The Man Who Was Saturday

The yearning to break free would become a ‘fever’ that mounted the longer he was behind bars.14 But the further he got from France, the harder escape became. While he was still in Lille, a young Frenchwoman who brought flowers and food to the wounded offered to help him and two others – an early example of the courage and patriotism shown by so many of the female resisters he encountered. When senior officers in the hospital heard about the plan, they were ‘lectured severely on the reprisals which might be visited on other wounded’.

It was too late anyway. In late July or early August, he was on the move again, on a ‘grim march through Belgium’, before embarking on a coal barge which chugged up the Scheldt and into the Waal, reaching the Rhine and the German frontier at Emmerich. Along with his belief in providence, Neave had an eye for the karmic re-adjustments that life sometimes delivers. He was pleased to note that his journey as a prisoner took him under the bridge at Nijmegen that he would cross four years later as a victor and see ‘the dead Germans on the sidewalks as we made all speed for Arnhem’.

Oflag – meaning ‘officers’ camp’ – IX-A/H was housed in a schloss overlooking Spangenberg, a small town in the heart of central Germany, 220 miles as the crow flies from the Dutch border, and further still from the French and Swiss frontiers. The castle, a Disneyish concoction with moat and drawbridge, had arched doorways and a clock tower which reminded him of school. The social hierarchy among the prisoners was also built on equally familiar lines, for there were ‘strict codes of behaviour designed for us by our senior officers, and social cliques appeared from the very first day.’

Nearly all prisoners’ memoirs speak of the desolation that descends when the journey is over, the destination is reached and the gates clang shut behind them. Neave’s portrayal of the ‘double tragedy’ of imprisonment was particularly eloquent: ‘First, there is the loss of freedom. Then, since there is no particular crime to expiate, unless it be personal folly, a sense of injustice scars the spirit … The prisoner of war is to himself an object of pity. 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, and to himself and his friends he soon becomes a bore, endlessly relating the story of his last stand.’15

Neave, like many others, seems to have experienced a period of numb acceptance, trying to find a rhythm of life to ease the tight confines of a new universe. He had always felt the urge to write and he tried to alleviate the boredom by starting a novel ‘about the life after death of an eighteenth century peer’ and a ‘superficial’ study of Shakespeare’s sonnets.16 Essays on ‘eccentrics’ and other subjects for the camp publication, produced on a ‘jellygraph’, a gelatin duplicator used to run off school magazines and the like, did not go down well. They were ‘rapidly dismissed as unsuitable’ and Neave ceased his literary efforts. The lesson was that it was ‘dangerous to tamper with the literary views of the average British officer’ and that ‘any attempt at being funny’ in print was ‘doomed to failure and will very likely lead to ostracism’.17

In these first months in Spangenberg, the rather adolescent bolshiness that surfaced in his Oxford days was again to the fore. The mood did not last long. By December he started thinking seriously about escape. Since the camp had opened in October 1939 there had been several attempts by inmates. Flight Lieutenant Howard ‘Hank’ Wardle, a Canadian who joined the RAF shortly before the war, was shot down in his Fairey Battle bomber in April 1940 and was the only member of the three-man crew to survive. In August, just before Neave arrived, he was being taken with other prisoners to a gym outside the castle walls when he scaled a high barricade and slipped away.18 He was captured after twenty-four hours and sent to Colditz, already established as a prison for troublemakers.

Flying Officers Keith Milne and Donald Middleton, two more Canadians serving with the RAF, managed to get through the gates disguised as painters, complete with buckets of whitewash and a ladder. They too were soon recaptured and ended up in Colditz. If these exploits sounded light-hearted, there was a price to pay. According to Pat Reid, who later escaped from Colditz with Wardle, all three ‘suffered badly at the hands of their captors, being severely kicked and battered with rifle-butts’.19

Such efforts were initially seen by the senior British officers in the camp as a threat to good order, inviting reprisals on the rest of the prisoners. Neave wrote that the pioneer escapers were ‘often unpopular … They were considered a disturbing influence in the orderly life of the camp where the pre-war British military and class system was applied from the day of arrival.’20 He blamed the discouraging attitude on low morale, caused by Britain’s poor performance in the war and the debilitating effect of the meagre rations. In the autumn of 1940, Red Cross parcels started to arrive. With that, ‘health and spirits improved, and with it the attitude of senior officers, who no longer claimed that escape was hopeless.’

