Bristol D-Day Veteran Art Cammarota: ‘For Some Reason, I Was Never Afraid’

Teens today love their war games. Click, click and the battle begins. They also crowd movie theaters to watch their superheroes perform might feats to banish evil.

On June 6, 1944, when 156,000 troops landed in Normandy Beach as part of Operation Overlord, Art Cammarota was among the tens of thousands of teenagers also ready for battle, only without controllers and monitors. Cammarota’s crowd were tasked to break the evil stranglehold of Adolph Hitler and his Nazi regime.

These youngsters carried lethal weapons, hauled heavy mortars, struggled in unwieldy tanks to blast the German army from occupied Europe. When then-18-year-old Cammarota was thrown to the bloody sand as the invaders were strafed by German planes, his first vision was no animation.

As he struggled to his feet, his eyes beheld a nightmare. Real corpses; real dead Americans and real Germans littered the beach.

Under fire from the cliffs above Utah Beach, where his unit ate, slept and fought among the unburied, the 18-year-old U.S. Army private began to understand the meaning of war.

“We did our jobs but, for some reason, I was never afraid. A lot of the guys weren’t afraid. Some of the older ones were very frightened, maybe because they were married and had families. I don’t know what was instilled in me that kept fear away.”

Allied progress was slow at first, but the Nazi’s lack of preparation and Hitler’s miscalculation about where the invasion would take place helped the allies successfully dupe German military leaders into believing the campaign would begin in Calais, north of Normandy.

Two other factors led to a successful penetration into France by the Allied storm from the five beaches: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. First, Hitler slept through because his aides were wary of waking him with the news.

Related: Bristol Veteran Joe D’Emidio Recalls D-Day Landing

Second, Germany’s greatest general, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, was absent from the Theater. He’d gone home to Germany to help celebrate his wife Lucia’s birthday. There was no one to order the release of the heavy artillery on standby near Normandy.

“If Rommel had been in France, I believe we would have been pushed right back into the water,” Cammarota said, adding that the population was so happy to be free of the Nazis that they went out to their fields, dug up the wines they’d hidden and shared it with their saviors.

Last Thursday, as Cammarota watched the scenes from the 75th anniversary of D-Day, the images brought back vivid memories of the war. Cammarota and his wife Liz visited Normany twice after the war. They stood where rows and rows of white crosses stood sentinel over the dead.

They also met up with German families in Normandy to mourn their own losses.

“We became friends, after all that. But I’ll tell you, the world we fought for is not the world we have today,” he said.

Cammarota and fellow D-Day veteran Joe D’Emidio will be honored by the mayor and Council Monday for their bravery. The honors will be bestowed at 7 p.m. and Bristol Borough: Raising the Bar will host a pre-meeting reception for the public at 6 p.m.