The Eagle Has Landed

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The Eagle Has Landed is a book by Jack Higgins first published in 1975. It was made into a film in 1976. The plot has some similarities with that of Went the Day Well?

The book is still in print, being reissued in New York by Berkley Books in 2000 with ISBN 0425177181

The film was directed by John Sturges and starred Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland and Robert Duvall. The majority of the film, set in the fictional village of Studley Constable, was filmed at the village of Mapledurham in Oxfordshire and features the village church, Mapledurham Watermill and Mapledurham House. The sequence set in Alderney was filmed in Charlestown, near St Austell in Cornwall. Some of the filming took place at RAF St. Mawgan, near Newquay, in Cornwall.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Inspired by the brilliant (real life) rescue of Hitler's ally Benito Mussolini by Otto Skorzeny, a similar idea is considered by Hitler, with the strong support of Himmler. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (Anthony Quayle), head of the Abwehr (German military intelligence), is ordered to make 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, but 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 it is all just a waste of time.

Template:Infobox Film An Unteroffizier on Radl's staff finds 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 scheduled to be visit an airfield near the village of Studley Constable, where Joanna Grey, a South African woman and German spy, lives. Radl comes up with a scheme that could work. Himmler meets secretly with Radl and unofficially tells him to proceed, without notifying Carnaris. An agent, a member of the IRA named Liam Devlin (Sutherland), is dispatched to contact Mrs. Grey.

Radl recruits a team of commandos to carry out the operation, commanded by a German Fallschirmjäger officer, Oberst Kurt Steiner (Caine). While returning from the Eastern Front, Steiner intervened when SS soldiers rounded up Jews at a railway station in Poland, and attempted to save the life of a teenaged girl who was shot while trying to escape. For this, he was court-martialled, along with a platoon of his men. Rather than the firing squad, the men were allowed to transfer to a punishment unit in the Channel Islands, where they made suicidal attacks with manned torpedos against British channel convoys.

Radl travels to Guernsey and, with the help of Devlin, recruits Steiner and his surviving men. The team will fly into the UK in a captured C-47 with Allied markings. The commandos outfit themselves as Polish troops, as few of them speak English, and plan to infiltrate Studley Constable, complete their mission, rendezvous with an E-Boat on the nearby coast and make their escape.

The film lacks many details of the novel, including the detention of Kurt Steiner's father, General Steiner, by the Gestapo as additional incentive for Oberst Steiner. Also, a member of an American SS unit is featured in the novel but absent from the film. Some details, such as Joanna Grey's hatred of the English due to her South African heritage and experiences, are not made clear in the film version.

The plan is ultimately foiled when a German paratrooper rescues a local girl from a water wheel. He is killed in the process and his German uniform (worn under the Polish uniforms as protection against being executed as spies) revealed to the village people. The locals are rounded up, but the daughter of Father Vereker, the local vicar, escapes to a base of American Rangers. Inexperienced Colonel Pitt (Larry Hagman) is killed in a poorly planned assault. Captain Clark (Treat Williams) then organizes a second, successful attack.

While his men sacrifice themselves to delay the Americans, Oberst Steiner manages to reach Churchill, shooting him before being killed by the security staff. One of the security officers then tells Captain Clark that the man that Steiner had killed was really a variety artist posing as Churchill. The prime minister was actually at the Tehran Conference.

With the failure of the operation, Radl is executed for acting without orders from Canaris.

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