I wouldn't have missed it for the world, but I wouldn't want to go through it again. -- Mr. Ronald Firth, Second World War veteran and Smith's resident, on D-Day.

It was on the rainy night of June 5, 1944 -- mere hours before one of the biggest military campaigns of the modern era -- that Mr. Frank Farmer, then a fresh-faced Londoner of 17, first became aware a crucial turning point in the Allies' long struggle to force an end to the Second World War was at last on the horizon.

"They kept us in the dark until the night before,'' says the 68-year-old Paget man of the news that he and his shipmates on HMS Ulster , a Royal Navy destroyer off the coast of Ireland, would have a part in the massive amphibious landing Operation Overlord.

"As young boys, we were very excited about (that landing),'' which began, a little before dawn, 50 years ago today.

At the same time, Mr. Ronald Firth, a Yorkshire-born petty officer who had just turned 21 in May, was on a Landing Ship Tank, LST Number 11, at the English port of Southampton.

"We were loading the Canadians who would land at Juno,'' he said recently from his home in Smith's. Juno was the code name for one of the five rocky strips of shoreline that would serve as an entry point for the following day's assault on Nazi-held France.

Unlike his two confreres in arms, Mr. Martin Smith, one of the few native-born Bermudians to have played a direct role in the assault, says he knew of the invasion as early as June 3.

An RAF flyer at the time, he was returning from a 48-hour leave period to his base near Down Ampney, a sleepy English village in Wiltshire, when he noticed a massive congregation of aircraft by a roadside.

"As I turned off the road into Down Ampney, I realised then that the invasion of northwest Europe was about to take place,'' he told The Royal Gazette .

Five decades and an ocean now separate these men from that horrible Wednesday in 1944. Mr. Smith returned home to become a successful businessman, Mr.

Farmer and Mr. Firth to begin new lives and long residencies.

But even the passage of 50 years, which anniversary celebrations in several countries will mark this week, cannot dim their memories of both the glory and the butchery of that all-important assault on "Fortress Europe.'' "Hampered by winds and tides, the 50th Division suffered high losses in soldiers and tanks,'' Mr. Farmer, a stoker in the Ulster 's engine room, recalls.

Thousands would die during the raid -- more than 2,000 Americans on Utah Beach alone. Utah, another code name, was the westernmost point on a 60-mile stretch of coast between Caen and Cherbourg that had been divided among the Allied Forces when they planned the assault. In that process, Utah and Omaha Beaches had gone to the Americans, Gold and Sword to the British and Juno to the Canadians.

The Germans, commanded in Normandy by the "Desert Fox'' of North Africa, Erwin Rommel, had been expecting an invasion -- the Allies had been planning one since 1942 -- but both Hitler and Rommel thought it would come at Calais, on the Channel's narrowest point.

To encourage that belief, the Allies set up a phantom First Army under General George Patton just across from Calais in Kent. The ruse ultimately worked, although the Germans probably should have realised that Calais, with its high cliffs, would have been all wrong for an invasion.

Normandy was chosen by the Allies because it had mostly sloping beaches and was near the port of Cherbourg.

Choosing Normandy also meant the invasion would be highly dependent on a low tide and the weather.

D-Day was supposed to have been June 5, but a storm put an end to that plan.

When the weather analysts subsequently predicted a brief clearing on the sixth, the Allied commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, gave the go-ahead.

The days, indeed the months, prior to that order were ones of fevered activity for Mr. Smith, who had been studying in England when the war started and was obliged, as a British subject, to offer himself in defence of the realm.

"As we approached June, our training intensified and we developed a very close relationship with the parachuters.'' Mr. Firth, meanwhile, had been in the Mediterranean, where the LST on which he was stationed had assisted in the Italian and North African campaigns.

Known as the "ugly ducklings of the Navy'' because of their cumbersome appearance, LSTs were 300-foot flat-bottomed boxes that were capable of carrying 20 tanks and 27 trucks to an invasion beach and then hauling themselves off to return for another load.

They proved vital to the Normandy invasion.

When the invasion finally came, at 5.30 a.m. on June 6, the massive Allied assault fleet was firmly in place. Surprisingly, none of the veterans recall experiencing any fear at this time. Instead, they remember a sense of "excitement'' and a preoccupation with getting the job done.

In Mr. Farmer's case, the mood was one of prevailing calm.

"Once the Ulster 's guns started to fire, you felt almost safe in your mind,'' he says.

