"Like Animals or Worse"
Narratives of Culture and Emotion by U.S. and British POWs and Airmen behind Soviet Lines, 1944-1945
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 16529742 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Frank Costigliola (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2004 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 749-780 |
| Publication date | 2004-11-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Diplomatic History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0145-2096 • E-ISSN: 1467-7709 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-7709.2004.00448.x |
| OpenAlex | W1987032641 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 5 |
As the B-17 bombed a German refinery on 2 December 1944 and flak punched through the gas tanks, Lt. R. E. Beam pointed the falling plane eastward. The mixed-ethnic American crew bailed out over Kuzmina in the western Ukraine, a mixed-ethnic region where “melting pot” remained a foreign notion. Like the more than seven thousand other Americans and British who found themselves behind Soviet lines in 1944–45, Beam's crew encountered a variety of cultural differences. Proving their American identity quickly became a matter of life and death because they were often mistaken for Germans. Surrounded by threatening Polish peasants, G. P. Schramn did some “fast talking” to explain how a German speaker could “still be an American.” Speaking in Ukrainian, airman John Dmytryshyn identified himself as American to a peasant, who replied cryptically that he “did not know what an American was.” D. A. Shepard recounted that he landed among anti-Soviet “Ukrainian ‘bandits,’ a form of partisan group.” A partisan who had lived in the United States told Shepard in English about the Ukrainians’ “army of 4,000,000 men,” warned him “not to tell the Russians or the Polish officials about their guns,” and predicted that “as soon as Germany is defeated Russia would go to war against America.” Some of Beam's crew landed near Soviet1 soldiers, who took them for Germans and continued shooting until convinced by shouts of “Amerikanski!” and “Roosevelt!”2
Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Economic history · Ethnic group · German · Immigration · Literature · Melting pot · Narrative · Political science · Sociology · Ukrainian · World War II · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Gender Studies · History · Law · Military History and Strategy
| Citations per year | 0.14 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2005 - 2023 (19) |
| Highly cited | No |