Haverhill D-Day veteran Bill Gladden dies three months after his 100th birthday
Bill Gladden, a man ‘who touched so many people’ and who was Haverhill’s only surviving veteran of the Second World War D-Day operation, has died at the age of 100.
Just three months after celebrating his 100th birthday, Bill passed away at his home in Arrendene Road early on Wednesday.
He had been receiving palliative care for skin cancer and had his niece, Kaye Thorpe, by his bedside when he died.
Within hours of his death, tributes were flooding onto social media as the news spread.
Kaye said: “He touched so many people. Just looking at Facebook the outpouring of love has been absolutely unbelievable.”
Bill moved to Haverhill from Welling in south east London in 2020 to be nearer family. His only child, Linda Durrant and her husband Kenny, also live in the town.
As a young man he flew into Normandy, France with the 6th Airborne Reconnaissance Regiment on a military glider with a tank and six motorbikes on June 6, 1944 as part of the D-Day operation.
He was holed up in an orchard with his regiment just outside the village of Ranville, near the strategically important Pegasus Bridge that the soldiers were tasked with protecting.
On June 18, two days after carrying two of his badly wounded friends to a barn, Bill was injured by machine gun fire from a Tiger tank and he was carried into the same barn.
His foot was almost severed, but he was given the required morphine and flown back to the UK and spent the following three years in hospital.
A prolific painter who sold many of his works to benefit charity, Bill was a regular on trips to Normandy and the Netherlands, as well as to events in the UK, with the Taxi Charity for Military Veterans - a cause that he supported by selling his artwork.
He was looking forward to trips to Arnhem, in the Netherlands on May 2, Normandy on May 13 and the big 80th D-Day anniversary event in France in June, only for fate to intervene.
Kaye said: “He had wanted to do all of them. I said ‘you can’t do all of them, you are not 21 any more’.
“He was a very proud and humble man because everyone calls him a hero but he didn’t feel like a hero. In his words he said I didn’t do much because I was only there for 12 days.
He was very upset he got wounded when he did because he always says other people talk about the other battles that they had. When he hears other vets talking about that he got upset because he couldn’t talk about it.”
Kaye added: “When I think of the amount of households all over Europe that have got at least one of his paintings on the wall. The amount of paintings he has done for people.”
His story attracted attention from the media worldwide, with even the New York Times ringing Kaye and asking to interview Bill.
GMTV was due to record a piece about Bill in early May and had agreed to send a car to collect him and put him up in hotel.