Deep in the bowels of the destroyer, there was no sense of how the invasion was going until much later in the day, when the first landing crafts started to come back, Mr. Farmer recalls. For the next few days, the Ulster pounded Gold Beach with artillery, allowing the British to make the crucial but painfully slow move inland.

On the third or fourth day, Mr. Farmer says, the Ulster ran aground and was effectively out of commission. It was eventually towed to Portsmouth, where Mr. Farmer sat out the rest of the invasion.

"That was the end of D-Day for me,'' he says. The end, as it were, had come slightly earlier for two of Mr. Farmer's schoolmates -- one died on the second day of the invasion and another lost a leg.

Echoing Mr. Farmer's sentiments, Mr. Firth says he too had experienced little fear, although he admitted to a claustrophobic sensation in the "tomb-like'' innards of the LST. He also says he wasn't fully conscious of the danger until much later in life.

"I saw one or two LSTs go, but I didn't realise how many had been sunk.'' Of the three veterans, Mr. Firth got the closest to the enemy. Having assisted in the attack on Juno Beach, his was among the first groups of LSTs to return to England with German prisoners of war.

"I felt sorry for them,'' he says of the captives who were in many cases younger than him. Herded into the bottom of the craft, "they were covered from head to foot in mud, they were seasick and there were no toilets.'' Once the re-conquest of Europe was well under way, Mr. Firth sailed for campaigns in India and Burma and was at Singapore for the signing of the Japanese surrender.

After briefly considering South Africa, he came to Bermuda in 1949. For Mr.

Smith, who received his flight training on the Canadian Prairies and spent some time ferrying B-26 bombers across the South Atlantic, most of D-Day was experienced from above.

As the youngest pilot in the 48th Squadron -- one of the main objectives of which was to knock out a German gun emplacement at Merville, near Sword Beach -- he was one of the last fliers of his group to go over Normandy.

Considering what ultimately happened, he could also have been one of the few that didn't come back.

The trouble started on the second day of the invasion, after Mr. Smith's Dakota, carrying the only all-Irish detachment of Royal Ulster Fusiliers, had emptied its men and released the glider that had gone up with it.

At that point, Mr. Smith says, "I realised my plane had been hit because the starboard engine had gone out. One of the (German) bullets had apparently hit the fuselage and gone out ahead of my feet.'' As if to confirm Mr. Smith's analysis of the situation, a cabin mate ran into the cockpit and shouted: "Some bastard is shooting at us!'' By that point the Dakota had fallen nearly 300 feet and had to descend even further to avoid oncoming British aircraft. At the precarious altitude of 100 feet, he came through a thick haze to within firing range of the Allied vessels then bombarding Sword Beach and narrowly missed being hit by the British ship Warspite .

Thinking, "I am not going to be shot out of the sky by the Royal Navy,'' Mr.

Smith managed to regain his bearings and hobble into an RAF base near Christchurch on one engine. Upon landing, a fellow flier turned to the relieved young pilot and heartily wished him a "Happy 21st Birthday,'' Mr.

Smith recalls, his eyes tearing up at the memory.

After that initial sortie, Mr. Smith returned to France to help with the evacuation of the wounded.

"I will never forget that first trip,'' Mr. Smith says, remembering a man with a particularly severe stomach wound. "Gangrene had set in, and you could smell it.'' Another soldier, "a great big corporal from Middlesex Regiment,'' had been shot in the face, leaving a big, gaping hole.

Recalls Mr. Smith: "You could see half his tongue. His teeth were shattered.

He couldn't speak but he was conscious.'' Needless to say, there are mixed feelings at such recollections, especially during this very important anniversary. On the one hand, there is a disgust at the kind of violence that had such an impact on their young lives -- and which has once again reared its head on the European continent.

"Will (the remembrance of D-Day) achieve world peace?'' Mr. Farmer asks. "We hope it will.'' On the other hand, there also exists a demonstrable though quiet pride at the accomplishments, collective and individual, of that very special effort -- the like of which, given the time and resources, will probably never be repeated.

Says Mr. Smith: "The fact is we won, and the world was changed.'' It certainly was. Almost three months after the Normandy landing, the Allies were in Paris, and shortly thereafter had liberated France.

Now facing two fronts, a weakened Germany was quickly overpowered, allowing the victors to turn their attention to the war in the Pacific. Of course, the Allies paid a terrible price for that privilege in terms of loss of life.

But though that price was high, no one would dispute that an Allied loss on D-Day would have resulted in a blow to democracy from which the Free World might never have recovered.

As Mr. Smith says, "the alternative would have been incomprehensible.''