A Wartime Journey: Bail-Out Over Belgium, World War II (review)

On 13 June 1944, Won Long Hop, a B-24 of the 861st Bomb Squadron, 493rd Bombardment Group, Eighth Air Force, was fatally struck by flak near the Belgian town of Ogy. Twenty-year-old Sergeant William L. Cupp, an air gunner from Tipton, Iowa, successfully exited, parachuted to earth, and evaded capture for ten weeks before being captured heartbreakingly close to Allied lines on 29 August. A Wartime Journey is Cupp's memoir of evasion and imprisonment, and a testimonial to the common people of France and Belgium who aided him before his capture with complete and surprisingly casual contempt for the probable consequences.

Cupp tells us little about his youth or the process which landed him in the Army Air Forces rather than another service. Instead, he opens with his fourth and last mission, the beginning of his "journey." His memoir moves through four phases: evasion; capture and transportation to the Baltic; five months in Stalag Luft IV; and the 504-mile road march away from the advancing Red Army that ended when he met troops of Terry Allen's 104th Infantry Division at the Mulde River on 26 April 1945.

Of all the sub-genres of the World War II memoir, the POW account is the least "heroic," reflecting as most do the impossibility of responding in kind to an enemy who degrades one in countless petty ways each day. Perhaps we have been misled by such films as The Great Escape and Stalag 17, with their cinematic stereotypes: the suave, cunning English squadron leader and the cocky, manipulative American NCO who make life miserable for their captors with a series of increasingly virtuosic breakout attempts. In contrast, POW life for Cupp was a grinding routine unrelieved by any possibility of escape, and a daily struggle to maintain his self-esteem within "the narrow limits of what was possible" (p. 286). His struggle was embedded in a cycle of roll calls, scrupulous efforts to divide inadequate rations, waiting for Red Cross parcels and letters from home, consuming news from clandestine radio sets, frustrating efforts at cleanliness, and dreams of eventual freedom.

Several incidents are, however, quite dramatic. Cupp's post-capture truck convoy in France was repeatedly attacked by Allied fighter-bombers, and only the skill of his Italian driver, who could insert his lorry into the smallest overhead cover in seconds, kept Cupp alive. Several POWs received completely uncomprehending and unintentionally cruel letters from home that rival anything sent to servicemen during the Vietnam War. And finally, he recalls a darkly comic moment in which he read a paperback of Plato's Republic while being followed around the compound by, and yielding pages already read to, comrades suffering from diarrhea.

Sergeant Cupp weighed 150 pounds before his last mission and 89 pounds when he returned to U.S. control. Cupp's service to his country required a lonely kind of courage as difficult, and as meritorious, as that displayed by those of his generation who defended their way of life and their sense of themselves as men with weapons they held in their hands.