DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Everything Else... D-Day

Can't believe it's been 80 years. Coincidentally, I'll be at Omaha Beach on this day next week. Been there once before. I would consider it "deafeningly quiet." Lot of gravitas that you feel when you're there. Definitely "heavy" to say the least. If you get the chance to go, I strongly recommend it.

Can't imagine going through what those boys went through on those five spots, especially Omaha. Very thankful to all of them.

We owe all of our veterans a profound debt of gratitude for helping protect and uphold the freedoms we enjoy today. And even a larger debt pf gratitude for those who paid the ultimate price. For every American who doesn't fully understand what D-Day represents, they need to learn. I think there are many who simply don't realize the gravity of the price which was paid or the gravity of what not paying that price would have cost us all.

A sad bit of news.....

A 102-year-old World War II veteran dies en route to D-Day commemorations in Europe and is mourned

A World War II Navy veteran was being mourned Thursday following his death while en route to France to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day, a trip friends said he’d talked excitedly about making.

Robert “Al” Persichitti of Fairport, New York fell ill during a stop in Germany last week and died in a hospital, his longtime priest and friend, the Rev. William Leone, said. Persichitti was 102.

“He’s been to most of the World War II remembrances down in Washington and Louisiana, and he wanted to get to the D-Day remembrance ceremony, too,” Leone, pastor of the Church of Saint Jerome in East Rochester, where Persichitti attended Mass every week, said by phone. “But the Lord took him in Germany. He was on his way to France, but he didn’t make it.”

A friend who was traveling with Persichitti said a doctor was with him when he died on May 30. “She put his favorite singer, Frank Sinatra, on her phone and he peacefully left us,” Al DeCarlo told WHAM in Rochester.

The National WWII Museum in New Orleans called Persichitti a “longtime friend.”

After enlisting in the U.S. Navy in 1942, Persichitti was assigned as a radioman to the USS Eldorado and in 1944 sailed to the Pacific where he took part in the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, according to the museum. He was in the harbor at Iwo Jima to witness the raising of the U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi, and had returned there in 2019, just before his 97th birthday.

In an interview with WROC in Rochester before he left for Europe, Persichitti said he’d been in his cardiologist’s office when he learned about the trip.

“And he says, `Go!’” he recalled his doctor telling him.

“I’m really excited to be going,” he said.

A retired public school teacher, Persichitti regularly spoke about his wartime experiences in schools and community gatherings, Leone said. He also wrote an autobiography for his family in 2015.

Persichitti led the Pledge of Allegiance at this year’s Memorial Day remembrance in East Rochester.

“He wanted,” Leone said, “to keep the memory of the sacrifices that had been made alive.”

https://apnews.com/article/world-wa...ichitti-e953d79b18ae0beb7ddc2e9c31ccfdcd

D-Day is one of the greatest examples of courage I can imagine. Those men saw their fellow soldiers being cut down all around them, yet carried on because the mission was that important. Even those who survived that terrible battle didn't come home unscathed. Brave, brave men, and that somehow seems like an understatement.

That's terrible.

Maybe fitting. I'd bet that is the way he would want to go..going back to pay his respect to his brothers.

I read somewhere there are only 150 vets of D Day left. I don't know if that is US vets or all the other countries involved in the invasion, mostly British and Canadian.
Either way, even the youngest have to be around 97-98. They would have been 17 at the time. I can't imagine kids that young or younger. Most have made it to 100+ years old. I wonder how many on that day ever figured they would live to be 100?

In the words of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away".

We are seeing them fade away, but they will never die.

These two kids are tying the knot in Normandy. Harold wanted to do it there -- to be there with his brothers and share the moment.






80 years after D-Day, a World War II veteran is getting married near beaches where U.S. troops landed


By Associated Press Nationwide
PUBLISHED 9:35 AM ET Mar. 10, 2024


Harold Terens and his fiancee Jeanne Swerlin kissed and held hands like high school sweethearts as they discussed their upcoming wedding in France, a country the World War II veteran first visited as a 20-year-old U.S. Army Air Forces corporal shortly after D-Day.

Terens, a gregarious and energetic 100-year-old, will be honored in June by the French as part of the 80th anniversary celebration of their country's liberation from the Nazis. Then he plans to marry the sprightly 96-year-old Swerlin in a town near the beaches where U.S. troops landed.

“I love this girl — she is quite special,” said Terens, who has been dating Swerlin since 2021. To demonstrate their fondness for dancing, they had Siri play “Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars and then jumped, twisted and gyrated like teens at homecoming.

“He’s an amazing guy, amazing," Swerlin said. “He loves me so much and he says it.”

“And my god, he's the greatest kisser,” she said.

The couple, who are each widowed, grew up in New York City: her in Brooklyn, him in the Bronx. They laugh at how differently they experienced World War II. She was in high school and dated soldiers who gave her war souvenirs like dog tags, knives and even a gun, trying to impress.

