Sitting in the choppy waters of the English Channel the day before D-Day, 20-year-old Pvt. James R. Lambeth wondered what would happen on the beaches of Normandy.

“We had no idea what we were getting into,” recalled Lambeth, who was born in Spring Creek, in Phelps County just east of Fort Leonard Wood.“I’d never seen combat before, and had no idea what it would be like.”

Thursday, June 6, marks the 75th anniversary of the massive D-Day invasion and Lambeth, a member of the 37th Amphibious Combat Engineers, was one of 156,000 men on Omaha Beach at Normandy on that day in 1944. Over 70 years later, the action still touches a nerve with many Americans.

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