WAR veteran Dorothea Barron entered the cockpit of the Spitfire today aged 99 as part of the countdown to D-Day 80.
The former Women’s Royal Naval Service signaller was delighted to see the fighter plane.
She was at Biggin Hill, a former Second World War air base in south London, with ex-servicemen due to travel to France next week.
The trip to mark the 80th anniversary of the June 6 invasion is organized by a veterinary charity.
Dorothea, from Bishop’s Stortford, Essex, was 18 when she was sent to Scotland for secret trials in temporary ports built by British forces in 1944.
She said: “I will probably cry most of the time at the enormity of what the forces did and the casualties.
“Those young men gave their lives willingly.”
In the summer of 1944, during the campaign to liberate Normandy, 22,440 servicemen and two women under British command were killed.
The D-Day victory became the turning point for World War II in Europe.
The German Army suffered a catastrophic defeat from which it was unable to recover.
The war finally ended on September 2, 1945, more than a year after the D-Day landings.
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