Terens enlisted in 1942 and shipped to Great Britain the following year, attached to a four-pilot P-47 Thunderbolt fighter squadron as their radio repair technician. Terens said his original pilots all died in the war.

“I loved all those guys. Young men. The average age was 26,” he said.

On D-Day — June 6, 1944 — Terens helped repair planes returning from France so they could rejoin the battle. He said half his company's pilots died that day.

Terens went to France 12 days later, helping transport freshly captured Germans and just-freed American POWs back to England. To him, the Germans seemed happy because they would survive the war. The Americans, however, had been brutalized by their Nazi captors over months and even years.

“They were in a stupor,” he said.

He then went on a secret mission — even he didn't know his destination. His planes hopscotched North Africa before eventually landing in Tehran. There, he survived a robbery that left him naked in the desert and fearing death until an American military police patrol happened by.

He learned the details of his covert mission when he was deposited at a Soviet airfield in Ukraine. As part of a new strategy, American bombers would fly from Britain to attack Axis targets in Eastern Europe. They didn’t have enough fuel to return so they would fly to the USSR. Terens' job was to get the crews fed and the injured treated before they flew their refueled planes home.

Terens soon contracted dysentery, which almost killed him. In another close call, a British barkeep refused to serve him past the mandatory closing time despite his pleadings for just one more drink. Moments after he was kicked out, a German rocket destroyed the pub.

Following the Nazi surrender in May 1945, Terens again helped transport freed Allied prisoners to England before he shipped back to the U.S. a month later.

He married his wife Thelma in 1948 and they had two daughters and a son. He became a U.S. vice president for a British conglomerate. They moved from New York to Florida in 2006 after Thelma retired as a French teacher; she died in 2018 after 70 years of marriage. He has eight grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

Swerlin married at 21 and was a full-time mom to two girls and a boy before being widowed in her 40s. Her second husband died after 18 years of marriage. She then lived with Sol Katz for 25 years before his death in 2019. She has seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

It was Katz's daughter, Joanne Schosheim, who introduced her to Terens in 2021.

She met Terens when her children attended camp with his grandchildren years ago and remained friends. She and a friend thought the two might hit it off, so invited them to lunch.

“She gave my dad such joy," Schosheim said of Swerlin. "I didn’t want her to be lonely.”

But after Thelma's death, Terens wasn't interested in other women and barely noticed Swerlin.

"I didn’t even look at her. I didn’t even talk to her,” he said.

“I looked at him. He looked at me," Swerlin said, but “it was like nothing.”

Even so, Terens' buddy Stanley Eisenberg took them to dinner the next night. Eisenberg wanted to see who his friend had dismissed.

It was love at second sight.

“I had never seen him lit up like that,” Eisenberg said.

Terens couldn’t talk or eat, and that’s not like him.

“I said, ‘You’re in love,’” Eisenberg said. “He said, ‘I don’t know. I’ve never had these feelings before.'"

After that date, Swerlin said, Terens "didn’t give me a chance” to turn him down. At 94, she also was in love.

“He was introducing me to the whole world, ‘I want you to meet my girl, my sweetheart,' and I didn’t even know him more than two days,” she said, laughing. “Being in love is not just for the young. We get butterflies just like everybody else.”

Terens proposed a few months ago, kneeling to give Swerlin a ring.

“She got hysterical” with delight, he said.

“I thought I’d have to help him up, but he’s so macho,” she said.

The couple and their families will head to Paris in late May, where Terens and a handful of surviving World War II veterans will be honored. Of the 16 million American WWII veterans, only 120,000 remain, the government says.

It will be Terens’ fourth D-Day celebration in France. He received a medal from President Emmanuel Macron five years ago.

The families then will travel to the town of Carentan-les-Marais, where the couple plan to be married June 8 by Mayor Jean-Pierre Lhonneur in a chapel built in the 1600s. Lhonneur said because of the American sacrifice on D-Day, more U.S. flags fly in the area than French.

“Normandy is the 51st state,” he said.

Lhonneur explained legally he is only allowed to marry town residents, but he thinks the local prosecutor will let him make an exception.

“It will be a pleasure for us,” the mayor said.

https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2024/03/10/d-day-world-war-ii-veteran-normandy

Well said. One thing that I thought was interesting when I walked amongst the tombstones was that a decent amount of the graves predated June 6. I found out that they were pilotsand air crew who were shot down running missions in the area, all the way up to Calais to prep for the invasion.

When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, near Paris, in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.

Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

Disgusting. But let's not detract from honoring these brave men and put this garbage in the political cesspool where it belongs.

Holy smokes! He did it in a C-47, too! Like riding a bike, I guess.

The scene from Band of Brothers where all the C-47s take off is one of my favorite scenes to watch over and over again.

One of the restored C-47s also happened to fly over my house on its way to Wright-Patt two years ago. That was pretty cool. Got to pull my son out of the house to watch it with me.

I really can't say I disagree with you with one exception. I'm sure if he knew he had to die on the trip, he would rather have died on the way home after the event than on the way there. But none of us really have a choice when it's our time to go.