When Mary Mullaney answered a knock at the door of her Newark, New Jersey, residence in the summer of 1944, she found officials from the U.S. Navy waiting to speak to her.

Several of her sons were serving overseas during World War II, and this visit was one every parent dreaded.

Mullaney knew she had lost a son, and she instantly knew which one.

“When she opened the door, she knew who it was because Jerry was the only one who was in the Navy,” her granddaughter Mary Louise Brambilla said. “She slammed the door in their face and fell to the floor.”

Though he’d served in the U.S. military for less than a year before he was killed, Jerome Martin Mullaney took part in the largest seaborne military invasion in history.

As Allied forces stormed the beaches at Normandy on D-Day , the Scran

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