Forgotten Novellas: Blitzkrieg in the Past - John York Cabot (David Wright O'Brien)

In a comment on a post a few weeks ago, Todd Mason mentioned the science fiction writer David Wright O'Brien, who published more than 50 stories in just a few years during the early Forties, most of them in the Ziff-Davis pulps AMAZING STORIES and FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. I'd never read anything by O'Brien, so I decided to change that and found an e-book edition of this novella on-line. It's from the July 1942 issue of AMAZING STORIES and was written under O'Brien's pseudonym John York Cabot. He published under his own name and several pen-names, of which Cabot was the most common.

I'll tell you right off the bat that "Blitzkrieg in the Past" is great fun and a Front Porch Book of high order. The protagonists of this yarn are three GIs in a tank crew who are training in their tank in Georgia prior to being sent overseas. They're also testing some experimental radio equipment, and when a thunderstorm blows up unexpectedly and the tank is hit by lightning, our heroes are tossed, tank and all, hundreds of millions of years into the past where they find themselves battling dinosaurs, cavemen, and a more advanced gorgeous blonde who doesn't have their best interests at heart.

Science? You want science? Go read a textbook! But if you want GIs in an M-3 tank fighting cavemen and dinosaurs and tangling with a beautiful but treacherous babe, then this is the yarn for you. I have no way of knowing whether Robert Kanigher ever read this story before he created the War That Time Forgot series in the comic book STAR-SPANGLED WAR STORIES about twenty years later, but just look at that cover! He must have! (Speaking of The War That Time Forgot, I'm slowly reading my way through the Showcase collection of that series and will have a post about it one of these days.)

But to get back to "Blitzkrieg in the Past", goofy premise or not, it's very well-written. I really enjoyed O'Brien's fast-paced, breezy, "sure this is silly but I'm going to give it my best anyway" style. My only complaint is that the story ends rather abruptly. O'Brien had enough plot set up that this could have been a full-length novel. Maybe he would have expanded it into one and sold it as an Ace Double, if he had lived long enough.

Because, you see, for those of you who don't know, after those few years of furious production, including many stories written in collaboration with William P. McGivern, with whom he shared an office in Chicago, David Wright O'Brien enlisted in the Army, became a gunner in a B-17 Flying Fortress, and was killed in a bombing raid over Berlin in 1944. He left behind a lot of science fiction stories, though, and I intend to read more of them.