Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Maquis The 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 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 , 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. George Reid Millar, soldier: born Boghall, West Lothian 10 September 1910; Paris correspondent, Daily Express 1939; MC 1944; DSO 1944; married 1936 Annette Stockwell (marriage dissolved 1945), 1945 Isabel Paske-Smith (died 1990); died Uploders, Dorset 15 January 2005. George Millar was in turn a journalist, a soldier, an escaper from wartime Germany, a resistance leader in France, a writer and a farmer. His father was an architect in Glasgow, and took for granted that his two sons would follow in his footsteps. As a small boy, George shared his cot with the family Airedale. The dog had to be put down in 1917, because U-boat attacks made it impossible to get meat enough to feed him; this did not make George love the Germans. His father died when he was 11. George Millar went from Loretto, for which he did not much care, to St John's College, Cambridge, to read Architecture and enjoy himself. He worked briefly for a London firm of architects, but gave it up to try his hand at journalism. He began on a Glasgow newspaper, which sent him to cover an early, unsuccessful attempt to find the wreck of the Lusitania. He was tall, sturdy, cherub-faced, and always attractive to women. His first wife Annette, the daughter of an army colonel, had set eyes on him twice before she abandoned her previous husband to live with him. He secured a post on The Daily Telegraph , and managed to scoop the Daily Express in that paper's heyday when Arthur Christiansen was its editor. Christiansen sent for Millar, and offered him a large salary increase, which he accepted. Lord Beaverbrook thought well of him, and he became one of the Express 's three correspondents in Paris. When the Second World War began, Millar was left in sole charge of the Express office, and got away from Paris to Bordeaux, under fire from the Luftwaffe, with a carful of White Russian friends, as the Germans swept over northern France. He got a boat out of Bordeaux to England, where he at once enlisted in the London Scottish. Obvious officer material, he was soon commissioned into the Rifle Brigade, and went out to North Africa with its first battalion. In a brush with the Afrika Korps, he had the misfortune to be taken prisoner and was packed off to a prisoner-of-war camp near Taranto, where he ran a black market in food. This was rumbled, and he was dispatched to the punishment camp at Calvi above Genoa. With stout friends, he was at work on a tunnel when Italy surrendered to the Allies; the Germans took over the camp, and he found himself crossing the Alps in a guarded train. From this train he and a friend jumped clear, near Munich. They got help from French forced labourers, as far as Strasbourg, where he lost his companion; he managed to get across into France, and hid in a small hotel near the Swiss border. At nightfall one evening, four men closed in on him. " C'est vous l'officier anglais " - statement, not question. One of them took him into a side room and greeted him in English: Robert Heslop, the local SOE organiser. Heslop put him on an escape line to Spain. Millar got as far as Perpignan, where he was twice betrayed by bad guides, but then managed to cross the Pyrenees and so get back to Great Britain. He was at once taken on by SOE - having an elder brother in SIS probably helped - and trained as a secret agent. Briefed by Vera Atkins, and codenamed "Emile", he parachuted into eastern France a few days before Normandy D-Day, to run a new circuit called Chancellor in the Ognon valley north of Besançon. In three hectic months he managed to do a great deal of harm to the Germans, for which he received a DSO to add to the MC he had been awarded for his home run from Germany. Sixty years later, women in the Ognon valley who had worked for him would still cry "Ah! Emile!" when his name was mentioned, and lay a hand on their hearts. This work Millar described in his Maquis (1945), still the most vivid book to have come out of the secret war, crisply written to convey what it felt like never to know, from hour to hour, whether you would live to see the next hour. He wrote it as soon as the ordeal was over, and followed it with Horned Pigeon (1946), an account of his escape; so named because the wife whose memory had sustained him as an escaper had not waited for him, and was living with somebody else. He at once divorced her and married a friend of hers, Isabel Paske-Smith, the half-Spanish daughter of a diplomat. He took Isabel by small boat across France for a tour of the Mediterranean, being sent for by General as they passed through Paris. De Gaulle thought highly of his Maquis , though he could not say so in public, and made sure Millar got the proper French decorations. This journey in turn led to a good book, Isabel and the Sea (1948), and he wrote several more, including Oyster River (1963), on the Cornwall- Brittany wartime small-boat link, and several other books of travel. Millar was no great lover of city life, Paris apart, and settled instead to be a Dorset squire, buying a thousand acres near Dorchester. Farming, hunting and shooting suited him - he once regretted that, although he had shot several Germans while he was "Emile", he had not shot a great many more. In 1979 he published his autobiography, Road to Resistance . His life had a sharp jar in 1989, when Isabel was involved in a banal car accident from which she never recovered consciousness. He gave up their farm, and moved to a house near Bridport, where Venetia Ross-Skinner looked after his closing years. Once such a pillar of physical energy, he was reduced to a wheelchair, and went blind; his spirit remained glowing. Maquis: The French Resistance at War by George Millar. Site dédié à la résistance, surtout du sud-ouest , la vie quotidienne sous l'occupation, les Alliés et la libération de la France pendant la seconde guerre mondiale. A blog dedicated to the French Resistance particularly in the Charente and the Dordogne, daily life under the occupation, the Allies and the liberation of France during the Second World War. ONGLETS. Accueil Actualité Articles Chronologie Lexique Liens internet Contact. Maquis de George Millar. R é dig é par Alain dans la rubrique Document et livre, Opération spéciale. Details about MILITARIA 179 FRENCH RESISTANCE WW2 MAQUIS_YUGOSLA VIA_AMERICAN TANKERS_MARSEI LLE. 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