This June will mark the 75th anniversary of D-Day, when 160,000 Allied troops swarmed onto the beaches of Normandy in an invasion that would ultimately lead to the liberation of Europe from the Nazis.
The region is preparing for millions of visitors, since it’s likely to be the last major commemoration of the battle attended by survivors. Jake Larson is among those getting ready to make the emotional journey.
Larson, a World War II veteran who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, wears a pin on his hat with the shield and motto of his military regiment, “To the last man.”
For Larson, 96, the phrase has never been more meaningful.
“I am the last man,” he said Tuesday afternoon at his home, an old wood-clad farmhouse in Martinez.
Larson is the last surviving member of his company, a unit that stormed Omaha Beach and suffered terrible losses.
He says he often asks himself: Why me? How did he survive when so many thousands did not?
“I never thought I’d be alive 75 years later,” he said. “I’m the luckiest guy in the world.”
He remembers jumping off his landing craft into frigid water up to his neck, the incessant explosions, the German machine-gunners raking the beach with bullets. The image that comes back to him again and again is hiding behind a pile of sand and asking a fellow soldier if he had any dry matches to light a cigarette.
“I looked again, and there was no head under the helmet,” Larson said. “I thank that guy today. In that instant I had the ability to get up and run.”
More than 9,000 crosses and Stars of David are arrayed with perfect geometry at the arresting cemetery in Normandy that commemorates the American dead.
Larson says he has returned to France only in his mind since the war. His modest salary as a technician at a printing business in Berkeley never allowed him the luxury.
But this June he is flying from Oakland to Paris with his son thanks to an online fundraising campaign by two women, Linda Linnell and Angela Larsen, who met Larson at a coffee shop in Martinez.
“We gave him the check, and he was so touched,” Linnell said. “He said, ‘I can’t believe people would donate to me — they don’t even know me.’ ”
Larson is writing a memoir, and he calls the trip to France the last chapter.
“It’s unbelievable to this little old farm boy from Hope, Minnesota,” he said. “To me I’m in heaven.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.