At some point, Neave was moved with others to a new camp in the woods beneath the castle. The rural setting was a relief after the cold walls of the schloss, and the laughter of children carried to the prisoners from a path that ran by the boundary. The winter of 1940 passed ‘in discomfort, but without great suffering, unless it be of the soul’. The main complaint was food, or the lack of it. The man who in his Eton diary had noted almost every meal he ate was reduced to a diet of bread, soup and root vegetables, cheered only by the occasional scrap of meat or treat from a food parcel. At Christmas, everyone was given a tin of steak-and-kidney pudding. His stomach had shrunk and he could not finish it.21

Early in 1941, there was another move which took him yet further from a friendly frontier. In February, the camp was temporarily closed and all the inmates moved by train to Stalag XX-A, a large prison complex based on a chain of fortresses surrounding the Polish city of Thorn, modern-day Torun, on the banks of the Vistula. Neave says the evacuation was a reprisal for the alleged ill-treatment of German POWs in Canada. The atmosphere and the attitude of the guards had certainly darkened. The new arrivals were met at the station by tanks, searchlights and Field Police with Alsatian dogs. Neave and his fellow officers were housed in semi-darkness in ‘damp, cold, vault-like rooms’, which had once served as ammunition bunkers in one of the forts, built in the nineteenth century to defend Prussia’s eastern borders. The prisoners were the flotsam of a string of British defeats. There were hundreds of survivors of the Norway debacle of May 1940 and many who had been captured at Dunkirk and St-Valery-en-Caux, where the 51st (Highland) Division were forced to surrender. In this ambience of failure Neave felt his resolve harden. ‘From this terrible futility,’ he wrote, ‘I determined to free myself.’22

Prisoners had two basic ways of dealing with incarceration. They could accept their fate and choose a settled existence, waiting for the end of the war and using the unmeasurable days of captivity killing time as best they could or engaging in self-improvement projects for a future that might never arrive. Or they could devote themselves to breaking free. Fatalists vastly outnumbered would-be escapers. An RAF report on Stalag Luft VI, the camp for NCO airmen at Heydekrug in East Prussia, estimated the proportion of escape-minded prisoners at only 5 per cent.23 One of the most determined ‘escapologists’ of the war, the American RAF fighter pilot William Ash, came to the same conclusion. ‘There cannot have been a single POW … who did not think about escaping,’ he wrote.24 In an average camp, about a third would be prepared to lend a helping hand to others’ attempts, by acting as lookouts, for example, forging fake documents or improvising digging implements. However, ‘maybe only 5 per cent were committed to getting outside the wire at all costs.’ And for most of those, one attempt was usually enough, leaving a handful for whom escaping was ‘a way of life’. Prisoners’ stories devote much time to analysing the elements that pushed a man into one group and not the other. They remain hard to define. There was little obvious connection with background, class, political outlook, nationality or even character. Ardent escapers could be introverts or extraverts, intellectuals or hearties.

In the end it came down to an impulse – something that had to be done. Pat Reid, who first wrote the story of Colditz, portrayed it as a supremely intoxicating pursuit on a par with winning the Grand National at Aintree. ‘I can think of no sport that is the peer of escape,’ he wrote, ‘where freedom, life, and loved ones are the price of victory, and death the possible though by no means inevitable price of failure.’25 It was echoed by Ash, who described the urge as something almost beyond his control. ‘Escaping is quite addictive,’ he wrote, ‘and, like all addictive drugs, extremely dangerous.’26

Others cited more elevated motives. Aidan Crawley was a pre-war journalist and intelligence officer who joined the RAF. He was shot down and taken prisoner in North Africa in 1941. He later wrote the official history of escape attempts by airmen, in which he judged that ‘no one could blame those who decided escape was not worthwhile.’27 However, Crawley believed ‘the arguments in favour of trying … were overwhelming.’ It was a self-imposed duty, ‘because the return of a prisoner had considerable military value’. At the very least, he might bring back valuable intelligence about enemy dispositions or the details of potentially useful underground networks. If he was an airman, he could go back into action and his very expensive training would not have gone to waste. This latter argument was often wielded by Neave when justifying the existence of MI9 in its frequent turf wars with other intelligence organisations.

A few weeks after arriving at Thorn, Neave hatched his first serious, thought-out and well-resourced escape plan. Stalag XXa was like a small penitentiary town, with outposts and suburbs and a labour force made up of NCO and ‘other ranks’ prisoners, who the Germans put to work building roads and infrastructure and clearing land for the ever-expanding complex. The practice was within the terms of the Geneva Conventions, though officers were exempted. However, what might at first have seemed to the officers a privilege came by many to be regarded as a curse. Work, however menial, was a distraction from the long empty hours of brooding.

