As he does most days, Bill Lowrance joined a group of friends Monday at a Mooresville Bojangles' to drink coffee and "tell a bunch of lies."But on this day, June 6, the talk turned to an event critical to history that Lowrance took part in 67 years ago - the D-Day invasion of France to liberate Europe from Nazi Germany.
He was 18 then, a Navy medic assigned to a beach battalion. Forty-five minutes before the invasion's start at 6:30 a.m., he and his unit were sent ashore at Omaha Beach in Normandy to clear mines and other obstacles and open boat lanes.
German bullets rained down. The dead quickly stacked up.
Among the five invasion beaches, the fighting was fiercest at Omaha, where Lowrance spent the day disarming mines and tending to the wounded. By nightfall, the Allies, landing about 156,000 troops by sea and air, had breached Hitler's Atlantic Wall at a great cost.
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