As the gray dawn spread over the coast of Normandy on June 6, 1944, revealing the legions of Allied ships staged to begin the D-Day invasion, a 25-year-old French aristocrat-turned-commando named Count Guy de Montlaur was told his squad would be one of the very first to splash onto the beach. Their mission was to take a seaside casino that held a Nazi stronghold.

Bobbing on a tiny landing craft, the young count, his green beret pulled low over one eye, replied to his commander that attacking the casino “would be a pleasure. I have lost several fortunes in that place.”

By the end of the battle, only 40 of the 177 French commandos who landed on the beach were still standing. The others had been shot down, blown to pieces, lost in the surf or felled along muddy roadsides. Montlaur survived and eventually became a hero of the French liberation, but he never got over the death and destruction he experienced that day.