for the attempted assassination of George Washington; which of course was a ploy for Shilling to kill Washington himself! Tomahawk has to bust him and his boys out of the stockade, take Washington's place for Shilling's murder attempt, and then face Shilling for what could be their final duel. Shilling catches a tomahawk in the forehead and falls over a fortress's wall, but Tomahawk still seems positive he'd be back to hassle him again. Of course, the most unrealistic thing about this one is the notion that George Washington was ever wrong, or needed saving.