SOUTH HADLEY — When Paul C. Robillard’s B-17 bomber went down over Europe on Oct. 4, 1943, he had no idea where he landed. A farmer approached Robillard and his crew, so Robillard took the opportunity to get his bearings. He asked the farmer a question in French. The farmer answered back in German.

That’s when Robillard knew he was in trouble.

Flash-forward to Christmas morning in 1944, where Staff Sgt. Frederick Czupkiewicz hides in a potato barn in Luxembourg from German fire. With his troops out of ammunition, Czupkiewicz has no choice but to wait out German fire in the bitter cold of the Luxembourg winter.

He hears a voice from outside the barn assure him in perfect, American-accented English that it’s safe to come out, but Czupkiewicz doesn’t move. The voice repeats the request, adding an ultimatum: Come out or the German troops will burn down the barn.

Czupkiewicz has two options: walk out of the barn and risk getting shot, or stay hidden and risk being burned alive.

In addition to being from South Hadley, Robillard and Czupkiewicz had another thing in common — they were both captured and held as prisoners in German camps during World War II.

Their stories live on in their families, who attended a recent inaugural ceremony that honored 16 POW/MIA veterans from town. At the Oct. 26 event, the town’s American Legion commemorated eight World War II soldiers who went missing in action, three prisoners of war and five other veterans who are buried in U.S. military cemeteries abroad. In what will become an annual ceremony honoring the town’s veterans, Legion volunteers this year laid poppies in front of certificates bearing each WWII veteran’s name, date assumed dead and military branch.

“When we pay tribute to those who have been captured, our POWs, our missing in action, soldiers, we think about their families who are wondering about the safety of their loved ones that are serving,” state Sen. Jake Oliveria said during the event.

One of Czupkiewicz’s daughters, Linda, brought two framed newspaper articles on her father’s story to the ceremony, hoping to show them to attendees to read.

“I feel like I was almost blown away at what he endured in his life and how well he carried himself,” said Carla Boutin, granddaughter of Fredrick Czupkiewicz and a niece of Linda Czupkiewicz’s. “We all know vets who have seen a lot of things, and he was a prisoner so he was really well grounded.”

Czupkiewicz, who lived in Holyoke as an adolescent, joined the National Guard in 1938. In November 1944, he was shipped out to the front lines with the 328th Infantry Division of the Third Army in Moncourt, France, which included multiple men from the Pioneer Valley. He spent a month on the front lines in a water-filled foxhole and contracted trench foot taking him out of service for a week.

After recovering, Czupkiewicz marched to the battlefield of the Battle of the Bulge on Dec. 22, 1944. In the last major German offensive campaign on Western Front, he was captured after coming out of the barn. Czupkiewicz figured it was better to be shot than burned.

“The day I was captured, the German officer who was taking me behind the line told me, ‘It’s your holiday today,’ and I was surprised. I didn’t even know what month it was!” Czupkiewicz said in a recorded interview with Carla several years before he died.

Czupkiewicz was sent to German POW camps called Stalag IID and Stalag Luft 1 during his five months as a prisoner. In the interview, he recalls meager prison food of vegetable soup and wooden barracks with only a blanket for warmth. He was 130 pounds when he went into the camps, and 75 pounds when he left.

Robillard, a 1941 graduate of South Hadley High School, was drafted into the Army Air Force as a waist and tail gunner because he was small enough to crawl into the back of the plane. Records say that Robillard’s plane was shot down during the bombing of Stuttgart, but Robillard’s son Dennis Robillard said his father told a different story.

“His plane went down in October of ’43, because a plane above them had gotten hit and lost engines. They were trying to lighten their load, so they threw everything out that they could. Something struck my father’s plane and that caused it to go down,” Dennis Robillard said.

Robillard was sent to Stalag 17B, a German prisoner of war camp in Austria, where 4,200 U.S. airmen were shoved into barracks made to hold 240 people. He stayed in the camp until a month before World War II ended, when the German soldiers began marching 4,000 U.S. POWs 281 miles to Braunau, Austria. They made it 120 miles before Russian forces liberated the prisoners.

Dennis Robillard estimates his father lost 55 pounds during his two years as a prisoner of war. However, Paul Robillard believed his experience relative to soldiers held in Japanese prisoner camps wasn’t as bad.

“He’s said, ‘We didn’t have it that bad as compared certainly to the Japanese. We didn’t have any food, but neither did the guards,’” Dennis Robillard said.

