Akron Beacon Journal...
Veterans Day observed; D-Day vet remembers seeing boxcars full of Holocaust victims  
November 15, 2011 

TALLMADGE: He saw incredible and horrible things when he was at war. 

In spite of those things, William “Bill” DiPuccio Sr., now 93, said his service in Europe — from Normandy to Berlin — “was a great time of my life.” 

DiPuccio was among countless men and women across the country who remembered their time in uniform Friday as the nation celebrated Veterans Day. 

Across the region, ceremonies included events at the University of Akron, at the Green Veterans Memorial Park, at several area high schools and at the Veterans Section of Copley Cemetery on Copley Road, where a new 50-foot flagpole was dedicated. 

At the Copley Township event, members of the Garfield High School Navy Junior ROTC program, along with members of VFW Post 7971 and American Legion Post 473, took part. Children from the Kids Academy of Copley held flags and watched from the cemetery and from across the street at the school. 

Before the ceremony, Army Reserve 1st Lt. Adrianne Hailey of Akron, a member of a Georgia Army Reserve medical unit, snapped pictures of her daughter, Carnita Hailey, a 17-year-old senior in the Garfield JROTC program. 

“She made me proud; they all made me proud,” said Hailey, 43, a registered nurse who served six years in the Navy after high school and joined an Army Reserve unit two years ago. Her daughter plans to enter the Army or Navy after high school. 

DiPuccio, a retired machinist with National Acme in Cleveland, lived in Chesterland until he moved to Stow-Glen Retirement Village’s assisted- living section two years ago. He spoke to the Beacon Journal at the Tallmadge home of his son, William DiPuccio Jr., 52, a Navy veteran. Both took part in a Veterans Day ceremony Nov. 4 at Tallmadge High School.

The elder DiPuccio, born in October 1918, was drafted into the Army in 1942 and arrived in England in May 1943 after serving as a gunner on the Queen Elizabeth, which carried 25,000 U.S. troops across the ocean. 

He landed with the third wave on D-Day at Omaha Beach and was part of the 852nd Engineer Aviation Battalion. 

From Normandy to Berlin in 1945, he and those he served with built and maintained more than a half-dozen air strips. They did the same thing in England before they arrived in France. 

He recalls a lieutenant being blown up early in Normandy when he grabbed a booby-trapped machine gun. 

DiPuccio, a first-generation American whose parents were born in Italy, said he and his comrades were strafed often by German planes. 

“If there was a place to hide, you would hide, and if there wasn’t, you’d run,” he said. 

Now a father of three, grandfather of four and great-grandfather of four with a great-great-grandchild on the way, DiPuccio said he feels fortunate to have made it home without a scratch. 

“I came out of it whole,” he said. 

Still, he deals with some lingering, disturbing memories. 

He saw bodies of American soldiers buried in a mass grave at Normandy. He saw Americans killed by Nazis on a hillside in Germany. And he saw boxcars filled with Holocaust victims. 

“You can’t get it out of your head,” he said. 

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