>D-Day veteran Frank DeVita says he’ll never forget how tough it was to be the man in charge of dropping the ramp as his landing craft approached Omaha Beach. “This was our shield as long as it was up. And as we approached the shoreline where the water hits the sand, and the machine guns were hitting the front of the boat—it was like a typewriter,” DeVita, who was barely 19 on June 6, 1944, remembers.
>When he was ordered to drop the ramp, he paused. “I figured in my mind when I drop that damn ramp, the bullets that are hitting the ramp are going to come into the boat. So I froze.”
>But then the coxswain again yelled at DeVita to lower the ramp, and he followed the order. “I dropped the ramp,” he said. “And the first 7, 8, 9, 10 guys went down like you were cutting down wheat…They were kids.”