John McAuliffe sent this to me:
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Good Job, Jack !!
Last Monday I drove to Hyannis, Cape Cod MA and back, in one day: 225 miles and freshened the flower bed at our VBOB Monument there with new flowers...which we commemorated back in Sept 1996...Perhaps you were there then !!! I try to do this at least on Memorial Day and Veterans Day every year...The local guys of the Cape Cod Chapter, VBOB have disbanded and gone now....as your article said: There are fewer of us now !!!...but I do my best with taking care of our own Cent.MA Chapt-22 Monument here in Worcester also.
Mac
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June 7, 2009
Local veterans gather to mark D-Day anniversary
John Boccacino
Staff writer
They are members of a prestigious and decorated fraternity, men in their 80s and 90s who survived some of the deadliest battles of World War II.
Sixty-five years have passed since D-Day, the highly successful, but bloody, Allied invasion of the Nazi-occupied beaches of Normandy, France.
Yet despite the passage of time, the memories from that traumatic day still stick with Rochester's band of brothers known as the Genesee Valley Chapter of the Veterans of the Battle of the Bulge Ardennes. Each anniversary is a new reminder that the number of WWII veterans is dwindling at a rapid pace — according to the national and local Honor Flight statistics, approximately 1,200 WWII veterans pass away each day. But members of the local group said that makes it all the more important that current and future generations should never forget the actions of the Greatest Generation.
More than 40 members of the group were among the hundreds gathered Saturday at Ontario Beach Park to commemorate the anniversary of D-Day, the campaign that saw more than 5,000 ships and landing craft navigate into a hail of German gunfire. The invasion marked the beginning of the end of World War II in Europe.
"We're all here now because of those guys that gave their lives fighting the Germans," said Dick Brookins, 87, of Pittsford, who helped found the local group in 1998.
"Soldiers like these, backed by the American people, saved the world, so it's kind of a reasonable thing to think about their heroics.
"If it weren't for them, who knows what life would be like here."
Joe Brandt is one of three living members of the Genesee Valley group who stormed the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944.
While he wasn't part of the first wave of soldiers who experienced the heaviest of fire, Brandt carries strong memories. He was part of a later wave to hit Omaha Beach, where the offensive claimed the lives of nearly 2,500 U.S. soldiers.
"We got in off the shore and there were bodies everywhere," said Brandt, 87, of Greece, who was a combat medic on the day of the invasion on the coast of France.
"It was terrible and I've never forgotten that day; I don't think you can forget something like that. But there are a lot of guys who did more than I did. When you're called upon by your country, you do what you have to do. That's the way it goes in war."
John Cipolla, 87, one of the group's other living D-Day survivors, was invited by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and President Barack Obama to travel to Normandy to attend commemorations Saturday at several historic locations associated with D-Day — including the town of Ste.-Mère-Église, where the first United States paratroopers landed, and the American war cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer.
In Rochester, the veterans stood in a loose formation near the Battle of the Bulge monument at the front of the park. The ceremony included the prayer that then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt recited to the nation on D-Day, as well as several veterans telling their tales of the front lines.
Of the 16 million Americans who served in WWII, the Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that as of November 2008 only 2.3 million are still living. That makes John Foy, one of the chapter's co-founders and the event coordinator, cringe.
"Most of us veterans don't have a lot of time left and we don't want this story forgotten," said Foy, 83, of Greece and a member of Gen. George Patton's Third Army.
"When our generation goes, this story must be remembered, forever. Events like this bring back the memories, good and bad, but mostly good. We'll sit around and tell lies about the war.
"We'll say 'my outfit won the war,' and someone else will say, 'no, my outfit won the war.' There's just a sense of camaraderie."
