D-Day 65 Years on!
On June 6, 1944, the fate of the world changed when Allied Forces stormed the beaches of Normandy. The scales were tilted against the Axis for good and World War II was soon over. This is your opportunity to stand in the very spot where this pivotal battle was waged, remembering its importance to France — and the world.

Sixty-five years later, thousands gathered on the beaches of northern France to remember the British fallen from the D-Day campaign to liberate Europe.

Paratroopers jumped into Normandy, watched by veterans on the same drop zone they had used as they parachuted in at the start of Operation Overlord in 1944. The airborne drop over the town of Ranville, the first village to be liberated by the British at 2.30am on D-Day, started the 65th anniversary commemorations.

Veterans in their 80s and 90s, who were up against elite German Panzer divisions, paid tribute to current servicemen, saying they believed that the soldiers fighting in Afghanistan today are up against a harder enemy. Among the 800 Britons watching the men of the 3rd Battalion The Parachute Regiment jump was Major Jack Watson who helped lead the attack on Ranville 65 years ago.

"To me I think Afghanistan is harder than what we went through," the 92-year-old veteran Paratrooper said. "Ours was a finite war and we knew where the enemy was and what uniform he wore. Yes, we had it very hard, but it came to an end within a year after D-Day but Afghanistan seems to go on and on."

He was joined by Dennis Boardman who pointed to a copse where he landed among the corpses of comrades who had been shot by the Germans after their parachutes caught in trees. "We were very apprehensive about what was going to happen and seeing the guys parachute today does bring a lump to your throat. I am a bit disappointed at the lack of interest shown by the Government. A lot of them don't seem to appreciate what we did on their behalf."

He added that Afghanistan was a harder campaign because of the suicide bombers, the heat and equipment difficulties. It seems they just don't know who the enemy is out there and they are having a terribly tough time of it."

George "Les" Martin, 84, from Wigan, Lancs, was one of the members of 12th Battalion Parachute Regiment who jumped to support those who had already taken the bridge which is now known as Pegasus. By taking the bridge, they prevented German forces from attacking from the east the soldiers who were landing at Sword Beach.

"It was dark. You were huddled up in the plane and we got fed up. We jumped through a hole in the floor, not like the modern way. You were sat on the edge of the hole with nothing to hold you in. It could be quite terrifying."

However, the death toll of 165 British troops killed in Afghanistan was brought into sharp focus by the scale of the losses on D-Day: 179 men were declared missing in action from just one parachute battalion. "These days we can certainly relate to what the veterans have been through," said Company Sergeant Major Stephen Tidmarsh, 37.

Lance Corporal Craig Sharpe, 24, who was Mentioned in Dispatches following the Para's Afghanistan tour last summer , said: "I have never done anything like this before but it has been a real privilege and makes all the fighting in Afghanistan worthwhile."

Lt Col Huw Williams, commanding officer of 3 Para, said: "I think this re-energies their enthusiasm for being the Parachute Regiment meeting the old soldiers who stand for something to take pride in as forbears. To be among these men is humbling."

The old men in their blazers and berets stared up into the bright sunlight as paratroopers filled the sky. Some struggled with their emotions as memories flooded back of battles fought a lifetime ago, of friends who never returned home: for 65 years ago the veterans on the ground were the ones floating down, some of the first troops to land on D-Day — day one of the Allies’ invasion of Nazi-occupied France.

For a fallen comrade, a British veteran holds a wooden cross with a poppy to pay respect to comrades killed in 1944 at codenamed Sword beach in Langrune-sur-Mer during the commemorations marking the 65th anniversary of the June 6, 1944 allied landings in Normandy, northwestern France.

When Dennis Boardman and his comrades jumped out into the darkness just after midnight on June 6, 1944, it was, in every sense, a leap into the unknown. This bloke tried to kill me when I landed,” said Mr Boardman, a signaller, pointing to the exact spot where he touched down. “It was one of our own blokes — he thought I was a German.” He may have had a lucky escape: he also had a lucky landing. In the trees surrounding Ranville, the village that they were supposed to capture, he saw ten to fifteen fellow parachutists hanging from the branches, killed by the Germans as they hung there helplessly.

“I always say when I am talking to people that for the last 65 years I have been living on borrowed time. I should have been with my buddies in the grave down there, but for the grace of God I am still here.”

Douglas Baines, 85, was supposed to land near Pegasus Bridge. His pilot got lost, though, and he ended up in the River Dives, several miles away. “The pilot could not find his way out of a paper bag,” he said. “The tide was out — if it had not been I would have been drowned. It took me two hours to get to the side of the river because it was so thick with mud.”

When they became separated from the rest of the British troops he and another paratrooper were hidden in a barn by a farmer, but their numbers eventually became so swollen by other troops trying to evade capture that he decided to find another hiding place. The next day the Germans discovered the barn, blew up the farm and shot the farmer and his labourer. Every year Mr Baines goes back and lays a wreath on his grave.

