LONDON (AP) — Even as he prepared to embark for the battlefields of Normandy, Pvt. Mervyn Kersh was summoned by his commanding officer and threatened with arrest.

Why, the officer demanded, had Kersh refused to eat his army rations of canned beef and vegetables, subsisting only on canned peaches? Was he trying to make himself so weak that he would be unfit to fight in France?

Kersh, then 19, was indignant.

“I said that was the last thing I wanted to do,’’ Kersh told The Associated Press. “I’m Jewish. I didn’t eat anything that wasn’t kosher as far as I could help it.’’

The officer dropped the charge and Kersh was soon on board a landing ship approaching the Normandy coast with artillery shells from Allied ships and German shore batteries screaming overhead. The sense of adventure turned to fear, Kersh recalled, and he sought comfort from a pocket edition of “The Book of Psalms” before landing in France a few days after D-Day, which on June 6, 1944.