Not Without Honor: The Nazi POW Journal of Steve Carano; With Accounts by John C. Bitzer and Bill Blackmon

Appendix

picture of the air defense. Not until they reach the British aeries do they gradually acquire a true-to-life picture of the air situation, especially when as occasionally happens—whole squadrons fail to return from their flying operations. Night raids are always flown by the British bomber formations. They become increasingly difficult, owing to the German strength of the growing air defense. Daylights are reserved for the U.S. formations. We shall let a U.S. pilot narrate his own experience during his last bombing raid over Germany. The pilot Foran D.—from Chicago, 27 years old, and a sergeant, relates, “We couldn’t get out of range of the German air defense, one fresh squadron after another of fighters and destroyers swooped in to attack us. The co-operation between the flak and fighters was excellent, they gave us hell from above and below. We lost one engine after another. The end came quickly for us. The majority of my crew were mortally wounded when our bus suddenly moved downwards. How I got out of it, I don’t know. Instinctively, I pulled the rip cord. I was lucky I guess. I am the only survivor of my squadron. At any rate, I haven’t seen a single one of my comrades in any of the German prisoner of war camps.” These utterances of captured U.S. pilots will suffice. We know what we are to think of our opponents. That the strength of our defense is increasing and that it tackles the Anglo-American terrorist fliers with growing ferocity is a fact that cannot be withheld from the American public. The “business” of “terrorist flying” will cost them dearly, both the big business jobbers, and the little ones who entrust themselves to the flying ships—that is to say—the “flying coffins.” 94 CARANO’S WARTIME LOG 1SLOAN_pages_i-104.qxd 8/20/08 10:49 AM Page 94 About the War On occasion, as Carano notes, Allied propaganda found its way into the camp, escaping the German’s notice. Everything that comes into a Kriegie camp is censored with hawk-eye scrutiny, principally reading material—however the following story apparently missed the censor’s eye. Let us never forget what the Germans do when they have power. Let us look at France and remember one stroke of the invader’s authority.The whole world knows the French working men are being recruited and sent to Germany to work in factories and farms. A great many naïve people are under the delusion not only that the French workmen make the migration willingly, but that the employment of foreign labor in German industry is a temporary measure, a device of war, and when peace is made the Frenchman can go back to France, and the Germans will do the work in Germany. To call this child-like faith, naïve, is to dignify it, because there is in naïveté a kind of innocent beauty, but this [in]stead, is credulity of a very dangerous sort. Let the Germans themselves dispel the illusion.The Parises Zeitgung, a German newspaper published in Paris, recently announced that the German occupation authorities have determined upon a radical revision of the French children’s educational system. French children, says the newspaper, need no general schooling as they will have no need for education later in life. Under the new system, it goes on to say the children will have a brief term at school and then be apprenticed in industry to 95 1SLOAN_pages_i-104.qxd 8/20/08 10:49 AM Page 95 provide the skilled workers Germany needs. This system, the paper coldbloodedly remarks, provides increasing numbers of French workers for German units. This means enslavement of body-mind, and spirit. This means that a generation of children will be bred to work as living machines, contented not to know, and not to hope. And this fate is prepared too, for Belgians, Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles. We must be very sure that in those legions of the enslaved there will not be wanted also the Americans. For it is the Americans who will bring them liberation with ”Victory.” 96 CARANO’S WARTIME LOG 1SLOAN_pages_i-104.qxd 8/20/08 10:49 AM Page 96 Liberation Account Toward the end of his journal, Carano drew the outlines of his buddies’ dog-tags and wrote in their names and addresses of...