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Bill Millin, ‘The Mad Piper’ of D-Day
William Millin, born July 14, 1922, and passed away on August 10, 2010, was the personal piper for Simon Fraser, the Fifteenth Lord Lovat from Scotland.
Bill Millin was born in Regina, Saskatchewan. His father had emigrated to Canada and moved the family back to Scotland when William was three years old.
He joined the Territorial Army in Fort William, where his family had moved, and played in the pipe bands of the Highland Light Infantry and the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders before volunteering as a commando and training with Lovat at Achnacarry along with French, Dutch, Belgian, Polish, Norwegian, and Czechoslovak troops.-from Wikipedia
Lord Lovat had a royal title, and was also a Highland Chieftan, but he wasn’t one to sit behind a desk, a proper Highlander that would join his men in combat.
Lord Lovat was in command of Commando Group 4, and he went ashore on D-Day and was tasked with getting off the beach and head to the Pegasus Bridge to relieve commandos that had flown in on gliders to prevent German soldiers from demolishing the bridge.
“Pipers had traditionally been used in battle by Scottish and Irish soldiers. However, 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 that doesn’t apply.”
Millin played “Highland Laddie” “The Road to the Isles” and “All The Blue Bonnets Are Over The Border” as his comrades fell around him on Sword Beach. Millin stated that he later talked to captured German snipers who claimed they did not shoot at him because they thought he had gone mad.
Millin, whom Lovat had appointed his personal piper during commando training at Achnacarry, near Fort William in Scotland, was the only man during the landing who wore a kilt. It was the same Cameron tartan kilt his father had worn in Flanders during World War I – and he was armed only with his pipes and the sgian-dubh, or “black knife”, sheathed inside his kilt-hose on the right side.
Lovat and Millin advanced from Sword Beach to Pegasus Bridge. Millin played the pipes from beach to bridge.
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Published in Military
I saw that he was played in The Longest Day by Pipe Major Leslie de Laspee the official piper to the Queen Mother in 1961.
Fantastic. Also reminds me of The Longest Day. But somehow seeing Sean Connery.
Wow, love it.
Major John Howard, who was the British officer whose orders told him to take the bridge and “hold until relieved” was played by Richard Todd in The Longest Day. In real life, Richard Todd had been a member of Lord Lovat’s 4th Commando – the relief. Not only did Todd play Howard, but the producers also hired another actor to portray Todd.
When men were men. God bless them all.
An often shared clip in my family … As it should be; as my maiden name is Flanagan.
I’ve never met a piper who wasn’t at least a wee bit mad. My dad befriended one on the ship from Scotland to Canada after the war. Some would describe him as a “big hairy highlander” (pronounced HEElander).He was a ginger with the last name Docherty; a name that means trouble. But he kept my (much smaller) dad out of jail, and from getting his a** kicked, more than once in Toronto.
They shared a room on Joy Street in Toronto; legend has it my dad would sit in the window with a blowstick, while Uncle Pat was out of sight giving it laldy on the pipes.
Uncle Pat went on to play for then President John Kennedy as part of the Black Watch just days before JFK was assassinated.
Whenever I hear the pipes, I am reminded of a great line from Braveheart: Do I get to kill the English?
While I lament that none in my family play the pipes, am grateful we always have someone on hand for weddings and funerals.
On the day of my mother’s funeral, the piper gave a nun a jump start.
“If you ask me Flanagan, there’s a lot of very peculiar blokes on this beach.”
A bagpipe is a really hard instrument to play…it is double-reeded like the oboe, so it operates through pressure, not volume of air. They sell practice chanters without the bag. You can practice the fingering, but then you still have to master coordinating the air from the bag and maintaining it at the correct pressure. Multi-tasking at its finest.
When I was in college there was a guy who used to practice his pipes in the music building. He got thrown out and practiced, usually on a Sunday afternoon, in the church basement. As it was practice and not performance it was an unusual sound coming from the church.
But if it’s not Scottish, it’s crap.
One of the mysteries in the Longest Day is that Sean Connery is at the beach landing site and watches Peter Lawford as Lovat passes him moving inland, yet Connery appears to already be at the bridge with the troops awaiting relief so he can complain about the bagpipes.
I used to peruse the fantastic obituary pages in the Guardian and other UK papers twenty and thirty years ago when so many were about WWII vets. Such an interesting generation. I recall one decorated tank commander famous for keeping his vehicle stocked with Champagne among his other flamboyant tendencies.
In A Bridge Too Far we saw Allison Digby Tatham-Warter who always carried an umbrella because (a) he could never remember the passwords and (b) figured sentries would know anyone in a combat zone with an umbrella had to be British. The story of his escape after capture at Arheim is amazing.
I think it is to be inferred that the two (Connery and the other guy) are part of Commando 4 as well. They first appear on the beach when the beachmaster (Royal Navy Captain Colin Maud, played by Kenneth More) bashes a Bren carrier with his walking stick to get it started.
That’s Connery and the other guy in the background.
There were so many really great performances in the Longest Day–except for scenes with John Wayne who was himself and treated all the actors around him as extras.
I saw it in the theater in 1962. There was a treasured elaborate program booklet that survived forty-some years in a box in the garage until lost in a move. It is amazing how well it holds up. There are few anachronisms which is why French Resistance figure Irina Demick’s 1960 hairstyle stands out.
The coherent coverage of so many events and locations was brilliantly done.
Maud’s dog (Winston) was actually a German Shepherd. We see Pluskat’s dog in the opening scene of the movie. (Pluskat doesn’t.) It was a German shepherd as well. Zanuck probably didn’t want to confuse the audience with two different German shepherds, so Winston became a bulldog.
The movie does have a flaw or two. My biggest beef is with the scene where they find that the guns weren’t in the emplacements at Pointe du Hoc. It is used as a “futility of war” moment, but it leaves out that the Rangers kept right on rangering, found the guns a short distance away, and took them out of action.
I loved the scene with Pluskat. Doesn’t he say something later about “All those ships you say they don’t have? Well, they are here!” The movie did a great job of capturing German surprise at the location of the landing and the reasons for the delay in mobilizing the armored divisions to respond.
By the time John Wayne made The Longest Day, he’d already appeared in 142 movies. Compared to him, everyone else in the movie was an extra.
A few minutes later, when the shore bombardment starts.
Frankly, anything that John Wayne is in is improved by that very fact. Yes, even “The Conqueror”. Genghis Khan would have been proud to be played by John Wayne.