BOSNIA: Rare Douglas C-47 plane which took part in the World War 2 Normandy landings is to be transported to France for preservation
- 00:02:22
- ITN Source
BOSNIA: Rare Douglas C-47 plane which took part in the World War 2 Normandy landings is to be transported to France for preservation
A rare Douglas C-47 plane which took part in WW2 Normandy landings is to be transported from Bosnia to France and refurbished to go on display with other wartime artefacts. Following the much awaited clearance from the Bosnian presidency, a team of French volunteers will arrive in Sarajevo on Saturday (November 17) to crate up the plane and truck it out of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where it was machine-gunned on an airfield near Sarajevo in 1994 during the war in Bosnia to prevent it from ever flying again. German troops based near Sarajevo will help the French by providing them with accommodation and food at the base and assist the operation with an eight-tonne crane. "These friends of the Merville battery, they have a kind of museum there, these old German bunkers, artillery bunkers at the Atlantic coast in Normandy, that were in 1944 during the invasion, this battery system conquered by the British parachutists and they were dropped out of Dakota. Maybe out of this aircraft, maybe," said lieutenant-colonel Ernst August Petermann, spokesman for the German troops based in Bosnia. French enthusiasts began hunting for a Douglas C-47 years ago, seeing the sturdy transport plane as a potent symbol of the 1944 D-Day landings, when hundreds of thousands of allied troops poured into Normandy to liberate France from the Nazis. A French soldier heard of the search and told them he had spotted one such plane while serving as a peacekeeper in Bosnia in the 1990s. A plane enthusiast, he had negotiated a one-hour ceasefire to see the plane up close and in safety. "After Dayton Peace Agreement was signed French soldiers came first to this camp in Rajlovac. And this plane was already there, exactly at this spot. From 1996 they used it as a pub for the evening drinks," said Lieutenant-Colonel Petermann. A check of its registration numbers revealed that it had taken part in the Normandy landings, as well as the disastrous Arnhem 'Market Garden' operation, the siege of Bastogne and the last parachute drop of the war in Europe in March 1945. It was seriously damaged by enemy fire on June 6, 1944, the start of D-Day, again at Arnhem and later, on December 27, 1944, when its main tyres were shot off, the wings shredded and holes punched in the propeller blades. Each time it was repaired and put back in the skies. After the war, it was sold to Czech Airlines, then to the French Air Force and finally in 1972 to Yugoslavia, where it has been ever since.
ITN Source | November 15, 2007
