Public Servant, Secret Agent

by Paul Routledge

  When the American army broke through to Brittany at the beginning of August 1944, Neave was determined to be right behind them. He loaded his jeep and took the American sections of IS9 to Rennes, expecting to find a group of airmen. The drive through villages offered a dreadful prospect of war: dead German soldiers, smashed vehicles and the bodies of horses littered the road, while ambush by retreating Wehrmacht units was a constant danger. They were often cut off from the American forces but Neave’s blood was up. ‘The exhilaration was unforgettable,’ he recorded. ‘The restraints of London and the beachhead were past and the smell of pursuit was in the air.’2 To his chagrin, the evaders at Rennes had already gone. Leaving one section to look after any stragglers, he wheeled about to follow Patton’s Third Army to Paris. On 10 August, Neave reached Le Mans, less than fifty miles from the camp at the Forêt de Fréteval. He and his men received a rapturous welcome from local people, and Neave based himself in the Hôtel Moderne, which had only just been evacuated by the Germans and was now full of Free French troops and war correspondents toasting the liberation of the city in white plonk. Neave was unable to join in the jollity, fearing that the American thrust towards the Falaise Gap that would destroy the German army west of the Seine would also deprive him of back-up transport and troops to free his camp of evaders. He drove north of Le Mans to the XV Corps headquarters, and implored the American staff officer to spare him lorries and light tanks to carry out his mission, pointing out that many of the evaders were Americans. He argued that they were at great risk from the retreating Germans, who were simply ignoring the rules of war in their headlong, murderous flight. But the Americans were adamant that they could spare nothing in the build-up to the push for the Seine, and Neave returned empty-handed to his hotel. There, to his infinite relief, he found a squadron of the SAS drawn up in the courtyard, a force of thirty officers and men under the leadership of Captain Anthony Greville-Bell. He immediately agreed to undertake the operation and got permission from his seniors at SAS headquarters, incidentally restoring Neave’s radio contact with Darling in Room 900, who for several days had been frantically scouring France for ‘Saturday’. On 11 August, the Resistance supplied Neave’s little force with requisitioned charcoal-burning buses, but they still could not find drivers. Reports from inside the Fréteval camp suggested that the men were very restive and might try to break out on their own, putting themselves and any French who might help them at great risk from SS reprisals. Neave sent orders that they were to stay put and wait.

  At this point, a captain in IS9 (WEA), Peter Baker, volunteered to go to the camp ahead of the main group. This young man, later, like Neave, to become a Conservative MP (for South Norfolk), was to figure substantially, and fatally, in the operations of IS9 in the coming months. Baker claimed in his autobiography, an exculpatory exercise written after the crash of his business empire, to be ‘an old and esteemed friend’ of Neave.3 The feeling was not entirely reciprocated. Neave knew that Baker had visions of changing out of uniform into civilian clothes and making his way to Paris to write an article on his derring-do for the American press. He was doubtful about Baker, but also loath to curb ‘such dash and enthusiasm’, and after some hours’ delay finally allowed Baker and five SAS men under one of their own officers to go on a reconnaissance mission to the Forêt de Fréteval camp. By Baker’s account, there were only four of them: himself, Gunner Mackenzie and two armed Frenchmen. Most of the Germans had fled, and in one village after another they were welcomed as liberators. However, as they neared their objective, Baker’s party came under machine-gun fire, and had to take refuge with the Resistance. Technically, at least, they were still in Occupied France.

  Back in Le Mans, Neave chafed at the lack of transport, until he received a mysterious summons to one of the city’s main squares, where, drawn up under civilian armed guard, was a motley assortment of sixteen buses and lorries, decked out with flowers and French flags. The operation by now seemed comic but he decided to brook no further delay. They set out after breakfast on 14 August 1944, a gaudy convoy headed by an SAS patrol. Not much more than an hour later, they reached the rendezvous point where Neave’s agents had been told to collect the men. They were jubilant at being rescued. Operation Sherwood had come to an end. Luck was still on his side. That night, German patrols reappeared in the forest, alerted by Neave’s charabanc army. By that time, however, the evaders – Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders, Polish and British – were enjoying a hot meal in Le Mans. This was the military exploit of which Neave was most proud, not comparable to the activities of the Long Range Desert Group in North Africa or the SAS in Europe ‘but none the less impressive’, not least because of the way his ‘private army’ had been treated. His initiative had brought together well over a hundred evading servicemen, many of them valuable aircrews, in a hidden camp supplied from the air under the noses of the retreating Germans. The exploit is commemorated by a plain stone memorial at the edge of the forest, unveiled amid full military honours by a French government minister for war veterans in 1967.

