It was 1943 and World War II was raging in Europe and in the Pacific. Seventeen-year-old Dan Robinson was observing what he saw as an epic struggle from the classroom and football field of Marion High School, and he was tired of sitting it out.

A year before the legal age to enter the armed services, Robinson decided it was time to join the fight.

Now 76 and retired from his work as a state senator from Cullowhee and as Western Carolina University football coach, Robinson recalled how he left his mountain home some 60 years ago to join the crew of a Navy LST (Landing Ship, Tank) that served in the D-Day invasion of Normandy, France.

What probably steeled him most to the task, he said, was not intensive training or patriotic fervor, but a Spartan admonition from his mother.

At 16, Robinson had just graduated from the 11th grade. His high school then took students only through 11th grade with an optional 12th grade. Robinson and his good friend Charlie Baker agreed to go back for the fall of their 12th-grade year to play football. After that, they promised, they would to go off to war together.

Robinson, who was a tackle on the football team, intended to keep the pact -- until July 17, his 17th birthday, when he went into Marion. There, he said, he "bumped into" a Navy recruiter.

Why Robinson decided then to join the Navy, he is still not sure. As a lifelong mountain resident, he had never seen the ocean. He insisted it was not the draw of salt water or the sea breezes.

"Why the Navy? I really don't have any explanation," he said. "I had a brother who was a sergeant in the Army. But I'm not sure what that had to do with it."

Robinson took the recruiter to his friend Charlie's home and tried to persuade him to sign on, but Charlie was "gung ho" on the Marines and insisted on playing football the next year.

Charlie did join the Marines, Robinson said, but, sadly, never saw service.

"He was killed in a training accident," he said. "I believe it involved a hand grenade."

Mother knows best

The other person Robinson tried to persuade was his mother.

Being 17, he needed his legal guardian to sign a release to sign up. His newly widowed mother of eight was not going to give up her youngest without first saying her piece.

"I had a real hard discussion with my mother," Robinson said. "We were on the front porch, and my mother asked the officer if he would excuse us and said, `Dan would you come in here a minute?'"

His mother said she knew Robinson would not be satisfied until she signed the release papers. "`But I want to tell you one thing,'" Robinson recalled his mother saying. "`I know you think that you are a man. But you're not. You're 17 and you have never left home. You don't know how serious this thing is you're getting into. And I will tell you this: I would rather get a letter saying that you were dead than one saying you did something dishonorable. Now, do you still want me to sign those papers?'"

Robinson said yes.

Remembering the moment now, Robinson said with a laugh, "You know I wasn't going to do anything to get into trouble. Not after my mother said that to me."

Through his nearly three years of service, Robinson said, he was never tempted to do anything to shame his mother. Rather, he said, as a young man, he found serving in the great conflict exciting even during dangerous times.

Aboard an LST 517

That fall, instead of taking his spot as tackle on the high school team, Robinson opted for a sailor's digs and headed for boot camp in Bainbridge, Md.

Gunnery school in Little Creek, Va., followed. When he finished training, Robinson was a petty officer third class.

"I graduated from gunnery school in the wintertime. Then they sent a group of us up to Seneca, Ill., to pick up our LST."

The small crew traveled to the middle of the country, where the flat-bottomed LSTs were manufactured on the Ohio River.

The skeleton crew took control of the 315-foot landing ship, LST 517, and turned it south down the Ohio River to the Mississippi River and on to New Orleans.

Topping out at 12 knots, or about 13 or 14 mph, each LST had a crew of more than 100. It could carry more than 300 troops and 30 Sherman tanks and place them onto a sandy beach through hydraulic doors that swung open at the bow.

A large ramp then was used to off-load personnel from the second deck. The LST could also carry six smaller LCVPs (Landing Crafts, Vehicle and Personnel).

"You could put almost anything on the LSTs," said Bill Schwartz, the president of the Carolinas chapter of the National LST Association.

"Their biggest advantage was their capability to go right in to the shore to unload their cargo," Schwartz said.

"They were rough riding," former LST 517 crewman Donald Gould, 77, of Oak Harbor, Ohio, said. "They weren't fast, either. They designed them good and they had to do it fast and needed a lot of them fast."

An LST's armaments included eight 40 mm guns, 12 20 mm guns, two .50-caliber machine guns and four .30-caliber machine guns. Robinson was in charge of seven gun stations at the bow and had to make sure the crew was trained and ready to use the weapons.

It took three men to operate a 20 mm gun station, Robinson said. "One was shooting and two were taking magazines off and changing barrels as they got too hot," he said. "They each had a specific duty and had to do it under pressure."

A 40 mm station took at least four men, with two gun operators. Mechanical sights for the weapon were "kind of crude," Robinson said, and the crew often used flarelike tracers to track the rounds.

A Navy workhorse

The Navy employed 1,051 LSTs to carry troops and supplies in the Pacific and European theaters. The ships proved their worth in such island storming campaigns as Micronesia and the Philippines in the Pacific and the D-Day invasion in the North Atlantic.

