CARENTAN-LES-MARAIS, France (AP) — Paratroopers jumping from World War II-era planes threw themselves into the now peaceful skies of Normandy, where war once raged, on Sunday, inaugurating a week of ceremonies for the fast-vanishing generation of Allied troops who fought from D-Day stranded 80 years ago, until the fall of Adolf Hitler, and helped free Europe from its tyranny.
Along the entire coastline of Normandy — where young soldiers from the United States, Britain, Canada and other Allied countries waded ashore through hailstorms on five beaches on June 6, 1944 — French officials, grateful Normandy survivors and other admirers say “ thank you” but also goodbye.
The dwindling number of veterans in their late 90s and older who return to commemorate fallen friends and their history-changing exploits are the latest.
Part of the purpose of fireworks displays, parachute jumps, solemn commemorations and ceremonies that world leaders will attend this week is to pass the baton of memory to current generations who are now seeing war again in Europe, in Ukraine. US President Joe Biden, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the British royal family are among the VIPs France is expecting for the D-Day events.
On Sunday, three C-47 transport planes, a workhorse of the war, dropped three long lines of jumpers, whose round parachutes shot open into the blue sky with puffy white clouds, to the cheers of the huge crowd who were entertained by tunes from Glenn . Miller and Edith Piaf as they waited.
The planes spun around and dropped three more sticks of jumpers. The loudest applause from the crowd came when a startled deer jumped out of the brush as the jumpers landed and sprinted across the landing zone.
After a final pass to drop the last two jumpers, the planes roared overhead in close formation and disappeared over the horizon.
Dozens of World War II veterans are gathering in France to revisit old memories, make new memories and bring home a message that survivors of D-Day and the subsequent Battle of Normandy, and from other theaters of the Second World war, have repeated again and again – that war is hell.
“Seven thousand of my Navy friends died. Twenty thousand shot down, wounded, put on ships and buried at sea,” said Don Graves, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served at 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 to Paris on Saturday.
The youngest veteran in the group is 96 and the oldest is 107, according to their Dallas-based carrier, American Airlines.
“We did our job and we came home and that was it. I don’t think we ever talked about it. For 70 years I didn’t talk about it,” said another veteran, Ralph Goldsticker, a U.S. Air Force captain who served with the 452nd Bomb Group.
Of the D-Day landings, he recalled seeing from his plane “a big, big stretch of beach with thousands of ships,” and spoke of bombing German strongholds and routes that German forces might otherwise have used to get reinforcements to to rush in. push the invasion back into the sea.
“I dropped my first bomb at 6:58 a.m. in a place with heavy artillery,” he said. “We went back home, we landed at 9:30 am. We reloaded.”
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Associated Press writer Jeffrey Schaeffer in Paris contributed to this report.
