Public Relations - In The News

Veterans returning to beachhead 62 years after D-Day
Joseph B. Nadeau, Staff Writer 03/22/2006

WOONSOCKET
Richard D. Fazzio doesn’t need the images of a Hollywood movie to understand the incredible feat Allied forces pulled off on June 6, 1944.

Fazzio, 80, of 319 Mowry St., is a member of an ever-shrinking group of World II veterans who experienced D-Day firsthand and witnessed the heavy price United States soldiers paid as the liberation of Nazi-held Europe began.

So did Cumberland’s Wilson Delasanta, 84, of 15 New Clark Road and Frank Chomka, 82, of 3816 Mendon Road.

All three local men participated in the first day of the invasion of Normandy and have held onto those memories over the past 62 years.

Today they will join two other Rhode Island veterans of the battle, Leo Heroux of Central Falls and Chris Heisler of Wakefield, for a trip back to Normandy intended to let others know more about the contributions of Rhode Islanders in the D-Day invasion.

Providence television producer Tim Gray came up with the idea for the one-hour documentary "D-Day +62 Years; Rhode Island Veterans Return to Normandy," after he visited the old Normandy battlefields last September and saw the 9,300 grave markers at the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach.

"I just wondered about the role of Rhode Islanders in D-Day and how many Rhode Island soldiers were buried there," he said.

His interest in finding an answer to that question led him to the state’s surviving D-Day veterans such as Fazzio, Delasanta and Chomka, and ultimately to plan the trip back to Normandy with them.

Fazzio, a Navy coxswain who piloted a Higgins boat landing craft during the first-wave assault on Omaha, hopes his journey back will give him a different view of Normandy than what his memories hold.

"I’m going back for one reason. I want a picture of that Normandy beach as it looks today, not as it did 62 years ago," Fazzio said as he, Delasanta and Chomka talked about the trip Tuesday.

"I want to erase that picture from my mind," Fazzio said.

At H-hour, Fazzio and three other members of the boat’s crew had a beach landing zone in sight they prepared to deposit 38 well-equipped assault troops into the teeth of the German defenders.

They had set out from their landing ship at 4 a.m. and begun maneuvers intended to form up the assault waves and align them on their beach targets.

Approaching the beach at 6:30 a.m., Fazzio could see machine gun bullets hitting the water around his boat as the Germans began firing at the wave of approaching boats. Shells from the 5,000-ship invasion fleet could be heard flying over head and then exploding on the enemy positions ahead.

The flashes of exploding bombs and shells made it seem like broad daylight, Fazzio said.

"It was awful. I mean it was like a hundred thunderstorms with flashes and everything else," he said.

As the boat came ashore, Fazzio gave the signal to his friend from Cumberland, the late Wally Lawton, to release the ramp and set the soldiers on their charge ashore.

"And as they left the boat, they met their fate," Fazzio remembers.

He remembers urging them on and out and he also remembers that it appeared not one of them made ashore alive.

Some had not wanted to go, he said, but the rule for the boats was that they would only bring back the wounded or the dead.

Fazzio himself took a bullet in his right armpit as he waved the unit out and began to back away.

The crew got the ramp back up and Fazzio stayed at the helm until he was halfway back to the landing ship and began to feel dizzy and faint from the loss of blood.

He went to a hospital ship for treatment as the attack continued and thousands more soldiers made their way into France.

Looking back today, Fazzio feels bad that he doesn’t know much about the soldiers he carried to the beach. They had been on his ship for about a week and they had trained together in the boat several times before the actual assault.

"They were all my age, 19, 20, 21-year old kids," Fazzio, who turned 19 a month before D-day, remembers.

Fazzio never really talked about his experiences that day until the 50th Anniversary of D-Day came around and like many veterans he began to open up about it.

When Stephen Spielberg’s D-Day movie "Saving Private Ryan" came out afterwards, some of Fazzio’s friends urged him to go see and it, and Fazzio said the first 20 minutes was a good representation of want he had seen that day, almost.