South Hadley also honored a third POW last month. Hugh Addison enlisted in the British Army as a paratrooper, fought in many major campaigns as a member of the Allied forces and was captured in the Battle of Arnhemin the Netherlands in September 1944. He is buried in Aldershot Military Cemetery in England, where the South Hadley American Legion donated a plaque in his memory.

MIA soldiers

In addition to the three POWs, the American Legion commemoration focused on eight South Hadley service members listed as MIA and the efforts to find their remains.

One of those service members was Edmond J. Oldread, a member of South Hadley High School’s Class of 1933. Oldread was a U.S. Navy man serving on the USS Juneau. In the infamous war story, during the Battle of Guadalcanal in November 1942, two torpedoes from Japanese submarines hit the American submarine in the same location, causing it to split in half in a large explosion. An estimated 115 sailors survived, and attempted to hold out for eight days in shark-infested waters. Only 10 were successfully rescued.

It’s unclear whether Oldread died in the initial explosion or succumbed to the hardships after. He was declared missing in action and assumed dead. The American Battle Monuments Commission estimated Oldread’s date of death as Nov. 13, 1942. Oldread and the rest of the USS Juneau crew are honored at a memorial on the waterfront of Juneau, Alaska.

Like Oldread, Earl Dressell and Walter Schulz were also Navy men. Dressell, South Haldey High School Class of 1939, was aboard the USS Flier in the Balabac Strait in the Philippines when a mine sank his submarine. Shultz served on the USS Corvina. Both men are still MIA.

Information is scant on the remaining five South Hadley soldiers who went missing in action during World War II: Robert Martin, Frederick Nitkiewicz, Edward McGovern, Harold Guyon and Edward Menard. Beyond their name, rank, unit and date of death, the American Battle Monument Commission, a nonprofit created to honor veterans through creation and upkeep of memorials, war monuments and cemeteries, knows little else. 

Buried abroad

The Legion also recognized four WWII soldiers and one World War I solider buried at international United States military cemeteries.

The WWII vets are Alexander Bain, Henry Czech, Robert Johnson and Charles Todt, while Francis Domper is the WWI veteran.

Before the commemoration of the veterans began, Brian Willete, chief of staff for Massachusetts’s chapter of Military Order of the Purple Heart, acknowledged the Vietnam veterans and their families who brought prisoners of war and missing in action veterans to national attention. Mary Hoff, whose husband, Lt. Commander Michael Hoff, went missing during the Vietnam war, designed the flag with the National Organization of POW/MIA Veterans to remind government and citizens of soldiers who cannot return home. 

“That organization wanted to let everyone know in the country that there were prisoners of war, people still being held in Southeast Asia, and think about these soldiers,” Willette said. “It was also a symbol to the government to not stop looking, not stop demanding, not stop trying to get our POWs back.”

Vietnam Veteran and Purple Heart recipient Vic Musanti gave a keynote remembering the four soldiers from his unit that remain MIA.

Two of Musanti’s fellow serviceman, Fred Mooney and Ron Babcock, went down in a scout helicopter right before the Battle of Phuoc Long. Their bodies were laid out as a trap for rescue helicopters. Every attempt to rescue the bodies was met with furious gunfire, preventing the men from coming home. When the United States uncovered the site in 1992 and searched it in 1996, no remains were found.

Two other soldiers in Vietnam, John Hummel and William Miller, went missing in a helicopter during a night mission. The poor weather and lack of radio communications hindered the soldiers from calling for backup, and the aircraft was never seen again. Hummel was three weeks away from coming home.

“I met [Fred Mooney’s six] children, and they want to know ‘What was my dad like?’ And what I say, I’m 74 years old, I say, ‘Well, we were 20 years old. We were kinda crazy. We drank a lot. But your dad was well-liked. He was a great aviator,’” Musanti said. “Fred Mooney was 39 years old when he went missing. He didn’t have to fly. He was the platoon leader and he wanted to show the kids how to do it, so we went on that mission.”

Willete said 2,898 Massachusetts residents are still missing from World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, including the eight honored veterans. State Rep. Dan Carey reminded the attendees of the importance of remembering all veterans, both those who returned home and those who didn’t.

“Whether you’re working stateside or whether you’re deployed oversees, [the veterans] know, the families know, that veteran might not come home,” Carey said. “When we hear that at Memorial Day and other events, we think about those killed in action, but we can’t forget those missing. We can’t forget those prisoners of war.”

Emilee Klein can be reached at eklein@gazettenet.com.