On “The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special,” Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro spoke with several veterans about their experiences on D-Day in preparation for the 75th Anniversary of the landing at Normandy. George Ciampa served in the US Army 607th Graves Registration. He shares his experiences on that fateful day on June 6th, 1944. Video and partial transcript below.
George Ciampa: When we got to the shores of Normandy, they say there are four or five thousand ships out there and I believe it. There were ships all around you, and the shelling above us, 88’s, you could hear them screaming, we called them Screaming Mimi’s. But we saw ships getting hit and I remember a tanker blowing up and there’s bodies in the water and there’s debris in the water, and you know I was 18 years old, 112 pounds; I was a skinny kid. I finally got down a rope ladder and with all the gear on and I get into an LCI landing craft, that’s the smaller Higgins boats, and we’re heading in… I could hear the 88’s screaming over us, and I remember when we started heading in and we came back out, and we started heading in and we came back out. I thought it was because of the shelling and thinking we’re going to get hit anytime, but I found out years later that the guy that’s driving that thing, he’s looking for place to land because the Germans had obstacles in the water to keep us from getting all the way in, so we had to wade in, you’ve probably seen pictures of that. I was so frightened. I mean I was blacked out momentarily, I don’t remember getting off the LCI, and I talked to a buddy of mine years later, and I said, “Hey Gus tell me what happened, did we really wade in the water?” he said “Don’t you remember that?” I said, “No.” He said, “We did; we waded in the water with our rifles over our heads and everything.”
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