John W Cutler, 87, a retired tree surgeon, soldier, and environmentalist died quietly after a long illness with family present at his home in Needham, Mass on February 19, 2004. Tall and good-looking, his passions were his country, the environment, wolves, whales, woods and the disenfranchised, particularly the Native American people. He grew up in New York City and graduated from St Mark’s School in Southborough Massachusetts. He attended Harvard University, which he left in 1940 to drive an ambulance in France for the American Field Services. Preferring more active duty, he soon transferred to Britain’s Royal Air Force. During fighter pilot training in Southern Rhodesia, his plane crashed and he sustained serious injuries.After convalescing back in the States, he joined the American Army Air Corps after Pearl Harbor as an arial photographer. Heading on a bombing mission towards Romania’s Ploesti oil fields, his plane was shot down over Bosnia and he landed in a tree entangled in his parachute. He was rescued two days later by a Serbian anti-communist guerilla. They walked through mountainous terrain, unable to understand one another, foraging off wild plants for sustenance.Eventually captured by a German military unit, he was handed over to authorities of Stalag Luft #4 prisoner-of-war camp in Poland. He escaped one year later, hiding in haystacks and trading his well-padded US Army Air Force uniform for the threadbare garb of a French prisoner of war. That deal, he would say later, saved his life: on the trek westward across Europe in the winter of 1945; he was ignored by German patrols as he limped on, pretending to be a mute, shell-shocked French soldier.Back in the States at war’s end, he worked in Washington with UNRRA, a United Nations agency charged with handling the vast and complex problem of the WWII displaced persons.In the late 1940s, he married Ann W. Hoffman. He worked briefly in Munich for Radio Free Europe before returning to New England to work in the tree business, first with Bartlett’s, soon running his own company. What gave him great pleasure as he aged was his work in the soup kitchens in Florida, helping Cuban sugarcane cutters, and sailing the waters of Maine.To his family, he was always a war hero for whom the peace never quite worked out. Not anyway, until in 1986 he married his second wife, Marietta H. Davisson, also in her seventies. With her, he spent half the year in Southwest Harbor, Maine, hiking, sailing, swimming in the cold ocean waters and entertaining friends and family. A memorial service will be held on Tuesday, February 24, at 11:00 a.m. at Saint John’s Church, Deerfield Ave., Westwood, MA. Jack’s favorite charity, amongst quite a large number, was Defenders of Wildlife, 1130 17th St NW, Washington, DC 20036.He leaves his widow, Marietta Cutler, three children, David S. Cutler of Acton, MA, Peter W. Cutler of Lexington, MA and Starr Gilmartin of Trenton, ME; two sisters, Patricia Warner of Lincoln, MA and Judith Shinkle of St. Louis, MO, six grand children, and one one great grandchild.