A World War II Navy veteran was being grieved Thursday following his dying while en route to France to celebrate the 80th anniversary of D-Day, a trip companions said he’d spoken excitedly about making.
Robert “Al” Persichitti of Fairport, New York fell ill during a visit to Germany last week and passed in a hospital, his longtime preacher and friend, the Rev. William Leone, said. Persichitti was 102.
“He’s been to most of the World War II memories down in Washington and Louisiana, and he liked to get to the D-Day commemoration ceremony, too,” Leone, pastor of the Church of Saint Jerome in East Rochester, where Persichitti listened Mass every week, said by phone.
“But the Lord brought him in Germany. He was on his route to France but didn’t create it.”
A friend who was touring with Persichitti said a physician was with him when he passed on May 30. “She put his favourite musician, Frank Sinatra, on her phone and he peacefully left us,” Al DeCarlo revealed in Rochester.
After enrolling in the US Navy in 1942, Persichitti was appointed as a radioman to the USS Eldorado and in 1944 flowed to the Pacific where he accepted position in the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, according to the museum. He was in the harbour at Iwo Jima when to noticed the raising of the US banner atop Mount Suribachi which had been replaced there in 2019, just before his 97th birthday.
In a discussion with WROC in Rochester, before he departed for Europe, Persichitti said he’d been in his cardiologist’s post when he knew about the trip.
“And he says, ‘Go!” he remembered his doctor informing him. “I’m eager to be reaching,” he said.
A retired general school teacher, Persichitti regularly talked about his wartime adventures in schools and community groups, Leone said. He also authored an autobiography for his household in 2015.
Persichitti taught the Pledge of Allegiance at this year’s Memorial Day commemoration in East Rochester.
“He desired,” Leone said, “to preserve the remembrance of the sacrifices that had been made alive.”