STATUES will be officially named in memory of the heroic soldiers who set out from Portland for the D-Day landings.

The naming ceremony for six statues, which were erected at Portland Harbour last summer, will take place at Castletown Pier on June 6, the 74th anniversary of D-Day.

The statues were commissioned by Castletown D-Day Centre and represent a named individual who was one of the millions involved in the largest maritime invasion of all time. It is intended that, periodically, each statue will then be re-dedicated to another hero.

The naming ceremony will take place 75 years after the Phoenix caissons were constructed during the Second World War.

These two huge structures made of concrete, each weighing 7,700 tons, were towed over to Normandy in June 1944 to act as a breakwater, forming part of the Mulberry Harbour at Arromanches, off Gold Beach.

In a series of Looking Back articles we're going to be looking at the lives of the soldiers who the statues are being named after. The first soldier whose story we are sharing is GI Santo John Benigno, nicknamed ‘Bingo’ by his fellow GIs.

Weymouth became a key place for Bingo to be posted to - he fell in love with a local girl who became his wife.

Of Sicilian descent, Bingo was born in 1921 in Montreal, Canada and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, with his five brothers, all of whom survived the Second World War.

Bingo enlisted at the age of 18 as soon as he graduated high school in 1939, and was assigned as a combat engineer to the 1st Engineer Combat Battalion of the 1st Infantry Division.

In August 1942, he sailed from New York to Scotland on the Queen Mary, and travelled south by train to Salisbury, where Bingo’s unit received several weeks of intensive and saw action in Tunisia and Sicily.

He was later promoted to technical sergeant, and returned to England in November 1943, being billeted near Weymouth. His unit undertook months of amphibious assault training before boarding ships on Portland over to Normandy in June 1944.

Whilst he was in Weymouth, he met a local girl called Stella Banks of Sussex Road, Westham, at a United Service Organisation (USO) dance.

Stella had seven sisters and one brother, Albert, whose bicycle Bingo would borrow to ride back to base after visiting her.

They married in Weymouth before Bingo left for Normandy in 1944.

Bingo and his unit landed on Omaha Beach in the early hours of June 6, carrying out their mission of clearing the Normandy beaches of mines and obstacles,and blowing up enemy concrete bunkers to establish a route off the beaches despite sustaining heavy casualties.

Seeing service in France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Germany, he returned home to Brooklyn with nothing more than a bout of malaria in May 1945. Bingo and Stella remarried in Brooklyn, New York, after the war and had three sons together.

Sgt Santo Benigno is depicted on the Caissons on guard duty talking with a senior officer.

These Grade II listed reinforced concrete structures are two of 212 caissons produced during the Second World War.

Weymouth-based company Dead Walk Designs Ltd took on the challenging statue project, working to create two British sailors, two American GIs and two dockyard workers.

Shaun Davies, co-founder of the company and Portland local, explained the design process: “It was quite a complicated project – they were after six individual statues, but because unique statues takes a lot of work, we sculpted one set of hands, arms and legs made moulds from them for each piece.

“It took us about six weeks to make them and had some help from the port with a spare tug to get them craned up onto the caissons in two pieces, then we put them back together.”

The statues are managed by the Castletown-D-Day Centre and funded as part of the Castletown Regeneration Initiative by local businessman Derek Luckhurst. Anyone who wishes to nominate a future dedication should contact Stephen George by emailing ddaydorset@gmail.com or calling 07751 663953.