Upstate New York |
UTICA
“I’m going to die.” That’s what 90-year-old Joe Rositano, who armed bombs as a member of the 15th Air Force during World War II, thought as he was drifting through the air, waiting for the right moment to pull the ripcord on his parachute. Minutes earlier, he’d been in the back of a B-24 Liberator after an all-out air raid over Austria, hearing the pilot confirming the worst: They’d been hit and were on fire. Rositano grabbed the side gunner’s window, holding on desperately as the plane went into a tailspin. “All of a sudden the plane just broke apart, just blew up,” Rositano said. Instinct kicked in and he successfully launched his chute — something he’d never done before. But when he looked down, he saw guns trained on him as he floated back to earth. “I’m going to die.” * * * German troops ushered Rositano, after a not-so-friendly greeting — one solider gestured that he was going to shoot Rositano — to a train to Stalag Luft IV, a barbed-wire-lined prison camp for allied airmen in northern Poland. But when an airstrike temporarily interrupted the trip, Rositano found himself in a culvert, face-to-face with another prisoner — a gentleman named Anthony Tomaselli, who’d been stationed in England. They made small talk as the planes passed, learning the almost impossible was true: Of the hundreds of prisoners en route to the camp, they were both from Utica. And they were both dating women who lived on the same small street: Wetmore. “You talk about chances,” Rositano said with a laugh. The two grew their friendship throughout their stay at Stalag Luft IV, where they landed before D-Day — June 6, 1944. Tomaselli later would be Rositano’s best man. But with scarce food supplies — often just one loaf of bread and some potatoes each day — to share with nine roommates, it wasn’t an easy year. “Prior to the barbed wire they had another, which they called the warning wire,” Rositano said. “If you stepped over that wire, there’s no excuse, you were shot.” He saw it happen twice. The prisoners got by listening to war updates on a rigged-up radio and rationing parcels of cigarettes, margarine, sugar and canned meat from the Red Cross. Read more at http://www.uticaod.com/article/20141111/NEWS/141119944. Comments are closed.
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ABOUTPieces that were published during the eight months I spent covering Herkimer County and other topics in upstate New York. Archives
February 2015
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