Hey Midnight! Golly, but it's Cold in Here!: pt. 1 (Smash Comics #41)

Smash Comics # 41 (March 1943)

Midnight feature (Hey Midnight! Golly, but It's Cold in Here!)

This story is a little unique in that the opening splash page (above) is directly incorporated into the story proper.  The first multi-panel page immediately picks up from the splash with Midnight's response:

As it turns out, the lair is freezing because the entire furnace system has apparently been dismantled and removed.  Midnight hypothesizes that Doc Wackey has handed their heating system over to the local scrap metal collector, but before our frigid twosome can interrogate the Doc, he speeds off in a truck for downtown Big City.

The truck, we learn, is Doc's latest invention:  a self-driving, trench-digging, tear gas-firing, transport vehicle that he means to sell to the U.S. Army for the war effort. (There's no explanation behind Doc's sudden lurch toward capitalism.  Eagle-eyed readers will remember when Doc gave away an invention to support the war effort.)

When he arrives at the Quartermaster's Department, Wackey is pawned off from one skeptical person to another.  Eventually he lands with the lowest man on the bureaucratic totem pole-one Private Klink. Klink decides to humor the old coot by heading down to the street to view his wonder machine.

Incredulous at thought of a self-driving vehicle, Klink assumes Wackey must have a hidden midget operating the truck.  When it finally dawns on the private that Wackey's claim is true, the realization thrusts the young man into a spasmodic fit.

Despite being threatened with a firing (see above panel) by his colonel (who, for all the world looks like he could've been the inspiration for Gen. Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross of Hulk fame) Klink evidences all the passion of a true convert.

In light of the enlisted man's persistence, the colonel rescinds the "firing" and replaces it with this far more even-keeled judgement:

I'm beginning to think there's a reason the colonel has been stationed stateside in a purchasing office, rather directing the deployment of artillery.

Once the "top brass" are assembled on the street below, they barge right into the control room of Wackey's machine and begin pressing buttons, turning dials, and pulling levers. (Because...that's how they teach you to behave around new equipment in the army?!)

Wackey is mid-way through explaining to young Klink why his superiors behaving like bulls in a china shop might produce bad outcomes, when the Prof seriously undercuts his own credibility by absent-mindedly uttering a trigger word programmed into the machine.

One wonders what Doc was thinking when he programmed this little functionality.  I'm betting there were lots of G.I.s who sat around the base talking about "getting Hirohito." It's challenging to imagine the practical application of a troop transport that would potentially attack its own soldiers.