The attack took the Germans completely by surprise and stopped them from swarming over the bridge and towards Sword beach. The crossing was later renamed Pegasus Bridge, after the flying horse shoulder emblem worn by British airborne forces. The 180-strong company airborne division, led by Major John Howard, swooped at dawn in gliders. The airborne division had captured the bridge in the early hours that day in an assault later immortalised in the classic film The Longest Day, in which the part of Millin was played by Pipe Major Leslie de Laspee, the official piper to the Queen Mother.
#Bagpipe player dday full#
They had orders to link up with the British 6th Airborne division and keep secure a strategically vital bridge over the Caen Canal three miles down a road full of German snipers beyond Sword beach. Lovat's commandos were heavily machine-gunned and mortared, but had a vital objective and pressed on. 'Yet when they heard the pipes, some of them stopped what they were doing and waved their arms, cheering.' 'Troops to my left were trying to dig in just off the beach,' he recalled.
'How about Highland Laddie and The Road To The Isles?' said Lovat, telling him to walk up and down the beach as he played.īill could see soldiers lying face down in the water as he played. 'Well, when I looked round - the noise and people lying about on the ground, the shouting and the smoke, the crump of mortars,' he said later, 'I said to myself: "Well, you must be joking, surely."īut Lovat insisted, and Bill said: 'Well, what tune would you like, Sir?' One commando was killed as Lovat got into the sea, his body floating up by Bill as he made for the shore. Within seconds the commandos were being struck down by German mortar shells and machine-gun fire. He said: 'My kilt floated to the surface and the shock of the freezing cold water knocked all feelings of sickness from me.' Because Lovat was over 6ft tall, Bill waited to see what depth it was before going in. Lord Lovat, 32, jumped into the water first. Then the order came to get ashore and I was very pleased.' We all got up on deck and we stood in the freezing wind watching the shoreline. I didn't think of being shot, how many Germans there were or anything other than the smell of seasickness on me. The only weapon Bill carried on D-day was a small dagger tucked into his sockīill continued: 'Everyone was checking their kit, and putting their kit on. We could see the mist of the French shoreline and the neat bungalows along the seafront.' 'Then after another half an hour people were starting to get gear together, their rucksacks on and were making towards the front of the craft. The next morning I pushed open the hatch and looked out at a grey dawn. There were some people playing cards, but most were violently sick, including myself. 'After we left the Solent and were out in the Channel, the hatches on the landing craft were put down and we were very cramped. He only stopped playing because the waves had become choppy and he was losing his balance. 'They heard the pipes, and they were throwing their hats in the air and cheering,' he remembered. When the commandos were just off the Isle of Wight, they met thousands of other boats and ships carrying troops. He stood at the front of the landing craft piping The Road To The Isles. You will be in the leading craft with me." ' 'Lord Lovat said: "You better get them out again because you can play us out of the Solent and into the Channel.
'I had been playing to the troops waiting to board the landing craft as we went along the Hamble river, and then I put them back in the box. 'I had my pipes with me as we set off from England the night before,' he explained later. The long stretch of sand where his haunting music stirred his fellow soldiers into battle near the French town of Ouistreham was codenamed Sword, while the other four beaches to the west were Omaha, Gold, Utah and Juno.īy the time Millin landed, it had already been a tumultuous journey across the Channel. The French awarded him their Croix d'Honneur and plan to erect a statue to him close to the beach where he marched ashore - the most eastern of the beaches picked by the Allies for the invasion. Bill Millin in 1944: The playing of the pipes lifted the spirits of hard-pressed British troops, and dumbfounded the German defenders
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