  Bolstered by success, but still anxious about the fate of up to ten evaders unaccounted for, Neave sent Baker back to the Forêt de Fréteval later in the day to search for the missing servicemen, only to discover that they had joined a tank unit of the advancing American army. The French capital was now everyone’s goal. Neave wanted to take his ‘private army’ twenty miles beyond Châteaudun to Chartres. His ostensible purpose was to recover more airmen known to be in hiding in the region, but he was also anxious about rumours of revolution and massacre reaching him from Paris. He feared for the safety of French people recruited to work for the Room 900 ratlines. The Americans disapproved of his intention to race ahead of the main force, deprecating him as a ‘bandit’, a term his appearance did nothing to disprove for Neave had lost his helmet and now wore corduroy trousers. He obediently followed the conquering US Third Army to Chartres, where minor fighting was still taking place. Though he does not mention it anywhere in his own writings, Neave was involved in a remarkable incident in the thirteenth-century Gothic cathedral at Chartres, a building generally recognised as one of the crowning achievements of Western civilisation. According to a record kept at the parish church of St Mary’s, Longworth, Oxfordshire, where he is buried, Neave and de Blommaert, his Room 900 agent, arrived in the place in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral, which was crowded with American jeeps and troops. When they returned in the evening, it was deserted but for three US tanks. Gunfire echoed round the side streets. De Blommaert recalled: ‘A frantic young Texan sergeant came up to Airey and explained that German troops were said to be hiding in the spire, and his captain had returned with orders to blow up Chartres cathedral. Airey calmly went up to the captain and asked if he could really justify opening fire on such a monument. He said: “My orders are to demolish rather than risk a single American life.” ’

  Neave replied: ‘I am in charge of Special Services in this sector. This is a special case. Wait five minutes before opening fire, no more. I will go in and look myself, and wave my handkerchief if all is clear.’ Neave entered the cathedral unarmed, and de Blommaert followed with his rifle at the ready. Neave told him: ‘Keep your distance, so we don’t offer a double target up this damned spiral staircase, and if you must shoot, try not to hit me!’ There were no Germans in the spire. He waved his handkerchief to the troops below as arranged and the cathedral was saved. This story has almost certainly gained something in the telling, but essentially it rings true, and it is unlikely that de Blommaert would have lent his corroboration to a fantasy. Admirers of French Gothic architecture owe more than a passing debt to Neave.

  Neave’s irregulars (he admitted they could best be portrayed as ‘paramilitary’, and evinced every sign of satisfaction at the description) continued on the road to Paris, picking up stray evading airmen en route, before landing in Rambouillet, where Peter Baker had set up a forward post. There were few soldiers in the town but many war correspondents, among them the tow
ering figure of Ernest Hemingway, waiting to cover the liberation of Paris. The American halted their advance to allow the French under General Leclerc to free their capital. At this point, Baker’s memoirs insist that ‘Airey had been ordered back to England’,4 but Neave logs no such order. He records spending time with French officers working out how best to extricate his helpers in the Comet and Shelburne organisation, whose arrest and deportation he still feared, though there was also an element of wanting to be in the front ranks of the liberators. ‘The desire to be first in the city was mingled with the more responsible objective of getting them out of danger,’ he admitted.5 He and Langley, who had joined him at Rambouillet, drew up a list of names and addresses for the rescue operation. Langley recorded that his fellow officer was in command of ‘what was indubitably a private army’.

