[2] Lieutenant-Colonel George Reginald Starr DSO MC (6 April 1904 – 2 September 1980), code name Hilaire, was a British mining engineer and an agent of the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) organisation in World War II.

SOE agents in France allied themselves with French Resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England.

Starr's accomplishments include building up a large network of resistance groups, carrying out a number of sabotage operations in the months leading up to the Normandy invasion on 6 June 1944, rescuing from imprisonment about 50 important resistance leaders and allied airmen shot down over France, and participation as a leader in the liberation of southwestern France from German occupation.

He had a confrontation with Charles de Gaulle after the liberation of France, and one of his agents, Anne-Marie Walters, accused him of permitting the torture of captured collaborators.

He was born in London on 6 April 1904, one of two sons of Alfred Demarest Starr, an American bookkeeper who became a naturalised British subject, and Englishwoman Ethel Renshaw.

[6] Starr was described by his wireless operator, Yvonne Cormeau, as short in stature, five feet six inches in height, very nervous, a heavy cigarette smoker, and a man who took duty and responsibility seriously and would never ask a person to do anything he would not do himself.

He was subsequently recruited into the Special Operations Executive (SOE) for his language skills[9] (although his spoken French was described as "atrocious") and given the code name Hilaire.

SOE agent Henri Sevenet persuaded Starr to go instead to the Gascony region in southwestern France where a resistance movement was forming.

Local leaders were sympathetic to the resistance and the nearest Germans to the village were in the city of Agen, 35 kilometres (22 miles) distant.

From Castelnau, Starr began to build up a local resistance movement, called by SOE the Wheelwright Network (or Circuit).

[13] These initial successes aside, in spring 1943, seemingly forgotten by SOE headquarters in London, Starr was suffering from a skin disease probably caused by stress and contemplating failure and the abandonment of his mission.

London's immediate answer was to send an aeroplane to hover over Castelnau to communicate with Starr by short-range S-Phone to determine that he was still alive.

[14] Starr's SOE team would expand to include explosives expert Claude Arnault, wireless operator Yvonne Cormeau, and courier Anne-Marie Walters.

On the boat which brought him to France in 1942 he complained about being "in charge of three bloody women," Marie-Thérèse Le Chêne, Mary Katherine Herbert, and Odette Sansom, all SOE agents.

He initially thought her to be a nuisance and contemplated her "liquidation," but learned to trust her, sending her back to the United Kingdom with an appeal for SOE assistance to his network.

[20] In December 1943 Starr requested and received permission from SOE headquarters to begin attacking the Gestapo and railroads in his region.

On New Year's Eve 1943, Starr reported that the maquisards he had trained had destroyed more than 300 locomotives by carefully placing explosives on the engines.

On 28 March, Arnault sneaked into the plant at night, placed explosives, and destroyed 30 electric motors out of 31 in the 'factory which were used to grind gunpowder.

"[24] With the Normandy Invasion on 6 June 1944, the SOE wanted the maquisards to convert from being saboteurs to armed fighters directly contesting German forces.

Starr was one of only a few SOE agents who was able to persuade the feuding communists and non-communists to join together to form a single resistance force.

Still on the run, Starr led the maquisards south 20 kilometres (12 miles) to the town of Panjas where he joined forces with his friend, the French resistance leader Maurice Parisot.

After the battle of Castelnau and other conflict, the men of the various resistance groups making up the battalion, including Starr's, were short of ammunition.

However, the leader of the Armagnac Battalion, Maurice Parisot, was killed on 6 September; while an American aeroplane was landing, a propeller broke away from the motor and struck him.

[32] The withdrawal of the Germans from southwestern France left the area in political chaos in which "feudal barons," of whom Starr was among the most important, took control.

On 16 September 1944, General Charles de Gaulle, head of the Provisional Government of the French Republic, visited Toulouse.

[35] In late July 1944, Starr ordered his youthful courier, Anne-Marie Walters, to leave France accusing her of disobedience.