96-year-old Thomas Murphy, formerly of Martins Ferry, Ohio remembers World War II as if it started last week.

The Great-Uncle of NEWS9’s Philip Stahl, he shared his experience as the co-pilot of an army air force glider plane.

Born Dec. 8, 1916, on Carlisle Street, he is the middle child. Three older sisters, two younger, made him the only boy in the family.

“My father was superintendent of the Yorkville Wheeling Steel Corporation until 1934. That is when he was fired. The reason given was, ‘your services are no longer needed,’” said Murphy.

He and his family, with the exception of an older sister moved to Cumberland, Maryland where his father got a new job and Murphy learned to fly.

Once the war started, he joined the military, and then embarked on one of the greatest missions in U.S. History, the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

“It was around 11 o’clock that night; we didn’t know what we were getting into. No one told us that we were going to be running into hedge row country. They were on top of these mounds of earth eight feet tall, and being that it was night, we couldn’t see, so we crashed,” said Murphy.

He was trapped in the plane, and the pilot of the plane gave him a hand and pulled him out of the wreckage.

“That was the last I ever saw of him,” he said.

Murphy waited in a field, behind enemy lines for 17 hours before a medic came and found him.

He suffered a broken leg and pelvis, another with other cuts and bruises.

“There were a lot of guys killed that day, I don’t know how I got lucky,” said Murphy.

While waiting to be found for almost an entire day, Murphy can still hear the thousands of men being shot and killed as they stormed the beaches of Normandy.

“You could hear the Tommy guns, and the guns the British and the German’s used. If I listen very hard I can still hear them,” he said.

He was later awarded the Purple Heart and the Air Medal.

At age 96, he has slowed down.  Murphy is legally blind and suffers from macular degeneration.

A sharp mind in the military, he went on to work for the national geological survey.

He's since retired and has outlived all his siblings, his wife, a son and a daughter..

But for Tom Murphy, he’s a fighter and will never forget D-Day, June 6, 1944.