James Doohan played one of the central characters in the long-running Star Trek phenomenon. But how many people know that he was also a real-life hero in World War II?

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“Beam me up, Scotty” is arguably one of the best known TV catchphrases of the past 50 years. And “Scotty,” Star Trek’s second officer Montgomery Scott, was among the long-running sci-fi show’s favorite characters, often helping to save the starship Enterprise and her crew from certain annihilation. But how many people know that the actor who played Scotty, Canadian James Doohan, was actually a real-life World War II hero?

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James Montgomery Doohan – yes, his middle name was the same as his Star Trek character’s first name – was welcomed into the world on March 3, 1920, in Vancouver, British Columbia. At the time, his parents, Sarah and William, had both recently arrived in Canada from Bangor in Northern Ireland’s County Down. Indeed, Doohan was actually conceived in Ireland.

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In his autobiography, Doohan remembered a childhood partially blighted by his father’s alcoholism and the unpredictable outbursts of temper that sometimes erupted. At the same time, as a youngster Doohan was a compulsive imitator of accents that he’d picked up from the movie theaters and radio shows of the day.

In fact, in a portent of what the future would hold for the young Doohan, he played the lead in a school production of Robin Hood when he was 16. By then the family were living in Sarnia, Ontario, a city on the banks of Lake Huron, close to the U.S. border.

But it seems that the delights of Sarnia had little hold over Doohan, and in 1939 he signed up with the Royal Canadian Artillery as a gunner. He did this shortly after Canada, allied with the U.K., had on September 10, 1939, declared war on Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

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Having obviously impressed his superiors, Gunner Doohan was subsequently commissioned as a lieutenant within the 14th Field Artillery Regiment of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division. He then traveled to England for more training. And there, he acted as an aide-de-camp to a senior officer who was planning the disastrous 1942 Dieppe mission. This attack on the northern coast of German-occupied France by more than 6,000 mostly Canadian troops ended with 3,623 men dead, wounded or taken prisoner.

Doohan was, in fact, probably lucky not to have been sent across the English Channel to Dieppe. However, in 1944 he was part of an equally hazardous mission: D-Day, on June 6. Doohan’s regiment was to land on the so-called Juno Beach – one of five landing points on France’s Normandy coast to be seized by the Allies in their invasion of France.

Two brigades from the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division, supported by Canada’s navy and the British Royal Navy, were given the lead in taking Juno Beach. The Canadians were to take the Caen-Carpiquet airbase as well as an important road between the towns of Bayeux and Caen. They were also to link up with forces landing on the two landing beaches on each side of Juno.

The Germans had a couple of battalions in place to defend the beach, with a force of tanks held in reserve. And the German troops from the 716th Division put up stiff opposition to the invading force. The invaders were also hindered by bad weather, which delayed their landing, and the fact that the prior naval bombardment had caused less destruction than planned.

But although some units of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, Doohan’s regiment, suffered heavy casualties on landing, Doohan led his 120-man company without loss to a village by the sea called Graye-sur-Mer. His day was hardly without incident, however. He witnessed one captain suffer a breakdown under the stress of combat and saw another man take a serious wound to the stomach.

And in Graye-sur-Mer, things became decidedly hotter. A German machine-gun nest set up in a nearby church tower opened fire on Doohan and his men. This of course immediately put all of them in mortal danger. Yet Doohan had the presence of mind to act decisively.

Grabbing a comrade’s rifle, he drew a bead on the Germans who were manning the machine-gun. His first shot went wide of the target. But then, with deadly accuracy, his next two shots hit two of the German troops. The machine-gun stopped firing. Doohan never knew, however, whether he had killed or only injured the men he’d hit.

In any event, now it was Doohan’s turn to be wounded. Darkness had fallen in the village, and he was making his way to his command post. Then, suddenly, machine-gun fire hammered out. In his 1996 autobiography, Beam Me Up, Scotty, Doohan wrote, “[A] machine-gun opened up on us. It hit me and spun me around. Staggering, I fell down into the shell hole.”

He continued, “Then I looked at my right hand and saw the blood covering it. I could see the holes in my middle finger.” Doohan now took himself off to a nearby first-aid post. And it was only then that he realized that not only had three shots torn into his right hand, but that four others had hit him in the left leg.

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And after discovering the wounds to his leg, Doohan noticed something else. There was a bullet hole in his uniform on the right-hand side of his chest. In his autobiography, the former gunner remembered reaching round with his good left hand to his right pocket.

“I pulled out the sterling silver cigarette case that my brother Bill had given me when I was his best man. And there I discovered a dent in it,” Doohan wrote in his book. “The bullet had come in at an angle, ricocheted off the cigarette case, and bounced away. Four inches from my heart.” And it turned out that this near-fatal attack had, in fact, been a case of friendly fire from the Bren gun of a jumpy Canadian sentry.

Given the seriousness of his wounds, which could have been the end of him, Doohan actually got off relatively lightly – but for the fact that his middle finger needed to be amputated. That was the end of Doohan’s spell as a frontline fighter, then, and he now trained as a pilot, flying Taylorcraft Auster Mark Vs in the role of an artillery support officer.

At something of a loose end after the War, Doohan subsequently took a course at a Toronto drama school. He then applied for a place at the Theater in Manhattan’s Neighborhood Playhouse School and actually won a scholarship. What’s more, this was to be the start of a long and prolific career spent acting in TV and radio shows as well as film.

Think of an iconic 1960s TV show, and Doohan may well have been in it. He played parts in everything from Bewitched to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Twilight Zone among many others. Then in 1966 Doohan auditioned for a new show: Star Trek. And for the part that he landed as the chief engineer of the starship Enterprise, the actor was paid the princely sum of $850 per episode.

Star Trek, of course, became an enduring phenomenon that rolls on to this day. Meanwhile, Doohan continued to play Scotty until his final Star Trek movie appearance in 1994’s Star Trek Generations. And then following his death in July 2005, some of his ashes were shot into space on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.