“During
an island raid in the Sibuyan Sea I saw a Japanese prisoner tied to a tree and
tortured to death by guerillas. The censors refused to pass this not uncommon
truth about the war in the tropics. They also stopped an account of Mindanao
guerilla groups fighting on the enemy’s side, and a story about an American
officer who “built morale” among Moro volunteers by having them mix fresh
Japanese blood with hot G I coffee; or an account of the Tacloban brothels
where soldiers stood in queues two blocks long in the hot sun with military
police allotting no more than five minutes to each man. The censors were
sensitive, too, about the unprotested practice of robbing Jap corpses of money,
watches, and fountain pens; of the occasional killing of Jap wounded to save
labor of nursing and feeding them; about the mere mention of the effects of
tropical diseases on our troops; about casualty figures; about the fact- long
known to everyone-m that enemy cadavers, if ever buried, were dumped into
shallow trenches dug out by bulldozers, or about an Army chaplain who during
the burial of an American soldiers was forced by snipers to jump into the grave
atop the dead man and fight back. However in a story of an infantry division’s
deeds, these are minor details, significant only in their accentuation of the
two-sidedness of the misery and the graceless brutality of war.”
This
is the follow up biography to Jan Valtin’s Out
of the Night where the author described his indoctrination into the
Communist party in 1920s Germany, his disillusionment with the authoritarian
Leftist policies and their rank hypocrisy, his capture by the Gestapo and being
forced to work as an informer for the organization, and his eventual escape to
the United States. The previous book was also the first one reviewed on this blog.
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| Author Jean Valtin aka Julius Krebs |
Jan
Valtin, as has been since discovered after his demise, was the pseudonym for
Richard Julius Herman Krebs. After he resettled in the United States, he
published the first book, a best seller, which was later on cast into doubt in
certain claims he made in the book. The
New York Mirror called it, “A huge literary hoax”. Others defended it.
Whatever the case, Children of Yesterday
is cut from an entirely different cloth.
Being
drafted in 1943, Valtin was deployed to the 24th Infantry in the Philippines to
defeat invading Japanese forces. Perhaps mindful of the claims against his last
book, which lambasted the lack of official documents to back up his statements,
Valtin writes his accounts hand-in-hand with excerpts from the Division Record
of the Infantry’s movements. He adds more flavor and color to each action, he
was involved with by personal accounts from the men involved in the fighting.
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| 24 Infantry Division |
In
fact, this barely is an autobiography and is more of a military journal,
accentuated by official records and the anecdotes of his fellow fighting men.
After the first chapter, he barely mentions himself at all. The results is an
excellent, blow-by-blow of the divisions’ actions in the Philippines, the
bloody tool it took, and personal snapshots of the men who died to defeat the
enemy, from October 1944, until the Japanese surrender.
For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst. 
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