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Sixty-five years ago, two teens from the same North Carolina community waited off the coast of France for the start of an invasion that turned the tide of World War II.
The friends were aboard different ships. But knowing someone from home was close by comforted each of them.
Pete Lail and Bill Brown had gone to Oak Hill High School in Caldwell County, joined the Navy together and sweated through boot camp side by side.
On D-Day, June 6, 1944, the 19-year-olds steered landing craft toward Omaha Beach at Normandy. On June 7, when their boats happened to pass, they recognized each other and waved.
“I was very surprised,” said Brown, 84, of Lenoir. “We didn't see each other again until after the war.”
Such fleeting moments are etched in the memories of veterans who fought in a battle that helped free much of Europe from Nazi Germany, claimed thousands of American lives, and changed even more.
On June 9, while the battle to take the beach roared on, Ray Stewart of Gastonia almost got killed climbing down the side of his transport ship into a landing craft.
About halfway, big waves hit his feet and slammed him against the side of the boat. Stewart decided to jump into the boat, but got hung in the net. As an officer pulled him into the landing craft, his machine gun fell into the water. Stewart went ashore weaponless and had to borrow a rifle to stand guard duty that night.
When he left Omaha Beach, Stewart was a tank gunner/driver with the Second Armored Division and fought in the Battle of the Bulge on the way to Berlin.
Good or bad, images from the Normandy invasion mean more to veterans as the years roll by.
“The older you get the more you understand things,” said Lail, 84, of eastern Caldwell County. “ Sometimes, thinking about that day, it makes you a little jumpy in the belly. Your heart beats a little faster. But the boys who got killed are the ones who paid the debts.”
About 16 million American troops survived the war and 2 million of those are still living, according to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. About 900 die each day.
“The experience of all our World War II veterans is important,” said museum spokeswoman Kacey Hill. “June 6, 1944 – D-Day – was an extraordinary day unparalleled in scope, size and sacrifice. On the 65th anniversary of D-Day, it's especially crucial to focus on those who not only witnessed the event, but made victory possible.”
‘I felt pretty helpless'
Shortly after daybreak on June 6, Lail pointed his landing craft toward Omaha Beach with the first assault groups.
“You could see the smoke and hear the big guns,” he said. “They were shooting around us, and sand or shrapnel was hitting the side of the boat. It was a dern mess.”
Smoke thickened the closer he got to shore, and the smell from explosions was so bad it stung his eyes.
“I focused on getting to one spot on the beachhead,” Lail said. “When we landed, troops hit the beach like geese flying.”
Operating another landing craft about midday, Bill Brown couldn't believe all the ships around him – the biggest armada in history, he'd later learn.
“I'd never seen anything like it,” he said. “Looking toward the shoreline, I saw a lot of smoke and dust. And the noise, I've never heard so much noise in my life.”
His mission was to pick up wounded, but about 100 yards from shore, his plywood craft hit an underwater obstacle and started sinking.
The crew pulled the boat ashore, and Brown spent the next six hours on a beach littered with dead and wounded and wrecked equipment. His boat's 30-caliber machine guns were removed and given to Army soldiers pinned down along the water's edge.
“I didn't have a weapon,” Brown said. “I felt pretty helpless. There was nothing I could do.”
Symbol of sacrifice
President Obama will visit Normandy today to pay his respect to the thousands who died there during the great invasion.
Ray Stewart, 85, expresses his feelings as a member of the gun squad in the World War II Last Man Club of Gaston County. The group has 142 veterans and a 50-member Honor Guard that provides free military rites at funerals.
Since 1994, Stewart has helped deliver 21-gun salutes at services for hundreds of veterans, including those who were in the Normandy invasion.
As he squeezes the trigger, he thinks of all who served in the war. They're like family to him now.
“I remember they were there with me,” Stewart said. “We were all in the same boat.”
Today, Brown and Lail live within 12 miles of each other in eastern Caldwell County. They meet occasionally and talk about old times.
Brown remembers how he shuttled back and forth between England and Omaha Beach from July until October, 1944, losing two landing craft, a pontoon boat and a ship. In his mind, the beach is always a place of smoke and bodies and broken things.
For Lail, talk of D-Day brings forgotten images to the surface. Like the detached hand he saw in the sand at Omaha Beach.
It's a symbol of the sacrifice he salutes.
