We have a friend who was on a Canadian ship at Normandy, I think it was a destroyer. He’s 96 now, so he must have been 16 yrs old then. He remembers rescuing soldiers out of the water. My brother in law accompanied him to Normandy a couple of times, including the 75th anniversary. The French treated him like an honored guest.
I was going to make the comment that this guy escaping the nursing home must have attacked the beaches at the age of 11....but then I see that the article was written in 2014!