CARENTAN-LES-MARAIS, France (AP) — Parachutists plunged from World War II-era planes Sunday into the now-peaceful skies of Normandy where war once raged, kicking off a week of ceremonies for the fast-disappearing generation of Allied soldiers who fought on the beaches of D-Day 80 years ago to overthrow Adolf Hitler and help free Europe from his tyranny.

All along the Normandy coast – where then-young soldiers from the United States, Britain, Canada and other Allied nations waded ashore through a hail of fire on five beaches on June 6, 1944 – French officials, grateful Normandy survivors and other admirers are saying “merci” but also goodbye.

The dwindling number of veterans in their late nineties and older who come back to commemorate their fallen friends and their history-changing heroism are the last.

The fireworks, parachute jumps, solemn commemorations and ceremonies in which world leaders are taking part this week serve, among other things, to pass the baton of memory to today's generations who are once again reliving war in Europe, in Ukraine. US President Joe Biden, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and members of the British royal family are among the VIPs that France is expecting to attend the D-Day events.

On Sunday, three C-47 transport planes, the workhorses of the war, dropped three long lines of jumpers, their round parachutes opening like mushrooms into the blue sky with its puffy white clouds. The huge crowd cheered as they waited, entertained by tunes by Glenn Miller and Edith Piaf.

The planes circled around and dropped three more jumpers. The loudest applause from the crowd came when a startled deer leapt out of the undergrowth as the jumpers landed and sprinted across the landing zone.

After a final flyover, during which the last two jumpers were dropped off, the planes roared over us in close formation and disappeared behind the horizon.

Dozens of World War II veterans are coming to France to relive old memories, create new ones and hammer home a message that survivors of D-Day and the subsequent Battle of Normandy and other World War II theaters have repeated time and again: that war is hell.

“Seven thousand of my fellow Marines were killed. Twenty thousand were shot, wounded, put on ships and buried at sea,” said Don Graves, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served on Iwo Jima in the Pacific.

“I want the younger people, the younger generation here, to know what we did,” said Graves, who was part of a group of more than 60 World War II veterans who flew to Paris on Saturday.

The youngest veteran in the group is 96 and the oldest is 107, according to Dallas-based airline American Airlines.

“We did our job and came home, and that was it. I don't think we ever talked about it. I didn't talk about it for 70 years,” said another veteran, Ralph Goldsticker, a U.S. Air Force captain who served in the 452nd Bomb Group.

Of the D-Day landings, he saw from his plane “a huge stretch of beach with thousands of ships,” and he spoke of bombing raids on German forts and routes that German troops might otherwise have used to quickly send in reinforcements and push the invasion back to sea.

“I dropped my first bomb on a heavy gun emplacement at 06:58,” he said. “We flew home and landed at 09:30. We reloaded.”

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Associated Press writer Jeffrey Schaeffer in Paris contributed to this report.