ay, arrived on JUNO BEACH on D-Day plus five. He pushed his new BSA motorcycle ashore. There was no fighting near the beaches by then. The battle had moved up the coast.
But he remembered his first sight of death on the old battlefield. A German shell had scored a direct hit on a British tank. There were still bits of bodies attached to the shattered metal. A piece of backbone had melted into one of the seats.
But Lord Killanin had amusing memories too. Most of his stories were hilarious.
He was in the 30th Armoured Brigade, which was attached to the 79th Armoured Division. He described himself mainly as a ‘backroom boy’, but he had experiences at the ‘sharp end’ at the battles of Dieppe and Le Havre which followed the D-Day landings. He spoke with amusement of working with Major General Sir Percy Hobarts who designed a whole range of fantastical armoured contraptions to deal with mines on the beaches. One example was ‘The Great Panjandrum’ - a giant Catherine Wheel designed to clear mine-fields, which had some calamitous failures in its experimental stage.
Lord Killanin was mystified that the whole Operation Overlord, the codename for D-day, was kept such a good secret. “For weeks beforehand I knew everything about it. Leading up to it I knew the exact date. Of course I didn’t know that a storm would postpone it for 24 hours. And when I was on leave I can tell you I was not a tee-total. I could easily have spilt the beans.”
His future wife, Sheila Dunlop from Galway, worked at Bletchley Park where, in great secrecy, German traffic signals were decoded. She also knew beforehand the date for the D-Day landings.
At Eton College Lord Killanin knew a William Douglas Home (whose brother Alec later became a British prime minister ), and was surprised to meet him again in the army. “He was totally unsuited for the army. He should never have been a soldier. He was a natural pacifist. He came up to me one day in France and asked me how he could make contact with the Germans as he wanted to end the war. He was a very eccentric man. I told him that I thought it would be better for all mankind if we won the war first.
“Then just before the battle of Le Havre he refused to fight because he believed that an awful lot of French people were liable to get shot."
Somehow the story got out. Some days later the Daily Mirror published the story under the lurid headline: Earl’s Son Refuses to Fight.
William was sent to jail in England and there he wrote his first play. "He was enormously sympathetic to his fellow IRA prisoners!"
Monty in trouble
Lord Killanin assured me that the following story was true, although my mouth dropped to hear how he misdirected Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, etc, etc, one of the key planners of the whole D-Day invasion.
“I was swanning around on my new BSA motorbike when I heard a siren and looked behind and saw two jeeps approach trying to make their way through the streams of soldiers, trucks, and transport vechicles. Montgomery was sitting grim-faced in the back seat of one of them.
“The jeeps stopped beside me. Monty’s ADC leaned out and asked the way to the 2nd Army HQ.
“Well, of course, I hadn’t a clue. But I had to let on that I knew my way around….
I looked behind me, I looked to the left, I looked to the right, and seeing an area with a lot of activity in the distance, I pointed in that direction and said confidently: ‘There. Over there Sir!’
The jeeps sped off. It was only later when I looked at my maps that I realised that I had sent Monty straight into the German lines.
“I laid low for a few days.”
Lord Michael Killanin MBE, Joined the British army at the beginning of the war. He was a journalist with the Sunday Dispatch and the Daily Mail. He was in Downing Street when prime minister Chamberlain returned from Germany, September 30 1938, waving an agreement over his head which he had negotiated with Hitler granting ‘peace in our time.’
“I didn’t believe it”, he said. “I was a liberal sort of man. I detested the Nazis and joined up for purely political reasons.