It was the largest seaborne operation in history and one of the bloodiest battles of World War II. History calls it D-Day and Deloy Lawson was right in the thick of it.
Lawson, the brother of former Poplar Bluff City Manager Tom Lawson, was born at his grandmother's house in Neelyville. But home was wherever construction jobs took his stepfather.
"My brother, Tom, went to three grade schools in one year," he said. "And I went to three high schools in one year.
"I got kindly put out with it and enlisted (at age 17 before graduating from high school)."
The year was 1943. He spent the next three years in the Navy, serving in both major theaters of the war (western Europe and the South Pacific).
On Thursday, June 6, 1944, Lawson was on one of 5,000 ships poised off the beaches at Normandy, France. The target was a 50-mile stretch of beaches, dubbed Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. The beaches were mined and covered with obstacles and guarded by German gun emplacements.
Despite a heavy naval bombardment meant to soften the German positions, the soldiers landing on the beaches were met with withering fire.
And Lawson was right in the middle of it.
He was among a four-man crew that operated a landing craft to put soldiers on the beach.
"Our ages were 16, me and another guy were 17, and the old man on the boat was 18," Lawson said.
They went in on the 25th wave at Omaha Beach.
"We took in soldiers of the Big Red 1. They loaded on our boat the day before. We ate breakfast on the deck on the way across. For some, it would be their last meal.
"The first wave hit the beach about 6:30 (a.m.). We got on the beach about 9:30 (a.m.).
"We had a hard time landing (in the high wind)," Lawson said. "My job was to crank the ramp down to let (the soldiers) get off. I was where they (the enemy) could see me. We were under a lot of artillery fire. Artillery shells splashed water in my face. Some schrapnel hit my helmet."
But that wasn't the only threat.
"A German dive bomber strafed us. He didn't miss me 6 inches."
But Lawson's craft was armed with a machine gun and the teenager operating it (Lawson was the magazine loader for the gunner) opened up on the enemy dive bomber scoring a hit.
As it splashed down, "we were jumping up and down hollering, 'we got him, we got him.' We were hoping to get somebody to paint a Swastika on our boat to show we got one."
During the landing, 4,414 American, Canadian and British soldiers were killed. Omaha Beach was the bloodiest. About 2,400 were killed during that landing, a little more than half the casualties totaled at all the other landing sites.
"Of all things, it was a miracle. I never got a scratch," Lawson said.
But having survived Omaha Beach didn't mean the war was over for Lawson.
There was some training back in the states, then, on a newly-built boat he sailed to the Pacific.
"We were at Tinian in the Mariana Island group when the first bomb was dropped (on Japan). They had a big air base at Tinian and that's where the bomber took off that dropped that first bomb.
"We found out later if everything had happened like planned, we would have been in the group that would have invaded Japan sometime in October or November (1944)."
But that didn't happen since Japan surrendered following the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So now Lawson's ship was sailing for home ... but it wasn't a leisurely sail. His ship ran into a typhoon.
"We lost our anchor, our screw, we had no power. The wind carried us 80 miles in 24 hours. We were crippled so bad we pulled mattresses off bunks and stuffed them in holes and stuck timbers in, too, to keep from sinking. We sent out an SOS for whoever was in the area."
A destroyer was sent to the rescue.
"It towed us in and took 45 days from Okinawa to San Diego. It was a terrible journey. They sold the boat to a steel company and it was cut up for scrap."
While many men were being discharged from the service, Lawson didn't have quite enough time in so he was assigned to a boat. "It was the same one that rescued us."
After leaving the military, Lawson went to work for the electric cooperative at Corning. He was 21. Forty-nine years later, he retired from there as superintendent for maintenance.
He also made a name for himself in this area as a distance runner.
"I ran a race or two after my 70th birthday, but I had slowed down to the point it wasn't fun anymore."
Lawson estimates he logged 25,000 miles or more during his time as a runner.
He also recalled renting a 40-foot sailboat with Poplar Bluffian John Holland and another man going on a seven-day cruise around the Caribbean.
"We anchored off a different island every night." he said.
In November, Lawson will be 91. But age hasn't dimmed the images of what he experienced at Omaha Beach.
"It was quite an experience that my older mind dwells on quite a bit," he said.
Now the Normandy beaches are home to a museum honoring the men who fell that day.
"I really thought about going back. I talked to a friend (in Jonesboro, Ark.) about getting together and going. If he had been willing, I would have made the trip. I would have liked to have walked the beach without anyone shooting at me."
(EDITOR'S NOTE: Lawson was the keynote speaker at Poplar Bluff's Memorial Day ceremony and has agreed to speak here at the Veterans Day ceremony at the Veterans Wall in front of the Black River Coliseum on Monday, Nov. 13.)