John Lupone, 2004
Woburn, Massachusetts
b. 1921

Crazy Things

The craziest things, says John Lupone, can change your whole life.

For instance, D-Night.  They kicked the supply bags out first, but the damn things stuck in the doorframe and it was a devil of a time getting them free.  So the jump was late and that's why John missed his drop zone and came down in a field daggered with stakes for smashing gliders.  That's why his lines got tangled, why his chute billowed up like a surrender flag, and why a German soldier on bicycle patrol captured him before he could pull in his gear.  Why he never used his medic's training, not once. 

If not for the supply bags, a different future might have met John.  He might be dead and gone, for that matter.  

John and hundreds of Allied POWs—Brits, Canadians, South Africans, New Zealanders—were marched down the Cherbourg Peninsula to a monastery dubbed Starvation Hill.  They ate snails stuck to a wall in the monks' garden and watched American P-38s strafe and bomb a bridge over the river below the monastery, but somehow it wouldn't go down. Wouldn't budge for nothing.  Turns out, that was the bridge the POWs crossed in trucks, east toward Germany, and John believes they might not have been moved, might even have been liberated, if not for that ridiculous bridge.

Paris, he couldn't have seen that coming. The POWs were marched through the city and along the way French civilians kicked them, punched them, and yelled hatefully. John was stunned.  What the heck, they're doing this to us?  Maybe they think we jumped into this mess for our health?  He remembers a radio reporter yakking into a microphone, transmitting news of the filthy, captured Allied soldiers back to the Fatherland.

Then they were stuffed in railcars and sent to Stalag 12A.  John has a raft of stories from that miserable “grin and bear it” place, and this one, well, judge for yourself.  Two Russian prisoners escaped, but were tracked down by dogs and killed. The Germans paraded their bodies down the main drag of the camp in wheelbarrows, for all to see.  And that night, in the POWs' soup, there was more meat than ever before.

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