TWO D-Day veterans in their nineties parachuted into Normandy yesterday, 75 years after they landed there during World War II under heavy enemy fire.

Harry Read, 95, and John Hutton, 94, took part in the commemorative drop in honour of the comrades they lost when they first made the descent.

They took part in the jump onto fields at Sannerville, the drop zone for the 8th Midlands Parachute Battalion during D-Day.

Now a retired Salvation Army officer living in Bournemouth, Mr Read was a 20-year-old wireless operator with the Royal Signals who had a battery the size and weight of a toolbox strapped to his right leg when he was pushed out of the plane in the early hours of June 1944.

Mr Hutton was 19 when he served in the 13th Lancashire Parachute Battalion.

The pair were among 280 paratroopers who boarded a Dakota aircraft in Duxford, Cambridge, yesterday, before flying across the English Channel with the Red Devils, then successfully performing a tandem jump.

Both men were shown on national television relaxing on chairs, surrounded by Red Devils, after their jump

Mr Read, a great-grandfather, was presented with the Chevalier medal - by order of the Legion d'Honneur - for the role he played in the D-Day operation as part of the sixth Airbourne Division.

Ahead of Wednesday's drop, he said: "I will enjoy the jump. There are very real and definite pleasures in parachuting.

"It might be a little bit tricky, but I'm willing to have a go. But also in my heart I will be thinking of my mates.

"I get very moved when I think about them.

I have lived one of the most fulfilling lives that it's possible for a person to live and they haven't. I will stand in the cemetery and I will be speechless and I'll weep."