Our comrades were baptised in their own blood. We owe them a D-Day memorial
Hero fundraiser for the Mail-backed Normandy monument tells Prince Charles of horrors he saw
The Prince of Wales received a firsthand account of the horrors of D-Day yesterday as he was introduced to Britain’s most indefatigable fundraiser who told him: ‘The whole place was awash with blood.’
The Duke of Cornwall was in his duchy in St Austell, where he was introduced to Normandy veteran and local celebrity harry Billinge.
The prince is royal patron of the Normandy Memorial Trust, dedicated to honouring the 22,442 members of the British Armed Forces who gave their lives there in 1944. harry spends his life campaigning on behalf of the project in his local area.
having heard about his efforts, the prince was keen to arrange a meeting during his visit yesterday. The royal visitor had clearly been well briefed.
‘I gather you used to blow things up,’ the prince remarked. ‘I was very good at that once upon a time,’ replied harry, 93, who was part of a Royal engineers crack unit charged with demolishing a German radar station near Arromanches on the morning of D-Day. Of his tenman unit, only four survived.
‘I didn’t want to talk too much about it. I told the prince that I never wanted to kill anyone but our boys were being baptised in their own blood. he just shook his head.’
M uCh of the prince’s private 25-minute meeting with harry and his wife Sheila concerned the progress of the memorial appeal, backed by the Daily Mail and its readers.
harry explained how much the project meant to the veterans and relatives of those who never returned. ‘The prince was absolutely lovely and genuinely interested in what we are doing. he’s as keen on this memorial as we are.’
All British servicemen killed on D-Day and in the brutal Battle of Normandy which followed will have their names engraved on the new memorial, thanks to the generosity of Daily Mail readers and the persistence of veterans like harry – men whose final, burning ambition is to see this thing finally unveiled.
Of all the Allied nations which took part in the D-Day landings, paving the way for the liberation of europe, the uK is the only one without a national memorial on French soil. That is why the Mail is campaigning to find the last £7.5million needed to complete a tribute that is long overdue.
On the 75th anniversary of D-Day – June 6 – the memorial site will be inaugurated, in front of veterans and VIPs, including royalty and world leaders.
There could hardly be a more timely reminder that there are some bonds which predate our marriage to – and divorce from – the european union. They are bonds which will endure long after today’s politicians have quit the stage. We might be leaving the eu, but we can never leave europe proper when it is strewn with the remains of those who died to make it free.
It will take at least another year to finish the task of building this peerless monument on a 50acre site overlooking the beaches where so many perished.
This week, though, the engraving process has begun. every name will be carved alphabetically by Service (including Merchant Navy, SOe and other units) and then in date order on columns of a carefully- sourced French limestone called Massangis. All the engraving, however, will be done by S McConnell & Sons, the stonemasons who produced London’s superb Bomber Command Memorial. The first lorryload of limestone has already arrived at the McConnells’ workshop at the foot of the Mourne mountains in Northern Ireland. I was there a few days ago to see an 18-ton chunk of rock cut down to a series of half-ton rectangular blocks by a rotating saw the size of a tractor wheel. The blocks will form columns around a central memorial court which, from above, will resemble the union flag.
There is no scope for error when the diamond-tipped tungsten drill is carving names straight on to solid stone.
‘I’m sure we’ll have a few sleepless nights along the way,’ admits Alan McConnell, the third-generation stonemason in charge of a project which will take a team of six a year to complete. Due to the carefully-planned installation of the memorial columns, the first batch of names to be carved have actually been those of men who died on June 7, 1944, starting with the Royal Navy.
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a result, the very first name to be engraved on the memorial has been that of Leading Seaman Frederick Alexander. he was a member of the crew of Tank Landing Craft 427. They were in the thick of the action on Gold Beach on June 6, 1944 and returned to sea again in one piece. They had just got home to pick up more tanks when they were involved in a collision with the battleship hMS Rodney outside Portsmouth harbour. All hands – 13 brave men aged between 19 and 37 – went down with the landing craft.
They might have died in home waters, victims of a ghastly accident of war. But their loss was no less painful. They all did their duty unflinchingly and paid with their lives. Frederick Alexander and his comrades have no marked grave, their names merely listed on the Royal Naval memorial at Chatham in Kent. Thanks to the Normandy Memorial, they will now be properly recognised and honoured for their valiant part in the liberation of an entire continent.
That is precisely why harry is out in all weathers with his tin in St Austell’s high street. When I
join him for an afternoon of tinrattling, passers-by of all ages stop to give him something. ‘This country owes a hell of a lot to those men,’ said Richard Wedgwood, 58, making a donation.
Harry was one of a team of ten Royal Engineers who came ashore on Gold Beach at dawn on D-Day, charged with blowing up a German radar station behind Arromanches.
‘They’d been well dug in for four years and they weren’t about to give it up,’ recalled Harry.
‘I was carrying the gelignite and we did it. But only four of us came out.’
As he himself likes to point out, he was always a little ’un. ‘I was the only man in the British Army who could hide behind a blade of grass,’ he jokes.
But in his green beret and a blazer heaving with medals, he is the most commanding presence here on the high street.
‘He’s the boss,’ joked one of the team in the local branch of Tui travel agents, bringing out the campaign banner which Harry stores in their cupboard. A greenhaired youth on a skateboard stops to put something in his tin. ‘He’s a hero, him,’ says the boy. It is particularly touching to see the local busker chipping in.
Miguel Fernandez comes up to give Harry some of his day’s takings at the end of an afternoon of guitar- strumming. ‘ He’s a great character, always here whatever the weather,’ said Miguel.
Recent days may have been a dispiriting affair for this country. What a profoundly uplifting contrast, then, to see the ordinary people flocking around Harry, a true giant of our times, on a British high street.