At the invitation of the French government, [a] restored Douglas C-47 will fly in for 70th-anniversary festivities and again release paratroopers over the original jump zone at Sainte-Mere-Eglise 
writes
the Associated Press.
"There are very few of these planes still flying, and this plane was very significant on D-Day," said Erin Vitale, chairwoman of the Return to Normandy Project. "It dropped people that were some of the first into Sainte-Mere-Eglise and liberated that town."
… Leslie Palmer Cruise Jr. …
still remembers being squashed between other paratroopers seated on pan
seats as the plane left England's Cottesmore Airdrome. He was weighed
down with probably 100 pounds of gear, including an M-1 rifle that was
carried in three pieces, 30-caliber rifle ammo, a first-aid pack,
grenade, K-rations and his New Testament in his left pocket, over his
heart.
"We
could hear the louder roar as each plane following the leader
accelerated down the runway and lifted into the air," he wrote in an
account of the mission. "Our turn came and the quivering craft gathered
momentum along the path right behind the plane in front."
The
airplane's engines were so loud he had to shout even to talk with the
paratrooper next to him, he said, and the scenery through its square
windows looked like shadows in the dark. Over the English Channel, a
colonel pointed downward.
"In
the partial darkness below we could make out silhouetted shapes of
ships and there must have been thousands of them all sizes and kinds,"
Cruise wrote. "If we had any doubts before about the certainty of the
invasion, they were dispelled now."
