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

Wartime Log

3SLOAN_pages_105-160.qxd 8/20/08 11:16 AM Page 106 Introduction With the image of himself and his buddy, “Cul,” rushing to catch up with their comrades on the march to liberation, Steve Carano stopped writing in his journal. He tucked away the book, sewn carefully in the durable brown cloth from his Army uniform, and with liberation looming ahead on the German border, he began to live in the present moment again. With freedom fast approaching, and the thrill of fresh eggs for breakfast and feather beds at night, he didn’t need to return to those pages that reminded him of his long months in Stalag XVII. At about the same time that Carano closed the covers of his journal and shut away his wartime past, another young soldier by the name of John C. Bitzer pulled out his own YMCA book, which already contained seven poems and several drawings he had made throughout his months of incarceration in Stalag Luft VI in East Prussia and, later, Stalag Luft IV near Belgard. With his comrades from Stalag Luft IV, he had just completed a torturous six-hundred-mile “death march” across Germany through snow and sub-freezing temperatures, a brutally cold trek that had begun nearly three months before, in early February. For John Bitzer, it was liberation—not the months of trauma or deadly boredom—that inspired him to write entries in his journal. The gnawing uncertainty about the future that had hung over him and his comrades in German prison camps had finally ended. He pulled out a pen to capture the overwhelming relief and joy of the moment for which he, Carano, and countless other prisoners of war had long awaited—the arrival of fellow GIs to bring him back home. Despite the exhaustion and starvation he’d endured on the death march, Bitzer recorded the elation during those first days in which he and his comrades celebrated their freedom. Like Carano, Bitzer had been 107 3SLOAN_pages_105-160.qxd 8/20/08 11:16 AM Page 107 a prisoner of war since December 30, 1943, when his plane went down over Germany. Like Carano, he also received a YMCA Log Book, but— until liberation—he had put it to use for poetry, occasional drawings and, most important, the home addresses of his comrades. Bitzer wrote what he knew he would want to remember. For four days following liberation, he recorded the luxury of having clean clothes, good meals—and the exhilaration of freedom. For Bitzer, at the end of his terrible ordeal, the blank pages of his journal offered a way of personally documenting the grand historic moment of liberation. At age nineteen, John Bitzer left his hometown of Euclid, Ohio, and enrolled in the U.S. Army Air Force on December 7, 1942.The Army sent him to gunnery school and airplane mechanics training before assigning him to the 447th bomb group, 711 bomb squadron in August 1943. A stocky, broad-shouldered young man, he became a ball turret gunner on a B-17 bomber.The ball turret, located in the belly of the bomber, isolated the man inside from the rest of the ten-man crew, confining him to quarters so cramped that a soldier could not even wear his parachute while operating the gun. It was not a place for claustrophobics. As Bitzer tells it, “To enter the turret it must be rotated until the door opening faces the inside of the plane, this means that the guns will first be pointed to the rear then 90 degrees straight down. Once inside the ball and the hatch shut and latched, the gunner sits curled up in the fetal position, swiveling the entire turret as he aims the two guns. You sit between the guns with feet in stirrups positioned on either side of the thirteen-inch diameter window in the front. One foot operates the gun sight, the other foot operates the intercom. This is why there are no six foot tall turret gunners.” On December 30, 1943, Bitzer was in East Angola, England, with thousands of other American airmen, all making the potentially deadly daytime raids over Nazi-held western Europe. That morning, Bitzer’s mission was to bomb the chemical factory at Ludwisghaven, Germany. The flight in was as ordinary as such a mission could ever be: a little flak, minimal fighter action.They successfully dropped the...