Long Island veterans remember D-Day invasion

In the early light of morning 66 years ago Sunday, men grim with anxiety, many of them sickened by the rolling sea, began pouring onto the beaches of Normandy, France. Along with their rifles, they cradled history in their hands. The D-Day liberation of Western Europe had begun.

"The shore was filled with all sorts of burning wrecked assault craft," wrote Billy Melander, 84, who landed that day on Omaha Beach, the scene of the invasion's bloodiest fighting. "Some were still unloading men, material and tanks. On the shoreline you could see the tanks and trucks that never made it out of the water and the gruesome sight of all those bodies being washed up on that littered beach."

Melander, of North Babylon, was among the 156,000 Allied troops who landed the first day.

He almost drowned during the landing while wading ashore through neck-deep surf, toward a beach littered with the machine-gunned corpses of fellow soldiers. But despair turned to optimism after he reached the safety of the cliffs, and turned back to see the Allied military might arrayed behind him.

"In the distance you could see the large gunships belching out flames and smoke as they fired on targets inland. In the air, English Spitfires and American Mustang fighter planes darted all over the sky, looking for German fighter planes. None came up to challenge them."

In all, some 326,000 Allied troops landed at Normandy in the first five days of the invasion, according to the New Orleans-based National World War II Museum, including fighters from the United States, Britain, Canada, France and Norway. Some 5,000 ships and 11,000 planes were involved in ferrying the troops.

A storm had delayed the invasion by a day, roiling the waters of the English Channel and adding seasickness to the list of challenges faced by troops already coping with fear and fatigue.

Far worse, arriving troops burdened with waterlogged equipment had to wade ashore and across the wide beaches to reach safety. Set upon by German soldiers who fired from cliffs overlooking the sand, thousands of Allied troops were killed or suffered grievous wounds in the invasion's first hours.

"Omaha took all damned day," said Tom Czekanski, director of the museum's collections and exhibits, about the Allied landing at Omaha Beach. Prior to the Normandy landing, Germany's ultimate defeat remained very much in doubt, Czekanski said.

An Allied thrust from the south had been bogged down in Italy since September 1943. Germany's occupation of France and the Low Countries helped keep it going with access to scarce food, raw materials and industrial capacity. And with no ground threat on its western flank, Germany had been free to focus its dwindling war resources against Russian advances from the east. "The ultimate impact of the invasion of Normandy was the downfall of Nazi Germany and the liberation of Europe," Czekanski said.

Jim Treuchtlinger, 84, of East Meadow, had been a freshman at Columbia University when he was drafted in 1943. Although the fighting on the beach itself was over when he landed on Utah Beach on June 8, German soldiers awaited him in the hedgerows just a few hundred yards from the water's edge. He was wounded three times over the next two months, as he advanced with Company F of the 358th Infantry, 90th Division. He was taken to a military hospital stateside when an exploding shell sent shrapnel into his skull.

But he said the victory was worth the price he and others paid. "June 6 was the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler. And that was good for the world."