George Reid Millar DSO MC (September 19, 1910–January 15, 2005) was a Scottish journalist, author and soldier who was awarded the Military Cross (MC) for his escape during the first part of the Second World War which he wrote about in Horned Pigeon.
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.
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[1] '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'. 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 Lord Beaverbrook.
His fellow correspondents in Paris were Alan Moorehead and Geoffrey Cox (journalist). 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 locally 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 Charles 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.
Related to the Second World War
Travel writing
Other works
A number of these titles have been translated.