I can't speak about the early issues, not familiar with them, but it always struck me that the standard line-up consists of citizens of what were then occupied nations. [Blackhawk is Polish of course] That had to have been deliberate. DC, in any attempts to continue or renew the concept have never seen the implications of this. In the more recent incarnations there is rarely an emphasis on the fact that they are aviators. planes don't feature too strongly and they often operate more like a ground-based squad. Yet another property DC has the rights to, and they haven't figured out what to do with it.
It's by no means conclusive that Blackhawk is Polish. That's what most readers would assume from the first story in MILITARY COMICS #1, given no further information, but there's nothing precluding him and his brother and sister being just visitors in Poland. Blackhawk's brother's name is Jack, and his sister's name is Connie, and while they're all obviously IN Poland when Von Tepp bombs the house with his brother and sister in it, killing them, Blackhawk is never actually positively identified as a Polish national, and there's nothing particularly Polish-sounding (as opposed to "Stanislaus") about the names Jack or Connie. So what
was he doing in Poland when Von Tepp bombed the place? It's possible he's a volunteer flyer. The captions in the origin story remark on "the lone pilot's" jet-black plane, and refer to him as "the mysterious flyer", even
before the death of his brother and sister, so there's already a hint of the Blackhawk identity he's later to assume. A later 're-origin' story from BLACKHAWK #50 (March 1952) finally definitely established Blackhawk's nationality as American. And after all, we already had Stanislaus, who's obviously Polish, to represent that Nazi-conquered nation. But then, we also had Chuck, who's identified as American from the start -- but darn it all, the minute he's introduced, he disrupts that beautiful "airmen of occupied nations" model. But let's be realistic... it's an
American comic book, after all. It's easy to see, however, that in 1952, it probably made better sense to positively identify Blackhawk as American, for an audience of American comic book readers.
Here's the link to that page:
https://box00.comicbookplus.com/viewer/27/2776bb2b6d43c12c63c1b245e7c7542f/12.jpgIn Mark Evanier and Dan Spiegle's run on the DC title (issues #251-273; 1982-84), he modified that Quality Comics origin just slightly to establish Blackhawk as an American citizen
of Polish ancestry. The later-1980s DC reboot by Howard Chaykin was the first to definitively identify Blackhawk's true identity as Janos Prohaska, a Polish citizen.
You should also consider that DC didn't treat them as a ground-based military unit out of sheer ignorance. That seems quite deliberate to me, as while war comics continued to remain popular for years, the romance of the aviator-adventurer dimmed quite a bit during the late 50s and early 60s, the dawn of the space age, when astronauts would briefly assume the popularity formerly devoted to aviators -- in fact, you can argue that had already been happening ever since Captain Video and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet.
Stuff I did not know until recently about Blackhawk, looking over the public domain (and mostly never-reprinted-by-DC-anyway) stories posted here:
1) "Lady Blackhawk" (a.k.a. Zinda Blake) never appeared during the Quality Comics era. She was not introduced until DC issue #133 in 1959.
2) The War Wheel (often seen in flashbacks to WWII in DC stories) never actually appeared during WWII in the Quality Comics era. It wasn't introduced until 1952.
3) Nothing from the DC era really prepares you to experience the raw actuality of Chop Chop, in his original Quality Comics incarnation. The DC stories from the 50's might still be racist, but not to that extreme. And the Chinese were supposed to be the
good guys, our allies in the fight against the axis powers. It does kind of help put the whole "Jap-a-Nazi rat" thing in perspective.
