Parachutists leaping from World War II-era planes on Sunday scurried into presently tranquil Normandy skies, bringing a week of celebrations for the quickly-dead Military troops who fought from D-Day beaches to Adolf Hitler’s fall, helping to free Europe of his tyranny.
On June 6, 1944, young men from across the United States, Britain, Canada, and other Allied countries waded ashore amid hails of fire on five beaches in France, where French officials, glad French survivors, and another admirers are saying “merci” but even good.
The number of veterans in their late seventies and older who are returning to recall their fallen buddies and their changing histories is on the decline.
It felt like time was traveling back in time for 63-year-old Neil Hamsler, a former British military glider, to watch the southern England beach recede on Sunday through the windows of one of three C-47 transport plane that flew him and another jumpers across the English Channel to their French drop zone.
” I thought that would have been the last perspective of England some of those boys of 1944 had,” he said. While theirs was a daylight jump Sunday, unlike for Allied flying troops who jumped at evening early on D- Time, and” no one’s fire at us”, Hamsler said:” It definitely brought it home, the poignancy”.
The purpose of the fireworks displays, parachute jumps, solemn celebrations, and ceremonies that world leaders will attend this week is to honor the current generation who are experiencing resumption of hostilities in Europe and Ukraine. The VIPs that France is anticipating attending D-Day events include American President Joe Biden, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and British royalty.
Looping around one after another, the C- 47s dropped strings of jumpers- 70 in all, dressed in WWII- style uniforms. In the blue skies and puffy white clouds, their round chutes burst open. A sizable crowd of many thousands of people cheered and whooped as they waited while listening to music by Glenn Miller and Edith Piaf. A startled deer pounced from undergrowth as jumpers were landing and sprinted across the drop zone, receiving some of the loudest applause.
Two of the planes, christened” That’s All, Brother” and” Placid Lassie”, were D- Day veterans, among the thousands of C- 47s and other aircraft that on June 6, 1944, formed part of what was the largest- ever sea, air and land armada. The Allied airborne forces, which included troops making hair-raising descents aboard gliders, landed first on D-Day to secure roads, bridges, and other strategic locations inland of the invasion beaches and devastate gun emplacements that raked the sands and ships with deadly fire.
The planes took off Sunday from Duxford, England, for the 90- minute flight to Carentan. In 1944, paratroopers jumped in the dark into gunfire, many of whom were scattering far from their objectives, at the center of D-Day drop zones.
Sunday’s jumpers were from an international civilian team of parachutists, many of them former soldiers. The only woman was 61- year- old Dawna Bennett, who felt history’s force as she exited her plane into the Normandy skies.
” It’s the same doorway and it’s the same countryside from 80 years ago, and it’s like,’ Oh my God, I’m so thankful I’m not doing this at midnight'” she said. They continue to claim that this generation is the best, and I firmly believe that.
Over the course of the course of World War II, survivors of D-Day and the ensuing Battle of Normandy have repeatedly remarked that war is hell.
” Seven thousand of my marine buddies died,” I said. Twenty thousand shot up, wounded, put on ships, buried at sea”, said Don Graves, a U. S. Marine Corps veteran who served in Iwo Jima in the Pacific theater.
” I want the younger people, the younger generation here to know what we did”, said Graves, part of a group of more than 60 World War II veterans who flew into Paris on Saturday.
The youngest veteran in the group is 96 and the most senior 107, according to their carrier from Dallas, American Airlines.
” We did our job and we came home and that’s it. We probably never discussed it. For 70 years I did n’t talk about it”, said another of the veterans, Ralph Goldsticker, a U. S. Air Force captain who served in the 452nd Bomb Group.
He recalled seeing” a big, big chunk of the beach with thousands of vessels” from his aircraft and recalls hearing about bombing raids against German forts and routes that German forces might otherwise have used to send reinforcements back into the sea.
” I dropped my first bomb at 06: 58 a. m. in a heavy gun placement”, he said. ” We went back home, we landed at 09: 30. We reloaded”.
