Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Six Brothers Serve US in WWII, While US Raids Father's House...He was from Italy !!!

The ANNOTICO Report

 

Tony Savella joined the Navy after Pearl Harbor, and encouraged his 5 other brothers to join up. Carmine, Razzie and Ray joined Tony in the Navy, but Pete and Patsy ended up in the Army.

One day while the brothers were serving their country, five of them overseas, government officials raided Antonio Santella's house. Tony Santella said the officials were suspicious of his father because he was from Italy. They took a shotgun away from him that the brothers retrieved after the war.

After Pearl Harbor, 6 Brothers Heard the Call

Roxbury siblings took up arms to fight in WWII

Daily Record 

                                                                                                                                                                                      

By Abbott Koloff
November 11, 2008

Growing up during the Depression, the six Santella brothers from Roxbury were always together.

They picked blueberries and sold them to vacationers at Lake Hopatcong. They retrieved scraps of coal that fell off trains at the Port Morris rail yard and used them to heat their house.

And after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, one by one, they went to war.

Tony Santella, 87, the one surviving brother who now resides in Florida, said he was at a girlfriend's house when he heard a radio report about Pearl Harbor.

"I didn't know what that was at the time," Tony said.

Three months later, he joined the Navy, and told his other brothers to do the same if they wanted to live through World War II. Carmine, Razzie and Ray joined Tony in the Navy, but Pete and Patsy ended up in the Army. They all came home, all got married, and had a total of 17 children.

Of eight siblings, Tony and a sister, Louise, are the only ones still alive.

Leading up to Veterans Day today, Tony Santella and several families members talked about the family's service during World War II.

Antonio Santella, the boys' father, had come from Italy and spoke only a little English, never learning to read or write, working as a laborer in the Port Morris rail yard. Mary, his wife, died when her youngest son Ray was eight years old. Ray's nickname growing up had been "Rags," said his wife, Lee Santella of Roxbury, because he always wore hand-me-down clothes.

One day while the brothers were serving their country, five of them overseas, government officials raided Antonio Santella's house. Tony Santella said the officials were suspicious of his father because he was from Italy. They took a shotgun away from him that the brothers retrieved after the war.

"My father was mad," Tony Santella said. "He said, 'I have six boys in this war and this is what you do to me?'"

The family had sacrificed more than its share. While the six brothers all survived the war, not all were unscathed.

Pete Santella participated in the Normandy invasion with the Army. Part of an artillery unit, he later was wounded in the ankle during the Battle of the Bugle.

Tony Santella served on the USS Healy, a destroyer in the Pacific, participating in a number of battles. He was at Iwo Jima at the same time as his brother Ray. Once, standing at a gunnery station during a typhoon, he remembers the ship rolling so much that he prepared to jump overboard.

"I'm glad I didn't, so I'm here," he said.

Razzie Santella and others survived their ship being sunk by a torpedo in the Pacific. He told his children that he expected to die when a Japanese submarine surfaced nearby. For some reason, the Japanese gave them food and cigarettes and left them to be rescued.

"He said he was amazed they didn't kill them," said Lee Godfrey, one of his daughters.

Ray Santella, the youngest brother, was on a ship in the Pacific preparing for the invasion of Japan when a another ship pulled alongside to share provisions. His brother Carmine was on board.

"They spent the night together," Lee Santella said.

When they parted, Lee Santella said, they hugged and kissed, both expecting to die during the coming invasion. Then the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, ending the war and making the invasion unnecessary.

Ray Santella stayed in the Navy after the war and was part of a shore patrol unit in North Africa that protected a movie crew, his wife said. All that time, he carried with him a crystal dog that his father had given him as a keepsake from home.

After he left the Navy, he walked into a restaurant where his wife worked as a waitress.

"He was irresistible," Lee Santella said. "You had to love him."

He was an ironworker for 25 years but his wife said the war left him with recurring nightmares.

The other brothers also came home and found jobs -- Patsy, the oldest, became a construction contractor; Pete worked with the Morris County road crew and had his own blasting company; Tony was an ironworker in Chicago; Carmine was an electrician and Razzie a machinist, both working at Picatinny Arsenal.

Razzie Santella met his wife, Jean, at a dance at Bertram's Island at Lake Hopatcong. He was a volunteer firefighter in Roxbury and headed a Picatinny machine shop. His children said he participated in secret projects during the Vietnam War, one involving cluster bombs.

He became known for his patriotism, decorating his house in Roxbury with American flags. He once attached a flag to a helium balloon that he controlled with a string, but it apparently flew a little too high. Law enforcement officials asked him to take it down.

"It might have interfered with small aircraft," said Carol Jean Waldron, one of his daughters.

And after he died last year, his coffin was decorated with images of an aircraft carrier and planes.

Tony Santella said he didn't talk much about his war experiences. Then one day his granddaughter, now 22, told him she was studying history in school and had been shown a documentary about Japanese planes crashing into U.S. ships during World War II.

"Were you there?" she asked.

Tony Santella told her that he was, along with some of his brothers. He said his granddaughter recently got a tattoo of an anchor on her arm. When he asked her why, she told him she wanted to look at it for the rest of her life, and to think about him.

 

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