After trying in vain to rejoin his unit he eventually made his way back to England, where he returned to his family in Bingley in Yorkshire. “My mother had had a telegram to say I was missing. She must have thought I was dead. I walked into the house, then she said, ‘Where the hell have you been?’”

As they stood there, on a narrow country lane running between cornfields, the old men seemed lost in the rituals of remembrance. One of them spotted Major Jack Watson, their old platoon second-in-command, who had led the successful attack on the German garrison at Ranville. “This is the man that captured the lot!” George Butler, a former sergeant, said.

Mr Boardman came over and gave Major Watson a bear hug.

If they cared about the controversies that have surrounded the commemorations — the row over whether the Queen would attend, the late intervention by the Prince of Wales to secure himself an invitation, the seemingly inept handling of the event by both President Sarkozy and Gordon Brown — then for a brief moment they were prepared to put it to the back of their minds.

A couple of miles away at Colleville-Montgomery, where a statue to General Montgomery stands 100 yards from Sword Beach, the carnival was in full flow. There were bands and a flypast by the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight. When the veterans paraded past Monty’s statue and down to the seafront, the medals on their chest gently tinkled as they marched.

The beaches there look peaceful, somewhere nice to spend a holiday. But that was not how they were recalled by the men yesterday. Michael Brennan was 19 when he landed on Gold Beach with the 1st Battalion Dorset Regiment. “The tide swept us in five minutes early, so we can claim that we were the first British infantry to land on French soil,” he said.

As soon as he left his landing craft, he said, he found himself chin-deep in the water. “The shorter men drowned there and then, dragged down by the weight of their kit. We worked our way up the beach in a sort of arc, losing men all the time. It was all hell let loose. There was a machinegun raking the whole of the beach, and they were also dropping mortars on us while the heavy guns behind them were decimating us.

“The only reason we succeeded was because there were so many of us. We were like ants. Although they were mowing us down there were still some who were going to get through.”

An estimated 800 veterans made it to Normandy, many of them making extraordinary efforts to take part in commemorations that have become an integral part of their lives. Mr Baines has had a wooden leg since 1947, the legacy of a bad glider landing in Germany in 1945 in which he was the only trooper to survive, but he still drove to Normandy from his home in Blackpool. “I have been coming here for 37 years,” he said. “But this is my last trip. I won’t be back.”

D-Day vet remembers WW2 comrades and today's fallen
He salutes each fallen soldier as their coffin comes home from Iraq or Afghanistan. Now it's time for Ken Scott to re-visit his own battlefield. The D-Day veteran returned to the beaches of Normandy to take part in the 65th anniversary of the Allied landings.

But even as he remembers the past, 93-year-old Ken will be thinking of today's heroes. "I will shed tears for them all," he says. "The men and women dying now are our brothers and sisters in arms. Their sacrifice is the same. The grief they leave behind is the same. Blood is still being spilled, in just the same way."

Ken knows all about the continuing cost of war... So far he has watched 70 casualties, killed in action, being brought back from the Middle East. The old soldier has become a familiar figure, standing to attention by the war memorial in his home town of Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire. Here silent crowds line the streets every time a flag-draped coffin is driven through after being flown in to nearby RAF Lyneham.

"I know what I'll be feeling when I look out across the D-Day beaches, because it's the way I feel when I see today's victims," Ken says. It's a bitter sadness, that war is still wasting precious young lives now, just as it did back then."

This will be the first time he returned to Normandy and will probably be the last. A final chance to honour comrades from long ago, he says. He was Sergeant Scott, a quartermaster in 30 Corps, that morning of June 6 when he arrived at Gold Beach on an American landing craft at first light, at the wheel of a truck laden with supplies.

"Someone shouted 'Go! Go! Go!' and we were off, not pausing for a moment, into the water with the wheels churning, and then on to the sand," he says. From the moment we landed, it was mayhem. I could smell the cordite from the bullets and shells - and I can remember the stench of cattle burning in the fields close by that were alight. From the front seat I looked through the truck window, and it was a scene from Hell that was unfolding. Men were running, falling, crouching to fire. I saw men that I knew being killed, either shot or blown to pieces."

He had served for three years in the Middle East and Africa and fought in the battles in the desert, but this was a firestorm unlike anything he'd seen. The German gun batteries opened up, and bullets rattled off the truck and tore through its canvas.

It probably took 10 minutes to cross the beach and reach the roadway. To Ken it seemed like an eternity. From there, he began the long advance across Europe, seeing horrors all the way. The flattened city of Caen. The bloody fighting at Arnhem in Holland. In one town, civilian bodies were stacked high inside a church, waiting to be buried. Amid the ruins of a German street, he saw a child in rags, holding out a hand, begging for the apple he saw Ken eating.