Public Servant, Secret Agent

by Paul Routledge

  Liddell Hart argued, somewhat patronisingly, that Churchill was obliged to justify his decision to sacrifice the Calais garrison, but questioned whether it had the outcome asserted by the wartime premier. The panzer division that attacked the port was only one of seven in the area and had been deployed ‘because it had nothing else to do’. The gallant stand was nothing more than ‘a useless sacrifice’, Liddell Hart maintained. Neave was plainly infuriated by this view. He contended: ‘There was nothing useless about the stand at Calais. It hampered Guderian during crucial hours, especially on 23 and 24 May, when there was little to prevent his taking Dunkirk. It formed part of the series of events, some foolish, some glorious, which saved the BEF.’8 Glover suggests that the truth lies somewhere in between these two extremes, though strangely he finds it ‘irrelevant’. Nicholson’s brigade had to be sacrificed as a gesture to shore up the crumbling Anglo-French Alliance, even though it was already doomed. ‘At least it made an epic for Britain at a time when all was defeat and withdrawal,’ he writes condescendingly.9

  At the time, however, the military merits of the battle for Calais were far from Neave’s mind. He was about to experience at first hand what he and his men had most feared: Nazi incarceration. He nearly did not make it. On the morning of 27 May, after surviving another night in the bastion tunnel, he was taken by ambulance into the centre of Calais. En route, the vehicle was rocked by a burst of shellfire that forced the crew to take cover. Ironically, this was offshore ‘friendly fire’, from the cruisers Arethusa and Galatea, bombarding the investing German forces. The ambulance restarted and he was dumped on a slab in the covered market of Calais-St Pierre as if he was a piece of meat. In this makeshift field hospital, his imprisonment began.

  4

  Capture

  Neave hated being taken prisoner, at the age of twenty-four, at the very start of the war. It was not just fear of the unknown. German front-line troops, soldiers like himself, had behaved well towards the wounded but it was the Nazis he dreaded. Furthermore, there was a psychological dimension to his capture. A prisoner of war, he discovered, suffers a double tragedy. Most obviously, he loses his freedom. Then, since he has not committed a crime, his spirit is scarred with a sense of injustice. Neave articulated this resentment as a bitterness of soul that clouded the life even of strong men. ‘The prisoner is to himself an object of pity,’ he argued. ‘He feels he is forgotten by those who flung him, so he thinks, into an unequal contest. He broods over the causes of his capture …’1

  Despite his wound, Neave determined not to fall into this psychological trap. Well-versed in the escape stories of the First World War, he quickly set himself to thinking how to avoid being sent to a prison camp deep in the heart of Occupied Europe, where escape would be much more difficult. Though hospitalised, he was still only thirty miles from England, and much of France was still free of Nazis. Flight was not impossible: Gunner Instone, of Neave’s Second Searchlight Battery, was already busy escaping through France and Spain after knocking out two sentries.

  His wounds were too serious, however, to attempt an escape from the hospital to which he was moved, unless he had help. Out of the blue, a French soldier, Pierre d’Harcourt, who had evaded capture from his tank regiment by posing as a medical orderly, offered a solution. Neave could abscond from the ward he shared with four other officers by posing as a corpse. Allied prisoners were still dying, and d’Harcourt, a Red Cross volunteer, could smuggle him out of the hospital in an ambulance in place of a deceased officer. It would not be easy. German guards checked the bodies before they were removed for burial in the Citadel, where Nicholson’s men had fought so bravely. Nor do the plotters seem to have given much thought to disposing of the spare corpse. They hatched extravagant plans to steal a boat and flee across the Channel, but before their ideas could be translated into action d’Harcourt heard that the prisoners were to be evacuated further inland to Lille in late July. The plot had to be abandoned. Nonetheless, Neave found the experience of escape planning very good for morale. It occupied his fertile brain and gave him hope. The elusive d’Harcourt vanished to Paris, where he was active in the first escape lines for Allied prisoners through Unoccupied France before being captured. He spent four years in the notorious Fresnes prison and Buchenwald concentration camp before being liberated, half-dead, in 1945.

