[1] The title is a fragment of a statement made by Adolf Hitler to the German Girl's League: "Unlike Mussolini, I would spring like lightning in the night and hurl myself on the enemy.

[4] Cultural historian H. Bruce Franklin commented on Lightning in the Night in his 1988 book War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, noting that Liberty boasted that Allhoff had consulted with experts like Robert Lee Bullard, Yates Stirling Jr., and George Sokolsky on the piece.

[8] The final product of Lightning in the Night almost entirely anticipated the then-forthcoming global air war of World War II, and attempt to beat the Nazis to the atomic bomb with the Manhattan Project, "Thus the millions of readers of Liberty in 1940 were confronted with a picture of the future that lies in wait for them if the United States does not build a separate air force capable of strategic bombardment and does not win a nuclear arms race with the Nazis.

[11] In Allhoff's scenario, set five years in the future in an alternate 1945, the "Greater United German Reich which has consumed all Europe and its colonies and has established puppet governments in Latin America.

[12] One 1979 reviewer said the magazine series "helped psychologically swing America away from a decade of pacifism that had unintentionally aided Hitler's war machine" but found the "flat characters, relentless plot and contrived denouement" tiresome.