Nicholas J. Cancilla comes home

Hack Stone sends us a link to Philly.com which reports that Nicholas J. Cancilla is home from Betio Island. Hondo told us when his earthly remains were identified in September.

“He needs to be honored,” said Darlene Johnson of Virginia, Cancilla’s niece and one of his only living relatives. “I’m glad he’s coming home.”

It was in late 1942, several months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, that Cancilla joined the Marine Corps. A photograph in the Mirror shows the young man – just 17 when he signed up – smiling in a crisp dress uniform.

Raised by immigrant parents, Cancilla grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Pleasant Valley, near the Altoona city limits.

[…]

Cancilla was only a teenager, but he’d already earned a reputation as a hard-fighting, beer-drinking tough guy – not a bad prospect as a Marine, said Dave Servello of Altoona, who became close friends with Cancilla’s brother in the last decade of his life.

“He didn’t take anybody’s crap,” Servello recalled Frank saying. “Certain guys come out of training – even though they’re not officers, they come out leaders. He was the guy.”

Like most of the other Marines that we read about from Betio, Cancilla was killed in the first hours of the battle, but he will finally come home this morning;

A funeral Mass, open to the public, is set for 10:30 a.m. Monday at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Debbie Santella of Santella Funeral Home said. After that, Cancilla is set to be laid to rest at Calvary Cemetery – either at the mausoleum or outdoors, she said, depending on conditions.

The military burial marks a small piece of closure for a family with a history of military service and loss. In 1969, a quarter-century after Cancilla’s death, his nephew – named Nicholas Cancilla in his honor – was killed on a river patrol boat in South Vietnam.

Category: We Remember