D-day veterans in their 90s parachute into Normandy once more
Seventy-five years ago, they jumped into the unknown, landing noiselessly in Normandy’s fields in the inky dark and pumped with adrenalin over what horrors might await them.
Now in their nineties, two D-day veterans made the same landing on Wednesday, this time to loud applause as part of a spectacular Red Devils display with flags and signature red smoke before a cheering crowd.
Harry Read, 95, a retired Salvation Army officer, was a 20-year-old wireless operator with the Royal Signals when he was pushed out of his plane in the early hours of 6 June 1944. John “Jock” Hutton, 94, from Larkfield, Kent, was 19, and serving with the 13th Lancashire Parachute regiment when he descended over the famous Pegasus Bridge.
On Wednesday both performed tandem jumps with the British army’s Red Devils, recreating the famous airborne landings at a historic drop zone at Sannerville. The pair were part of a display that also included 280 British and French paratroopers. Both men gave a thumbs-up to the crowd as they landed.
Read told reporters: “I thought the jump was brilliant. The jump was wonderful in every way. I feel good. My health is good and my mind is still ticking away.”.
Hutton said: “Its great to be back on French soil.” He said though he thought he should have “more sense at 94”. The landing was not as smooth as he had hoped and he had a sore backside, he joked, after landing “on a bunch of boulders”.
Reflecting on his jump in 1944, he said he had enjoyed it because he had previously done a lot of freefalling.
Both men had been worried that because of problems with the availability of their original aircraft, the jump might not go ahead. “We were looking out of the window and all of the mist was coming in,” Hutton said. “All this bloody way and we’re not going to get out of the aircraft.”
In the earliest hours of that longest day, thousands of Allied troops were disgorged into the night sky from Horsa and Hamilcar gliders and planes. They included more than 4,000 from the 6th Airborne division, including Major John Howard’s 181 men of the “Ox and Bucks”, who swooped in on six woodand-canvas Horsas to take two crucial bridges over the river Orne and the Caen canal in the first hour of D-day.
In Operation Deadstick, Howard’s troops landed on target and on time, at 00.16. After a fierce 10-minute firefight, the action was over by 00.26 – a full six hours before the beach landings. Ninety minutes after taking off from Britain, Howard was able to send the code words “Ham and Jam” indicating that both bridges, critical to defending the invasion force’s left flank, had been successfully taken.
Since then the bridge over the Caen canal has been known as Pegasus Bridge, after the winged mythical stallion that is the defining symbol of the British airborne forces, and in tribute to what has been described as “the most outstanding flying achievements of the war”.
On the eve of the 75th anniversary, paratroopers from the 16th Air Assault
Brigade and their French counterparts joined the mass jump into Sannerville, dropping from the RAF Hercules aircraft and a C-47 Dakota.
Among them was a British army officer whose grandfather fought for the German forces during the second world war. Warrant officer Maik Briggs said he was born and raised in Germany and his grandfather had been an infantry officer. “For me this is a huge occasion. I just jumped French there, under a French parachute, it’s all about collaboration. It’s a huge occasion for myself because of my German links, but also to pay tribute to what the Allies did as well 75 years ago.”
On Wednesday, the veterans followed next. Accompanied by a team of 12 Red Devils, they jumped from a Beech 99 and a Cessna Caravan aircraft, which had crossed the channel.
The two aircraft had to be hastily arranged by the Ministry of Defence at the 11th hour to save the day because of issues over the availability of the civilian plane that was to transport them. At one point it looked as though the jumpers would not get to fulfil their wish. But flight plans for the substitute aircraft were submitted just two hours before being approved by the French authorities.
Many on D-day paid the ultimate price. Men were lost in swamps and flooded trenches, dragged down to their deaths by heavy equipment. Some gliders crash-landed, scouring deep wakes of furrowed soil. Many paratroopers were blown off course, landing alone miles from their allotted rendezvous points.
Just minutes into D-day, the first house on French soil was liberated, and the first Allied soldier of the invasion, Lt Den Brotheridge, 28, was killed, cut down by enemy machine-gun fire.
This year, as every year, a vigil and silent march by 1 Battalion the Rifles and the Army Air Corps will be held at Pegasus bridge at midnight, and a bottle of champagne will be opened at Cafe Gondrée, the site of the first combat of the invasion in those first minutes of the longest day.