A Soldier’s Memory Book on Facing the ‘Good’ War

In the hearts and minds of the Americans who fought in it, World War II remains the brooding and dominant fact of their lives. Not wives, lovers, children, success, failure, neither later griefs nor joys match in magnificence or terror that first experience in young adulthood of combat endured and death faced down. At 75, Fred Rochlin recalls his own deadly wartime encounters in the memoir “Old Man in a Baseball Cap.”

Rochlin, a retired Los Angeles architect, is speaking not just to us but to himself to comprehend the enormous events that swept up this Jewish boy born of immigrant parents in the border town of Nogales, Ariz., and deposited him in an Army Air Force bomber flying against targets in Germany and the retreating German army in Eastern Europe. Rochlin was a navigator, not a pilot, because his instructor told him that “Hebes” were good with numbers--just one of many prejudices typical of that age.

Rochlin’s plane was a Consolidated B-24. The navigator, bombardier and nose gunner sat in the nose. Their first mission was to bomb German ships in Genoa harbor. German anti-aircraft fire hit the plane and killed the gunner and the bombardier, Rochlin’s friend, “whose blood and skin and bone and stuff were all over me.” As Rochlin tells this story, sparely, matter-of-factly, it sounds authentic. So does the next in the series of eight stories in this memoir, an account of the bombing of a little Hungarian town supposed to be harboring great, tempting targets of German tanks, artillery and men. But when the planes arrived, there weren’t any Germans. The commanding officer ordered them to bomb it anyway because it was safest just to follow orders. So they dropped about a hundred pounds of explosive for every man, woman and child in that little Hungarian town, roughly the size of Nogales.

Rochlin says that the day after, he helped the flight surgeon deliver, by caesarean, a baby to an Italian woman in a nearby town. Rochlin told the flight surgeon about the Hungarian village.

“Listen to me, and do what I tell you because I’m right,” the flight surgeon said. “First, you follow orders and do what you’ve been trained to do.

“Then just forget it. Forget it. And if you can’t forget, then pretend. Pretend. And if you can’t pretend, then deny, deny deny. And that drink you’re having, finish it and have another and another.”

So he did everything the flight surgeon told him. “I thought I was all right,” Rochlin says. “Yeah! I was all right.”

But he wasn’t, and that is why we have this book. The stories of the first bombing run, the Hungarian town and the baby resonate with psychological and moral truth. To this day, Rochlin feels guilty about the bombing of that town. But Rochlin knows that time bends memory as a pool of water bends rays of light falling into it. He confesses as much:

“My memory, it’s accurate and false at the same time. It’s complex and simple. It changes constantly, often just to fit the circumstance.”

But even under these shifting circumstances, “Old Man in a Baseball Cap” remains a recollection that is about as honest as can be of a young man and a time--and O what a time it was--which lives now only in wavy light in the waters of memory.