  En route to Lille that July the German lorry carrying the wounded broke down. This mishap seemed to offer a chance to escape. While the lorry was being repaired, Neave and other walking wounded survivors of Calais wandered around the streets of Bailleul, without guards. The local people offered them food and wine, and some offered to hide them from their captors. The French spirit of resistance was already showing itself within weeks of capitulation, but Neave did not avail himself of these offers. He admitted later that he lacked not just the physical strength but also the nerve to seize the opportunity. The weeks in hospital had sapped his will. ‘My vacillation cost me dear,’ he wrote, ‘but at this time there was no military training in such matters.’2 In the warm summer evening, French people threw flowers and bid them goodbye from the main square of Bailleul, and Neave felt ashamed at his inaction. Subsequently, he vindicated his hesitation. Had he got away so soon, he argued, he would not have escaped from Colditz and would not have been in a position to help others emulate his example. It was perhaps a questionable piece of rationalisation after the event, to square his conscience with this unheroic episode.

  Once in the Lille hospital, his thoughts again turned to flight. This time he planned to escape with Captain John Surtees of the Rifle Brigade and a Corporal Dowling of the Durham Light Infantry. A young Frenchwoman who brought food and flowers to the wounded promised to help. Once out of the hospital, they would get civilian clothes, take the train to Paris and live incognito in a Left Bank pension. It did not seem dangerous, but it was not a very well thought-out escapade for the trio had no papers and practically no money. Senior officers later upbraided them for putting the other wounded men at risk of reprisals had they got away.

  In August 1940, the prisoners of Lille hospital, or at any rate those judged to be walking wounded, were taken on a long march east to their destination in a POW camp. They trudged through Belgium ‘from one foul transit camp to another’ before arriving at the mouth of the River Scheldt. There, they embarked on a huge, open coal barge for a three-day journey up the Waal and the Rhine to Germany. Neave felt he was on a voyage of lost souls crossing into the unknown. Life was over. As they passed under the bridge at Nijmegen in Holland, a young woman waved at the prisoners; as she did so, the wind caught her clothing, lifting her skirt and with it the spirits of the men. Neave, although overcome with despair, could not but admire the insouciance of the average Tommy, who never gave in, never lost heart.

  The officers were disembarked to take up residence in Oflag IXa at Spangenburg, near Kassel. Their place of incarceration was an imposing Schloss with a vaulted gateway, moat, drawbridge and a clock tower. Here the men could walk round the battlements and on a clear day take in the view of farmland and distant hills.

  Spangenburg reminded Neave of school – a school to which their fathers might have been sent. In a sense he was correct, for indeed they had: the castle had been a POW camp in the first war. The new boys, like the previous generation, slept in two-tiered bunks with straw palliases and coarse blankets. It was August, one year into the war. Years of imprisonment stretched ahead of them, and initially Neave resigned himself to his fate. He filled in the time with composition and meditation, writing half a fantastic novel about the life after death of a Regency peer, a study of Shakespeare’s sonnets and an essay on eccentrics for the camp magazine. He soon discovered the limits to the literary taste and sense of humour of English officers. His articles were rejected as unsuitable. The days thus passed wearily, and when he came to write his accomplished account of his adventures he preferred to draw a veil over these early efforts.

  There were few attempts to escape. On one occas
ion, the officers who got away were captured and beaten up by drunken German civilians. Surprisingly, escape was considered bad form by the senior British officers, who had successfully imposed a pre-war army system of discipline and class values inside the camp. They argued that escape for one or two men would invite reprisals on the hundreds left behind, and even threatened unsuccessful escapers with court martial, though they were not in a position to carry out the threat. Low morale and poor rations also contributed to the ‘anti-escape’ attitude.

