Remembering D-Day

As the ranks of World War II veterans thin with time, the memory of one of the great battles of history fade.

On this day 67 years ago, U.S., British, French, Polish and other Allied military personnel began Operation Overlord – the invasion of Hitler’s “Fortress Europe.” Since thattime, June 6, 1944, a bit of arcane military jargon – D-Day – became part of the public consciousness.

Over the years and through the filter of movies and TV shows, the battle has taken onmythic proportions, making the scope of the invasion itself hard to fathom.

The numbers are mind boggling – more than 5,000 ships and hundreds of landing craft transported nearly 150,000 troops to wade ashore. Roughly 23,400 glider-borne and paratroopers dropped behind the coastal defenses. Thousands of airplanes dropped thousands of tons of bombs.

The invasion area spanned about 50 miles – roughly half of Long Island – at five beaches named from west to east, Utah, Omaha, Sword, Gold and Juno. U.S. forces attacked thewestern two; English, Canadian and others attacked the others.

That first day, 4,144 allied soldiers were killed, more than all U.S. combat deaths in Iraq.

The deadliest sector was Omaha Beach – a distance about equal to the distance from CitiField to the city line – where 34,250 troops landed beginning about 6:30 a.m.

Sometime after 10 p.m. when the beach was finally declared “secure” 3,000 Americans had been killed, wounded or were missing.

“Bloody Omaha” faced fortified cliffs, some more than 100 feet high – about the sameas the New Jersey palisades at the George Washington Bridge. A detachment of U.S.Rangers climbed ropes up the cliffs at Pointe Du Hoc to knock out some large guns –only to find they weren’t there.

After the 16-hour battle, most sectors were far short of the goal of securing an area almost as wide as Queens.

At Omaha beach, the 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions got about as far as the distance from Fort Totten to Northern Boulevard, at a cost of more than 1,000 dead, most of them within one city block of the water.

The total number of killed and wounded will never be known – figures on German casualties range from 4,000 to 9,000 killed and there was no accounting of how many French civilians perished in the bombing and shelling just before and during the invasion.

U.S. dead from D-Day and the fighting throughout June and July are buried at the 172-acre Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial – with 9,387 graves and a wall with the names of more than 1,100 missing, it is nearly four times the size of Crocheron Park.

To grasp the number of casualties on D-Day, consider the entire population of Bayside –every man, woman and child, killed or wounded on one day. And remember.