Once we were in the craft we took off for shore. Everyone knew that they might be dead within minutes. I feel sure we all prayed; I certainly did. And I remember thinking of home: my mum and dad and my sister, Marian, and my girlfriend, Eileen, and that we might never see each other again.

The ramp went down at Gold Beach and our training took over. I didn’t think about the other men. There was no time; it was all about keeping yourself alive. We jumped into water that came up to our chests and waded to shore, loaded with equipment that was only getting heavier as it got wetter.

We ran up the beach, looking for cover. The Germans were firing along the beach from houses at Le Hamel; casualties were mounting. When I got up against the sea wall, I looked back and saw dead and mutilated bodies everywhere, in the sea and on the beach. I had arrived in France.

— George Batts served with the Royal Engineers.

BERLIN — It was a few days after the invasion at Normandy had begun, and we had been under intense fire from American naval artillery since daybreak. Mercilessly and without pause, shells of every caliber plowed toward us, shredding everything that stood in their way.

I could feel my breath getting heavy as the pressure from the explosions sucked the air out of my lungs. When the ground shook under the force of the impacts, there was no one in our unit, not even the most hard-boiled, who was not brought low by fear and a sense of total powerlessness in his foxhole.

When, after five hours, the barrage finally ended, I regained my senses and looked around. I saw nothing but a destroyed landscape, bare trees and leafless branches that stretched up their stumps as a reminder of peace in the overcast sky. I couldn’t count all the craters made by artillery shells, which had turned Normandy’s green fields and meadows into a moonscape.