  However, in the autumn of 1940, Red Cross parcels began arriving, improving health and lifting spirits. Would-be fugitives could now hoard ‘iron rations’ to sustain them during any planned flight. Opportunities for escape also increased in December 1940 when Neave and others were moved to a new camp in the wooded village below the castle. They were closer to a Stalag, a camp for non-commissioned officers and rank and file, who went on working parties outside the wire where the prospects for escape were more frequent. Neave, by now bored by the deadening routine of reading, talking and waiting for Red Cross parcels, sought to transfer himself to the Stalag. Life in the new camp brought new frustrations. The prisoners were closer to society and woke every morning to the sounds of the farmyard. Such proximity sometimes made them feel part of normal life but at the same time reminded them they were not. Here, Neave passed the winter ‘in discomfort, but without great suffering, unless it were of the soul’. His stomach became accustomed to the meagre prison diet, and he was unable to eat a whole tinned steak and kidney pudding doled out to each prisoner on Christmas Day.

  Before his plan to transfer to a Stalag could be implemented, however, Neave and his fellow POWs were suddenly transferred in February 1941 by train to Poland. Their destination was an ancient, moat-encircled Polish fortress on the River Vistula at Thorn (modern-day Torun), part of the huge encampment of Stalag XXa. (They later learned that they had been moved to this inhospitable spot as a reprisal for alleged ill-treatment of German prisoners in Canada.) At Thorn, officers were quartered in damp underground rooms, with little opportunity for exercise and none for escape. The fact that they were in Poland, a country about which they knew little, and hundreds of miles further east, made flight even more difficult. It was a soul-destroying existence, enlivened only by the daily rendition of ‘Abide With Me’ at sunset by a group of British orderlies on the drawbridge above the moat. Despite his imprisonment, Neave, who had been confirmed at St Ronan’s, did not lose his Christian faith, as some did. He later remarked that the singing of this hymn ‘was the only moment of hope and reality in all our dismal day’.

  The main compound, for several hundred British NCOs and men, was three miles away. Neave quickly realised that this site was his best hope of escape. Several of the men from his own Searchlight Battery captured after the fall of Calais were in the hutted camp, and he communicated with them through working parties that came every day to the fortress. As required by camp discipline, Neave took his plan to the senior British officer, Brigadier the Hon. N.F. Somerset DSO, MC. He proposed to escape from the hut used by a captured British dentist to treat POWs. The ‘surgery’ consisted of a treatment room, waiting room and a lavatory behind it with a corrugated iron roof. Neave, with his co-escaper Flying Officer Norman Forbes, planned to slip away from the dentist’s hut, and then hide for a few days among the teeming throng of ‘other ranks’ inside the camp, before making a break from an outside working party. Neave’s fellow officers in his room mocked his plan, but it was approved by Brigadier Somerset. He was ‘paired’ with Forbes, an RAF Hurricane pilot who had been shot down over the French coast, because he spoke fluent German. It was an excellent match. Forbes, Neave decided, was of original mind, more practical than himself and a man of great determination.

  Theirs was not the first escape bid. Several other officers had tried to get out of Spangenburg, and three Canadian flying officers dressed in fake Luftwaffe uniforms had almost succeeded in stealing a German aeroplane to fly to neutral Sweden. They had swapped places with men on an outside working party to reach the aerodrome and were only detected by their ignorance of German. Tougher controls on movement in and out of the fort were introduced after that but Neave was undeterred. He bought a workman’s coat and pair of trousers from a British officer who had given up thoughts of escape to read for a law degree, and a fellow officer with artistic skills made him a forged civilian pass, identifying him as a carpenter from the town of Bromberg.

  Neave was not very thorough in his escape plans. For instance, he had no travel papers for the hazardous 200-mile journey across Poland to where he believed the Soviet front lines to be, nor had he much money, only a few Reichsmarks and a ‘medieval faith’ that his store of tinned food and chocolate would see him through. Escaping east was a doubly dangerous business. The Soviet authorities looked with deep suspicion on Allied escapers. They sometimes interned them, or worse. As Neave noted: ‘Few British soldiers who reached the Russian lines during this period were heard of again.’3 The pair planned to make contact with the Polish Resistance in Warsaw, with a view to linking up with the Red Army on the Russian armistice line at Brest-Litovsk. Alternatively, and rather fantastically, they hoped to do better than the Canadians by stealing an aeroplane at Graudenz, north of Warsaw, and flying to Sweden. Neave had two copies of a sketch plan of the aerodrome.

