Vardia Brewer was 19 years old on D-Day. He served on a landing craft carrying soldiers and equipment to Omaha and Utah beaches. Chris Thelen/Staff

'The Lord was with us. He had to be.'

Editor's Note: The stakes were high and well understood. To Allied Forces - and the Nazis - the success of World War II rode on the outcome of the invasion of Northwest Europe on June 6, 1944, better known as D-Day. Code-named Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy landed more than 150,000 U.S., British and Canadian troops along a 50-mile stretch of coastline in 24 hours. Six divisions assaulted five code-named landing beaches: Omaha, Utah, Gold, Juno and Sword. Those who survived that hellish day will never forget what they saw. The Augusta Chronicle talked to a number of D-Day veterans and will present their stories this week.

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Vardia Brewer

Service: Enlisted in the Navy on June 6, 1943

Rank: Seaman 2nd Class

Where he landed: Landing Craft Tank 765 was supposed to land on the Dog Green sector of Omaha Beach in the second wave of the invasion, but a strong current that flowed parallel to the coast from west to east caused nearly every flotilla to miss its designated zone.

That proved lucky for Mr. Brewer, who recalled that the current took them out of direct confrontation with the Germans' 88 mm cannons.

"We got in there, and just before we made the landing - how in the world it happened I don't know, but God knows - everything shifted," recalled Mr. Brewer, whose job was to undo the hooks ("dogs") to the boat's ramp to allow it to be dropped. "We were supposed to go in on Green Beach, but we went in on Red Beach (Dog Red sector). And what happened was when we went in we shifted to the left, not just my boat but everybody.

"When they shifted, the gap where we were supposed to been, that's where they dropped their 88s," said Mr. Brewer, whose boat also took men and equipment to Utah Beach. "So we were lucky."

Once the ramp went down and Mr. Brewer saw that everything had gone off without a hitch, he said he "scooted" into a storage locker on the LCT for protection against enemy gunfire coming from the beach.

"I don't know how we did it," he said. "The Lord was with us. He had to be."

Most vivid memory: The heavy barrage from German artillery took its toll on Allied troops, and one of Mr. Brewer's jobs was to help "police" the beach of bodies.

"We picked up the dead on the beach, the ones that got blowed up or killed," he said. "That was terrible. You'd reach down and pick up a fatigue, and there'd be an arm, a part of the body, stuff like that.

"But you didn't have much time to think about the gory part of it. It bothered you, but mainly I guess you got to thinking about a lot of it, that that could have been me. Boy, I'm glad it wasn't me."

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• Bennie Bolgla: 'Everybody had religion that night'
• James Scoggins: 'The first wave, they were just slaughtered'
• C. R. Harbuck: Chow time in the field
• Dwight Parken: 'The invasion was the key, the crucial key'
• Roderick Turnbull: Journals tell soldier's story
• Charlie Wendt : 'I didn't want to do it, but had to do it'
• Harry Reynolds: 'You had no time to get nervous'
• Willis Irvin Jr.: 'We had all prepared ourselves to die'
• Albert Lee Nix: 'I have no regrets for what I done, what I seen'
• Roy Raborn: 'I didn't even get a scratch. I guess I was lucky'
• Vardia Brewer: 'The Lord was with us. He had to be'
• Jay Pearlstein: 'It was mass confusion'

--From the Monday, May 31, 2004 printed edition of the Augusta Chronicle