CAPTURED!

O’Neill’s harrowing memoir chronicles his time as a prisoner of German forces during World War II.

The author was drafted into the United States Army in 1942 and served with the “Tigers” of the 61st Armored Infantry Battalion, an element of the 10th Armored Division. He survived the Battle of the Bulge and the Siege of Bastogne, but was shortly after captured by German soldiers in 1945, only four months before the fighting ceased. Over the next few months he was forced to march 500 miles, walking as many as 20 miles a day and subsisting on meager and sporadic rations of bread and water. Like his fellow prisoners, O’Neill was exhausted and demoralized, caked in dirt and grime, and terrified for his life, his existence reduced to a “series of blunt degradations.” In addition to the threat of execution by the Germans, the author also feared an air raid by his fellow Americans, who were conducting devastating night missions. O’Neill chillingly depicts the “debasement of total war,” the bleak manner in which he saw his own measure of humanity gradually dwindle in the face of starvation and humiliation. One “demon farmer” taunted the men with rotten potatoes, throwing a few over the fence that separated them to see them lustfully leap for the putrid spuds like desperate animals. Just as jarring was his experience traveling through towns the Americans had bombed beyond recognition. Once, an old man came out to meet them, carrying in his arms the corpse of a young girl, an act of both despair and moral indictment. This brief remembrance is edited by the author’s nephew, Scott MacGregor, who provides helpful autobiographical and historical context, including a melancholic account of the struggles O’Neill wrestled with following the war. Graphic black-and-white illustrations are provided by Dumm—haunting pictures that punctuate the terror the author experienced.

While this account doesn’t add much new to the historical record—the experiences of prisoners of war under German control have been exhaustively documented—O’Neill does illuminate the strangeness of it all, as well as the moral murkiness of his predicament. At one point, a German guard belittled him harshly while angrily insisting that he have a second bowl of soup, making the guard’s intention inscrutable. On another day, the author felt a hand attempt to shove a pistol into his pocket, a gift (or curse) he lividly refused. Amidst the “unbroken sequence of physical misery and mental depression,” there were also unsolvable mysteries, bizarre mortifications, and, very occasionally, minor expressions of tender kindness. O’Neill’s prose can be clunky and ponderous—occasionally, he stretches too laboriously for existential profundity (“I do not say coldly that men should annotate the dimensions of emotion when they are consumed with agony. I do say there is something better than what happened to these prisoners of whom I was one in every sense”). Despite these infelicities, this is a powerful work brimming with nuance and insight.

A stirring account of a prisoner-of-war’s tormenting trial.