The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
‘Like the war, this experience will bring us together’
Veteran Harry Billinge talks to Joe Shute about ensuring fallen comrades are never forgotten, and offers wise words in a crisis
Second World War veteran Harry Billinge was awarded an MBE this year for raising thousands to build a Normandy memorial to honour lost comrades. Now, with many VE Day anniversary celebrations cancelled due to the Covid-19 crisis, he is capturing our hearts with his wise words and cheerful stoicism. By Joe Shute. Portrait by Glyn Dewis
From the moment he returned to Britain at the end of the Second World War, Harry Billinge pledged to devote his life to the memory of those who didn’t come back. For more than 60 years he has rattled tins for the Royal British Legion, and he recently secured £25,000 for a national memorial to Normandy veterans in a lone act of fundraising that captured the heart of the nation.
With Britain now in the midst of its greatest crisis since the war, fundraising veterans are very much in the news. Harry, along with the wonderful Captain Tom Moore, has become one of the most famous faces of his generation, and his wise and inspiring words have taken on a greater resonance. Covid-19, Harry says, is an ‘evil disease’ but one the country will once again come together to defeat.
Seventy-five years ago, as the nation celebrated the end of six long years of war, Harry was just another wounded and traumatised young soldier struggling to make sense of the horrors he had been subjected to. On 8 May 1945, as all life poured on to the streets across Britain, the then 19-year-old roused himself from his hospital bed, swung both legs, coated in thick plaster, on to the ground and hobbled to a nearby park bench close to the Kent and Sussex Hospital.
He had been taking his daily exercise here since returning injured from Germany a week or so earlier, walking with two sticks in his hospital pyjamas.
On VE Day the weather was warm and people were out in droves. A few stopped to chat to the young soldier, offering cigarettes, and congratulating each other that the war was finally over. Try as he might, Harry could not conjure the same feeling of jubilation. ‘I was just grateful that I managed to get home,’ the now 94-year-old recalls. ‘So many of my mates never did and that is what moved me. I felt so sad that they couldn’t be there as well.’
Harry is one of a dwindling number who can recall the triumph and sorrow of the day. After the war, he settled in St Austell, Cornwall, where he met his wife of 66 years, Sheila, and has devoted much of his life to keeping the memory of his fallen comrades alive.
In March he was appointed MBE for the money he raised towards the cost of the Normandy memorial, which was due to open to the public this autumn (like so much else, this is postponed due to coronavirus).
Back in 2018, ahead of the 75th anniversary of D-day, Harry donned his blazer draped in wartime medals and started collections in St Austell town centre several times a week. In doing so he captured the public imagination for his loyalty to his former comrades and his sheer indomitable spirit.
He remains sharp and sprightly for his age. When he accepted his MBE from the Queen at Buckingham Palace, Harry told her it was not for him, but in honour ‘of all the poor devils that never came back’.
Harry volunteered after his 18th birthday in 1943, enlisting with the Royal Engineers, following in the footsteps of his father, Horace, who had fought in the First World War. The military ran in the family’s blood. One of Harry’s brothers, Bill, was a glider pilot; another, Allan, received a commission in the Royal Fusiliers. Harry trained as a sapper (a private) and says he never sought a higher post. ‘I never wanted to tell people what to do,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want to be in charge of anybody.’
As for what his work as a sapper entailed, the Prince of Wales summed it up when he met Harry in St Austell last year. ‘I gather you used to blow things up,’ the Prince remarked, as the pair shook hands. ‘Demolition was my game,’ Harry says. ‘Bridges and radar stations. Anything that needed blowing up, I could see to it.’
Harry’s first overseas operation was on D-day in June 1944. He was a member of a unit that landed on Gold Beach charged with demolishing a German radar station near Arromanches. Of his 10-man unit, only four of them survived. To this day, he can still recite the names of the others in his sleep.
‘It was terrible,’ Harry recalls. ‘There are no words to describe D-day. It was murder on the beaches, the German guns had their ranges perfectly calculated. I will never forget the sight of the sea red with blood. I’ve never been able to forget that, and have had it in my head for 75 years.’
Once the beaches were secured, the fierce fighting continued. During the battle to retake Caen that summer, Harry lost a close friend who died in his arms. He prefers not to name him, for fear of upsetting his relatives, but says the man was just 22 years old and had a three-week-old baby back home. ‘When you’ve been in a hole in the ground with a bloke being shot at and bombed, you become part of each other,’ he says. ‘Their lives are our lives. I cannot describe the depth of the love between Normandy veterans.’
Despite the mounting losses, the momentum was behind the Allied forces and they pushed ever further through enemy-occupied France. Harry’s unit fought at the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes, where the ground was frozen solid, making it impossible to bury the dead, before eventually crossing over the Rhine and into Germany. ‘They were fighting in their own country and they weren’t going to give up easily,’ Harry says.
For a reflective and gentle man, and a devoted Christian, he admits to having possessed a deep loathing for his enemy, fuelled by atrocities carried out by the Nazis. ‘World domination is what they wanted and they nearly got it,’ Harry says. Peace, however, has forced a reappraisal of his views. Two years ago during D-day commemorations in Normandy, a German veteran sought Harry out and offered him a German army soldier’s service badge, which Harry now wears among his own service medals.
After months of fighting, in the spring of 1945, Harry reached a German town called Goch near the Dutch border and his unit was finally withdrawn. He returned home on a passenger ship, the Princess Josephine Charlotte. A circulatory condition in his legs which had first developed in the Ardennes had by that stage flared up and he was sent to convalesce while Britain celebrated victory over Germany.
Following VE Day came VJ Day (Victory over Japan) in August 1945, and the official end of hostilities. But the war never ended for Harry. As he tried to adjust to a life of peace, the horrors he had witnessed and images of the friends he had seen killed replayed endlessly in his mind.
After being discharged from hospital, he was diagnosed with what he describes as ‘psycho-neurosis’ and spent two years in a mental institution in Dartford. He became gripped by insomnia and each night would go for long walks through the countryside. ‘My country told me how to kill people, and when you’ve done that you have to live with it,’ he says.
He found solace in poetry during this time, and in particular Wordsworth’s famous Daffodils. Harry says he would recite the final stanza as a mantra in memory of his fallen comrades: For oft, when on my couch I lie/in vacant or in pensive mood/they flash upon that inward eye /Which is the bliss of solitude. He still recites it today, faultlessly.
Eventually he found some respite after moving to the Cornish coast, where he worked as a hairdresser and met Sheila, with whom he has three children, two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Given the gift of life when so many of his generation lost theirs, he has devoted himself to preserving their memory. As much as the anniversary of VE Day should be about the triumph of peace, he says, we must also remember those who didn’t come home.
His fundraising work has helped soothe the demons in his head, though he still suffers the occasional nightmare. ‘When I wake up I put my hand out and feel my wife lying next to me,’ Harry says. ‘And then I know all is well in the world.’