Lieutenant Norman Poole: The first Allied soldier to set foot in France on D-Day whose exploits helped seal the reputation of the SAS

By showing its versatility Poole helped to ensure a future for the SAS, but spoke of his adventure only in old age.

Poole: with his fluent German, one of his feats was persuading the SS not to shoot one of his comrades

Lieutenant Norman "Puddle" Poole was the first Allied soldier to set foot in Nazi-occupied France on D-Day, 6 June 1944. He led the first of two SAS parties to drop by parachute five miles west of Saint-Lô, and his boots hit the ground at 11 minutes past midnight. This muddy field, at the base of the Cotentin peninsula, was far from where the main invasion thrust would come, on the Normandy beaches farther east.

Poole's mission was to deceive the enemy. All around him and his party of six, and another similar group under Lieutenant Frederick "Chick" Fowles that followed, there drifted down in the light of a full moon 200 dummy parachutists, mannequins of cloth and straw. The 12 SAS men made fake battle-noise using "special gramophones" and amplifiers, then in the ensuing eerie silence went to ground.

The first British troop-carrying glider landed at 16 minutes past midnight 45 miles away near Caen, and paratroopers of the US 82nd Airborne Division dropped over Utah Beach 27 miles away from 1.15 am. For Poole and his comrades it was the start of a nightmare six weeks behind German lines, but the mission, codenamed Operation Titanic IV, was a success. Almost a whole German division went on a wild goose chase after the SAS men, easing the US troops' advance.

Norman Harry Poole, a 24-year-old electrician's son educated at Peter Symonds' School, Winchester, had been chosen as one of the first officers of the fledgling 1st SAS Regiment by Lt Colonel Blair "Paddy" Mayne. He joined the Royal Hampshire Regiment in 1939 and served as an instructor at the Airborne Depot Battle School of the Army Air Corps at Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, before volunteering for the decoy mission.

The dummies, all called "Rupert", self-destructed; but men had to hide. In their first three weeks they patrolled with the French Maquis, sabotaging signal and telephone lines, until the local leader, Andre Le Duc, who had met and assisted Poole, was seized and shot, and a German anti-parachute company was set on the SAS's men's trail.

With his party Poole had four US soldiers, escaped prisoners of war, two of them wounded, whom he had personally gone five miles to fetch. Food was scarce and cooking impossible. He took the party into no-man's land in the hope of reaching Allied lines, and would have got them to safety had the Germans not happened at that moment to be making a counter-attack.

A German patrol's grenades wounded all but Poole as they crouched in a ditch. By multiple runs across open ground under fire, Poole carried and dragged them to a house and fetched water. After holding out there they were surrounded and captured within yards of American positions. Later, with his fluent German, Poole persuaded the Germans to call off the imminent shooting of Fowles, who had also been captured with his men. He convinced an SS interrogator that they were not special forces – doomed by Hitler's decree to die if caught – but Parachute Regiment regulars.

Their train to Germany came under attack from British Typhoon aircraft at Chateau Thierry in eastern France. A Typhoon's armour-piercing shell killed many, but Poole's life was saved by his having just agreed to a man's request to swap places to sit with friends, who all died, Poole receiving a skull fragment embedded in his knee. The train was attacked again in marshalling yards at Cologne.

The SAS groups went to different Poole to Oflag 79 in Brunswick, Lower Saxony. Of the 12, only Poole and three others survived. Mayne upbraided Poole on his release for having let himself be hampered by wounded men, but recommended him for the Military Cross.

Poole's "resourcefulness and courage... coolness and clear-mindedness... sustained the other members of his party incalculably", the recommendation declares. "His determination, courage and leadership were of the highest exemplary value and quality."

Poole's fillip to morale when the mission was delayed for 24 hours because of bad weather, forcing a wait at Hazells Hall, near Tempsford aerodrome in Bedfordshire, is also remembered. A talented pianist, he played Richard Addinsell's soaring, romantic Warsaw Concerto from the 1941 film Dangerous Moonlight, so reminding his audience of the laconic words of the hero, a Polish airman played by Anton Walbrook, seated amid ruined grandeur at the piano, a cigarette dangling from his lips as bombs crash around: "I'm just playing to myself. Soothes my nerves." Also waiting before her mission to France was the SOE agent Violette Szabo. She and Poole did jigsaw puzzles.

Freed in April 1945, Poole worked for MI9 and was posted to the Allied Screening Commission (Greece), a dangerous job, verifying claims and distributing compensation in remote country places riven by civil war and infested with bandits. For this he learned Greek. He and the mobile team he led set up headquarters at Tripolis in the Peloponnese, just as the rest of the British army was withdrawing so as not to be sucked into the spiralling violence.

By showing its versatility Poole helped to ensure a future for the SAS, which politicians were threatening with abolition. On being demobbed in 1946 he took a job as office boy in the National Provincial Bank in Winchester, but was promoted after an army friend, who was happening to use the branch, pointed out Poole's talents. He was Lt Col Viscount Fitzharris, future William, Earl of Malmesbury, with whom Poole had served in the Royal Hampshire Regiment. Poole became premises manager for the south-west region of what would become the National Westminster Bank in 1970.

In 1951 Poole married Elisabeth Barnes. They had two daughters, Alison and Elisabeth, and later lived in Portishead, Somerset. His wife predeceased him by four years, and his daughter Elisabeth died of cancer in 2014.

Poole spoke of his adventure only in old age. He never revealed the content of the secret message he had sent to London on landing in France. To convey it, high command had provided a homing pigeon, to be clutched to his chest as he parachuted down. The bird, too, fulfilled its mission.

Norman Harry Poole, soldier and bank manager: born Winchester 9 April 1920; MC 1946; married 1951 Elisabeth Barnes (died 2011; one daughter, and one daughter deceased); died Portishead, Somerset 26 June 2015.