American Experience Presents

DEVITA: You see, we carried 30-32 men. My job was to drop the ramp and when we got close to the beach, there was one machine gun, he took a liking to my boat and he was peppering the ramp and the ramp is about two or three inches steel, so we could absorb the peppering and the sniper fire. But then I know, I had to drop the ramp because I had to get these kids off the boat, and they were screaming let us out because they felt trapped on the boat.

KLAY: On D-Day, June 6th, 1944, Frank DeVita worked on a landing craft that transported infantry to Omaha Beach.

DEVITA: It was very loud, from the fire and the two big diesel engines behind me, it was hard to hear, and the coxswain screamed drop the ramp and I never heard him. Then he screamed again, “drop the ramp”, and I froze...I didn't want to drop that ramp because I knew when I dropped the ramp the bullets that were hitting the ramp would come into my boat. So, I hesitated and then he screamed at the top of his lungs, he says, “God damn Devita drop the f'ing ramp”.

KLAY: Frank DeVita was one of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II...

DEVITA: I was in the United States Coast Guard. I was a gunner's mate--third class.

My serial number is 7015170.

KLAY: This was almost 80 years ago. Frank DeVita is now in his 90s.

DEVITA: My boat was number 28.

KLAY: Yet he remembers his boat number, his serial number… and so much more. Because for so many veterans, even if they’ve remained silent for decades, unable or unwilling to share what they’ve endured, the wars they fought live on.

KLAY: From Insignia Films, and PRX for GBH, this is American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories. In each episode we’ll hear one American vet tell us who they were before they joined, what they did, and who they became. 

I’m Phil Klay.

I’m a veteran myself. I served as a Marine Officer in Iraq, over sixty years after Frank DeVita’s service in WWII. Now I write books about war, and about coming home. About the disconnect between service members who fight our wars, and the civilians they’re fighting for. To help bridge that divide, veterans from every generation have spoken up to let Americans know what has been done in their name. These are their stories. 

KLAY: In 2019, in a TV studio in New York City, Frank Devita sat down in front of the camera to tell the story he has never forgotten. 

DEVITA: Want me to start?

PRODUCER: Yeah.

DEVITA: OK.

KLAY: The producers asked him to start… at the very beginning….

DEVITA: I grew up in Brooklyn, New York in Bensonhurst, mafia country (LAUGHS) I had a wonderful childhood.

PRODUCER: You spend a lot of time out on the street with your buds? 

DEVITA: Oh yeah. After we did our homework we were always out in the street, playing stick ball or handball, something like that yeah. Yeah.

KLAY: Frank DeVita’s father worked for the military.

DEVITA: My dad was the clothing designer for the whole United States Navy…and on a Sunday he used to have officers come to the house, for have...to have dinner, and my mom used to say to me, “we don't want any kids around, so you go in the other room when the company comes”, and I was listening to a football game and the report came over the radio.

Clip: radio announcement, “Our...President Roosevelt says that the Japenese has attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii from the air.”

DEVITA: So I went up to my mother and father and I says, “I have something to say”, and my mom says, “I told you not to interrupt us.” So I said, “but this is important, the Japanese just bombed Pearl Harbor,” and with that the officers that were there got up and left.

Audio: “Go ahead Honolulu”

DEVITA: When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, it bothered me so much. When I grew up, I grew up in a neighborhood, you had to fight every day. You know, it's...it's...it was in my genes that I wanted to get revenge, I wanted to get even.

So when I was 16, I enlisted. I lied about my age and then they wouldn't let me...they found out how old I was and at that time, you had to have your mothers permission. My mom said, “I want you to finish high school”. She wouldn't sign for me, so I had to wait.

Film: “Kind of thought I’d like to get close to one of them flying fortresses” [from “the Rear Gunner”]

DEVITA: I saw a movie about a tail gunner on a B25 Plane...

Film: “But the gunnery schools are always on the lookout for men short on height” [from “the Rear Gunner”]

DEVITA: I decided I want to be a tail gunner. So, I enlisted in the Air Force, I passed all the tests, all the physicals then they put me in a dark room…

DEVITA: And they had planes coming in from all directions. I could pick up the plane in front of me but I couldn't pick up the planes on the side, peripheral vision, so I failed.

[beat]

DEVITA: So I decided to join the Navy. And I passed all the tests again, and they said, “we'll call you in six weeks”. I says “six weeks, hell I want to go in tomorrow”. So, next door was a Coast Guard recruiting station, I went in there and I said “if I enlist, when could you take me?” They said, “10 days.” I said “you got it,” and I enlisted in the Coast Guard.

DEVITA: Sixteen of us in my class, in my senior class, all enlisted the same day.