The main compound for non-commissioned prisoners was about four miles from Neave’s cell in the fort. Inside it, there was a wooden hut where a British dentist had his surgery. The Germans allowed British officers to visit every Thursday. It was Neave’s good luck to suffer from inflamed gums, a result of poor diet and his run-down condition, which required regular treatment. The dentist’s hut would be the springboard for his dive for freedom. On his trips back and forth he worked up a plan. Even though Germany and the Soviet Union were still at that time uneasy allies, he reckoned that if he managed to make it to the frontier at Brest-Litovsk, the Russians would treat him well and ‘I should swiftly be ushered into the presence of the British ambassador [in Moscow], Sir Stafford Cripps.’28 It was a fantastic proposition. It meant a journey, via Warsaw, of 300 miles over heavily occupied territory, with a very uncertain reception at the end of it.

As it turned out, breaking out of Thorn was the relatively easy part. But to succeed he still needed help. There was plenty on hand among the soldiers in the work camp. Their ingenuity and selflessness left a deep impression. Every day a party of about a dozen made the four-mile journey from the compound to the fort to carry out maintenance work. Among them were two men who had belonged to Neave’s battery at Calais. Through the messages that they carried back and forth each day, he was able to establish a team of helpers in the work camp to put the operation into action. He planned a phased departure from Stalag XXa. The idea was that he would slip away during a trip to the dentist and get into the compound. There, protected by the inmates, he would lie low until the hue and cry following the discovery that he was missing had died down. Then he would walk out with one of the work parties and hide at the end of the shift. When the coast was clear, he would strike out eastwards, disguised as a workman – Polish or German, depending on who challenged him.

The scheme was bold and ambitious. It needed considerable organisation, precise timing and significant resources in the form of clothing, food, money and documentation. At least a dozen accomplices were needed for it to work. Protocol required that the Senior British Officer, Brigadier N. F. Somerset, was kept informed as the plan matured. Neave had decided that he did not want to travel alone. He was unable to persuade any of his room-mates, who ‘regarded my plans with friendly derision and few could be found who would even discuss them seriously.’ He asked Somerset if he could suggest a companion – one who, like him, spoke some German. Flying Officer Norman Forbes, a Hurricane pilot with 605 Squadron who had been shot down just south of Calais on 27 May 1940 while Neave was spending his first day in captivity, was an excellent candidate. He was a ‘tall, slender man with fair hair’, quick, determined and shrewd. He had also been brought up a Christian Scientist and ‘had faith in the success of our plan’.

By the second week in April everything was in place. Using barter and persuasion, he had assembled an impressive escape kit. His workman’s coat and painter’s trousers he obtained from a British officer who had ‘decided to abandon escaping to read for a degree in Law’. He was one of many who took advantage of the system, operated under the Red Cross, which offered correspondence courses resulting in valid professional qualifications. Neave procured some reichsmarks by selling Player’s cigarettes (tobacco was usually available to prisoners and a universal currency) to a Polish glazier. Rations in the shape of tinned sardines and condensed milk and chocolate came from the food parcels. All were smuggled out of the fort and down to the work camp.

Why had Neave chosen discomfort and danger over acceptance and making the most of a bad situation? Lying on his bunk bed at night as the hours to the escape bid ticked away, he struggled to explain it to himself. ‘I desired only to be free from the terrible monotony of the fort and once outside under the stars I cared little what happened to me,’ he wrote. ‘I dreamed of nights sheltering in the shade of some romantic forest alone in the world. I felt that once outside the camp I should be happy if I were only free for a while.’

On the morning of 16 April 1941, he and Forbes set off under guard for the dentist’s hut, just outside the British prisoners’ compound, four miles from the fort. Under their overcoats, badges had been removed from their battledress tunics so they could pass as ‘other ranks’. Neave left a detailed description of the events of the morning, embellished with literary touches.29 Looking through the waiting room for his turn in the chair, he could ‘see small groups of British prisoners among the pine trees pushing carts of wood, and from the distance came the strains of “Roll Out the Barrel” as a working party set off into the forest … A light breeze blew among the pines.’ The account was written twelve years after the event and it might be asked how he could remember so much. Some moments in our lives embed themselves in our memories, leaving the indelible trace of a smell, a voice, a colour. For Neave, this was surely one of them. His first escape was a landmark of his existence, the point when he at last seized control of his own destiny, in the process scoring a small but immensely pleasing victory over the enemy.

Everything went swimmingly. After his session in the chair, he made way for Forbes. In the waiting room he told the guard he wanted to use the ‘Abort’ and was allowed to go unescorted to the latrine next door. Inside, he stowed his overcoat and retrieved some lengths of wood hidden in the ceiling by his helpers to be used as props in the next phase of the escape. He was soon joined by Forbes and, at a signal from a sergeant who was keeping watch outside, they stepped out, carrying the timber, ostensibly just two ordinary soldiers engaged in some errand. It was a short walk to the main gate of the compound, where the sentry’s attention was distracted by a corporal detailed to engage him in chat, and they passed through, mingling with the other POWs. At the door of a long hut housing warrant officers, Company Sergeant Major Thornborough of the Green Howards, immaculately turned out in spruce uniform and shining boots, grinned and shook their hands. They were left to rest for a bit until Thornborough returned, telling them there was a sight waiting that was not to be missed.

