Stirling-born veteran Jock Hutton won the admiration of the country when – at the age of 89 – he parachuted into the 2014 70th D-Day anniversary celebrations.

But yesterday, five years later, he did it all over again, strapped to a member of the RAF Red Devils Parachute display team, and coming down in the same Normandy field he had landed in on June 6, 1944.

Jock had been one of the first Allied soldiers to land in Nazi-occupied Western Europe and with his comrades in the 13th (Lancashire) Parachute Regiment secured Ranville, the first village liberated on D-Day.

He joked yesterday that this year’s landing, on a pile of boulders, was not as smooth as the one in 1944.

Thinking back to the original jump when he was aged just 19, he said: “I enjoyed the fall, I had done a lot of free falling. But [the French] thought that we were German soldiers on exercise.”

He was born at 17 Cowane Street in Stirling and brought up by his grandmother. When she died he was sent to the Quarriers orphanage in Bridge of Weir.

Jock Hutton completes his commemorative parachute drop

Jock joined the Black Watch in July 1939 before the start of the war and was based at Dover Castle.

Speaking to the Observer from his home in Maidstone, Kent, after the 2014 jump into Normandy, Jock said of his early Army days: “I hated every minute of it because there was just too much discipline.”

He also recalled a how a pipe major tried to shape his career: “He was holding this chanter and he said `this will be your constant companion until you have qualified to play the pipes.’ I told him he could stick it up his backside.”

After continuing his training at Queen’s Barracks, Perth, Jock volunteered to join the Parachute Regiment in 1943 and he found that more to his liking.

Within months he was in the vanguard of the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France and recalled nerves as they prepared to parachute from between 800-900 ft to their ‘drop zone’.

“Apart from ‘brown underpants’ a wee bit, we were ready,” he said.

Jock Hutton with paratroopers after his drop on to the field at Sannerville

“We were all young guys and we wanted to get stuck in. We had a good team but we lost some good guys to obtain the target. We battled through and liberated Ranville.”

In the fighting that followed, Jock suffered a stomach wound and was taken to a hospital in Newcastle Under Lyme.

He recovered in three weeks and before the end of the war was involved in some of airborne forces’ bloodiest actions including the push through the Belgian Ardennes – in which he recalls: “I was one of the few to come out of that” – and Operation Varsity, the assault over the Rhine.

After the war he served withthe British Army in Palestine and Egypt and later with both the Rhodesian and South African armies.

Click here for more news and sport from the Stirling area.