U.S. WW2 plane leaving Bosnia for French museum

SARAJEVO (Reuters) - Smashed up, rusty but still dignified, a Douglas C-47 plane that took part in many of World War Two's major battles will soon start its final journey from a field near Bosnia's capital to the D-Day museum in France.

A huge crane carefully lifts a wing, the red five-point star of the Yugoslav army still visible, and places it in the back of a truck. Nine French volunteers look on anxiously.

"It's a magnificent adventure for us," said Hans Combee, one of the men who traveled to Bosnia to dismantle the plane and prepare it for transport, following a long bureaucratic battle with Bosnian authorities.

He and his colleagues, all aviation enthusiasts, see the sturdy transport plane as a potent symbol of the 1944 D-Day landings, when hundreds of thousands of allied troops poured into Normandy to liberate France from the Nazis.

"It means huge emotion. When we got final approval, some people started to cry. They identified so much with this particular airplane," Combee said.

The request to take the plane to France was approved last week, days before German peacekeeping troops are scheduled to leave their camp at the field.

"We were just in time to get the plane back," Combee said, referring to the December 1 deadline for the troops' departure.

The plane bears the scars of a long life.

Its registration details show it took part in the Normandy landings, as well as the disastrous Arnhem 'Market Garden' operation, the siege of Bastogne and the last parachute drop of the war in Europe in March 1945.

Each time it was repaired and put back in the skies. After the war, it was sold to Czech Airlines, then to the French Air Force and finally in 1972 to Yugoslavia.

Some 20 years later, it was machine-gunned full of holes.

A 'Maybe Airlines' logo on its back echoes the moniker given to all flights leaving Bosnia in the 1992-95 war, when United Nations planes were the only ones taking off and landing in Sarajevo, under the constant fire of Bosnian Serb forces.

That's when a French soldier, a plane enthusiast, spotted it on a field and -- legend has it -- negotiated a one hour ceasefire to see it close up.

In its last incarnation, after the war, it was a bar, used by French soldiers who painted a long-legged beauty on the nose and tail.

The museum in Merville is hoping to have the plane reassembled by next June. Families of all U.S. airmen who flew it, and even one surviving pilot, now 88, have promised to attend the ceremony.

As it makes its way there, the plane seems to have come full circle, being loaded by Germans.

"During the war this plane dropped American parachutists who fought together with the French against the Germans. Now we are helping them," said German logistics officer Enrst Petermann, with a big smile.

(Editing by Ellie Tzortzi and Michael Winfrey)