Seventy-five years after Harry Read parachuted into Normandy as a 20-year-old wireless operator, with a battery the size and weight of a toolbox strapped to his right leg, he will board a Dakota aircraft and do it again.

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This time there will be no cumbersome battery, which on D-day failed to release on time and so pulled him sharply down into a swamp, an area deliberately flooded by the Germans which would claim the lives of almost 200 of his comrades before they could fire a single bullet.

“And when I board the Dakota, I will go and sit in seat 12. Because that was where I sat on that day,” said Harry, who will perform a tandem jump with the Red Devils Parachute Display Team as part of the 75th anniversary of D-day commemorations.

“It is a stupid thing to do at my age,” said Read, who is 95 on 17 May. “Elderly men don’t do parachute jumps”. But he is looking forward to it. “There is a delight in jumping,” he added, after having had a practice jump in September, his first since D-day. “But I resonate more with the sacrifice than I do with the celebration. The sacrifice enabled the celebration to take place, of course. And I will think of my mates who died”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Harry Read pictured in June 1943, aged 19. ‘Just been awarded my wings.’ Photograph: Harry Read

Read, a great-great grandfather living in Bournemouth, who served as a signalman with the 6th Airborne Division attached to the 3rd Parachute Brigade, has vivid recall of that fateful day.

He remembers one of their final briefings. “One of the briefing officers, whether it was deliberately or an onrush of untoward honesty, I don’t know, but he said: ‘We ought to tell you, we are expecting 50% casualties on landing.’ It was very sombre. Being young, we thought we were immortal. It’s going to happen, but not to me. But at over 50%, the odds are slightly against you.

“I remember, it was a bright sunny day. And I went to a quiet place in the camp. I sat down and thought very deeply about what I was going to do. I came to the conclusion I would do everything I could to live up to being a para in enemy country. I wouldn’t surrender. I would be ready for any opportunity when it came. I settled it within my heart and within my mind”.

This time Read, who is a Salvation Army commissioner having enjoyed a life-long career with them, will take off from the preserved second world war airfield at the Imperial War Museum Duxford in Cambridgeshire, during a two-day programme of events to mark the 75th anniversary. He will perform his jump over Sannerville, Normandy, at historic DZ K, [Drop Zone K] in a mass drop that will also see another parachute regiment D-Day veteran, Jock Hutton, 94, from Kent, repeat the tandem jump he first performed for the 70th anniversary in Normandy. Around 30 Dakotas will be participating in Daks over Normandy.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Harry Read during a practice sky dive in September. Photograph: Salvation Army

Read hopes, through performing the jump, to raise awareness of and funds for the Salvation Army’s anti-trafficking and anti-slavery programme through his Just Giving page.

Back in 1944, Read boarded his aircraft “pretty well full of adrenaline”. Approaching the coastline of Normandy “we could see this magnificent fireworks display ahead of us, except it wasn’t fireworks. We flew into this dreadful situation. We could hardly keep our seats. We were bouncing here, there and everywhere from the shockwaves from shells. We could see the tracer bullets.” His Dakota took a sudden great turn upward to the right. He realises now it had been caught by a shell.

As he jumped into the darkness, at 00.50 on D-day, he could see ahead of them one Allied aircraft going down in flames. On landing, he found himself alone. The pathfinders, whose job was to set up markers, had earlier been dropped in the wrong DZ, he said, and he had no idea where he was, or where he should head to.

“I had fallen into one of these deep trenches. I was immediately submerged. But fortunately my knees helped me. And the strong grasses enabled me to pull on them to get myself out,” he recalled.

He pulled himself slowly from flooded trench to flooded trench, discarding his accumulator battery “because it was jolly heavy”.

After one hour, he met another para, Paddy from Galway. Passwords were exchanged: “ham and jam”. For the next 16 hours the two slowly crawled through the swamp.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Read aged 22 with the Royal Signals Scotland Command in Edinburgh, 1946. Photograph: Harry Read

Eventually, they came across a farmhouse. After keeping it under observation for several hours, in case “the enemy” were within, they ventured to knock. Inside was a welcoming farmer, and a group of other bedraggled paras taking shelter.

Together, the troops would push forward to their appointed HQ at Le Mesnil. “And I was quite surprised at the very small number of men that we had there. The size of the casualties on landing was very obvious.”

Read saw action as a wireless operator throughout the Battle of Normandy, from 6 June when he landed, until 7 September when he left France. “We had our wireless sets. We even had pigeons. We had our landlines. We were up with the troops, usually with a wireless set of some description strapped to our backs. And we had a silly little gun, with a silly little bayonet. The Germans were way ahead of us with their weaponry. We had the sten gun, which was very basic and accurate only up to 50 yards. And they put this little thing on the end to serve as a bayonet, but you wouldn’t want to be that close. It was a pathetic gun”.

“I was very fortunate to survive the whole thing,” he said.