Today's 58th anniversary of the D-Day landing in World War II has a special meaning for Angelo Macanufo of St. Peters.

He finally has his medals from the Normandy campaign.

Macanufo, 79, watched D-Day unfold from the deck of a troopship off the Normandy beaches. "I remember seeing the corpses washing past in the water," he said Wednesday.

Two days later, on June 8, he went ashore with the rest of his regiment, the 357th Infantry of the 90th Infantry Division. After precisely one month of combat, a piece of shrapnel from a German artillery shell sliced into Macanufo's right knee.

Now, he has a Purple Heart to show for it.

That medal - plus a Bronze Star with four oak leaf clusters - arrived because of the persistence of Macanufo's niece.

She is Nancy Joyce of Maryland Heights. Last August, she was looking at her uncle's military records and noticed that he had earned the medals. When she asked to see them, Macanufo shrugged and said he had never got them.

So Joyce put in the paper work. Recently, the medals arrived.

"I'd like to put them in a display case," Macanufo said. "Nancy went to a lot of trouble to get them for me."

Macanufo's wound got him two months of respite in a hospital in Britain. But then he rejoined his old outfit as it crossed the Moselle River in France. He suffered no further wounds. But he said, "I still remember the snap and whip and crack of bullets going over my head and by my ears."

After the war, Macanufo worked as a machinist for Moog Automotive, retiring in 1984. He married Audrey Boehning, with whom he had four children. Today, Macanufo lives with one of those children, Faye Aubuchon of St. Peters.

On D-Day, Macanufo was a very small part of a very grand event - the landings that would liberate Western Europe from Nazi Germany. Back then, did he think of himself as a part of history?

"No, sir. I was there, and I had a job to do, and it had to be done, and that's all I could think of."

Reporter Harry Levins: