The Eagle Has Landed

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For the film see The Eagle Has Landed (film)

For the Saxon album see The Eagle Has Landed (album)

For the historical quotation, see Apollo 11

**The Eagle Has Landed**
Image:The Eagle Has Landed.png 1976 UK second edition paperback
Author	Jack Higgins
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre(s)	War, Thriller Novel
Publisher	HarperCollins
Publication date	8 September 1975
Media type	Print (Hardback and Paperback)
Pages	352 pp (hardcover edition)) 356 pp (paperback edition)
ISBN	ISBN 0-00-221208-0 (hardcover edition) ISBN 0-671-01934-1 (paperback edition)

The Eagle Has Landed is a book by Jack Higgins first published in 1975. It was made into a film of the same name 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 0-425-17718-1

1 Plot summary
2 Sequel
3 Characters
4 External links
5 Release details

[edit] Plot summary

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, 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 Radl to undertake the study, despite feeling that it is all just a waste of time.

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 said. "And then synchronicity rears its ugly head." Winston Churchill is scheduled to 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 Canaris. An agent, a member of the IRA named Liam Devlin, is dispatched to contact Mrs. Grey, who hates the English due to her South African heritage and experiences.

Radl recruits a team of commandos to carry out the operation, commanded by a German Fallschirmjäger officer, Oberst Kurt Steiner. 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 teenage girl who was shot while trying to escape. For this, he was court-martialled, along with a platoon of his men. Rather than face a firing squad, the men were allowed to transfer to a punishment unit in the Channel Islands, where they made suicidal attacks with manned torpedoes against British channel convoys.

Radl travels to Guernsey and, with the help of Devlin, recruits Steiner and his surviving men. The safety of Kurt Steiner's father, General Steiner, detained by the Gestapo, serves as an additional incentive for the Oberst. 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; the plan is to infiltrate Studley Constable, complete their mission, rendezvous with an E-boat at the nearby coast and make their escape.

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 sister of Father Verecker, a local priest, escapes and alerts the United States Army Rangers. Inexperienced Colonel Pitt is killed trying to shoot Mrs. Grey in her house, while his poorly-planned assault on the church fails. Captain Clark then organizes a second, successful attack.

However, Steiner, his second-in-command, and Devlin manage to escape with the aid of a local girl, Molly Prior, who has become romantically involved with the Irishman. Instead of taking his chance to escape, Steiner opts to make one last attempt at Churchill. He succeeds in reaching Churchill, but hesitates and is shot and is supposedly killed. (However, Steiner reappears alive in The Eagle Has Flown, a sequel.) Radl has a heart attack in a Dutch hospital after discovering Devlin has escaped from England and is convalescing in the same hospital.

The novel concludes with the author Higgins supposedly meeting with various surviving characters as he gathers information for the story, the final revelation coming from an aged Father Verecker that "Churchill" had been an impersonator and even if the mission had succeeded, it would not have mattered.

[edit] Sequel

After the success of The Eagle Has Landed, Higgins wrote a quasi-sequel called The Eagle Has Flown.

[edit] Characters

The Liam Devlin character seems to be based on the real-life Frank Ryan. Like Devlin in the book, Ryan was an IRA man who had fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, was captured by the Franco forces and afterwards passed to the Germans. The real Ryan had not, however, participated in any German commando raid, and his deteriorating health (he died in 1944 in a Dresden hospital) would have made this impossible. Devlin is also featured in a later Jack Higgins book, older and supporting British authorities in stopping an attack on the Pope.