Not Without Honor: The Nazi POW Journal of Steve Carano (review)

Despite the subtitle, Not Without Honor is not simply or particularly the wartime journal kept by Steve Carano. His “journal,” which is a compilation of the work of his fellow prisoners as much as a collection of his, comprises fewer than 100 pages.

Steve Carano became a prisoner of war when his B-17 was shot down over Germany in World War II. At the Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, like all prisoners, he received a blank-paged book from the Red Cross. In this book he wrote about life in the Air Corps, the hours leading to his captivity, and some events that occurred while in captivity. “Life in the Prison Camp” takes only six pages. Carano also included miscellaneous items such as a letter never sent to his wife, a list of his fellow prisoners, a propaganda tract, and the like. This is not a diary as much as a scrapbook. Also in the volume are poetry and narratives of Carano’s fellow prisoners, including one narrative more fully developed than Carano’s writing on his own experiences. The book also includes Carano’s sketches, some of his fellow prisoners and others more cartoons about daily life or oddities. Tucked into a pocket he added to the cover of the Red Cross book to hold loose items is a piece about camp barbed wire that Carano wrote before receiving the Red Cross volume.

Fleshing out Not Without Honor are smaller fragments—not journals and not part of Carano’s journal—by two other prisoners, John Bitzer and Bill Blackmon. Bitzer’s log consists of five entries dealing with liberation and a collection of poems he wrote. Blackmon’s contribution is a recollection in 2005 about his life in an orphanage as well as in the same camp as Carano. With introductory material and end matter, the Bitzer, Blackmon, and Carano components comprise Not Without Honor.

Because the various elements of this book are insufficient to stand individually, the editor had to develop a strong rationale for putting them in the same volume, something beyond proximity in time. Sloan describes the work as an attempt to indicate the mental and psychological effort involved in maintaining sanity in inhuman conditions. The goal is reiterated in the foreword by Lewis Carlson, author of a significant work on American and German POWs in World War II.

Although the illustrations include photos of a couple of pages of the diary, the missing—and key—photo is one of Carano’s Red Cross book itself.

Not Without Honor is not without merit. The various fragments in combination provide an interesting sampler of the life of an American flyer, more so in the failed attempt to elude capture than in enemy hands. But Carano’s life before the war, as a flyer, and as a POW is addressed more effectively in the introduction than in the journal itself. Because the various writings are limited in scope, style, and coverage, Not Without Honor falls short as a definitive examination of either the general or a specific POW experience during World War II. It does, however, add another volume to the already generous supply of memoirs and oral histories of the greatest experience of a fading generation.