The main thing was to keep going.

You sat huddled in the landing craft as massive shells from British warships thundered high overhead. No one was saying much.

Finally, on command, you ran down the ramp into the water and slugged up onto the beach with machine-gun fire all around and you saw men getting hit and falling and yelling. You ran past the bodies.

Now you heard mortars whining in from the six-barrelled maw of a Moaning Minny -- one of those terribly accurate German machines. It was an awful feeling. There was heavy fire from 88-mm German anti-tank guns up in the hills. The lieutenant 'got it' and sarge took over. He waved you on. You kept your eyes on a ridge several hundred yards off the beach and pounded forward until you got the hell up behind it.

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That's how Frank Zantolas of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division remembers storming Juno beach on D-Day, the morning of June 6, 1944.

He was just a cog in the largest amphibious invasion of all time, code-named Operation Neptune.

About 5,000 Allied vessels and 175,000 troops poured across the English Channel to take an 80-kilometre beachhead, absorbing hellish fire from German troops firmly embedded in the cliffs of Normandy.

Canadian troops got farther than any Allied divisions on that first day, paying in blood with 1,074 casualties, including 359 dead.

Neptune was a brazen, all-or-nothing attack that likely decided the Second World War.

One veteran aboard a Royal Navy vessel that day, West Vancouver's Harry Greenwood, says: "It was almost stupid -- there was no way to retreat."

Historians marvel at the clockwork precision of Neptune plans, but for Zantolas, now 86, the attack seemed anything but seamless.

"We knew it was a big show, but part of the plan was nobody knew what was going on," he recalls, sitting in his apartment above North Vancouver's Legion 118.

"Everyone had orders and they were doing what they had to do -- I can see it now -- but that day it seemed like quite a schmozzle."

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Zantolas represents a singular perspective of Neptune. But the surprising discovery brought to light by a North Vancouver man, Alex Hart, is like a magnifying glass on the whole massive attack.

Hart's uncle Colin Mackay, who commanded a British landing craft at Gold Beach on D-Day, died six years ago in New Brunswick, and family members cleaning his study discovered a massive cache of news clippings on the war.

In the midst of the pile was a thick sheath of top-secret Neptune battle plans and three books of photo-recognition panels covering the nooks and crannies of coastal Normandy.

When Hart read the bold print on the main binder -- "To be destroyed by fire upon completion of the operation" -- he suspected he had something special.

Hart took the documents to the British Antiques Roadshow at Capilano Mall earlier this month, and expert appraiser David Freeman almost flipped over the find.

"All I know is that it must be a very valuable document," Freeman told The Province. "I've never seen one before."

Freeman and Hart carefully read the plans and considered the historic importance of the document.

"The planning was so high-end, so ultra top-secret, that if the ledger was found out the Germans would have killed everyone," Freeman says.

The document shows the operation to have been minutely planned, with exact directions on vessel positioning and pinpoint firing orders.

"It seems to have been planned down to second by second, and there are no backup plans," Hart says. "Freeman kept looking for the what-if-something-goes-wrong page."

There was no such page.

Andrew Whitmarsh, military history officer at the D-Day museum in Portsmouth, U.K., says his museum has a copy of the Operation Neptune orders, but figures there may be only a few similar ledgers in Britain and Canada.

"Fortunately, a few individuals did not destroy them and some copies survived," Whitmarsh says. "Certainly they are rare.

"One of the amazing aspects of the D-Day story is the amount of effort that was put into the planning. That's demonstrated by the size of these orders."

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When Zantolas and fellow veterans Bob Bell of North Vancouver and Greenwood of West Vancouver were told of Hart's copy of Neptune orders, each said they had no idea such comprehensive plans existed. And that makes sense, given the bloody lessons learned in the disastrous Allied raid of Dieppe in northern France in 1942, according to Zantolas.

"Everyone in Britain knew Dieppe was happening," he says. "The Germans knew all about it, and it was a bad show. But [the plan for D-Day] was just handed down piece by piece. Dieppe taught us a lot about silence."

In fact, Allied leaders were so focused on secrecy that troops couldn't even send out mail until well after D-Day.

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Unlike Zantolas, Greenwood, now 84, had a panoramic view of D-Day while escorting minesweepers aboard the HMS Jaunty and bracing battleships that were firing massive 16-inch guns. "It was like hell -- like standing directly under a thunderstorm," he says.

To the people of Normandy, the mind-numbing show of Allied naval forces must have looked like a vast steel city rising ominously out of the waves. Greenwood still remembers being awestruck watching 1,000 Allied planes come in above the sea of metal.

"It was the greatest armada since the Phoenicians," he says.

"There were things at Normandy that no one had ever seen."

Bell, now 84, was approaching Russia aboard the HMCS St. Pierre when news of D-Day success came in by Morse Code. There had been indications "something big was afoot," but even as a naval telegrapher, Bell had no foreknowledge of the attack.

"They opened up the rum and everyone got pretty well sauced," he says. "Everyone was so damned happy that D-Day was over. There was a spirit in the air that we'll go home safe and sound."

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As a military policeman, Zantolas was uniquely positioned to see the surrender of German troops, and the suffering caused by Allied bombing.

Within 30 days, Allied forces had obliterated the strategically crucial city of Caen on the eastern edge of the beachhead, leading to the ultimate collapse of Hitler's forces.

Zantolas was there, and witnessed the power of heavy artillery. The sound waves alone shattered windows in a home he was searching.

He saw broken families running ragged on the streets. "That was the saddest part for me," he says.

"We were trying to get them the hell out of there."

When the Germans surrendered in 1945, Zantolas was in a Dutch village on the German border. The celebration was muted, compared with villages farther to the west.

In fact, Canadian troops were wary of villagers, as some homes continued to display swastika flags.

Occupation fallout continued as gangs of "Orange Band" patriots took vengeance on Dutch women who they believed had been intimate with German soldiers. The Canadians were able to quell some of the ugliness.

"These guys were cutting these women's hair off," Zantolas says. "It spoiled any celebration."

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The veteran sits in his apartment listening to war-era tunes and slowly stands and walks to the corner, bringing back a stash of war loot, including a Prussian duelling sword, and pictures seized from a German officer's camera, showing tall, square-faced men in long, black capes posing confidently in front of the Eiffel tower.

"They [the Germans] were battle-seasoned pros," Zantolas says. "They had truly wonderful weapons and machines. But when we got to them in Caen they'd pretty much had enough. They'd been under pretty heavy fire."

scooper@theprovince.com