Public Relations - In The News

Bob Kerr: Heading back to a place to remember

This week, Richard Fazzio invades France for the third time. He has no idea what to expect. He just knows that he wants to remember that beach the way it is now, not the way it was then.

He is 80, and he leaves Wednesday on a remarkable return trip to the place where, at 19, he was a Navy coxswain and took men ashore on D-Day on Omaha Beach.

"Remember the beginning of Saving Private Ryan?" he asks. "It was exactly like that, only worse."

He returns to reaffirm the connection between the place where he has lived his entire life and the place where he took part in the beginning of the end of World War II.

Every one of the men he brought to the battle in his landing craft was shot as they reached the beach, he said. And so was he.

He is one of five men from Rhode Island who will go back to France this week with Tim Gray and cameraman Jim Karpcichik to talk about what they did there on and around June 6, 1944.

What the men do and say there will become part of anhour-long documentary -- D-Day + 62 Years: Rhode Island Veterans Return to Normandy -- which will be shown on Channel 10 (WJAR) on June 6 and June 18.

Gray visited the American cemetery in Normandy last fall during a visit with his wife, Sheila. And he looked at the graves and wondered about Rhode Island's connection to this place. He wondered how many Rhode Islanders were buried there.

"I got home and started to sniff around," says Gray, a former Channel 10 sports reporter who opened his own company, Tim Gray Media, in January.

And, as any wise person in search of the state's World War II history would do, Gray got together with Gene Peloquin.

Peloquin, a Navy veteran and retired North Smithfield school principal, has spent years with his veteran friends Al Auclair and Roger Peit making sure that the history of World War II claims a prominent and easily accessible place in Rhode Island.

It was Peloquin who helped Gray contact veterans in the state and arrange interviews.

It was Peloquin who convinced Richard Fazzio that he should be one of the people to return to Normandy and talk about what he did there. Peloquin is just a very convincing guy.

So on Wednesday, the former coxswain from Woonsocket will join Leo Heroux, a former member of the Army's 348th Amphibious Engineers, from Central Falls; Frank Chomka, a former Navy radioman from Cumberland; Chris Heisler, a former member of the 82nd Airborne Division, from Wakefield; and Wilson Delasanta, a former Army truckdriver from Cumberland. They will fly to Paris, then travel to the village of Bayeux, which is near the beaches. They will be there for five days and will remember with a camera and microphone nearby.

Philip O'Connell, a former machine gunner from West Warwick, is also in the documentary but will not travel to France because of health reasons. Therese Blais will also be a part of it, although she will not make the trip either. She was a teenager when she went to work at the U.S. Rubber Company in Woonsocket. She helped make rubber tanks. They were part of an elaborate deception created in England to mislead German aerial observers as to where the buildup for the invasion was actually taking place.

The veterans have dealt with their war in different ways over the decades. For some, this will not be the first trip back.

For Fazzio, this will not only be the first time back but the first time he has really talked about the experience. He says the first time his wife, Frances, heard him talk about the war was when Gray came to interview him a few weeks ago.

He was 17 in 1943 when he persuaded his parents to sign the age waiver and let him sign up. He said he'd never been farther from home than Blackstone when he left for boot camp in upstate New York.

And on D-Day, he says, he won the "lottery." He was sent in in the first wave. And he saw soldiers shot down all around him before he was shot in his armpit. The bullet went out through his back.

He was sent to Scotland to recuperate. He recovered in time to take part in the invasion of southern France.

And now he hits the beach for a third time as part of a wonderful project that will bring that day in 1944 closer to a state that provided more than its share of men to fight.

Gray found the names of 99 Rhode Islanders who are buried in the American Cemetery in Normandy -- from Pvt. Nelson Alexander to Flight Officer John Wilkes.

There have been a bunch of World War II and D-Day history projects but none that have taken local veterans back to the place where they saw far too much in a very short time.

Gray says he has been a student of World War II for as long as he can remember. One of the first books he ever picked up was about the war.

When he came home from France last year with the documentary idea, he had to go out and sell it. After a lot of years as a reporter, he says he's used to hearing "no," and he did hear it now and then. But Bank of America came up big as the presenting sponsor, and others signed on, and now a uniquely packaged piece of history will be available simply by tuning in to Channel 10. A copy of the program will also be given to libraries and schools in the state.

"This generation today has no idea," said Gray. "We'll tell kids what happened. And maybe they can ask their grandfathers. It will get people talking."

And that is as fine a thing as people with camera and microphone can do.