On the morning of June 6, 1944, Staff Sergeant Leonard G. Lomell sat on the edge of a landing craft writing a letter by galley lamp. He was 25, from Toms River, New Jersey.\n\n"Dear Ma," it began. "I am going somewhere tomorrow and I may not be able to write for a while. Don't worry about me. I have a good feeling about this. I'll be home for Christmas."\n\nFour hours later he was scaling a 100-foot cliff at Pointe du Hoc while German machine guns rained fire. A mortar shell shredded the cliff face beside him — shrapnel tore through his left leg. He treated his own wound, then continued directing his squad for two hours.\n\nThe reason his unit had been sent: to destroy six 155mm French artillery pieces that could devastate both Omaha and Utah beaches. When they reached the gun positions, the guns were missing. The Germans had replaced them with painted telephone poles.\n\nLomell didn't panic. He took a squad 1,200 yards inland and found five of the guns hidden in a copse of trees, camouflaged with branches and netting. Without demolition charges large enough, he placed white phosphorus grenades in the recoil mechanisms of each gun and pulled the pins. The grenades melted the elevation gears, rendering every gun permanently useless.\n\nHad those guns remained operational, they would have devastated the landing forces at both beaches. Lomell had single-handedly saved potentially thousands of lives.\n\nLomell returned to the cliffs after the battle, the shrapnel wound still bleeding. He would not be home for Christmas — he was wounded again in the Hürtgen Forest in December 1944.\n\nThe letter he wrote aboard that landing craft was found decades later in his mother's attic, preserved in a shoebox alongside his Purple Heart and Silver Star. It is now in the collection of the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.