NORMANDY, France–The day that Oklahoma construction executive Peter Plank found his life’s passion confirmed was when he spotted a cardboard sign on a street corner in northern France that said one word, and that word was “Hoots.”

Plank was still in the early days of his project to return World War II veterans to places like Normandy and Bastogne, the battlefields of youth for these aging warriors.
Plank, of the founding members of the Liberty Jump Team non-profit, met World War II paratrooper Harry Hoots at an air show in Tulsa, Okla., that Plank attended with the team, which was making a commemorative parachute jump.

“Hoots had no fingers, only nubs,” Plank recalled. “He jumped into Normandy and two days in, he caught a German ‘potato masher’ grenade, and threw it out, and it blew off his fingers.”

His paratrooper buddies knew they couldn’t carry him, leaving hastily, and telling him, “We’ll be back for you.”

Seriously wounded and maimed, he took refuge in a barn at a nearby farm. Hoots was discovered by “a little French girl and her brother who came out to feed the chickens.”

The children’s parents feared reprisal from Nazi troops fighting the D-Day liberation forces, but the children brought the stricken soldier food, and they stripped linens to bandage his mangled hand. On the third morning, the Americans pushed through and secured the area. Harry Hoots was saved, his active role in World War II, over. He told doctors he’d rather live with finger nubs than use prosthetic hooks.

At the air show in Oklahoma, Plank told the World War II paratrooper, “We would like to take you back to Normandy. You won’t pay for anything.” He added, “Maybe we can go to that village.”

Plank, along with Liberty Jump Team co-founders Dominique and Jilray Launay, have been helping to bring World War II veterans to Normandy and Bastogne, France, and the Netherlands in the years since as part of their mission to preserve history of all World War II veterans who fought there.

The Army veteran said that Dominique Launay, a French paratrooper veteran, and another team founder, Jil Launay, have the quality contacts in the Army, and Europe, to provide a peak experience for World War II veterans.

So, Plank and paratrooper Hoots were traveling together, at the 60th anniversary of D-Day, amid the parades and revelry there was an old woman in a lawn chair, with a cardboard sign with the large, scrawled letters, “Hoots.”

“It was all she could remember from the white name tape sewn on his jacket,” Plank recalled. “She sees Harry’s nubs on his hands, and she gets up, screaming and crying.”

What followed was a joyous reunion between the little girl, aged into her 70s, and the wounded paratrooper of more than 80 birthdays.

“That little old lady had set out on that street corner in that village since the 50th anniversary of D-Day, not knowing if Hoots died from wounds or old age, and that maybe that would be the special year that Hoots came back.”

Plank recalled an American general was flabbergasted at the reunion, and Plank said, “I knew my mission was validated.”

“I told him I didn’t orchestrate this,” Plank recalled. “It took us from the team jumping at the air show, it took Harry coming to the air show, and the woman in France sitting on the corner, waiting.”

Liberty Jump Team members, many of whom are paratrooper veterans, make commemorative jumps at air shows and military bases to raise funds for the endeavor. During a span of nearly 20 years, the team has donated and supported the travel of more than 120 “Greatest Generation” veterans. For some, it is a reunion, and for others it is a healing, or both.

In 2022 for the 78th Anniversary of D-Day, Plank escorted Bill Parker, an Omaha Beach veteran of D-Day. The previous time Parker had been on the wide sweep of Normandy beachhead, he had seen death and dying all around him, with German machine guns killing his buddies. He lived with nightmares for decades.

After the visit in 2022, seeing children at play and families walking peaceably on the beach that adjoins the now peaceful countryside of Normandy, after the visit Parker told Plank, “My nightmares are over.”

“Bill, an old cowboy, and a pretty famous one at that,” Plank remarked. “He said that since he visited the beach, his nightmares were gone.”

Over nearly 20 years, Plank’s has excelled at hosting “Greatest Generation Veterans” on the return trip of a lifetime.

“The airlines always upgrade the veterans to first Class,” he said. “Wheelchairs are a priority now, because of the veterans’ age.” He added, however, that the travel, rather than tiring for veterans, has a restorative quality.

“When we get them over for seven or eight days, the aches and pains of age are gone,” he said.

Time is of the essence, Plank said. “The ranks are thinning quickly. We are not going to say ‘No.’” For D-Day ceremonies this year, the Liberty team is hosting five veterans. “This is what’s keeping them excited.”

Capt. Darren Cinatl, an active-duty officer with the 82nd Airborne Division, and combat veteran of Afghanistan, is also a Liberty Jump Team member. In his Army public affairs work, he helped coordinate dozens of events to commemorate D-Day, one of the largest events in paratrooper history. He coordinates with Plank and World War II veterans supported by team Liberty.

Within the past year, he escorted World War II veterans at visits at Normandy and Bastogne, France, Belgium, and even Germany to memorialize “Operation Varsity.” Less remembered than D-Day, Varsity was the “jump across the Rhine” by thousands of American and British airborne troops.

Last year, Cinatl helped arrange the visit of 17th Airborne Division Bob White, who jumped into Germany on March 24, 1945, as part of Varsity, the last major Airborne operation of World War II.

“I loved being a paratrooper,” White told Liberty Jump Team members in a recent teleconference from his home in Florida. “Paratroopers are the best people.”

He said he volunteered for “jump school” in England because Normandy casualties had been so high for the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions. His combat jump would be into Germany to seal the fate of the Third Reich.

“We had to win, so we were going to win,” White said. “I was very patriotic.”

Last year, White and Cinatl, journeyed together to Wesel, Germany, where the 16,000 paratroopers and glider troops of the American 17th Airborne and British 6th Airborne divisions swooped in on the east shore of the Rhine River.

“I never dreamed I would come back here,” White said, who was able to survey the field where he parachuted in. A radio operator, he recalled that he grabbed his gear, and moved “toward the sound of the guns.”

On March 25, 2023, Liberty Jump Team hosted another World War II veteran of the 11th Airborne Division at the team’s headquarters hangar in Corsicana, Texas. Clinton Carl Finner, 97, made an astounding seven combat parachute jumps in the Pacific, parachuting into the jungles of New Guinea, and Luzon and Leyte in the Philippines.

“If your choices were to jump into trees in the jungle, or water (in the Pacific), you’d choose to jump into the jungle,” Finner, a retired Texas construction foreman, quipped. “Were the trees tall? Yes, they were!”

That afternoon, family and paratrooper brothers, lifted Finner into a World War II vintage C-47, so he could watch the Liberty team members “stand in the door” and exit the perfectly good airplane in flight.

“I enjoyed the ride very much,” he told his Airborne comrades, adding he was not used to landing in a troop carrier transport.

Closing out a day of honoring veterans and heritage, team members awarded Finner team jump wings, followed by a hearty chorus of the morbidly humorous paratrooper anthem, “Blood Upon The Risers.”

Finner teared up, listening to choruses of “Gory, gory what a helluva way to die … and he ain’t gonna jump no more.”

“This was a good day for my dad,” his son, Clinton Finner III, said.

Editor’s note: Dennis Anderson is a paratrooper veteran of the 8th Infantry Division in NATO during the Cold War who has made more than 110 “round canopy” parachute jumps. A longtime journalist with Associated Press and Aerotech News, he serves on the Los Angeles County Veterans Advisory Commission, and still jumps.