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Seven men parachute into the mountains of Germany, a women (Mary Ure) is also there but she isn’t known by six of the other men yet. Chilling actions from the men are best described as daring suicide. Somebody is a double agent but who it is will not come out until it’s too late. An American General Carnaby has secrets (D-Day plans) that might restart WWII again and Nazis wants that information. The task: these seven men will go get the general and rescue what seems impossible of a castle perched high into the Alps. One thing is for sure, the men start dropping like flies and the car crash while Lieutenant Schaffer (Clint Eastwood) tries to understand the whole mess. Allied forces include several countries that need to get general free. Meanwhile British Major Smith (Richard Burton) has to tell Schaffer the whole story. Nearby is a army base so everything must be top notch to infiltrate the castle without disturbing anyone nearby. No can be trusted when things start to heat up, very interesting read, I’m not going to give anymore to the book. I rated book 5*****.Read full review
(WARNING! This review contains SPOILERS for both the film and the novel!) I'd never read anything by Alistair MacLean before. I had however seen The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare, both top-knock WWII thrillers. So I randomly decided to nab MacLean's novel(ization?) of the latter. Everyone ought to know the plot. A group of Allied commandos led by British Major John Smith and American Lieutenant Morris Schaffer are to infiltrate the dreaded Schloss-Adler, the Castle of the Eagles, an impenetrable mountaintop German fortress, to rescue a captured American general. Or so they think! Not everything is as it seems, and, to Schaffer's continued annoyance, Smith isn't telling him everything about the mission. Considering the novel is by the same guy who wrote the movie's screenplay it's no surprise it's quite excellent. A few of the characters' names are different (ex: Major von Hapen, the Gestapo officer in the movie, is named von Brautisch here). The key difference between book and film is that whereas in the film Smith and Schaffer mercilessly gun down practically every Nazi they come across, here in the book they tend to just knock them out. The best example is the dining room scene: there, instead of shooting all of the Nazis present, the commandos hold them at gunpoint and inject with a knockout drug. While escaping, Smith even goes so far as to rescue a German soldier he'd knocked out earlier! It's a stark contrast to the movie. It's still a very violent book and people still get killed, it's just got a lot lower body count. My only two criticisms with the novel (and with the movie) are the Nazi helicopter and the revelation about the American general's identity. First, the helicopter. Helicopters did exist in WWII but they weren't the kind shown in the film, and the Germans certainly didn't have any, so its inclusion is a mystery to me. I was hoping MacLean would explain that General Rosemeyer's helicopter was some kind of experimental aircraft, but no go. The novel treats the helicopter as if it were commonplace, same as the movie. Now for General Carnaby. In both novel and film Smith reveals that he is actor named Cartwright Jones far, far too early in the story for my tastes. I really think this revelation should've been held back until the dining room scene. All in all, though, despite these flaws, Alistair MacLean's Where Eagles Dare is an excellently paced adventure novel and I highly recommend it to fans of high adventure and action.Read full review
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