The Butt Trials
Secrets are everywhere in families. Of course they are. Even events that appear on the front page of the local newspaper can be locked away and forgotten over time. I encountered that recently with a client whose grandfather turned out not to have been her biological relative. Once upon a time it had not been a secret, but it became one.
That reminded me of my uncle, the late (and dearly missed) James J. Cupp. In December 1943, a few months after his nineteenth birthday, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. Before he he left, though, and in grim acknowledgment of the possibility that he might never return, my grandmother had portraits taken of all six of her children. She mounted them in a special, six-slotted frame, and when she died, the hexaptych went to my mother, and when Mom died, to me.
It’s a wonderful record of that moment in time—the youngest, my almost-three-year-old mom, playing with her toy phone, and the oldest, Jim, dashing in his new uniform.
Uncle Jim didn’t say much about the war when I was growing up. It’s almost a cliché when talking about the so-called Greatest Generation. “They didn’t like to brag,” as someone put it to me recently—naively, in my opinion—although it’s true that Jim wasn’t much for that, or for talking about himself at all. And believe me, my dad, a history teacher, tried.
But sometimes lips are pursed for other reasons. For Uncle Jim it may have been this story on page 1 of the Daily Dispatch, the paper of record in his home town of Moline, Illinois
I discovered this article and others like it—some referring to the “Butt Trials”—in a digital newspaper archive about ten years ago. My mom had never heard of the “Cigaret Case.” She was genuinely shocked and even upset. What on earth had her brother done?
The gist was this: Jim and many, many others who worked on the Army supply line in and around Paris were convicted of stealing cigarettes, chocolate, and other valuable goods and selling them to French black marketeers. He was court-martialed and received a sentence of thirty-five years of hard labor. It was an astonishing sentence and makes me want to do more research about the black market, its reach and effects.
My grandparents must have been shocked, concerned, and, ultimately, deeply shamed by what had happened and how it appeared in the paper. My mom’s oldest sister, Shirley (later Sister Germaine), was attending Catholic boarding school at the time and remembered the nuns expressing their disapproval with hard looks and shakes of their habited heads.
After judicial review Jim’s sentence was reduced to fifteen years, all suspended. The Battle of the Bulge was happening, and according to Sr. Germaine Corporal Cupp was quickly sent to the front, where Ike needed all the men he could get. Thankfully, Jim survived. At war’s end he came home and never spoke of his conviction again.
Who can blame him? But my job, as a family historian, is to be curious. So I ordered a copy of the trial record from the National Archives. After an almost two-year wait, it arrived yesterday.
Now for the first time, I can hear Uncle Jim, who died in 2012, explaining his side of the story. He told the court about the complete lack of discipline in his unit, Company C, 716th Railway Operating Battalion.
Jim testified that when the 716th first arrived in Paris, the men were not issued rations and did not have a mess tent. They became accustomed to taking supplies for their own use, which eventually led to taking them for their own profit. It was, to put it mildly, a complete mess.
And anyway, everyone was doing it. (Yes, I realize this is the oldest excuse in the book.) “One occasion,” Jim told the court, “Lieutenant Loop of the 716th walked in and asked me for a carton of cigarettes. I told him that I didn’t have any. He went into my closet and took a carton. As he walked out he said, ‘These ought to buy me a couple of bottles of cognac,’ which in my estimation the officers knew perfectly well what was going on and didn’t do anything to stop it.”
In the end, the Army charged 190 enlisted men and only eight officers with stealing and reselling supplies. Of those, five of the officers were acquitted, while 176 of the enlisted men, Uncle Jim among them, were convicted.
My best guess is that Jim knew he was guilty while also understanding that, to some extent, it was a rigged game.
The records the National Archives sent add up to 257 pages. I’m not sure I know my uncle much better having looked through them all, but I do understand his situation better—the bind he got himself into, the mistakes he made.
It has been an unexpected gift.
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