Despite being wounded in the shoulder by shrapnel just as he landed on the beaches of northern France on D-Day in 1944, Warrnambool's Duncan Smart thinks it probably saved his life.

The wait to have his wounds tended to by a doctor meant he wasn't sent further up the line until days later where again he was injured almost as soon as he went back into battle.

This time he was hit by machine gun fire and shrapnel which broke his leg.

Doctors later pulled nine bullets from his stomach.

It was the end of his fighting days, and his own words "a distant memory".

But he says he was one of the lucky ones.

About 6.30am on Tuesday, June 6, 1944, Mr Smart was among about 160,000 troops who stormed five beaches on the coast of Normandy, France.

It was the largest seaborne invasion in history and while the Allied casualties on that day will never be known, they have been estimated to be 100,000 with more than 4000 killed.

The WWII operation, code named Operation Overlord, was one of the most ambitious and potentially dangerous military exercises ever undertaken.

A combined naval, air and land assault on Nazi-occupied France, D-Day was the start of a long and costly campaign to liberate north-west Europe from German occupation. .

Mr Smart, 96, was an apprentice carpenter in the whisky town of Dufftown in the northern Scottish highlands when he enlisted.

Nearly all of his mates had signed up and instead of waiting a year to be called up, Mr Smart joined the Scottish regiment Gordon Highlanders.

He was barely 18, but his paperwork listed him as 19.

Mr Smart spent 10 weeks in Aberdeen, Scotland, training and was among the second wave of troops to land on one of five French beaches on D-Day.

It was the first action he'd seen during World War II.

"I got wounded twice within a couple of days," he said.

While much about those few days are a distant memory, Mr Smart says he clearly remembers going down the rope ladders on the landing craft.

"The Royal Marines went out before us," he said.

"The Royal Marines they got the worst of it.

"I was wounded right away.

"I was lucky I got through a minefield, 'jumping jacks' they called them.

"There were explosions."

He said the tanks were used to clear the lines so the troops could get through.

Mr Smart was injured in the shoulder.

"It saved me actually because they took me behind and got all the shrapnel out and rubbed stuff on it," he said.

"That was on the Tuesday and by the time the doctor got to me, the daylight was coming up on the Tuesday.

"They don't send you up when it's daylight, they send you up the line when it's dark.

"I continued to fight. It's the only thing you could do."

When they did send him back up the line he was wounded again "almost right away".

Mr Smart was a gunlayer on a 25-pounder gun, according to Warrnambool RSL's John Franc, who coordinates visits to veterans in hospital and nursing homes.

"It's a senior position in the gun crew and when he got wounded his gun position must have been attacked by infantry. He was obviously machine gunned," Mr Franc said.

"Wherever they had the gun set up, he was at the site where he got shot.

"Exactly where he was we don't know."

A bomb exploded near Mr Smart who said he was "unlucky" that it broke his leg between his left knee and ankle.

"The shrapnel must have got my leg," he said.

"I was out for the count I think.

"It's a distant memory you know.

"The first injury was D-Day. I got wounded again on the Friday which was a bit worse so they sent me back.

"The first time was just shrapnel. The second time they were bullets through my belly button.

"I was just lying there and they put me on a stretcher.

"I can remember them coming to get me on a stretcher. They took me to a train."

He was put on a hospital ship full of wounded soldiers back to Southampton in England where he was taken to a hospital just outside of London.

"I was only there a day or two when they decided the Scottish blokes could go back to their own country," Mr Smart said.

He was put on a stretcher and onto a train for the journey to a place just outside Edinburgh where he spent a "long time" recovering.

"A new doctor had found penicillin and I was on penicillin for weeks to stop gangrene," he said.

"I lost a lot of blood. They weren't worried about the break, it was the amount of blood I had lost.

"I was lucky in a way because my younger brother was too young for the army and he gave me a pint of blood and I produced my own blood off of what he gave me."

Mr Smart said that doctors removed about "half a dozen bullets" during the first surgery and another three more after that.

"They got the bullets out my belly button," he said.

His son still has one of the bullets that was removed from his stomach.

"A lot of the nurses grabbed them and they were making them into rings," he said.

Mr Smart said he spent at least a couple of months in hospital before being sent out for recovery.

"It was a long, long time," he said.

"That was the end of my fighting career.

"I was glad to get back home.

"The first thing they told me was that my fighting days were over and I said: 'that's good'.

"I landed in Normandy and I went to France, and from France I went to Holland and Belgium and I was wounded before I got over the line into Germany, but they gave me a medal.

"There's two medals that are still in Scotland, I haven't got them here."

Mr Smart said nearly all those he fought alongside on the beaches of Normandy didn't make it home.

"I was lucky," he said.

It was while in Scotland recovering that he met his wife Isabella.

"I met her when I got wounded," he said.

"She was my nurse and she was my girlfriend and ended up my wife."

When his army days were over, Mr Smart went back to work as a carpenter before the couple moved to Australia in the 1950s.

His wife's relatives in Australia were always telling them how good the weather was here, so they decided to move.

Mr Smart worked as a carpenter in Melbourne before he moved to Warrnambool.