Biography | Bill Millin — He Piped Ashore on This Sector, and the Rest Is Recollection

A photograph exists. Sergeant Leslie Evans of No. 5 Army Film and Photographic Section made it on the morning of 6 June 1944, on the Queen Red sector of Sword Beach at La Brèche, at about 0840.

It shows commandos of the 1st Special Service Brigade coming ashore, Brigadier Lord Lovat in the water to the right of his men, and in the foreground, about to step off, Lovat's piper. The Imperial War Museum identifies him as Private Bill Millin, born in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1922 to Scottish parents, raised in Glasgow, trained at the commando depot at Achnacarry.

Almost everything else comes from Millin himself, decades on — a memoir, a recording made for the museum's sound archive in 1990, interviews. He said Lovat ordered him to pipe, and that when he cited the rule keeping pipers out of the forward area, Lovat answered that it was an English rule and did not bind two Scots.

He named the tunes: Highland Laddie and The Road to the Isles on the beach, Blue Bonnets Over the Border at Bénouville. The order shifts between his own tellings.

The most repeated episode is the least supported. Millin said in later life that captured German soldiers had told him they did not fire at him because they thought he was mad.

That account reached print at scale only in the obituaries after his death in August 2010. No interrogation report, unit record or named witness corroborates it, the German wording usually quoted has no traceable source, and his own fullest published narrative puts a quite different sniper episode in the same place in the sequence.

The pipes he carried that morning are not in Normandy. He gave them to the museum at Dawlish in Devon in 2004, whose curators have spent years correcting the regional tourist boards, which still place them at the Pegasus museum on their own pages about this statue.

The bronze on the Boulevard Maritime at Colleville-Montgomery is by Gaëtan Ader, about 3.9 metres, unveiled on 8 June 2013 and paid for by subscription. Its plaque, in English and French, ends by saying that the brigadier and his piper both entered the legend.

📸 Cover: the Piper Bill Millin statue, Colleville-Montgomery, photograph by Mike McBey, 30 July 2018, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.