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 in the confused fighting around Gazala in June 1942 and shipped to Italy. In a prisoner-of-war camp near Taranto, he organised the buying of black-market food from outside the camp, played female parts in prisoners’ theatricals and, as a fellow inmate was to relate, “ while others were forming escape committees and drawing up rotas for tunnelling parties, Millar was planning to climb over the wire, dressed as a nun”.

His opportunity to escape came when the prisoners were being sent to Germany by rail after the collapse of Italy in 1943. Jumping from the train at night near Munich, he made an extraordinary journey via Strasbourg to Paris — his command of French and German enabled him to pass as a migrant worker. There, the former administrator of the Daily Express office, Mara Scherbatov, a White Russian princess, gave him money to complete his journey across France and then through Spain to Gibraltar and safety.

On being flown back to England, he was shattered to find that his marriage had not survived his absence. Declining an offer to stay in London to help to organise escape routes for other British fugitives, he volunteered for the SOE.

After training, he was parachuted into France, near Besançon, on June 1, 1944, to work with the Maquis in delaying the movement of German reinforcements from the South of France to the Normandy battlefield after the Allied invasion which was to begin five days later. He established the SOE “Chancellor” network in the region and embarked on a series of sabotage operations in conjunction with the Maquis, once he had won their confidence.

He began by a night operation against the Besançon railway marshalling yards, blowing up the turntables for shifting rolling stock from one line to another. Enthused by their success, the Maquis were easily persuaded to return in strength the following night — relying on the Germans not expecting lightning to strike twice in the same place — to put charges on each set of points. These caused such disruption to rail traffic that Millar advised SOE’s headquarters in Baker Street against an RAF bombing attack on the marshalling yards — this had the welcome side-effect of preserving the city’s 17th-century architecture from almost certain destruction.

Millar’s courage in the Western Desert and subsequent escape from the train carrying him to prison camp in Germany had already been recognised by the award of the Military Cross. His quick thinking and reactions were again put to the test when he was with the Maquis. Challenged by an enemy sentry, he shot the man dead with a pistol fired through his overcoat pocket. A measure of his achievement during the months he spent in France in 1944 was the award of the DSO, the Légion d ’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre.

George Reid Millar was born in 1910, into a prosperous Scottish family. The second son of Thomas A. Millar and Mary Reid Morton, he inherited his parents’ good looks. Beneath the charm, however, there was a great determination, occasionally amounting to ruthlessness. This was demonstrated when as a 12-year-old new boy at Loretto, he turned on two bullies with such ferocity that it was he, not they, who was beaten by the housemaster.

Millar, destined to follow his father’s profession as an architect, trained at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he was a contemporary of Sir Hugh Casson. He started well but both men enjoyed rowing and, while Casson was a cox and had only to keep his weight down, Millar was an oar and undertook rigorous training, so falling behind in his work — so far indeed, that he decided to abandon architecture in favour of journalism. He proved himself on The Daily Telegraph and then on the Daily Express, whose editor, Arthur Christiansen, sent him to Paris in 1939 to relieve Alan Moorehead as assistant to the senior correspondent Geoffrey (later Sir Geoffrey) Cox. It was Christiansen who coined the nickname “Golden Millar”, after the racehorse, prompted by the young man’s good looks and fair hair.

Shortly before the war, he had married Annette Stockwell but both he and Cox decided that they should fight, resigned from the Daily Express, and enlisted in the Army. Returning to London before the end of the war in Europe, he wrote a book about his experiences, Maquis, which told the public that British officers had been fighting with the French Resistance.

In 1945 he married the half-Spanish Isabel Paske-Smith and, after writing a second book about his war experiences, Horned Pigeon — the title referred to the ending of his first marriage — he found himself a successful and relatively affluent author. The Millars bought a yacht and cruised in the Mediterranean, an experience which he put to practical use by writing his first book about sailing, Isabel and the Sea.

Soon after their early cruises in the Mediterranean, Millar decided to farm, for he came from farming stock and wanted to live in the country. He bought Sydling Court, a beautiful old house near Dorchester, and leased a thousand acres adjoining it from Winchester College and began many years of successful sheep and cattle farming. He hunted in winter and sailed in summer, and became a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron.

Half a dozen more books followed, including A White Boat from England, The Bruneval Raid and his autobiography, Road to Resistance, published in 1979. He was for a spell the principal book critic for his old newspaper, the Daily Express. Latterly, he gave up hunting — but not sailing — and reduced his farm to 600 acres, although he and his wife actively worked it, often with the help of only one farm worker.

Charming and witty as he was, Millar was regarded as something of a recluse by his neighbours in Dorset, seldom being seen beyond the belts of trees and Elizabethan topiary hedge that surrounded his house, or outside his secluded farm. However, he valued a number of close friends elsewhere in the county, in London, Scotland and in Spain and will be remembered by them for his warmth and his skill as a raconteur. He and his wife were a devoted couple, although different in temperament. She predeceased him; there were no children.

George Millar, DSO, MC, author, farmer and officer of the wartime Special Operations Executive, was born on September 19, 1910. He died on January 15, 2005, aged 94.