It's difficult to conceive of the carnage of the D-Day landings when you're driving through Bristol on a sunny spring afternoon.

Sixty-five years on, the death and destruction that faced a generation of young men on the Normandy beaches all those years ago, feels all too much like a page in a history book – the reality lost somehow in the flickering 1940s newsreel footage.

But I'm on my way to meet a man for whom June 6, 1944, still seems like yesterday.

Retired newsagent, Michael Brennan enjoys a quiet life these days with wife Maureen in Shirehampton, just down the road from the Stoke Bishop newsagent's shop that filled many of his post-war years.

Michael's bright eyes and warm smile glow from the front door as I arrive. His sprightly frame belies his 83 years. He is smartly dressed, complete with a navy blue tie, embroidered with '1944' in yellow silk.

He has agreed to return with me to those fateful beaches of Normandy to mark the 65th anniversary of D-Day. As we set off towards Portsmouth and the ferry to Caen, he begins to tell me about his wartime experiences.

Michael was little more than a boy when he faced the carnage of Gold beach on that blustery morning 65 years ago.

In fact, back in 1939, when war broke out, he was a child evacuee – a 14-year-old, sent away from his London home to the relative safety of a Wiltshire farm.

After a spell in the Home Guard, from age 16, Michael joined the 1st Battalion of the Dorset regiment as soon as he turned 18. Given his sporty physique, he was quickly assigned to a challenging assault unit.

The Dorsets were the crack troops of their day, and Michael's assault unit had already seen frontline action as the first infantry troops to invade both Sicily and the Italian mainland at Anzio.

Michael may have been one of the new recruits, but by June 1944, he had already been through numerous mock landings while training in Scotland, Suffolk and around Southampton and the Isle of Wight.

But nothing could have prepared him for the feeling in the pit of his stomach during the two hours in the landing craft as dawn broke on June 6, 1944.

The storms, which had held up the invasion by 24 hours, were clearing, and the American Liberty-class ship, the ss Empire Spearhead, which had housed Michael and his unit in the middle of the Channel since May 30, was already feeling a long way away.

Surrounded by a unit of around 500 fellow Dorsets in the flotilla steaming towards the distant shell-peppered shore, Michael cannot have even imagined that within just a few weeks he would be the last fighting man from his unit who had experienced this day.

From the moment the doors dropped on the front of the landing craft, he would lose, on average, two of his Dorset comrades every minute, in the next couple of hours.

He would continue to lose friends on a daily basis for months to come – from the indiscriminate blasts of mortar shells, and the hellish swathes of machine gun fire, through to the calm and careful executions made by the long distance snipers.

"We had been told that the whole of Normandy was being defended by an aging group of German Home Guard soldiers, who would be easily overcome," Michael recalls with a wry smile.

"In fact, Rommel, the great German General, had recently panicked about the level of defence on the Normandy coast, and had the whole area reinforced with some of the Wehrmacht's best soldiers.

"We were about to be decimated, but thankfully we didn't realise it. At that moment, it wouldn't have done our morale any good to know just how strong the German resistance would be. D-Day may have been, ultimately, a success. But we only managed to overpower the Germans through sheer weight of numbers. The Allies were storming up those beaches throughout the day like as many ants. Although we were being slaughtered, there were enough men landing to keep the invasion moving.

"As an 18-year-old, you don't have a real sense of your own mortality. Although I was terrified, I didn't have time to stop and think about what was happening around me. At that age death is something that happens to other people.

"Even when your friends are being killed beside you, there is always a sense that it won't happen to you. That's what keeps you going in that situation."

When the landing craft finally reached the shore, the tide had pushed them slightly off course, and they landed a few hundred yards further up the beach than planned.

"This confused our officers for a few moments, until we managed to get our bearings with the German gun emplacements – the destruction of which was to be our objective for the day," Michael explains.

"We should have landed in line with one of the gun emplacements, but the fact that we ended up a little offline is probably why I'm still here today and talking to you. The men who were directly in front of the machine guns were always the first to be mown down.

"As soon as the doors of the landing craft open, the machine gun fire is trained upon you. So you lose people straightaway. In fact, we'd lost entire landing craft, which had been hit by shells before we even landed," Michael adds.

"People tend not to realise how far out the landing craft stopped. As soon as I left the boat, I found myself chin-high in sea water, and some of the shorter men drowned there and then, dragged down by the weight of their kit.

"We worked our way up the beach in a sort of arc, losing men all the time. It was a dreadful scene. Death and body parts everywhere.

"But we just continued moving steadily towards the first of the gun emplacements. We approached it from the side, up off the beach and across the higher ground. This was all mined, but it seemed safer to walk through a minefield than it was to approach the machine guns head on.

"Eventually, just through sheer weight of numbers, constantly returning fire on the Germans, we were able to take that first gun emplacement."

"We landed at 7.20am, but it took the entire day to take out all four of the gun emplacements. After battling to take each one, by about 4pm we were surprised to get to the final one, only to discover that the Germans had recently run out of ammunition there, and abandoned the post."

Michael had the terrifying responsibility of being "company runner" for the day – a role which saw him dashing up and down the battlefield, delivering messages.

"The gist of the messages was that everyone should make a push in a certain direction at a precise time," Michael explained.

"I was finally hit with a bullet in the shoulder, as we attempted to break into Arnhem – in order to rescue the airborne troops who had become trapped in the city after their famously disastrous drop there.

"I felt a sudden sharp pain in my shoulder, and I dropped to the ground. I looked down and blood was pouring down my arm, and I knew straightaway that if I tried to continue fighting I would bleed to death. I stood up and stuck my rifle into the ground, bayonet down, to try to show the sniper who had hit me that I wasn't about to start fighting back.

"As I turned and walked away, I fully expected the sniper to shoot me in the back. These were elite German soldiers, and they were under orders to shoot again if they hadn't killed you with the first shot.

"But whoever it was watching me through the eyepiece of his gun, must have felt a pang of sympathy, because he let me go.

"I walked a little way back towards my unit, before I passed out. The next thing I knew I was waking up in a military hospital in Brussels, with a nurse telling me that I'd be back in England tomorrow."

We've been driving for about an hour, as Michael and I gradually make our way towards the Portsmouth ferry. But with Michael's recollections, the time seems to have passed in an instant.

We have one more stop to make before heading towards the coast. We pull up in Calne, the Wiltshire town where Michael was evacuated in 1939.

But we're not here to revisit his childhood haunts. The elderly man standing expectantly in the door of his bungalow is 87-year-old Albert Williams – who on D-Day was General Montgomery's personal mechanic.

Albert will be joining us on our trip back to Normandy. The two old boys shake hands with broad smiles, and start to tell each other about their experiences of 1944.

TOMORROW: Albert Williams recalls his experience of D-Day at the side of General Montgomery.