Books: Off the Target

FACE OF A HERO (312 pp.)—Louis Falstein—Harcourf, Brace ($3).

Face of a Hero is called by its publishers “one of the most powerful and truthful novels to come out of World War II.” It is powerful only if a mixture of bitterness and resentment can be called power, and it is not so much a novel as one grouser’s-eye view of the war in the air. The author is First Novelist Louis Falstein, a gunner who completed his 50 missions, won the Air Medal and added a couple of clusters to it. His hero and narrator is Gunner Ben Isaacs, a congenital soul searcher, as much at war with his neurotic self as with Nazi Germany.

When Ben’s B-24 crew arrived in Italy, he was 34, small, thin-fingered and a wearer of glasses. He knew himself to be only a fifth-rate gunner, and because he was a Jew, he felt that the rest of the boys had never accepted him. At 15, he had come from the Ukraine, where he had seen pogroms with his own eyes. Ben had become a gunner because he hated Hitler and understood the necessity for defeating him. He was nonetheless scared to death of combat—and honest enough to admit that, while it had been easy to hate fascism, “the difficulty had been in bridging the distance between belief and action.” His self-knowledge was accurate. Ben on his first mission was a praying, vomiting passenger.

Like millions of other civilians-turned-soldiers, Ben Isaacs became hardened to combat and began to pull his weight. But his ingrown, slit-focus view of life kept him on sour emotional rations. Face of a Hero is less a novel than a first-person recital of discontent: Ben’s buddies didn’t know what they were fighting for, the B-24s weren’t fit to fly, some of the officers were deadweights, the G.I.s behaved crudely with Italian civilians, the Red Cross girls dated officers only.

It seems fairly clear that not only Ben but Author Falstein, too, is out to hand-pick an ugly side of the war and call it the whole picture. It would be hard to guess from Face of a Hero that the war was won, that Hitler was rubbed out, that millions of G.I.s knew very well, beneath their gripes, what the score was.