James Dixon pushed his Higgins landing craft up to full speed and headed toward the Juno Beach section of France’s Normandy coast.

There were about 40 Canadian soldiers on his craft, and one of them looked up and watched as the American Navy coxswain repeated the “Hail Mary” over and over again while hoping he didn’t strike an underwater mine.

“Hey cox, what are you saying? You praying?” the Canadian yelled.

“Damn right I am,” Dixon replied. “I’m saying Hail Marys, and if you could see what I see, you’d be saying a Novena.”

Shortly after 7 a.m. on June 6, 1944 – 62 years ago today – Dixon saw smoke rising into the air from the pounding Allied naval guns were giving Juno as the D-Day invasion began.

“My chin was quivering a little,” the 82-year-old Dixon, of rural Eudora, said as he recalled that moment recently.

But Juno turned out to be a quiet beach compared to what American forces encountered when they landed on Omaha and Utah beaches or the British on Gold Beach. The Canadians faced little initial German opposition, and Dixon doesn’t remember taking any enemy fire on his landing craft.

“I thank Gen. (Bernard) Montgomery for saving our lives. He put us on a soft beach,” Dixon said of the British military commander during World War II.

Dixon and his three-man crew, however, were not happy before the invasion when Montgomery requisitioned them for ferrying Canadian troops on D-Day. They wanted to drive their own country’s troops into battle.

By the end of the invasion, Dixon had changed his mind. The Canadians were well disciplined and clean-cut, he said.

“The Canadians were some of the best soldiers I’ve seen,” he said.

Dixon took his landing craft back and forth between Juno and ships offshore ferrying more troops and supplies and sometimes taking out the wounded.

“You did what the beach master said, and you kept feeding that beach all day long,” he said.

On the fifth day after the invasion, Dixon was sent to Omaha Beach, where the heaviest D-Day fighting took place.

“It was still a bloody mess,” he said. “There were still bodies in the water.”

It was off Omaha that Dixon’s boat was damaged by one of the metal obstacles the Germans had placed in the water.

Dixon went into D-Day with plenty of experience landing troops during invasions. He had done the same thing at Sicily and then on Italy’s coasts at Salerno and Anzio.

Several days after D-Day, Dixon was on a larger Landing Ship Tank returning to England when it was damaged by a mine. Dixon was thrown into the air and injured his knees and elbows when he landed.

A few years after the war, Dixon joined the Army and stayed for several years, including a stint as an instructor in Kansas University’s ROTC program. He later worked for KPL and retired in 1984.

When he was younger, Dixon said he often thought of D-Day when June 6th neared. Now the only time he thinks about it is when the news media or someone else asks him about it.

“The ones who should get the glory are the airborne troopers and the infantry,” he said. “We sailors, we did our job, but we had to get the troops over there so they could do what they did.”