Bagpiper Millin

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Any reasonable observer might have thought Bill Millin was unarmed as he jumped off the landing ramp at Sword Beach, in Normandy, France on the morning of 6 June 1944. Unlike his colleagues, the pale 21-year-old held no rifle in his hands. Of course, in full Highland rig as he was, he had his trusty skean dhu, his little dirk, tucked in his right sock. But that was soon under three feet of water as he waded ashore, a weary soldier still smelling his own vomit from a night in a close boat on a choppy sea, and whose kilt in the freezing water was floating prettily round him like a ballerina's skirt.
But Millin was not unarmed; far from it. He held his pipes, high over his head at first to keep them from the wet (for, while whisky was said to be good for the bag, salt water was not), then cradled them in his arms to play. Bagpipes, by long tradition, counted as instruments of war. An English judge had said so after the Scots' great defeat at Culloden in 1746; a piper was a fighter like the rest, and his music was his weapon. The whining skirl of the pipes had struck dread into the Germans on the Somme, who had called the kilted pipers the Ladies from Hell. And it raised the hearts and minds of the home side, so much so that when Millin played on 5 June 1944, as the troops left for France past the Isle of Wight and he was standing on the bowsprit, just about keeping his balance above the waves getting rougher, the wild cheers of the crowd drowned out the sound of his pipes, even to himself.
His playing had been planned as part of the operation. While on commando training near Fort William, he had struck up a friendship with Lord Lovat (photo, at left, from the movie The Longest Day, played by Peter Lawford), the officer in charge of the 1st Special Service Brigade. Not that they had much in common. Millin was short, with a broad cheeky face, the son of a Glasgow policeman; his sharpest childhood memory was of being one of the “poor”, sleeping on deck, on the family’s return in 1925 from Canada to Scotland. Lovat was tall, lanky, outrageously handsome and romantic, with a castle towering above the river at Beauly, near Inverness. He had asked Millin to be his personal piper: not a feudal but a military arrangement. The War Office in London had forbidden pipers to play in battle, but Millin and Lord Lovat, as Scots, plotted rebellion. In this “greatest invasion", Lovat wanted the pipes to lead the way. He was ordering now, as they waded up Sword Beach, in that drawly voice of his: “Give us a tune, piper.” Millin thought him a mad bastard. The man beside him, on the point of jumping off, had taken a bullet in the face and gone under. But there was Lovat, strolling through fire, quite calmly, in his aristocratic way, allegedly wearing a monogrammed white pullover under his jacket and carrying an ancient Winchester rifle, so, if he was mad, Millin thought he might as well be ridiculous, too, and struck up Hielan’ Laddie. Lovat approved it with a thumbs-up, and asked for The Road to the Isles. Millin inquired, half-joking, whether he should walk up and down in the traditional way of pipers. “Oh, yes. That would be lovely.”
Three times, therefore, he walked up and down at the edge of the sea. He remembered the sand shaking under his feet from mortar fire, and the dead bodies rolling in the surf against his legs. For the rest of the day, whenever required, he played. He piped the advancing troops along the raised road by the Caen canal, seeing the flashes from the rifle of a sniper about a hundred yards ahead, noticing only after a minute or so that everyone behind him had hit the deck in the dust. When Lovat had dispatched the sniper, he struck up again. He led the company down the main street of Bénouville playing Blue Bonnets over the Border, refusing to run when the commander of 6 Commando urged him to, as pipers walked as they played.
The use of bagpipes was restricted to rear areas by the time of the Second World War by the British Army. Lovat, nevertheless, ignored these orders and ordered Millin, then aged 21, to play. When Private Millin demurred, citing the regulations, he recalled later, Lord Lovat replied: “Ah, but that’s the English War Office. You and I are both Scottish, and so that doesn’t apply.” Millin said that he later talked to captured German snipers who claimed they did not shoot at him because they thought he was crazy.
He took them across two bridges, one (later renamed the Pegasus Bridge) ringing and banging as shrapnel hit the metal sides, one merely with railings which bullets whistled through: “the longest bridge I ever piped across”. Those two crossings marked their successful rendezvous with the troops who had preceded them. All the way, he learned later, German snipers had had him in their sights but, out of pity for this madman, had not fired. That was their story; Millin himself knew he wasn’t going to die. Piping was too enjoyable, as he had discovered in the Boys’ Brigade band and all through his short army career. And piping protected him. The pipes themselves were less lucky, injured by shrapnel as he dove into a ditch. He could still play them, but four days later they took a direct hit on the chanter and the drone when he had laid them down in the grass, and that was that. The last tune they had piped on D-Day was The Nut-Brown Maiden, played for a small red-haired French girl who, with her folks cowering behind her, had asked him for music as he passed their farm.
He later gave the pipes to the museum at the Pegasus Bridge, which he often revisited, and sometimes piped across, during his long and quiet post-war career as a mental nurse at Dawlish in Devon. On one such visit, in full Highland rig with his pipes in his arms, he was approached by a smartly-dressed woman of a certain age, with faded red hair, who planted a joyous kiss of remembrance on his cheek.