A 66-year-old Oxfordshire man has won a four-year fight to secure the return of his father’s war medals.

Now he is already preparing to give them away again — to a museum that commemorates the battle in which his father fought.

Tony Berridge claimed that he was fooled into handing over his father’s medals to a French woman, who had promised to put them in a war museum.

When appeals to police and the French authorities proved unsuccessful, Mr Berridge went on to enlist the support of the French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Now after numerous visits to France and scores of letters, Mr Berridge has been handed back the medals.

They were collected from a solicitor’s office in Paris by Lieutenant Colonel Alan Edwards, chairman of the Airborne Assault Normandy Trust.

Mr Berridge, who has headed back to France, said: “I am taking them to the Pegasus Bridge Museum, where they were meant to have gone in the first place. I still feel that is where they belong.”

Mr Berridge told the French president how he had handed over the medals in the belief they would be put on display in the Pegasus Memorial Museum, close to where his father had taken part in the famous Second World War action at Pegasus Bridge, one of the most revered military sites in Normandy. He had travelled to France to hand over his father’s six medals to the woman, who he believed was the founder of the museum, which opened in 2000.

But the medals were never put on display and he discovered the woman was not employed by the museum.

Mr Berridge, a retired RAC patrolman, of Centre Rise, Horspath, said he had never given up hope of getting the medals back.

“For me it was a matter of principle,” he said. “My father would have turned in his grave if he had known what had happened.”

Mr Berridge first made contact with the woman through a Pegasus Bridge website. He now believes he was the victim of a feud between members of a French family that has collected Pegasus Bridge memorabilia.

His father Sgt Wilfred Berridge was part of a second wave of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry glider troops who landed near the bridge on June 6, 1944. Sgt Berridge, who also served in Burma, died in 1969, aged 59.

Mr Berridge said he wanted the medals to go to the museum, which opened next to the bridge, for safe keeping.

He first learnt that he had made “a terrible mistake” handing over the medals when he went back to France in 2007 to scatter the ashes of his brother David, in the grounds of the museum.

When he complained to the French President, he received a reply from President Sarkozy’s chief of staff who said the issue would be passed on to the Minister for Defence and Veterans and the Prefect of Basse Normandie.