Lewis County Herald - Serving Hohenwald, Lewis County Tennessee Since 1898

Sitting in the choppy waters of the English Channel the day before D-Day, twenty-year-old Private James R. Lambeth wondered what would happen on the beaches of Normandy.

“We had no idea what we were getting into,” recalled Lambeth, who died in late 2021 at age 97. “I’d never seen combat before, and had no idea what it would be like.”

Lambeth, a member of the 37th Amphibious Combat Engineers, was one of 156,000 men on Omaha Beach at Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Nearly eighty years later, the action still touches a nerve with many Americans.

Lambeth now has vivid memories of those fateful ho...