DEVITA: My mom was very happy when I entered the Coast Guard because she thought I was going to patrol a beach on Coney Island, (LAUGHS)

KLAY: Initially, Frank didn’t have to go far. His basic training took place in Brooklyn. After boot camp he went to Providence, Rhode Island, for gunnery training... 

DEVITA: We had 20 millimeters, 40 millimeters, and I had to learn all those guns. Then they sent me to a little island off North Carolina, called Whale Head Island, and there was a bunch of people there, just waiting for ships and it was like the lottery, every morning they would come out and they'd say “Jones, you're going to be on this ship. Devita, you're going to be on the Samuel Chase”. APA 26, USS Samuel Chase.

DEVITA: I grew up in a neighborhood that was predominantly Italian. There was no Black in my neighborhood, no Hispanic in my neighborhood, no Chinese in my neighborhood. So, when I got aboard ship, I had all of that. So, I meant a lot of different nationalities. We have 520 people aboard our ship. And it was a big ship, it was a 10,000 ton ship.

[beat]

DEVITA: We didn't know about D-Day. We knew it, we knew what we were going to do eventually but we were on maneuvers. What we used to do on my home base, was Glasgow, Scotland and we used to take a fleet of ships and sail down the channel. We used to go to either Africa or Italy and then turn around again and do the same thing. So, when the Germans actually saw the fleet, they thought it was maneuvers again.

[beat]

DEVITA: We had 11 hundred troops from the first division, the Big Red One, aboard our ship. The boats are in what they call divots, and the cranes come up like cherry pickers, and they pick the boat up and drop it in the water. On the boat is a crew of three, which I was one of the three, so we were in the boats but the Army had to climb down rope ladders and jump into the boat, and the boat was going like this...because it was very rough. Some of them missed the boat, got crushed to death, so they died before they even made the invasion.

DEVITA: The Germans had a gun, and the range was ten miles. So, the transport stayed 11 miles out. So, we had to leave from 11 miles to get to the beach, and on the way to the beach there was mines in the water, glass mines. Hard to see. Some boats hit the mines and blew up, and when we got towards the beach we couldn't get on the beach, even though these boats are made to go on the beach, because there was obstacles in the water. You remember when you were a kid, you played Jacks, well the Germans made Jacks out of I-Beams, and railroad tracks, and then there was a telephone poles and on top of the telephone poles was a mine, just sitting there on top of the pole. So, if the boat happened to hit that telephone pole, that mine would fall into your boat. It wasn't an ordinary mine, it was what they call a teller mine. A teller mine when it explodes it doesn't explode up, it explodes sideways, take a man’s legs off. We were afraid of the telephone poles.

[beat]

DEVITA: You see, we carry 30-32 men. The three-man crew was in the back...So 32 men were in front of me. And when we got close to the beach, my job was to drop the ramp. I dropped the ramp and the machine guns that were hitting the ramp came into the boat. I'm in the back, I didn't see it, but they say the machine gun cut down 8, 10, 15 kids. 15 kids.

[beat]

DEVITA: In the back of the boat there was two stragglers, they didn't want to get in the front of the boat because of the machine guns. So they stayed with me, which was bad because they drew fire to me. One kid was maybe a foot away from me, and the other kid was maybe, two feet away from me. The kid two feet away from me, he got hit first. He got a machine gun that ripped his stomach open and somehow that kid, I don't know how it happened, his whole stomach was ripped open and he survived a day. The other kid that was standing next to me, the machine gun took his helmet off and part of his head, he had red hair, and he was crying, help me, help me. I had no morphine, I couldn't help him. I couldn't help him, and he kept crying help me, help me. So I prayed. I started saying the Our Father, and when I prayed he stopped screaming help me, help me, help me like that, then I don't know what possessed me I reached down... (CRYING) Excuse me. I touch his hand, because I didn’t want him to know that he was alone. I squeezed his hand, he squeezed my hand as if to say it's all right, and he died. He died.

[beat]

DEVITA: So, the coxswain yelled, “Devita pull up the ramp let's get the hell out of here, we're caught in a cross fire”. So, I pulled the handle for the ramp, the ramp did not move. I pulled it again. The ramp did not move. So, I put it on automatic, the ramp did not move. Now I'm in the back of the boat, all the way in the back, the ramp is in the front. Now, how do I get to the ramp? I couldn't see the ramp because there were dead bodies in front of it, and I had to do something I didn't want to do, I had to desecrate a dead body. I had to crawl over the dead bodies to get to the ramp, and I started crawling over the bodies and all of the sudden somebody joined me, I don't know who it was, but I was happy to have some help and when I got to the ramp, I realized why the ramp wouldn't come up. There was two GI's, never made it out of the boat, they were dead on the ramp. The weight of their body, the water, and every GI had 90 pounds of equipment on his back, so that ramp was not going to come up. So, I pointed to the guy's belt, my other friend, and we grabbed the belt and I started pulling him, and I pulled him and he moved a couple inches, and we got him off the ramp and the ramp came up. The ramp came up ‘cause it was on automatic. When the coxswain saw that, he started backing out in between the mines, in between the telephone poles, and the obstacles, going backwards, and he got us out of that situation. When we got to my ship, the crew had dropped a sled so we could put the dead bodies and the wounded on a sled, and someone yelled out, I want somebody from each boat to come aboard ship to be interrogated. I went aboard the ship, I was interrogated by a Naval Officer and a big Army Sergeant, and I told them my story what exactly happened and then this Army Sergeant, he said to me, “Son, those machine guns can only fire so long, then they overheat and they have to change the barrel.” He said, ”What you wanna do--you gotta wait. When they change the barrel, that's when you drop the ramp”. So, I told the coxswain, I says, “I'll decide when to drop the ramp this time”.

