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Nazi troops were swarming and an attack was imminent on the gloomy summer day in 1944 when U.S. Army Capt. John Marsh received word that he was a new father.

"The happiest guy in the unit" was how a fellow soldier described Marsh.

Hours later, Marsh and Sgt. Paul Inman climbed to the top of a hill in France's Normandy region in hopes of assessing a German offensive. Suddenly, mortar fire erupted, wounding both men.

Propped against a tree, in a gasp before he died, Marsh told Inman:

"They may get me, but they can't get my boy."

It took more than 60 years for those words to reach the World War II soldier's only child, John Marsh Jr., 61, of Plano.

A free-lance writer who was helping another veteran write a book arranged a phone call between Marsh and Inman's son, Wade, who lived about 200 miles away in Edmond, Okla.

Marsh said that once he learned what his father had said in his dying moments, he realized that he had not gone unnoticed by the father he had never met but had always admired.

"It was just like hearing words from beyond, reaching out to speak to me," Marsh, in tears, said last week from his Houston hotel room, not far from M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, where he is being treated for cancer.

His wife, Susan, added: "Finally, his father is coming alive for him."

John Marsh Jr. was born June 24, 1944. His mother, Beth, immediately sent a letter to her husband. It reached Capt. Marsh within two weeks, just as German troops were advancing toward him and his soldiers.

Inman said his father described Marsh as being "the happiest guy," enjoying a brief moment of elation despite a looming attack.

The assault and its aftermath were described in the book Bootprints ... An Infantryman's Walk Through World War II, written by another member of Marsh's unit, Hobert Winebrenner, and author Michael McCoy.

Winebrenner wrote: "On his deathbed, amid the tangled landscape and sheets of enemy fire, Marsh's thoughts left the battlefield behind to visit a son he'd never see -- a son he'd never hold, but a son he surely loved."

John Marsh Jr. was born William Joseph Marsh. But when Beth Marsh learned of her husband's death, she changed her son's name to honor his father.

The young mother and son moved from Montana to the Dallas area, where Marsh grew up, got married and raised two daughters, never knowing how his father, in a matter of hours, had handled being a new parent.

And a doomed man.

"I'd always wondered if anybody was with him" when he died, Marsh said. "My mother and I talked about that. ... Every time we would talk about him, in my mind, it would come down to the final battle, his death."

Beth Marsh died in 1990 from cancer. She had just turned 70.

After the war, Paul Inman moved to Oklahoma, where he and his wife, Tommie, raised four sons.

Through the years, while Beth Marsh was relating stories to her son about his father, Paul Inman was routinely telling his sons about that day on a Normandy hill.

"He told it ever since I was a little boy," said Wade Inman, 44, who sells playground equipment and still lives in Edmond.

"He wouldn't talk much about the war. But he talked a lot about Captain Marsh," Inman said, adding, "I felt sorry for the guy, that he had just found out he had a son on the same day that he died."

Inman said his father was always haunted by the belief that he may have worsened his commander's internal bleeding and "accelerated" his death by giving him some water from his canteen.

Paul Inman died July 23, 2000, from a sudden illness. He was 85.

About a year ago, while doing research for the book, McCoy arranged for Wade Inman and John Marsh Jr. to talk on the phone.

They had no idea how close they lived to each other or that their lives shared such parallels.

The phone call was punctuated by long pauses as the men gathered themselves after talking about fathers bonded by war, one lost in battle, the other living to make the story complete.

"It was very emotional," Inman said. "I wish Dad had lived long enough to see it."

Marsh remembers crying.

"I didn't know that Wade's dad had been with my dad or that anybody had been there," he said. "It was overwhelming."

Marsh's daughter Allison Fitch, of Fort Worth, said the revelation has boosted her father's spirits as he fights cancer.

"I know it brought a lot of closure for him, knowing that his father actually knew about him, and that his final thoughts were about my dad," she said.