LI's D-Day vets recall historic battle

Barney Reynolds recalls getting off a boat to slog ashore at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944 -- D-Day -- and thinking to himself: What am I doing here, and why am I not getting hit by bullets?

Bodies and body parts were strewn around him on the sand and in the water. It was chaos on the 19-year-old's first day ever in combat. Expecting death from German fire at any moment, all he could think to do was say the Act of Contrition, a Roman Catholic prayer asking for forgiveness for sins.

"We knew it was bad because we saw so many bodies," said Reynolds, a Rocky Point resident who was a demolition expert in World War II. "The first waves were just about annihilated."

Today marks the 67th anniversary of D-Day, the great Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France that heralded the beginning of the end for Germany.

Reynolds and some of his former brothers-in-arms -- those few still alive -- are doing their best to stay united and remind newer generations of the horrors they survived.

Reynolds and about a half-dozen D-Day veterans from the 297th Engineer Combat Battalion, along with their relatives, spent three days leading up to the anniversary gathering for a reunion on Long Island. They came mainly from the tri-state area.

They visited the Armed Forces Plaza in Hauppauge, ate at a cookout honoring them in Patchogue, attended a ceremony at the Long Island National Cemetery in Pinelawn and were feted at the American Airpower Museum at Republic Airport in Farmingdale.

Their battalion was given one of the most difficult tasks on D-Day -- clearing the beaches of Nazi bunkers, tank traps and machine gun nests constructed to prevent landing craft and troops from advancing across the beach. Once they landed, they had to work under withering enemy gunfire to eliminate minefields and fortifications.

Reynolds, who was a corporal, recalled sheer horror, fear and confusion that day. With 30 pounds of C2 explosive strapped to his back, he made it across the beach with his unit to relative safety at the bottom of a hill where the Nazis were entrenched but could not fire down on them. Reynolds saw boots gathered from the dead and wounded. He decided to swap a pair for his soaked ones.

As he slipped on the first one, he was stopped by something inside. It was a foot. He dropped it, and put his soggy ones back on.

Another member of the battalion, Andy Ranaudo, 86, of Ridgefield Park, N.J., said memories of the invasion that helped win the war were so horrifying it's "something we don't remember too much of."

Sixty-seven years later, he reflected on what was accomplished with so much blood, and on a lifetime of watching American sacrifices. "When we look at the world today, what did we solve?" he said. "It hasn't solved anything in the world. Still American boys are being killed."