[beat]

DEVITA: I went back 15 times, 15 times. So, there was a lull just like he said, and I dropped the ramp and I got eight guys on the beach. They were killed immediately. We had 90 percent casualties on the first...it was a bloodbath. Nobody got on that beach. At the end of the day, I took 308 dead bodies back to my ship, 308. Young kids. (CRYING) Young kids… Can I take a break?

[MIDROLL]

PRODUCER: Tell me about how you felt at the end of that day.

DEVITA: Well you know, we dropped our first boats to the water at four o’clock in the morning. Ten o'clock at night we started seeing this...German's with the white flag, ten o'clock at night, (CRYING) and we felt good and that's what I made my last trip. I went back--I went back aboard the ship, and they pulled my boat up and I'm standing on the deck and I'm looking at my boat, it looks like popcorn, it was all shot up. So now I got back aboard ship and all the guys, don't forget we haven’t eaten since four o'clock in the morning. They had cheese sandwiches and coffee, all the guys went down to the mess deck and naturally everybody had a story to tell. I wanted to be alone. So I went back to my guns, I felt safe under my guns and I sat down on the cold deck and I'm saying to myself, “what the hell just happened here and why am I alive?”

[beat]

DEVITA: When I woke up the next morning, we pulled into the harbor. And the English nurses came aboard our ship, in white uniforms. We were filthy dirty, covered with blood and vomit. They were pristine, these beautiful white uniforms and they helped us. They helped us. They knew what we had gone through and they would say, it's all right son, it's all right and they helped us take the dead bodies and we unloaded the ship. We unloaded the ship. We pulled up the anchor, and we went to our home base in Glasgow, Scotland.

[long beat]

KLAY: The horror of war isn’t just about men and women facing their own death. Not simply about moments, minutes, or even hours of pure existential terror. For men like Frank, it’s also about the people they sent to death. Bringing boatload after boatload of terrified soldiers into machine gun fire. And knowing that they’d have to do it again. And again. And again. 

Because the war wasn’t over for Frank DeVita. Far from it. The USS Samuel Chase helped launch invasions in Southern France. The beaches there weren’t as heavily defended, and DeVita says he even went on shore, to look for war souvenirs. And finally when it looked like the war in Europe was over and he could go home, his ship got orders to go to the Pacific, to fight the Japanese.

But in the Phillipines, the Samuel Chase ripped open one of its hulls on a reef, and had to go back to the West Coast for repairs. 

DEVITA: So, we limped back to San Diego and they put us in dry dock. And I decided I wanted to see my mother. So, I took a bus to San Francisco and I picked up a troop train, no papers. It took five days to go from San Francisco to Grand Central Station. I got off the subway, I ran all the way home. My father was at work, my sister was working in the hospital, my kid brother was in school, I couldn't find my mom. So, I went to the neighbor next door and she said your mom is at the church rolling bandages. When I got to the church they were in a gym. They were in a big circle, these women, rolling bandages. My mom had her back to me and naturally when I came in, had my uniform, and all the women (HOLLERS) like that you know, and my mother didn't know what was going on. So she turned around, she saw me, fainted dead away. I thought I killed my mother.

KLAY: So Frank was on the East Coast. His ship was on the West Coast. And it didn’t take long for someone in his family to realize there was something suspicious going on.

DEVITA: My dad was in the First World War, so he knew about it. He says, “You know you're home for a long time, let me see your papers”. I said, “Pop I don't have any papers I'm AWOL”. “AWOL?!”, he says “Get your bag we're going to Grand Central Station, you're going back”. So, we go to Grand Central Station, I'm waiting for the train and there was two MP's. My dad walked over to the MP's and he said to them, “That's my son over there. He's AWOL, but he's going back.” My father threw me under the bus. (LAUGHS) So, the MP said “As long as he gets on the train, we're not going to pull him in”, and I went back.

