D-Day invasion signaled
start of victory in Europe
Barney Hoffner
BY DICK METZGAR
Staff Writer
A sky blackened by planes and the paratroopers they were dropping is how one D-Day Army veteran remembered the landings at Omaha beach during the invasion of Normandy, France, by Allied forces on July 6, 1944.
That is how Harry Brachfeld, 89, recalled that horrific day. Brachfeld, a resident of the Surrey Downs adult community in Howell, was one of thousands of American soldiers who stormed the beaches on the bloody day that signaled the end of European domination by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi war machine. Brachfeld was a member of the U.S. Army Signal Corps that landed at Omaha Beach on that day, where some of the heaviest German resistance was encountered.
The 60th anniversary of the landing at Normandy will be commemorated on Sunday.
The late Barney Hoffner, who was also a resident of Surrey Downs, was also in the first wave to land at Omaha Beach. He described the invasion as the largest amphibian operation since the Spanish Armada’s invasion of England.
Hoffner was a combat engineer whose task it was to remove all obstacles and mines to clear the way for the landing troops and vehicles. He gave a vivid account of the hell that awaited American infantrymen when they landed on the Normandy beaches on that day in a special article he wrote for Greater Media Newspapers on the 50th anniversary of the D-Day invasion 10 years ago.
"I believe we lost 40 percent of our engineers and it was impossible to carry out our assignments to blow up the obstacles," Hoffner wrote. "The infantrymen were dying like flies and our tanks never got ashore. They had wide belts of canvas around them and were supposed to float in off the ramps. Instead they sank like stones and all our bulldozers and trucks were set afire."
D-Day was the launching of Operation Overlord, the massive invasion of Europe that began at Normandy. Thousands of ships, planes and men participated.
From more than 3,500 ships, the attack was launched along 50 miles of the Normandy coastline at 6 a.m. that morning, according to a report in U.S. News & World Report. That translates to having 70 ships for each mile of the coastline under attack.
Some 500 of the mighty armada were warships that began a relentless shelling of the beaches and German positions in the hinterland at 5 a.m.
Some 3,000 of the ships were troop transports or landing craft which began pouring thousands of infantrymen on the beaches at 6 a.m.
"From the first light at 6 a.m., we were in trouble," Hoffner wrote. "This section of Omaha Beach was most heavily defended and crisscrossed with pillboxes, machine gun nests, heavy artillery and 88 mm cannons. During the night another German division, a crack outfit, had been moved in."
By 6:30 a.m., 15,000 American, British and Canadian ground troops had landed on the Normandy beaches under heavy fire to launch attacks on the strong German positions.
During the night of June 5 and the early morning hours of June 6, some 10,000 members of the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions and 5,000 British paratroopers dropped behind German lines from C-47’s to establish positions there to clear the way for the Allied invasion.
More than 13,000 Allied aircraft took part in the invasion. Nearly 133,000 soldiers landed at the five beaches — Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword — which stretched from Cherborg to Le Havre.
About 3,000 Americans, Britons and Canadians lost their lives on June 6.
Some 10,000 German soldiers were estimated to have been deployed in defense of the Normandy beaches.