The latter was to be the fate of LST 517.

Though plans for allied commander Dwight Eisenhower's "Great Crusade" -- to retake Europe from Nazi Germany via the French coast -- was still top secret, Robinson and others sensed something was brewing.

From New Orleans, LST 517 joined a flotilla in New York in March 1944 and headed across the Atlantic toward England.

The German U-boats that plagued cargo and tanker ships left their flotilla largely alone during the half-month-long journey.

But the infamous rough seas of the North Atlantic tossed the flat-bottomed ship about fiercely, Robinson said.

"It was kind of a wild ride," he said. "We ran into one major storm. And I think if I had been older and more experienced, I would have been more concerned."

Once in England, it became more obvious to the crew that something big was afoot. Toward the end of May, droves of planes began to head out in the evenings, Robinson said.

One of the biggest invasions in history was only a few weeks away.

In early June 1944, the weather turned bad. Robinson and his crew were confined to their ship. June 5, they were ordered to the main deck.

"They ordered all of us to go and take a bath and put on clean clothes, and said we would be shipping out tonight," he said.

That evening, more than 150,000 men and 5,000 ships, the largest armada in history, sat poised off the coast of southern England, preparing for a secret attack on 50 miles of Normandy coastline.

"When we got out there in the English Channel there was an enormous number of ships," Robinson remembered. "It just amazes me that it could have been a surprise. There were ships as far as you could see."

LST 517 was loaded with about 350 troops, mostly Canadians. They were to be part of the second landing wave on one of the five code-named beaches. Their beach was "Juno" and the objective was the French city of Caen.

That evening, they anchored next to a cruiser that boomed shells at the Normandy beachhead. Recoil from the cruiser's big 16-inch guns rocked the LST, and the guns' noise further ensured that already edgy sailors and soldiers got little sleep.

At 4 a.m. June 6, LST 517 got under way and motored toward the beach.

Resistance was lighter at Juno than at more infamous beachheads such as Omaha and Utah, which accounted for many of the 4,900 casualties the Allies suffered in the operation.

The German air force had already been largely vanquished, but the LST, according to one crew member, still used barrage balloons to discourage aerial assaults.

"They're like small blimps that have long cable stringers coming out of them," former crewman Gould said. "We had one tied to the bow and one to the stern." Planes that came in contact with the high-flying balloons could become entangled and crash."

With the threat of aircraft largely nullified, the main dangers to the LST and its cargo were mines and sharp tripod traps to punch holes in the hull.

The ship outmaneuvered a German pillbox on the shore by steering wide and outside of its range of fire, Gould said. Off-loaded soldiers destroyed the pillbox with grenades, he said.

The ship came in at high tide in about 3 or 4 feet of water and dropped its ramp.

"As soon as we got them off, we became a hospital ship," Robinson said. "They had welded brackets to accept stretchers on the sides."

Many of the Canadians who left the LST returned moments later after landing on the heavily mined beach.

"That, by far, was the worst sight that I saw," Robinson said. "We put them off and then we had to bring them back in minutes after they stepped on a land mine." The Canadian commander, he remembered, lost a leg.

Medical personnel on the ship cared for the wounded on their return trip to England.

Missions of might, mercy

For the rest of the day, and days following, LST 517 became a ferry of might and mercy, unloading troops and supplies from England onto the beaches and bringing wounded from France back across the English Channel.

LST 517 made almost 60 trips back and forth across the channel, with each leg lasting five to six hours.

The last danger for the ship at Normandy that Robinson remembered was a German plane that somehow got loose three or four days after D-Day and tried to strafe them as they sat on the beach waiting for high tide to buoy them off the sand and back into the channel. Allied aircraft quickly chased it away, he said.

Later missions took the LST up the River Seine and past channel islands that were still controlled by the Germans.

Robinson said the trip past the Guernsey and Jersey islands with the ship full of ammunition was one of the more harrowing experiences.

The trip up the Seine was made to resupply Gen. George Patton's troops in their race toward Germany.

The LST spent 17 months in the European theater and then went back to Port Arthur, Texas, and into dry dock.

Walter Williams Jr. is the son of an LST 517 crewman from Alabama who died in 1990. He saw his father's pictures of the ship being prepared for the final chapter of the Pacific campaign.

"It's got this strange camouflage paint on it," Williams said.

Gould remembered the gray paint being covered with light blue, dark blue and gray paint, "to make them look like waves."

But the anticipated assault on the Japanese main island never happened. President Harry S. Truman ordered the atom bombs dropped over Japan in 1945.

Looking back at the small part he played in the war, Robinson said he was aware of the importance of the war, but as his mother had said, he really had no idea of the seriousness of the conflict.

Now Robinson said realizes World War II was a battle for the future of American civilization.

"I don't want to glamorize it," he said. "But I think we later understood that we were fighting for our existence as we knew it, our way of life. If we had not won, the world would have changed dramatically."