Written in 1975,this novel by the master of historical fiction"JAck
Higgins",is still considered to be a big hit through
out the world and
one of the favourite war fiction novel among the World War enthusiasts.
After the succesful rescue of Hitler's
beloved friend "Beninto Mussolini" by Otto Skorzeny a similar idea
was proposed by Admiral Wilhem Canaris head of Abwehr and was strongly
reported by Hitler and Himmler. Canaris is asked to provide a
feasibility study of the seemingly impossible task of capturing Prime
Minister Winston Churchill and returning him to the Reich. Canaris
considers the idea a joke and
realizes that although Hitler will soon forget the matter, Himmler will
not. Fearing Himmler may try to discredit him, Canaris orders one of
his officers, Oberst (Colonel) Radl (Duvall) to undertake the study,
despite feeling that Germany has already lost the war.
Radl and an Unteroffizier on his
staff investigate and find that one of their spies, code named Starling,
has provided a tantalizing piece of intelligence. "At any other time,
in any other place, this information would be useless" Radl says. "And
then Synchronicity rears its ugly head." Winston Churchill is reported to be visiting an
airfield near the village of Studley Constable, where Joanna Grey, a
South African woman and German spy, lives. They quickly find an agent
to send to contact Mrs. Grey, a member of the IRA named Liam Devlin (Sutherland).
Radl needs to recruit a team of commandos to carry out the operation,
and decide that a German Fallschirmjager Officer, Oberst
Kurt Steiner (Caine), is perfect for the job. What Radl doesn't know is
that while returning from the Eastern Front, Steiner intervenes as SS soldiers round up Jews at a railway station in Poland,
attempting to save the life of a teenaged girl who is shot while
escaping. He is subsequently court-martialled along with a platoon of
his men. Rather than face death at the hands of the military justice
system, the men are given the option of facing death in a punishment
unit in the Channel Islands where they make suicidal attacks with manned torpedos against Britishchannel convoys.
Radl travels to Guernsey
and, with the help of Devlin, recruits Steiner and his men as well as a
Luftwaffe pilot named Gericke who will fly the team into the UK in a
captured C-47 in Allied markings. The commandos outfit themselves as Polish troops,
as few of them speak English, and plan to infiltrate Studley Constable
and complete their
mission, rendezvousing with an E-Boat on the nearby
coast and making their escape.
But the whole of the plan foils when a soldier tries to save a village
girl from the water cycle in which his German uniform was revealed
under the Polish uniform and thus destroying their mission.The locals
are rounded up, but the daughter of Father Vereker, the
local vicar, escapes to a base of American Rangers, where Captain Clark
(Treat Williams) is forced to organize a second attack on the
German forces after Colonel Pitt (Larry Hangman) is killed in a poorly
planned assault.
Oberst Steiner, the only survivor of the mission, evades capture and
manages to find Churchill's lodgings, shooting him before being killed
by Churchill's security staff. The security staff then note to Captain
Clark that Churchill was really a variety artist posing as Churchill,
who was in actuality in Tehran at the Tehran Conference.