D-Day 80 The Last Veterans: John Gillespie

John Gillespie, Age 104, Royal Engineers

Interviewed by ITN 6 June 2024

Brought up in Glasgow and trained in civil engineering, Mr Gillespie went to Normandy to work on projects including Pluto - Pipelines Under The Ocean.

He had trained with the Royal Engineers in Aldershot and the regiment was tasked with implementing this impressive technical feat. PLUTO was a scheme to supply the advancing armies with a ready supply of fuel once they had landed in Northern France.

The Allies built an integrated network of pipes from oil terminals to pumping stations that were built and disguised on the Southern coast. 

The fuel then ran through submarine oil pipelines put together under the English Channel. One set went from Dungeness to Calais and the other from the Isle of Wight to Cherbourg.

Mr Gillespie - who had made the crossing from Portsmouth to Gold Beach - was part of the team that built steel petrol storage tanks on the French coast to allow fuel to be collected and distributed. 

This included fuel that was pumped ship-to-shore although oil tankers had been ruled out as the sole means of transporting supplies. Partly because of the risk of air attacks while they were moored offshore.

PLUTO was up and running by August of 1944 and by the end of the war had delivered millions of tonnes of fuel.

Mr Gillespie said: "I landed in the first week, not actually on D-Day. With PLUTO pipelines and so the Royal Navy put down a buoy mooring at Port-en-Bessin on Gold Beach and we ran petrol lines from small tankers - ships - into storage tanks that we built on the beachhead. Storage tanks that had 1,200 tons of petrol. It was three stories high."

Mr Gillespie’s team also assisted with the link-up to other pipes built as the fighting force moved forwards into Belgium, Holland and Germany.

"I was thinking about the wider aspect," he said.

"The war affected me because my war  started in 1939 as a civil engineer with McAlpines and we were at Clydebank and we were building munitions factories to make track links for tanks in the Singer sewing machine works. 

"And every week two of the staff had to do the air raid warnings and so on the Monday I was on duty in the office overnight with a Spanish engineer and the next night was the Clydebank blitz and the two colleagues who were on duty in the office, they were killed.

"I was on duty on the Monday and they died on the Tuesday. My brother was in bomber command. He was killed. On the landing there were two companies in Pluto, the engineer company and the landing craft, and one of them was bombed, sunk and they were all killed. And on the beachhead I transferred to take his unit. I knew them all because both of us had trained together.

"They say, why not me? For example, we ended up Normandy to the Baltic and then went on leave to go to Japan. And when I was on leave and we were married at the time, they dropped the two atomic bombs.

"I didn't go to Japan. I wouldn’t have been here today if I had gone to Japan. And so these are the memories I was going through today."

Want a quick and expert briefing on the biggest news stories? Listen to our latest podcasts to find out What You Need To Know...