This Military Service Page was created/owned by
Tommy Burgdorf (Birddog), FC2
to remember
Vaghi, Jr., Joseph Peter, LCDR.
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Contact Info
Home Town Bethel, CT
Date of Passing Aug 25, 2012
Location of Interment Gate of Heaven Cemetery - Silver Spring, Maryland
Joseph Vaghi was born in Bethel, Connecticut on June 27, 1920, one of nine children born to Italian immigrants. His father owned and operated a successful cabinetry business and during the war received a contract to make rings for the Norden bombsite. All six boys in the family would eventually serve in the armed forces.
Vaghi attended Providence College on a football scholarship, graduating in December of 1942. He immediately went to midshipman school and was commissioned as a naval officer in April of 1943. He asked to train for amphibious operations, hoping to be the skipper of a landing craft. Seasickness made that impossible, and he was then selected to be a beach master. He trained extensively for the invasion of France, in the United States and England, and was put in charge of a platoon in Company C, 6th Naval Beach Battalion.
It would be his job to use flags, blinkers, and a megaphone to get men, vehicles and supplies safely ashore on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, D Day. At 7:35 A.M., Vaghi and his platoon landed alongside the 16th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division, on the Easy Red section of the beach. The tide was low, and they came ashore under heavy enemy fire. Vaghi and his men ran several hundred yards past scores of wounded men huddling on the sand and shingle. He went to work, directing his men, struggling to clear a path off the beach, helping the wounded and the dying.
The explosion of a German artillery shell knocked Vaghi unconscious. When he came to, his clothes were on fire and he was wounded in the knee. But he kept at it, struggling to remove cans of gasoline from a burning jeep before they could explode and kill the wounded men lying all around him. Eventually, an Army officer told Vaghi to tell the frightened GIs in his sector to “get the hell off the beach.” He used his megaphone to do just that, and several succeeded in using a bangalore torpedo to blast an opening in the barbed wire that blocked their exit from the beach.
In spite of his injury, Vaghi remained on the beach for several days and although the ground fighting had moved inland, German planes still strafed the landing zones at night. After 23 days in Normandy, Vaghi returned to the United States and was given an assignment training other officers in amphibious warfare. But before long before he decided he wanted to go back into action, and volunteered for combat duty.
In the spring of 1945, he was sent across the Pacific for the invasion of Okinawa. Vaghi came ashore on April 1st and was astonished to discover that, unlike Omaha Beach, there was virtually no opposition from the Japanese that day.
After the war Vaghi attended Catholic University and became an architect. He married Agnes Crivella in 1947 and settled in Washington, DC, where they raised four sons.
World War II/Asiatic-Pacific Theater/Okinawa Gunto Operation
From Month/Year
March / 1945
To Month/Year
June / 1945
Description The Battle of Okinawa, codenamed Operation Iceberg. was fought on the Ryukyu Islands of Okinawa and was the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific War of World War II. The 82-day-long battle lasted from early April until mid-June 1945. After a long campaign of island hopping, the Allies were approaching Japan, and planned to use Okinawa, a large island only 340 mi (550 km) away from mainland Japan, as a base for air operations on the planned invasion of Japanese mainland (coded Operation Downfall). Four divisions of the U.S. 10th Army (the 7th, 27th, 77th, and 96th) and two Marine Divisions (the 1st and 6th) fought on the island. Their invasion was supported by naval, amphibious, and tactical air forces.
The battle has been referred to as the "typhoon of steel" in English, and tetsu no ame ("rain of steel") or ("violent wind of steel") in Japanese. The nicknames refer to the ferocity of the fighting, the intensity of kamikaze attacks from the Japanese defenders, and to the sheer numbers of Allied ships and armored vehicles that assaulted the island. The battle resulted in the highest number of casualties in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Based on Okinawan government sources, mainland Japan lost 77,166 soldiers, who were either killed or committed suicide, and the Allies suffered 14,009 deaths (with an estimated total of more than 65,000 casualties of all kinds). Simultaneously, 42,000–150,000 local civilians were killed or committed suicide, a significant proportion of the local population. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki together with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria caused Japan to surrender less than two months after the end of the fighting on Okinawa.
