World War II Paratrooper On Commemorating D-Day: 'Show Some Citizenship'

Retired Pvt. Leslie P. Cruise, 95, remembers June 6, 1944 clearly. Standing at the airplane's edge, preparing to jump onto the enemy lines of Normandy on D-Day, fear didn't occur to him.

"It was very moving and exciting," Cruise tells NPR's Noel King. "We fly over the channel, you can look out the window and see the silhouettes of the ships. We know what's going to happen now; we've talked about it but look at all those ships down there, my gosh."

The nonagenarian, who joined the military in 1943, is one of the last surviving paratroopers from World War II. Were it not for Cruise and the success of his division, the 82nd Airborne, the course of history might have looked remarkably different.

Four years prior to Cruise's enlistment, Adolf Hitler began annexing land in Europe and exerting force across the continent. The D-Day operation, which took over a year to plan and became the world's largest seaborne invasion, was an attempt to block Hitler's army and reverse the direction of influence on the battlefield.