George Ciampa: A WWII Veteran Who Became a Filmmaker at 81
I met George Ciampa at a dinner in Normandy. A producer on The Girl Who Wore Freedom told me to look for a World War II veteran who had become a filmmaker, and I couldn’t find him. The man I was pointed to, in black glasses and a baseball cap, looked 65 or 70. I couldn’t believe it when I heard how old he was.
George landed on Utah Beach in June 1944, ten days before his 19th birthday. He served in the 607th Graves Registration Company, the soldiers who recovered and buried the fallen, from Normandy to the end of the war. Sixty years later, at 81, he started making documentaries about the price of freedom, and he made six of them without ever being paid. He sat down with us for five conversations in 2021, when he was 95. He died on January 3, 2024, at 98.
These are his episodes, in order. Start at the beginning if you can. His story builds.
George’s story, in five conversations
A kid from Boston, one of ten children of Italian immigrants, wanted to fly fighter planes. He failed the Air Corps eye test twice, was drafted at 18 and put into graves registration. George starts with the deaths that frightened him as a little boy and takes us to Utah Beach.
Watch on YouTube
Through the coldest winter anyone there could remember, George’s company dug in at Henri-Chapelle, Belgium, and buried 17,300 Americans in a temporary cemetery. When the Battle of the Bulge broke out, they went onto the frozen battlefields to bring the fallen back.
Watch on YouTube
What happens to a 19-year-old who has spent a year burying the dead when the war suddenly ends? For George, it was a circus, a young trapeze star named Margot, and the long road home.
Watch on YouTube
Newspaper advertising, a lost condominium, and then a call from friends in Belgium: people were riding bikes through the cemetery where his company had buried 17,300 soldiers. George spent a year writing letters to get it protected.
Watch on YouTube
He meant to make one documentary, filming a trip that taught four young history teachers reverence for the American cemeteries in Europe. The emails that came in afterward kept him going for six films over 14 years.
Watch on YouTubeSaying goodbye
Recorded in January 2024, after George died at 98, peacefully, surrounded by his loved ones. I remember the first time I met him, his six documentaries, and what he still means to me.
Watch on YouTubeChristian