  As they waited in the hot sunshine for permission to leave the grounds of the great chateau at Rambouillet, Langley heard dark rumours that Paris was burning, that Leclerc was being pushed back and the Nazis were murdering civilians. However, on Liberation Day, 25 August, Neave was on his way, driving with one of his men through Versailles and entering the city by the Porte d’Orléans before tearing down the Champs-Elysées, round the Arc de Triomphe under fire from French snipers who mistook them for Germans, to the Hôtel Windsor where he set up a temporary headquarters for IS9. Baker suggests that he preceded Leclerc by two days, though Neave, again, makes no such claim. To have admitted such an action would have been to acknowledge a breach of orders, of course. His first act was to rescue two Germans from an angry crowd. Over succeeding hours, he found that most of his helpers were safe and well. The following day saw, as he put it, ‘the wildest scenes of shooting, jubilation and drinking’. Langley reported that Neave and his private army were fully engaged in collecting snipers, contacting helpers, routing out suspected enemy snipers and German collaborators. Baker also observed that Neave was in his element: ‘The people of Paris had greatly exaggerated his importance, and crowds of them assembled at our hotel each morning to bring information or complaints to “The Chief of the British Secret Service”.’6 To Baker’s reply that they had come to the wrong HQ, they would exclaim: ‘Oh, but we heard General Neave was here.’ The hotel began to resemble a bizarre scene from a Graham Greene novel, with men offering to assassinate Hitler or Pétain. Obscure French politicians and self-styled Russian agents demanded appointments with the mysterious Mr Neave. They refused to believe the ostensible reason for Neave’s presence, dismissing it as a cover story. All this Neave found entertaining, but it was difficult to compose his thoughts in such bedlam. Apart from volunteers offering to serve in IS9, some came demanding British decorations for their part in the war. Others simply asked for food. ‘Airey and I wondered if we would ever get all our problems sorted out and cursed the letters “IS” in the unit’s name since the French instantly assumed they stood for Intelligence Service.’7 Officially, it was Intelligence School, but the difference was basically semantic, and it reported to MI6.

  From London Crockatt sent Donald Darling over to Paris to open an Awards Bureau for the hundreds of French nationals and others who had helped escapers, but Neave was keen to follow the Allied advance into Belgium, where, he assumed, there would be substantial numbers of Allied airmen in the Marathon camp he had ordered to be set up in the Ardennes. After only a few days he took off, without his SAS back-up who had been ordered to return to their unit. His ‘paramilitaries’, consisting of a small group from IS9 (WEA), were now officially known as Rescue Teams, though, as he later pointed out, they were ill-equipped to conduct rescue operations. In the event, due to internal rivalries in the escape and evasion lines, there was to be no repeat of the Châteaudun initiative. Room 900’s Belgian agents working the Comet line viewed the Marathon programme with suspicion, and the supposed camp at Bastogne did not exist. It had never been set up. Neave followed hard on the advance towards Brussels, searching for his ‘missing airmen’ but found nothing. They were hidden in safe houses around the Belgian capital.

  Neave accompanied the liberating tanks of the Guards Armoured Division into Brussels on 3 September, amid further scenes of wild elation. With difficulty he reached the Hôtel Métropole where MI9’s agents had been asked to gather. They sat in the lounge, drinking champagne ‘on Uncle Sam’ at the behest of an ‘American colonel’ who looked suspiciously like a war correspondent with a sense of humour. A large bill of nearly £200 was settled by SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) only under protest, but on the following day more than a hundred flyers and as many Belgian helpers reported to Neave. ‘I found it moving to see them celebrate and later take leave of those who had risked so much for them.’8