But he also knows his own time on Omaha seemed much longer to him that what it actually had been.

"I guess I was there for no more than 5 or 10 minutes on the beach," he said.

It was just the horrific nature of those moments that has lasted so long. "A lot of the soldiers in the boat didn’t want to get out because they saw the guys in front of them getting shot," he said.

Chomka wants to return to Normandy because he actually saw very little of the area as his Navy ocean-going tugboat dragged a floating pier section into the beach area to help set up a landing zone breakwater for the attacking forces.

The sections were towed across the English Channel in a group the night before the attack at slow speed, Chomka, a radioman on the tug, said.

"I understand about a 100 tugs were towing them," Chomka said of the massive floating pier sections.

"It was all done in darkness because we were only going 3 miles an hour," he remembers. "Can you imagine what the Germans would have done to us if they spotted us?"

As it was, a tug up ahead of his own ship hit a mine and sank, he said. As his tug passed the area, Chomka saw men in the water, their life vest lights flashing in the night.

"These guys were in the water but we couldn’t stop. We had to keep on course and couldn’t pick them up," Chomka said.

After dropping the tug’s pier section, Chomka said he did see a destroyer aground on the beach but has never found out why it was there.

And when his boat turned back toward the fleet in the growing light, Chomka witnessed a scene that he still sees clearly to this day.

"The whole sky was covered with airplanes and the ocean was covered with ships," he said.

Delasanta went ashore at Omaha later in the day with a truck company attached to the 1st and 29th Divisions.

The unit’s LCM landing ship drove in as close as it could to the beach but Delasanta found himself sitting in water up to his neck as the truck became swamped in the sea.

"The tide had come in fast," he said. Getting out of the vehicle, Delasanta saw another member his unit waving to him from up the beach under a cliff and he headed over to him.

Before coming into the beach, Delasanta said his unit had been told the troops were already moving up the cliff but found that wasn’t the case when they arrived.

"When I landed, no one was on top of the cliff," he said. "They were all still down on the beach and the Germans were still shooting at us."

Delasanta said he stayed under that cliff all day.

The Germans keep firing shells on to the beach throughout the day and Delasanta feels himself lucky to have made to the relative safety of the cliff base.

Looking down the beach, Delasanta remembers seeing a group of soldiers trying to make their way out of the water.

"They were all holding hands like some of them couldn’t swim," he said. Some of the soldiers were hit before they made it to safety, he said.

"I don’t know the rest of it because I was busy watching out for myself," he said.

He remembers being wet and cold on the beach overnight and then the next morning getting a look at his swamped truck.

"I’ll tell you, if I had stayed sitting there I wouldn’t be here today with all the shrapnel that hit it," he said.

While Fazzio and Chomka never returned to Normandy since the war, Delasanta said he did go back for the 50th anniversary and remembers not feeling "that good about it."

"You see a lot of graves and when you see that, you don’t feel too good about it," he said.

But Delasanta said he wanted to be a part of this trip because it will help tell the story of D-Day to the next generation.

"I hope I don’t break down though, because I usually do," he said.

Gray said he hopes that the five-day trip will show the veterans that Normandy is now a beautiful place, silent, and yet still honoring those that fought to free Europe 62 years ago.

"I think they will see a much calmer beach than they saw 62 years ago," he said.

Eugene Peloquin, a retired North Smithfield Elementary school principal and naval officer, helped put Gray in touch with some of the local people contributing to the D-Day program, and believes it will help another generation learn about the many sacrifices leading to victory in World War II.

Gray gained the help of other local residents such as former Senator Alphonse F. Auclair and his wife, Jacqueline, whose brother, Maurice, died in France after going ashore on D-Day, while researching the story of Northern Rhode Island’s contributions to the battle. And, the program will also touch on local war production in the area and the impact on local family life.

The completed program will be premiered at the Stadium Performing Arts Centre on Sunday, May 28, with former Mayor Francis L. Lanctot and Roger Petit hosting the event. WJAR TV 10 will broadcast the documentary on June 6 and June 18, Peloquin said.