Navy veteran Robert Persichitti at the 74th Reunion of Honor ceremony on Iwo To, Japan, on March 23, 2019. The ceremony is held annually to commemorate the heroism and sacrifices made by service members during the Battle of Iwo Jima and World War II. Persichitti died Friday, May 31, 2024, on his way to the D-Day commemoration in Normandy, France. (Mark Gibson/U.S. Marine Corps)
A 102-year-old World War II veteran died Friday while en route to France to take part in the remembrances planned for the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, according to news reports and a veterans organization.
Robert Persichitti died in a hospital in Germany during his travels toward Normandy where veterans and officials from the U.S. and other countries gathered this week to mark the anniversary of Operation Overlord — the June 6, 1944, amphibious assault on France’s northern beaches by some 160,000 Allied troops, including 73,000 Americans. The Rochester, N.Y., chapter of Honor Flight, with which Persichitti had been associated, confirmed his death in a social media statement.
Persichitti was a Navy veteran who served as radioman aboard the USS Eldorado — an amphibious force command ship — in the Pacific during World War II, according to his biography in the New York State Senate Veterans Hall of Fame, into which he was inducted in 2020. He served at Iwo Jima, Okinawa and Guam during the war.
Persichitti was among the American troops on Feb. 19, 1945, that witnessed Marines raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima, a moment captured by The Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal that would become one of the most iconic images of the war. In 2019, Persichitti returned to Mount Suribachi as part of a veterans program with the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. A Stars and Stripes reporter spoke to Persichitti during that visit.
“I was on the deck” of the Eldorado, Persichitti said, as he looked up toward where the flag had been raised twice that day 74 years earlier. “When I got on the island today, I just broke down.”
Persichitti, then 96, recalled some of the grievous injuries that Marines suffered as they were brought aboard his ship. He said he witnessed several burials at sea.
“When they made the landing, they started losing all these guys,” he said. “It wasn’t a very good sight.”
After the war, he became a carpentry teacher in the Rochester, N.Y., school system, his biography said. In recent years, Persichitti had regularly visited school kids in Pittsford, N.Y., just outside Rochester, to speak about World War II, according to the Pittsford School System. In April, he celebrated his 102nd birthday with students at Calkins Road Middle School, according to Rochester’s WROC TV news station.
Al DeCarlo, a friend of Persichitti’s who was traveling to Normandy with him, told another Rochester TV station, WHEC News 10, that Persichitti grew ill while aboard a ship in the North Sea. He was airlifted to a hospital and died shortly after in Germany, DeCarlo told the news station.
“The doctor was with him. He was not alone,” DeCarlo told the station. “He was at peace and was comfortable. [The doctor] put his favorite singer, Frank Sinatra, on her phone, and he peacefully left us.”
DeCarlo said he believed his longtime friend would have “no regrets.”
“He taught us how to live every day to the fullest and he left his tank empty,” he told WHEC from Germany.