  Neave did not bask in the reflected glory for long. Similarly urgent duty called in Holland, where British undercover operations had so fatally been undermined by Abwehr infiltration. Despite the Germans’ best endeavours, Room 900 had managed to parachute in Dignus ‘Dick’ Kragt (codename Frans Hals) who established contact with the Comet line and sent back more than a hundred airmen before Operation Market Garden, the airborne attack on Arnhem, in September 1944. Pushing north to link up with his Dutch agents, Neave reached Nijmegen, on the River Waal, in the first week of October. The bridge over the Waal, visible from his headquarters in the outskirts of the city, was under constant German shelling. He took his life in his hands every time he crossed the bridge, while recollecting the hot summer’s day in July 1940 when he had passed under it in a coal barge on his way to prison camp. Close by the bridge, Neave made a vital discovery in the city’s electricity generating station. It was still in contact with sister stations in enemy territory, through a direct telephone link across the Waal and the Rhine further north. The Dutch Resistance was already using the line to talk to its people and Neave saw a golden opportunity to get in touch with evading airmen and the remnants of the force that had taken part in Operation Market Garden. Initially, Neave’s superiors blanched at the idea of telephoning across enemy lines, but the Dutch power engineers assured them that the circuit was safe from prying Nazi ears, and IS9 got approval from 21 Army Group to take full advantage of this opportunity. In Nijmegen, Neave was joined by Major Hugh Fraser of the SAS who became second in command of IS9. They became firm friends, nightly making a hazardous journey to the power station to draw up a plan with the Dutch Resistance to bring out the Arnhem survivors. The operation, codenamed Pegasus, relied on the Allied evaders being brought by underground guides to the Rhine near Wageningen before winter rain made crossing the river by small boat too dangerous. Neave’s operations did not usually prompt critical comment from the army High Command, but on this occasion clearance was accompanied by a message to Langley which read: ‘The Field Marshal hopes this will not be an Imperial Balls Up as if it is it will be the last IS9 will make under its present Commanding Officer.’9

  On 6 October, Neave wrote to Langley at IS9’s Brussels headquarters asking permission to send an officer through enemy lines on a reconnaissance mission to the Dutch underground. In Saturday at MI9 he declined to identify this agent, codenamed Harrier. He was in fact the turbulent Captain Baker, evidence of whose devil-may-care bravery had already been seen in the Forêt de Fréteval. Langley consented to the plan, as long as Baker promised to remain in British army uniform and never to wear civilian clothes or leave the safe house in which they would be hidden. It was as well for Neave that he retained this correspondence with Langley because Harrier disobeyed orders, with fatal results. Baker was excitable and romantic, and ‘fancied himself as a secret agent, for which he had no training’, Neave wrote later. With a small patrol from the Highland Light Infantry, Neave and Fraser escorted Baker and his companion, a young American soldier, across no-man’s-land to the River Waal on the night of 11 October, after a long march across farmland and dykes. The canoe that took Baker and the US private into enemy territory also brought out a Dutch representative, Herman van Roijen (later Netherlands ambassador in London) with vital
intelligence for his government in exile. Neave escorted the VIP to Nijmegen, pointing out in his record of events that he and Fraser were now in charge of secret intelligence.

  He waited anxiously for Baker’s return. Operation Pegasus was now ready to go. Canadian army engineers, protected by troops from the 101st American Airborne Division, would row Market Garden survivors back in assault craft. Neave expected at least a hundred men to make their escape, but on 18 October he received distressing news. Baker and the American private accompanying him had been spotted in civilian clothes. First, and incorrect, reports said the Germans had arrested and shot them. Why were they in civilian clothes, despite orders to the contrary? In his account, Baker insisted that his Dutch hosts in the town of Tiel made him wear ‘civvies’. ‘There was no argument I could offer,’ he wrote. ‘I could only place myself in their hands.’10 The Dutch Resistance took the pair to a farm where they were well treated and even taken for walks under the noses of the Germans. Here, Baker stayed for twenty-four hours, guests of the Ebbens family, before a treacherous tip-off brought the Wehrmacht to the farm. They were not harmed but both were taken prisoner; their unfortunate hosts were shot by the Gestapo for harbouring the Allied servicemen. Baker was later found in a POW camp. Of the American soldier nothing was ever seen again. Neave was deeply troubled by this blow, which harmed relations with the Dutch Resistance and prompted a post-war enquiry. ‘The ultimate responsibility must always remain with those in command, but I had reason to feel that the tragedy was unnecessary,’ he recorded. Langley and he were cleared of responsibility.