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Veterans show lifelong patriotism
By WILLIAM K. ALCORN
YOUNGSTOWN
A patriot is anyone willing to make sacrifices, military or otherwise, for their country, said Daniel E. King, a World War II ex-prisoner of war.
King, of Lordstown, and William E. Bletso of Boardman, World War II veterans in their 80s, are men who fit the patriot mold.
Friends since boyhood, they went to school together in North Jackson and skinny-dipped with their pals in McGiffies’ pond by the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks.
King likes to hunt and fish, and he ran trap lines to make a few extra dollars. Bletso, at 118 pounds, played basketball and six-man football for Jackson-Milton High School.
But soon enough, the fun was over.
They both left school before graduating to enlist in the military to fight in World War II: King in the Army Air Corps and Bletso in the Navy.
Bletso, 84, had earned enough credits to graduate with his class in 1944, but he was not there. “My mother picked up my diploma,” he said.
Most of the boys in his class enlisted before they graduated because of the high level of patriotism at the time, Bletso said.
“Danny was my idol growing up ... my mentor,” Bletso said of King, who was a couple of years older.
“My father, Merl, and my older brother, Robert, were my role models,” Bletso said.
“My dad was a super patriot. He served in the Army during World War I and saw combat in France and Italy. Robert, a Navy machinist mate, served six years in the Navy and, after Pearl Harbor, was in every major battle in the Pacific on the USS San Diego, a light cruiser,” he said.
Bletso was a radioman 2nd class aboard the destroyer USS Gregory, which was present at the Battle of Iwo Jima, enabling Bletso to see “with my bare eyes” the U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi about an hour after it had been raised.
King wears around his neck, as a reminder of his most-defining experience of the war, dog tags from Stalag Luft 1, a German prison camp near Barth on the Baltic Sea in northern Germany. He was prisoner No. 7858.
King, 87, said he had a hard time getting in the military.
He tried to enlist in the Navy but failed the physical because of bad teeth. Determined to serve, he went back home and worked at U.S. Steel’s McDonald Works and spent $400 on dental work. “That was a lot of money in 1942,” he said.
He wanted to be a pilot in the Army Air Corps, but the only slots the Army had available at that time were infantry and paratroopers.
Then he got a break.
The requirement of two years of college for acceptance into flight training was waived if one could pass a written test, which King did, and a physical that, with his $400 teeth, he also passed.
He graduated from flight school, got his wings, and got married on the same day, March 12, 1944, at Eagle Pass Texas Army Air Corps Base. He was shipped overseas on Thanksgiving Day 1944 and joined the 364th Fighter Group, 384th Fighter Squadron, 8th Air Force Fighter Group at Honington, England. There, he flew P-51 fighter planes that escorted bombers on missions over Germany, France, Belgium and Holland.
On one of King’s missions, his plane’s engine developed an oil leak about 50 miles south of Hamburg, Germany, and he had to bail out. He was captured and taken to the POW camp.
He had been in Stalag Luft 1 about 45 days when the Russians arrived on April 29, 1945, and the Germans fled.
It was while they were waiting for the American forces that an experience occurred that still haunts him.
He said he and another prisoner wandered outside the camp and found a building enclosed by a fence with the gate unlocked. We went in and found large numbers of prisoners who had been starved and worked to death.
“They could not even get out of bed. Some were alive, but as hard as the doctors worked to save them, I don’t think any of them lived. To this day, when I see pictures like that, I remember the smell,” King said.
After they were liberated by American forces, King was flown to Camp Lucky Strike in France and then returned home by ship to the Army’s Camp Myles Standish in Massachusetts.
In the meantime, his wife, Shirley, at Eagle Pass Texas Army Air Corps base, did not know for three months if he was living or dead.
She had received a telegram from the Department of Defense saying he was missing in action, and she did not know otherwise until she received a letter from him that he wrote at Camp Lucky Strike.
He was discharged as a first lieutenant and came back to the family farm on Rosemont Road in North Jackson, where he and his wife raised their seven children. They moved to Lordstown in 2001.
Bletso came back to North Jackson and went to Youngstown College on the G.I. Bill. “I was very grateful that the government gave me a free education. That is the only thing I have ever taken from the government,” he said.
He joined the Naval Reserve after the war and just five days before his reserve obligation was to end, he was extended for a year and served during the Korean War in Guam as a communications technician intercepting communications from the Russians.
Given their experiences, it is perhaps not surprising that King and Bletso have strong feelings about service to country and patriotism.
“Many people have given their lives for freedom. It is too often taken for granted,” King said.
Bletso has this posted on the door of his office, that he also calls his war museum: “Admission — 50 cents. Free admission to all veterans, those over the age of 65, all children, and all who respect the flag. Traitors, draft dodgers and some individuals in government will be excluded ...”