KLAY: Luckily for Frank, he got on board the Samuel Chase in time to sail. The ship went to Okinawa, where it would endure frequent attacks from enemy planes. Frank would stay in the Pacific until the Japanese surrender. Then, he was discharged and went home again—this time with papers. But ever since Odysseus arrived at Ithika and couldn’t recognize his own country, veterans have discovered that homecoming is often not what they thought it’d be.

DEVITA: You know, it was very sad. I think I was less tolerant when I came home. You know why? I had been to war, and people were talking about the price of a tomato or something like that. That bothered me because there's so many important things in this world and they're talking about little stupid things. You know of a girl kissed my boyfriend or something like that, and I couldn't take that, you know. I used to walk away. I was probably not a good person coming back. I was a stranger in my own house. I didn't know what to do. Everybody was in the service. A lot of soldiers were still overseas. So all my friends in the neighborhood, the soldiers, were not home yet. I was very lonely. But I had a girlfriend. Her name was Dorothy, and she wanted to get married. So, the rest is history...yeah.

[beat]

KLAY:As it is for a lot of veterans, Frank’s history turned out to be a pretty good story. Frank’s father, the clothing designer for the Navy, got him a job and he learned his trade as a clothing designer himself. He was good at it. Maybe his exposure to so much ugliness helped him appreciate a line of work that brought beauty into the world. He went on to do work for companies like Calvin Klein and Yves Saint Laurent. 

DEVITA: You know what, I'm almost 94 years old, I'm very proud of my life. I think I accomplished a lot. I worked for three different companies, I ended up Vice President of three different companies. And I’ve got three of the most beautiful kids--my wife gave me the best gifts, three most beautiful children. Oh, I love them. I love them.

KLAY: Frank has lived a long and full life. But until recently, he didn’t talk about the war...even to the people he loved… 

DEVITA: My wife, God bless her. She was so good. So understanding and compassionate. I used to have nightmares. She'd say “take it easy, everything's going to be all right, take it easy.” You see all those dead bodies. I still have nightmares. You know for 70 years, I never talked about it. My wife died six years ago, she never knew what I actually...what I went through, and you know why, because I came home, they were so pristine, so innocent, why should I bring my trouble onto them? I didn't want to bring my troubles to them.

KLAY: This reticence might seem surprising in our age of over sharing, but it isn’t an uncommon sentiment. I’ll never forget chatting with an Iraqi refugee who told me she didn’t tell stories of war either. “People have a right to live in peace”, she said, and to not have to think about the things that happen in war, the things that give her nightmares...

DEVITA: When I came home there was nobody to talk to. I mean I could've talked to a priest or something like that, but there was no psychiatrists or anything like that. You talk to any veteran, they’ll tell you they’ll never talk about the war. It's too hard, it's engrained in your brain, you don't want to talk about it. It's like a big weight that I've been carrying around, like an elephant on my back for 70 years. Now I want to talk about it, because...I want to go to young kids, talk to kids in high school, talk to people in churches, and tell them because I don't want this thing to die. I want to keep it alive.

KLAY: Keeping these stories alive is the very least we owe our veterans. We owe it to them because war is too strange to be processed alone. We owe it to them because when, after decades veterans do finally speak, we must be prepared to listen. We owe it to them because of the courage and the humanity it took to hold the hand of a dying soldier and calm him with a recitation of the Our Father under machine gun fire. But especially we owe it to them because war is not waged by individuals, but by nations. Because even after our withdrawal from Afghanistan, America remains at war, conducting counter terror operations in more than a dozen countries. Because being a responsible citizen means having some idea what that means. 

[credits]

KLAY: American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories is a production of Insignia Films, and PRX for GBH. The lead podcast producer is Curtis Fox, the composer and sound designer is Ian Coss, and the executive producers for Insignia Films are Amanda Pollak and Leah Williams. Stephen Ives did the interview with Frank DeVita. Thanks to Kathleen Horan and Matt Gottesfeld for their research. For GBH, Devin Maverick Robins is managing producer, and Judith Vechione and Elizabeth Deane are executive producers. 

KLAY: Funding for American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories was provided by The Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding was provided by The Wexner Family Charitable Fund, Battelle Memorial Institute, JPMorgan Chase, and Analog Devices.

KLAY: For more powerful memories from veterans, visit PBS.org/American Veteran, where you can also watch the American Veteran television series and digital short films. You can also learn more by using #AmericanVeteranPBS.

I’m Phil Klay. Thanks for listening.

<NARRATION> Frank DeVita, whose story you just heard, passed away on March 12, 2022 at the age of 96. We remain grateful for his service and for his courage in sharing these difficult memories, ensuring that the sacrifices of D-Day will be remembered for generations to come.

[GBH sting]

Note: Red text denotes Archival Transcription.