On the 81st anniversary of the unprecedented D-Day invasion at Normandy, the memory of one Navy veteran lives on after his son was named the first American Pope in history.

Shells exploded around them. Nazi gunfire pounded from the shoreline. It was D-Day, one of the 20th century’s most famous battles, history’s largest amphibious invasion. With an assault wave of 160,000 Allied soldiers, the Battle of Normandy has been memorialized in countless books and movies.