Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Maquis the French Resistance at War by George Millar George Millar

Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Maquis The French Resistance at War by George Millar George Millar. George Millar, who died on Saturday aged 94, was awarded the MC for a daring escape from captivity in 1943 and subsequently received the DSO for his services with the Special Operations Executive in enemy-occupied France. In June 1941 Millar landed in Egypt with the 1st Battalion the Rifle Brigade and crossed Libya to the Tripolitanian frontier. His scout platoon was captured by the Germans in January 1942 while on patrolling duties and he was taken to Rommel's HQ. After interrogation, he met Rommel who told him that he had no option but to hand him over to the Italians. Millar was sent to Campo 66 at Capua before being transferred to a Carthusian monastery at Padula. He made several attempts to escape, and was sent to Campo 5 at Gavi, a high-security PoW camp where Colonel David Stirling was a fellow inmate. After the Italian Armistice in September 1943, Millar and the other PoWs were loaded into cattle trucks and moved north. Shortly after a change of trains in Germany, he and a burly comrade, Wally Binns, went to the lavatory together - Millar crawling between Binns's legs to escape detection. Once inside, Binns tore out the window frame and both men threw themselves out. They made their way to Munich, where they made contact with some Frenchmen who were doing forced labour at the main railway station. They concealed Millar and Binns in a goods train, in which they remained, in complete darkness, for about 60 hours until they were approaching Strasbourg. The two men then broke out and were hunted through the marshalling yards before separating. Millar ran and crawled all night through muddy fields in unremitting rain. In Strasbourg, he made contact with the local escape organisation, which supplied him with false papers in the name of Georges Millard, a house- painter. He lived in a cafe among the underworld until he was smuggled across the border into France; he made his way to Paris and then Lyon, where there was a strong resistance movement. Millar worked in a black market restaurant in Lyon as a deaf and dumb waiter until, at the end of November, he moved to Annecy, where he lived in a maison de rendezvous. He then hid up in a safe house at Perpignan and, after two failed attempts, in December 1943 he crossed the Pyrenees with a number of American airmen and reached Barcelona. After returning to England, he was subjected to a rigorous de-briefing for three days by MI5 and MI9, the escape organisation. To them his escape from the middle of Germany with the minimum of outside help seemed little short of miraculous, and they had to satisfy themselves that the Germans had not captured him and were employing him as a double agent. He was awarded the MC. George Reid Millar, the son of an architect, was born near Glasgow, on September 19 1910. His grandfather began his working life in a joiner's shop at the age of 14 and had already made a fortune in the building business when he married into a family connected with the Royal Stuarts which owned a considerable estate in Glasgow. At the age of 12, the young Millar (who was always known as Josh) was sent to Loretto, where he was allocated to a dormitory which was notorious for bullying. New boys were "hardened off" by being suspended, head down, from one of the top windows. Millar had a fear of heights, and, when his turn came, he set about the ringleader, a 17-year-old, succeeding in laying him out. The boy was carried away on a stretcher and did not return to school until the following term. Millar was severely beaten after the incident. Millar subsequently went up to St John's College, Cambridge, to read Architecture. When he gained a First in his prelims his mother rewarded him with a cheque for £500 which he spent on a Chrysler roadster. He rowed for his college, enjoyed racing and coursing on Newmarket Heath, poached a few of the royal pheasants and managed only a poor Third in his finals. After three months with a firm of architects in London, he secured an introduction to the assistant editor of The Telegraph and was sent to Glasgow as a cub reporter on the Evening Citizen. He spent the summer months on a salvage vessel looking for the sunken liner Lusitania and, at the end of his assignment, signed on a freighter bound for Panama and Vancouver as an ordinary seaman. A spell at Elstree Studios followed but, with his resources running low, he returned to The Telegraph to work in the news room in 1936. In July, King Edward VIII chartered the yacht Nahlin for a tour of the Dalmatian coast, where Mrs Simpson would join it. Millar was sent to Southampton to cover the yacht's sailing, but reporters were not allowed on board and they killed time in the town's bars, waiting for the press conference which the captain was to give on the quayside at 10 am the following morning. Millar went to the yacht club, where he struck up a friendship with one of the officers of the Nahlin over a few whiskies and was aboard at 6 am. The King and the captain joined him for breakfast, and his story was on the front page the next day. Arthur Christiansen, editor of the Daily Express, was impressed, offering Millar a job at twice the salary and sending him to the Paris office. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Millar was accredited to the French Army as a war correspondent. On a tour of the danger areas, he saw German aircraft bomb a road crowded with refugees and decided to enlist. He and his wife, who had been serving with the Mechanised Transport Corps, embarked for England, where Millar enlisted with the London Scottish but subsequently transferred to the Rifle Brigade. After his escape from Germany, Millar was determined to return to France as an agent, and he managed to secure an interview with F section of SOE. Although ordered to wear civilian clothes, he arrived in service dress carrying a swordstick. "I find you bolshie," said Vera Atkins. "You are too mannered, too showy. You have got to sink into the background." "Give me a background," replied Millar, "and watch me sink. When do I start work?" After intensive training in combat and sabotage, Millar met Col Maurice Buckmaster, who told him of his promotion to captain and gave him some gold cufflinks as a leaving present. Millar calculated his chances of returning from France as no better than 50/50. He was given the field name Emile, and, shortly before D-Day, he was dropped by a Liberator near Dijon. Millar was subsequently closely involved in training the maquisards. When the maquis in the Doubs area were equipped and organised, he moved to the Haute-Saone to continue his work with the Resistance. He obtained a forged doctor's certificate, saying that he had incurable throat problems and, in moments of difficulty, spoke with a husky voice to disguise his imperfect French. On one occasion, rounding the bend of a path in the forest, Millar came face to face with a German soldier armed with a Schmeisser. His training took over; without thinking, he fired twice through his pocket, killing the man instantly. On another, he and a French comrade escaped from the Germans by hiding in the village sewer. When all F Section's officers were withdrawn on orders from General de Gaulle, he was flown back to England. He was awarded the DSO but was not tempted to stay in the Army because he had lost too much seniority. Long periods of absence abroad had placed a great strain on his relationship with his wife, and the marriage was dissolved. He re-married in 1945 and, always a keen sailor, spent an extended honeymoon sailing his 30-ton ketch Truant through the French canals to the Mediterranean and then to Greece. The French Government recognised Millar's services by creating him Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur and awarding him the Croix de Guerre avec Palmes. After the war, he farmed at Sydling Court, near Dorchester, and wrote about his experiences in Maquis (1945), Horned Pigeon (1946) and Road to Resistance (1979). Other books included A White Boat from England (1951) and Bruneval Raid (1974). He married, secondly, in 1945, Isabel Paske-Smith. She died in a motor accident in 1990. He had no children. George Millar. SOE officer who organised the Maquis in sabotage which disrupted German reinforcements in 1944. HAVING planned to become an architect and then turned his hand to journalism, George Millar made his name as an officer of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), formed on Winston Churchill’s order to “set Europe ablaze” after the fall of France in 1940. His French was embellished by a distinct Scottish accent, which proved no hindrance as he was not engaged in the clandestine activities of SOE in the early years of the war, but parachuted into the French Jura to work with the local Resistance groups. Millar had begun the Second World War by being commissioned into the Rifle Brigade in 1940, and he served with the 2nd Motor Battalion in the 7th Armoured Division in the Western Desert. He was wounded and captured. George Millar. George Millar was in turn a journalist, a soldier, an escaper from wartime Germany, a resistance leader in France, a writer and a farmer.

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