  As he lay on his bunk bed, day after day, Neave fantasised about freedom. His sole desire was to be free of the terrible monotony of the fort. Once outside and under the stars he imagined he would care little what happened to him. He dreamed of nights sheltering in the shade of some romantic forest, alone in the world. He would be happy if he could be free if only for a while. Such daydreaming indicated an obsessive desire to get out, one sadly unmatched by the organisational planning required to sustain a successful escape. On 16 April 1941, Neave and Forbes joined the small detachment of officers being marched to the dentist’s surgery. It was a warm spring morning, with signs of new growth in the fields around. The prisoners joked with their guards: ‘Back home by Christmas!’ an unsuspecting German ribbed Neave. ‘Certainly!’ he replied, laughing.

  Everything was ready at the dentist’s. Under the roof of the lavatory hut, Neave’s go-between, an army sergeant, had hidden bundles of wood for them to collect as part of their deception. The dentist treated Neave’s gums with iodine and he divulged their escape plans. The dentist smiled and shook his hand. Back in the waiting room, Neave waited until 11.00 a.m. before asking to go to the lavatory. The attention of the guards outside was distracted by a fast-talking prisoner. Once inside the lavatory hut, Neave took off his greatcoat and hid it where the wood had been secreted and waited for Forbes. His companion swiftly joined him, and at a low whistle from the sergeant they strolled out with their bundles, wearing unmarked battledress uniforms. They walked unchallenged towards the main entrance of the camp, joshing one another as they walked, in the habit of British POWs. The German guard on the gate, who was chatting to a British corporal, showed no interest in them. He was not on the lookout for people breaking into the camp. Neave and Forbes walked casually to one of the huts, where Company Sergeant Major Thornborough of the Green Howards ushered them to their new quarters at the far end. There they discussed plans for their concealment with Neave’s former Searchlight Battery Quartermaster-Sergeant Kinnear. Their disappearance would be discovered as soon as the dentist’s detachment was recounted, and the pair would have to hide in the hut for several days until the German search parties were called off. They lay on their bunks savouring the moment, before Thornborough called them out to watch the entertainment. By now the guards had realised they were two dental patients short, and a hullaballoo ensued. Neave and Forbes, each equipped with a brush and pail as part of their escape props, looked on as heavily armed soldiers set off for the woods with maps and dogs, in pursuit of the men watching them from inside the wire.

  Lying on their bunks, or hiding beneath them during hut searches, the escapers waited and waited,
tortured by fears that a stool pigeon in the camp might give them away. It was clear from their repeated searches of the huts that the Germans believed they were still in the camp, and their helpers in the warrant officers’ hut (‘a homely place’, Neave observed, spick and span as a British barracks) risked severe reprisals if they were unearthed. They were anxious to get someone back to England to report their plight, as rations were inadequate and some POWs had not survived the long Polish winter. ‘Their selflessness touched me deeply,’ Neave recorded. During their three-day stay, they mixed as equals, without reference to rank, united by a common objective to defy the enemy.

  Early in the morning of 19 April, Neave and Forbes fell in with a working party of more than a hundred men and marched out of the camp into the countryside, singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ and ‘The Quartermaster’s Stores’. The next stage of their escape had been worked out by their camp hosts. They were to hide in a hay barn, and make a final break for freedom at night. Meanwhile, they worked under the gaze of armed guards, filling palliasses with straw. At one stage, Neave, stopping work to seek out a hiding place, feared he had been identified by a German officer who ordered him to get on with his job and kept him under close surveillance thereafter. But the day passed without incident, except that the food lorry brought two extra men to take their place on the return to camp. In the late afternoon, a corporal motioned Neave and Forbes to their hiding place in the rafters of the barn. Here they stayed until ten that night, silent and unobserved. Then they concealed their army uniforms in the hay and donned workmen’s clothes, complete with Polish ski caps made from army blankets. They had now become Volksdeutscher, or German nationals, who had been sent to live in eastern Poland by the Nazis.