Operator #5 08
November 1934
Curtis Steele (Frederick C Davis)
"Tonight these Orientals are just so much yellow dynamite - ready to explode"Oh boy, it's one of those. The foreign menace of the month for this issue of Operator 5 is basically everyone even remotely Asian, even down to Mexicans due to ancestors coming across the Bering Strait.
The uprising is led by an descendant of Gengis Kahn, Jenghis Dhak. The sci-fi weapon of the month is a ray that turns oxygen into ozone, suffocating US troops and causing their weapons to malfunction.
Alaska is invaded, and Operator 5 must develop a strategy that will drive them out without delivering America's arms to the enemy.
This one had a bit too much large scale military action, as opposed to the dramatic one-on-one action Operator 5 excels at. There's at least a little biplane to zeppelin action - air combat was so much better before jet engines.
Interestingly, we have the cliche "Resistance is futile" decades before it appears in sci-fi. Also ahead of the curve, the Red Finger backup story has Nazis as a villain years before World War II. Arthur Leo Zagat was an author that knew he got paid by the word, and was obviously typing with his thesaurus open.
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