Public Servant, Secret Agent: The elusive life and violent death of Airey Neave

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 occasion, 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.

One of the barn doors was padlocked but the other was secured only by a wooden bar held in place by twisted wire which the corporal had already loosened. It was the work of moments before they were out in the open farmyard. Through the dark, they could make out the farmhouse, which was used by Germans as a mess. A dog growled and then barked, and they froze as an officer looked out to satisfy himself that there was nothing untoward, before bolting the door. Clambering over a high wooden fence, they could make out the profile of low hills where the Germans had an artillery firing range. They walked quickly across marshy ground, fearful of the noise of tracker dogs and torchlight pursuers, but they had got clean away. Neave rapturously breathed the fresh air of freedom. ‘It was like walking on air,’ he remembered. They stumbled through a landscape pockmarked by shell holes. Their route took them into a wood, along rides between the trees towards the town of Alexandrov, some twenty miles distant. Occasionally, they saw lights and once, near a small settlement, a dog disturbed the night silence. They hurriedly took refuge in the dark banks of trees.

It was hard work. The heavy rucksack of tinned food dug irritatingly into Neave’s shoulder, while beneath his thin workman’s clothes he sweated in thick Red Cross underwear. By 4. 30 in the morning they had covered ten miles, and stopped to fortify themselves with chocolate and an apple. A cold wind sprung up, bringing rain. Swinging his tins of sardines and condensed milk on to aching shoulders, Neave and his companion trudged on. There was no mistaking the amateurish nature of their enterprise: ‘These were the pioneer days of 1941, when escape was not a science but an emotional outburst,’ he admitted later. ‘I thought of an escape as a kind of hiking tour … as for Forbes and myself, we were tramps or hoboes, glad to be at large.’4

Dawn found the pair by the railway line which ran from Podgorz and Sluzewo, checking their compass to keep on a southeasterly direction to Warsaw, 150 miles away. They tramped on, bypassing Alexandrov and keeping to the fields to avoid German patrols. The early morning rain turned heavier, soaking and dispiriting the pair. They took refuge in a Polish farmhouse, where two young women watched wordlessly as they stripped naked and dried their clothes before the open fire. Resuming their march through sodden fields, they came upon evidence of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg on Poland in the autumn of 1939: Polish army helmets perched atop rough white crosses, burned-out farmhouses and barns, a shattered chapel with a crucifix broken in two. At nightfall, lost in a labyrinth of cart tracks, they sought shelter in another Polish farmhouse. A farmworker listened to them ask the way to Wlocawek (German Leslau), smiled and answered in English. The farmer there was ‘Tscherman [German] … very bad’. He suddenly appeared, shouting at the farmworker as if he were a dog, and the escapers fled. Deeper in the countryside, they came on another farm, where they were welcomed by the old man of the house and his two daughters. Neave stood awkwardly in the living room, pointing to his soaked and torn trousers. The old man spoke to one of his daughters and she left the room, returning with a pair of peasant’s corduroy trousers. They had no fly buttons and Neave cut off the buttons from his painter’s trousers for the girl to sew on, which she did, blushing and giggling. No money changed hands. Neave was conscious of the dangers the family ran in helping them. Another Pole came to warn that the German farmer was looking for them, and fear was evident in the way they talked. ‘A great feeling of guilt ran through me as I witnessed their terror,’ Neave recalled. ‘Was it to destroy these simple lives that I had escaped?’5 They could sleep in the barn, said the old man, but they must leave at dawn.

After a fitful night in the hay, the pair resumed their forced march to Wlocawek. Neave shaved by a stream and cooled his blistered feet. He reflected how oddly domestic it seemed, using Elastoplast to dress his sores. By mid-afternoon on their second day of freedom, they reached Wlocawek. Resting by the River Vistula, they were spotted by a German officer, who went away without speaking. Once in the town, they were overwhelmed by the ubiquity of Nazi flags and emblems, even above the doors of workmen’s cottages, until they realised the date: it was 20 April, Hitler’s birthday. In Wlocawek Neave witnessed an act of thoughtless Nazi brutality: a young SS thug assaulted a Jew wearing the Star of David on his back for not saluting his troop, sending the man flying into the gutter and his hat across the road. No one dared pick it up. That evening, they again sought refuge at a farm but realised they were among the enemy. The family was German, the boy of the family sporting a swastika belt bearing the legend Gott Mit Uns. They escaped into the cover of a pine forest and huddled together for warmth, worn out by their ordeal.

