The question of whether or not Captain America ever killed anyone during World War II is relevant to the current entry i'm working (Captain America #321-322) on for my Marvel timeline project, and i already have a couple of examples where he does, but i wanted to take a peek at some Golden Age issues i don't "own". And before i get to some more examples, i first wanted to call out this great image, which was an opening splash from a story in Captain America Comics #2.

We've all seen Cap punching out Hitler on the cover of issue #1, but i had never seen this one before. It doesn't actually happen in the story. I wonder if it's all part of the same story, told only on covers and in splash panels. Did Cap punch Hitler and then, with Bucky's help, knock him into a trash can? Or were these two separate occasions? Did Cap give Hitler a wedgie some other time, and maybe another time a book check? OMG, is there an alternate universe where Cap and Hitler went to school together, and Cap and Bucky were the class jocks picking on poor Nerd Hitler?

Also from issue #2, something completely different:

How often did Cap and Bucky "Go to Europe"?

Ok, now for what i was actually looking for. Here's some scenes from issue #2:

And some from issue #5:

I stopped looking after #5, but the other thing on my mind regarding Cap never killing is the retcon about Bucky actually being a trained assassin. Obviously it was something Cap was aware of and condoned. Which would make a refusal by Cap to kill anyone himself a pretty dumb and irrelevant decision. Now of course a retcon from the Ed Brubaker era doesn't retroactively make Mark Gruenwald wrong (but the examples from the Golden and Silver Age do), but it does indicate that Marvel's position on the subject today is not what was established by Gruenwald.

Here's a quote from an interview with Brubaker regarding the decision to turn Bucky into an assassin:

I had always liked his character because I had read those "Tales of Suspense" issues -- the ones that were Iron Man story and half Captain America wartime story -- and Bucky was always running around with a machine gun. He didn't look like a little kid like he did in the comics in the 1940s. The funny things is in the [pre-code era] comics of the 1940s he was actually more [of a bad guy] running around with a flamethrower and dropping atom bombs on people. [Marvel executive editor] Tom Brevoort told me that every third cover in the '40s it was Cap and Bucky parachuting into enemy territory and Cap is holding his shield while Bucky is the one unloading with multiple machine guns on anybody below. Bucky was more of the [bad guy] of the two. I started looking at it that way as I built his character.

Here are links to some of those covers: issue #22, issue #25, issue #31, and issue #33.

The above isn't comprehensive; just a random sampling.

On a whim, i decided to look through one of those issues and picked #33. And it raised another point for me. Captain America was also deployed as Private Steve Rogers during World War II, and his unit definitely saw action (and yes, i picked these panels in part to show Captain America using the word "Nips"):

So did Rogers never fire his gun at the enemy? What did his squad mates think of that?

Also in this issue was a scene that really nicely supports the Brubaker retcon:

These issues are a real gold mine. One day i'd like to get all the Golden Age Cap Masterworks, but i see that they only go up to issue #24.