Leyte &After

CHILDREN OF YESTERDAY (429 pp.)-- Jan Valfin--Readers Press ($3).

German-born Richard Julius Hermann Krebs ("Jan Valtin") has been under fire again--this time real fire. In 1941, after publication of his autobiographical Out of the Night, U.S. leftists damned him as a former Gestapo agent (he said he had joined to bore from within) and a tattletale Communist who had owned to some strange deeds before his apostasy. Plain citizens began to wonder whether he was a fraud, a martyr or a marvel.

In 1942 the U.S. Immigration Service arrested him for illegal entry, confined him for a spell to Ellis Island. A year later he was paroled, promptly inducted into the Army. In 1944-45 he served overseas, part of the time with the 24th Infantry Division. Now he is back, with a Bronze Star medal and a book.

G.I. Story. Wholly nonpolitical, Children of Yesterday is a history of the 24th Division's Philippine campaign. Other fighting units, among them the 103rd and 84th Divisions, have already been celebrated in combat histories, and doubtless in time every U.S. outfit which saw action in World War II will have a published record of some sort. Some will be of the illustrated souvenir-program type, complete with a frontispiece of the Old Man and his ribbons. Others will tell an earnest, factual, down-to-earth G.I. story--which is what Children of Yesterday sets out to do.

Corporal Valtin's job in the 24th was gathering Joe Blow stories to be sent to U.S. hometown papers. Much of Children of Yesterday reads like an extended P.R.O. report: Pvt. So-and-So of Topeka, Kans. did this, Lieut. So-and-So of Valdosta, Ga. did that. So many hundreds (probably 500 to 1,000) of individuals are mentioned by rank, name and home address that at points the text must come almost straight from unit rosters.

But these are the men who did the sweating and slugging, who wrote the story of the 24th on Leyte, Mindoro, Luzon, Mindanao. For the general reader, the best parts are those in which Valtin is the observer, not the recorder. A G.I. wants a pair of pliers. Why? To salvage gold teeth from a dead Jap. "Use your rifle butt," says a friend.

In a village square a tired rifleman sits down to eat a can of K-ration cheese. A fully armed Jap suddenly springs from an adjacent house, starts running away. The rifleman puts down the cheese, picks up his rifle, aims, fires twice. "Missed the bastard," he calls out to Valtin, sitting near by; "don't put my name in that book of yours."

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