By the third morning of their escape, Neave was in a state of physical exhaustion. The regime of a poor diet and lack of proper exercise during almost a year of captivity was taking its toll. He felt that he had ‘lost his feet’, which had deteriorated to ‘raw stumps’ dragging along the ground. Their pace slowed. Hauling themselves painfully along rough tracks, they halted from time to time to sleep and regain their strength. Apart from a lonely woodman, they met no one. They crossed the Vistula by a rail bridge taking the line south from Plock, and in the evening approached the village of Gombin. It was empty and unwelcoming. They stumbled on the road to Warsaw, looking for shelter but finding none. The pair lay down in a ploughed field, endeavouring to sleep but waking regularly to keep their circulation going. Their reserves of chocolate had gone, forcing them to eat a revolting mixture of condensed milk and tinned sardines. ‘I thought the night would never end,’ recollected Neave.

When it did, they set off without breakfasting but with as much vigour as they could muster to reach their goal, Warsaw, by nightfall. Trudging across interminable ploughed farmland, they reached the agricultural town of Itow, thirty miles from the capital. Beyond Itow they would be in the frontier zone of the General-Government of Poland, the remnant of Polish territory left between the Russians and western Poland handed over to German nationals. They had no papers to enter this zone and only a haphazard idea of where the actual frontier lay. Three miles further on from Itow, they came to another run-down village, and asked a woman where the border was. Nervously, she replied ‘It is here’, and fled. Pain and weariness conspired to rob them of vigilance as they walked through the village, towards the frontier post alongside a guardhouse, which was apparently unmanned. They strode through the gate, straight into the arms of two watching German sentries sitting by the roadside, rifles by their sides. They did not have the strength to run away. The soldiers, remembered by Neave as big, stupid and fresh-faced, asked them for their papers. Forbes, the German speaker, admitted that they had none. But everyone had to have papers to cross the General-Government, the soldiers insisted. Surely these men knew that. ‘We were only going to visit our mother, who is sick in Sochaczew,’ said Forbes. ‘This is my brother.’ They were led into the guardhouse where a German official, a whip hanging on the wall behind him, bawled ‘Attention, Polish swine!’

He then instructed the sentries to take Forbes outside while he interrogated the exhausted Neave, who mumbled his prepared explanation that he was a Volksdeutsch from Bromberg. Desperate with fatigue, his brain refused to function. He forgot his limited stock of German and spoke haltingly. The official laughed and brandished the whip in his face. Neave stuck to his story, hoping to give time for Forbes to make a run for it. ‘I could not. I no longer cared that I was caught again or even if this brutal official were to flog me to death,’ he admitted.6 After a few minutes, Neave gave up the unequal struggle and brought from under his shirt the metal disc identifying him as Prisoner of War No. 1198. His enthusiastic but ill-prepared bid for freedom was over. Had his grasp of German been better, or his exhaustion not so complete, he might have bluffed his way through. It was not to be.

Pandemonium broke out. Forbes was brought back into the guardhouse, and another official woke from his sleep and joined in the general clamour. Neave’s co-escaper tried manfully to cope with their accusations. ‘You are not Englishmen, but Polish spies,’ they cried. ‘This is a matter for the Gestapo.’ Neave’s accuser gabbled down the telephone, his dog-tired prisoners barely understanding what was being said. They were then marched back to Itow by a soldier, who, conscious of their condition, did not hustle them. Neave noticed Forbes discreetly tearing up his map of Graudenz aerodrome, which might suggest they were indeed spies, and panicked. Where had he put the other copy? From the police station at Itow they were driven back under guard to Plock, which turned out to be a down-at-heel town swarming with SS. Their lorry dropped them outside a modern block and Neave’s heart missed a beat. By the door, he saw a board carrying the legend ‘GESTAPO’. Their worst fears had been realised.

The two men were taken to a small room where an SS officer and an interrogator in plain clothes asked them more questions and ordered them to empty their pockets. Pitiful remnants of their bid for freedom – bits of chocolate and bread, scraps of paper, a match box disguising a compass – spilled on to the table. The plain-clothes interrogator sorted through these items disdainfully and then seized on a small, folded piece of paper from Neave’s wallet. It was the map of Graudenz aerodrome. ‘So, my friends, you are from the Secret Service!’ he said triumphantly. Unbeknownst to Neave, Graudenz was a bomber station, from which the Luftwaffe would attack the Soviet Union at the outset of Operation Barbarossa only two months later.