Judging Category
Basic or Experimental Research
Student Rank
Senior
College
Liberal Arts and Communication
Faculty Sponsor
Dr. Andrea Davis; andavis@astate.edu
Description
Through declassified archival documents, family archives, and oral histories of WWII airmen, this poster examines how memory was impacted by wartime and post-war secrecy. Using the American Air Crew of the B-17 Flying Fortress, “Baby Dumpling,” as my case study, I explore how the containment of sensitive information through intelligence protocols during and after WWII led to different understandings of the same catalyzing experience among the ten man crew. Following their crash—resulting in death, POW capture, or evasion—I trace how Francis B. Cater and Jack R. Zeman shared different accounts of the same event based not only on their experiences, but also on their access to information, leading their families to construct different memories of the war. These differences add nuance to our understanding of combat memory about America’s “good war,” illuminating competing generational memories of “heroism” and “cowardice” among veterans.
Disciplines
History
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Thompson, Darrah S., "Sanitizing Escape Lines: Memory Transmission Among WWII Airmen" (2026). Create@State. 31.
https://arch.astate.edu/evn-createstate/2026/posters/31
Included in
Sanitizing Escape Lines: Memory Transmission Among WWII Airmen
Through declassified archival documents, family archives, and oral histories of WWII airmen, this poster examines how memory was impacted by wartime and post-war secrecy. Using the American Air Crew of the B-17 Flying Fortress, “Baby Dumpling,” as my case study, I explore how the containment of sensitive information through intelligence protocols during and after WWII led to different understandings of the same catalyzing experience among the ten man crew. Following their crash—resulting in death, POW capture, or evasion—I trace how Francis B. Cater and Jack R. Zeman shared different accounts of the same event based not only on their experiences, but also on their access to information, leading their families to construct different memories of the war. These differences add nuance to our understanding of combat memory about America’s “good war,” illuminating competing generational memories of “heroism” and “cowardice” among veterans.
