Did you know why a U.S. veteran’s ashes were recently laid to rest in Hungary?

The remains of U.S. World War II veteran Robert E. Field have recently been laid to rest in Hungary, when his daughter Jane Ellen buried his ashes in a field near the small village of Rábatamási. It is not uncommon for a soldier’s remains to rest in foreign ground if he died far from home, but Mr. Field actually returned home from the war and only died recently. Why would he ask to have his ashes taken to a country he was fighting against in the war?
 
Robert Field served as a radio operator and gunner on a B-24 Liberator heavy bomber Joe Bananas stationed in Italy. On April 23, 1944, the plane flew on a mission to hit factories and an airfield near Vienna in Austria. Their route took the planes over Northwest Hungary, where they came under attack and their plane was heavily damaged, prompting the pilot to sound the bail-out alarm. Instead of jumping immediately, Field and his friend Frank Coupe stayed behind to help the ball turret gunner out of the jammed turret.

Hanging from his parachute on the way down, Field saw Coupe’s motionless body in a field beneath him. According to witnesses, Coupe jumped very late and slammed into the ground as his parachute could not open in time. Field was immediately captured and taken away on a fire engine as he wept for his friend. Coupe was given a burial with military honors in a small nearby cemetery. (He was disinterred and returned to America after the war.) Field was moved from one POW camp to another until he was liberated in April 1945.
 
Field never talked about his war experiences to his family, but he became involved with veterans’ meetings. His daughter Ellen accompanied him to these events, and was eventually asked to become an organizer herself in 2003, by when most veterans were too old to do much of the actual organization.

In 2017, Ellen received an email from Hungarian historian Balázs Szalay who was researching the story of the bomber. Robert Field was already living in a retirement home at the time and never had a chance to visit Hungary, but learning that people were aware of his and Frank Coupe’s story gave him joy and a sense of closure. He departed our world in 2019, but asked that his ashes be taken to Hungary and buried in the field where his friend died. That happened recently, in late April 2024, when Jane visited Hungary to meet Mr. Szalay; an old local gentleman who, as a ten-year-old boy, witnessed her father’s capture; and Hungarian well-wishers.

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