George Reid Millar DSO MC (September 19, 1910–January 15, 2005) was awarded the MC for his escape during the first part of the Second World War which he wrote about in Horned Pigeon. This book, one of the great escape stories, belongs with The Great Escape, The Wooden Horse and A Crowd is not Company by Robert Kee.Millar was awarded the DSO, the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur and the Croix de Guerre avec Palmes for his service in France in 1944 fighting behind the lines with the local Resistance. He recorded this experience in the book Maquis. This book, his most well known, belongs with others written by British servicemen who fought behind enemy lines including Ill Met by Moonlight, Eastern Approaches and Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
'Josh' Millar was born in Scotland. He showed his courage and independence when he fought off the traditional hazing by an older student at his boarding school. While at school he was happily initiated into fox hunting which became a lifelong passion. Between school and university he spent some formative months in France. He graduated in his father's profession of architecture from Cambridge but only worked for a few months as an architect. For want of alternatives he started into journalism at the Glasgow Evening Citizen - another formative experience. He worked as an ordinary seaman on a freighter for four months and tried his hand at writing film scripts. In 1936 he joined the Daily Telegraph where he was twice able to scoop the Daily Express. The editor of the Express, Arthur Christiansen offered him a job and sent him to the Paris office. At the Express he came to know Beaverbrook.
His fellow correspondents in Paris were Alan Moorehead and Geoffrey Cox . He covered the Battle of France and was evacuated back to England to enlist in the army. Beaverbrook paid him half his Express salary while he was in the army.
His second published book Horned Pigeon tells of his service in the 1st Battalion the Rifle Brigade in North Africa. As a second lieutenant he was in command of a scout platoon of Bren carriers and motorcyclists. He had an uncomfortable time with the second in command of his battalion Major Vic Turner. His scout platoon was overrun by Rommel's advance at Gazala in the Libyan desert. For a time he and some of his platoon evaded the Germans but eventually he was captured and briefly brought in front of Rommel himself. He was handed over to the Italian army who took him to the prisoner of war camp Campo 66 in Capua in the Padula Monastery. After a number of escape attempts he was moved to Campo 5 at Gavi, a high-security PoW camp, where, like Colditz, the 'escapers' were confined. One of his fellow inmates for example was David Stirling who had established the SAS.
After the Italian surrender the Allied prisoners were entrained for Germany. Millar and a companion jumped from the train in Germany. Millar and Binns made their way from Munich to Strasbourg where they were separated. Millar continued to Paris and then Lyon. While in the south of France he was found by the SOE section run by Richard Heslop, codenamed Xavier and Elizabeth. He volunteered to stay in France and fight with the Resistance. When Heslop refused Millar asked Heslop to recommend him to SOE for the future. Finally, after more than three months on the run, made it across the Pyrenees and over the Spanish border to Barcelona
Back in London he pulled strings and managed to get into F Section of SOE. Here he was prepared for a return to France by Vera Atkins and Maurice Buckmaster among others. He was parachuted into the Besançon area of France just before D-Day and returned to England three months later when the US Army pushed the Germans out of that part of France. On his return took a month's leave, rented a cottage in the country and wrote the manuscript of Maquis, the nickname of the French Resistance. In this immediate and vivid account he drew on his journalistic skills to describe life living in the woods with the Maquis, various sabotage missions against the railways and trying to organise the villages before liberation by the Americans. He meets Paul, an American radio operator, the competing local resistance chiefs, and eventually joins the famous Boulaya.
Maquis sold well and was followed by Horned Pigeon which was based on 'prolific notes I had dictated...to a shorthand typist, during the month's leave following my escape.' The second book 'was, if anything, more successful than the first'.
After the war he bought Truant a Looe lugger and sailed with his wife Isabel to Greece. This journey was recorded in Isabel and the sea. In Road to Resistance he records that while their boat was in Paris he received a summons from General De Gaulle who had read Maquis and had taken the trouble on a trip in the area to detour to the village of Vieilley where Millar had been based.
After the war, he farmed at Sydling Court, near Dorchester, recording his yachting holidays as travel books and continuing to write.
He had married Annette Stockwell in 1936. Their marriage was dissolved in 1945. In 1945 he married Isabel Paske-Smith who died in 1990.
Maquis 1945 (Autobiography June to October 1944) (Published in the USA 1946 as Waiting in the Night; A Story of the Maquis, Told By One of Its Leaders. French title: Un anglais dans le maquis.)
My past was an evil river (A novel of American occupation of Germany during World War II) 1947
The Bruneval Raid. Flashpoint of the Radar War 1975
Road to Resistance 1979 (Autobiography 1910 - 1946)
Travel writing
Isabel and the sea (1946 sailing holiday through France by canal to Greece. ) 1948
A white boat from England (Subsequent sailing holidays in the sloop Serica from England via western France, Spain, Portugal, Morocco and the Balearic Islands to the south of France.)1951
Full text at Archive.org
Oyster River. One summer on an inland sea 1963 (Sailing holiday in the Gulf of Morbihan France)
Other works
Through the Unicorn Gates 1945 (novel)
Orellana discovers the Amazon. (Published in the USA as A Crossbowman's Story of the First Exploration of the Amazon). 1954
Siesta 1950. (Novel about the painter Henry Eldon.)
Horseman: Memoirs of Captain J. H. Marshall 1970 (Millar wrote up the reminiscences of his friend and neighbour including Marshall's experiences as a cavalryman, a fox hunter and horse trainer.)
18 July 1948 The Milwaukee Journal reviews Isabel and the sea: Europe in a Ketch
26 July 1948 Time Magazine reviews Isabel and the sea Keel Over Europe
'Perhaps the most readable personal war reporting of the year was by Britain's Captain George Reid Millar, who described in Horned Pigeon and Waiting in the Night his hair-raising escape from a Nazi P.O.W. camp and subsequent undercover work with the French Maquis.' Time Magazine 16 December 1946
10 June 1946 Time Magazine reviews Horned Pigeon Horned Pigeon
14 January 1946 Time Magazine reviews (Maquis) Waiting in the Night Books: Toward Morning
