This
is my story and my Tribute |
| I
first became interested in the S.O.E. after reading an account
in a national newspaper of a young British agent George Millar
(left) code name "Emile". His story is incredible....at
the outbreak of war he was a journalist in Paris and evacuated
to England after the fall of France. He joined the Rifle Brigade
and was posted to Alexandria, where he went on patrol sorties
in an armoured car across the Western Desert, he was captured
by the "Afrika Korps" and interned in a P.O.W. camp,
near Tripoli. |
Georges
Molle and George Millar
Vieilley, France 1944. Photo taken soon after a confrontation with
the Germans. |
From there he was shipped to Italy and spent many months being transferred
from one camp to another. On their final journey to a German P.O.W.
camp, George and Wally Binns made a daring and successful escape
jumping from a moving train. They later made contact with the local
Resistance and from there George was passed from contact to contact
through France until he reached the French-Spanish border. Here
he met the guide who would escort him across the "Forbidden
Zone" over the Pyrenees. Once across into neutral Spain he
was met by the British Consulate and taken to Gibraltar, where he
flew to England. He then joined the S.O.E. and was parachuted into
France on the night of June 1st 1944, there to instruct the Resistance
in the use of arms and sabotage, and to destroy communication and
railway systems in the Besancon area.
.. |
|
When "Parachutages" (Parachute containers filled with
machine-guns, explosives, and weapons of different types) were to
be dropped, many local people waited patiently in the cold of the
night with their horses and carts listening intently for the distant
drone of the expected aircraft carrying their valuable cargo.
When the containers had been dropped, there would be a frenzy of
activity to load them onto the carts and depart the dropping zone
as quickly as they could, for fear that the enemy would find them,
knowing full well that should they be caught after curfew no mercy
at all would be shown to them, and execution on the spot was a very
real fear.
|
Resistance fighters using weapons
dropped by the allies. |
Everywhere, throughout Europe civilians paid a heavy price for their
Resistance activities, it is estimated that by the end of the war,
more than 150,000 men and women in France alone lost their lives in
defying the German forces.
But by their courage and self-sacrifice, they
wrote a great and noble chapter in the History of France. |
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