Picking up brushes and buckets so as to look like orderlies off on a fatigue, they followed him across the parade ground. Their escape had been discovered and the guards were angry and indignant. ‘Around us a crowd of British soldiers were laughing and shouting sallies at the Germans,’ he wrote. ‘Furious Germans stamped around … Down the steps of the Kommandantur [administrative headquarters] came agitated German officers gesticulating at the crestfallen sentries.’ They were joined by Field Police with dogs, who set off on the hunt in the opposite direction to where their quarry had gone to earth. The satisfaction was enormous. For the first time since the start of the war, Neave had put one over on the Germans. They spent the next three days hidden in the warrant officers’ hut. There was one scare when they had to hide under their cots while the Germans conducted a search. Neave wondered why they now suspected they might still be in the camp. Thornborough had warned him there were ‘one or two stool pigeons in the camp’. It was an early lesson that in the escape business it was wise to say the minimum and trust nobody, a policy that Neave’s critics would later say he followed closely in his political life.

At six o’clock on the morning of 19 April, after a cup of ersatz coffee, he and Forbes left the camp in the middle of a party of 150 men. They spent the day at a farm, where they were put to work in a barn stuffing mattress covers with straw. During the afternoon, on a signal that the coast was clear, they climbed into the loft and burrowed into the hay. Earlier, their helpers had smuggled in two extra men on the ration lorry. When the guards counted the work party out they matched the number who had marched in. It was the final touch in a superb performance by the NCOs and men, and Neave never forgot these ‘staunch and kindly people’. They ‘ran greater risks of punishment than we did, but not one spoke of the consequences … During my stay there had been no feeling of class or rank among us, only a mutual desire to defy the Germans.’

When night fell, they climbed down from the hayloft and went to the back door of the barn, where one of the helpers had loosened the wire holding it shut. They stepped out into the starlit night and, for the first time in two years, breathed the air as free men. For the next four days, dressed in their rough clothes, they trudged eastwards. Since devising his original plan, he and Forbes had hatched an alternative. There was a German aerodrome at Graudenz, north of Warsaw. The Poles in the camp had provided enough information about it to sketch a map. Forbes was a pilot. Perhaps they could steal an aeroplane and fly to neutral Sweden. It had been tried before by two RAF inmates of Thorn, who had got as far as climbing into an aircraft disguised as Luftwaffe aircrew before being rumbled because they could not understand the instructions from the control tower.30

The trek started well, matching the fantasies he had entertained while day-dreaming on his bunk. It was ‘like walking on air’. The language is telling, a further sign of the quasi-mystical importance Neave gave to the act of escaping. Relating the story of this first attempt, he stated that ‘no one who has not known the pain of imprisonment understands the meaning of Liberty.’31 The capital letter is his. For Neave this was more than a simple act of duty or defiance. It had an almost religious significance. ‘The real escaper,’ he wrote, ‘is more than a man equipped with compass, maps, papers, disguise and a plan. He has an inner confidence, a serenity of spirit which make him a Pilgrim.’

After a few hours, the intoxication of freedom began to wear off. His sack of rations – tins of sardines and condensed milk and Red Cross parcel chocolate – cut into his shoulder, he was soaked in sweat and his feet swelled up painfully inside his army boots. In the morning it rained for hours. The countryside, carved through by the wide, muddy Vistula and dotted with small farms and orchards, was filled with ominous landmarks. They were following the river to Warsaw, taking the same route that the Germans had followed twenty months before, and the scars of the fighting were fresh. There were graveyards where Polish army helmets sat on white crosses, charred buildings and a smashed-up chapel with half a crucifix hanging over the doorway. Almost every farmhouse, no matter how small and mean, had new owners. The Poles had been turned out of their homes and German settlers put in. The pair were anxious to avoid all human encounters, but it was impossible not to feel the presence of the new masters.

Late that first morning, they were passed by a ‘a four-wheeled open carriage … driven by a German farmer in a flat cap, smoking a short cigar.’ He turned back to examine them and ‘his arrogant, fleshy face … bore an expression of savage contempt … and he fingered the stock of his long whip.’ Neave had been exposed to Germans frequently in his short life, as a schoolboy visitor, as a patient in the care of the military and as a captive. Until now, these experiences had suggested that, despite the repellent philosophy of the new order, the population had its fair share of decent human beings. On this journey, the Germans seemed wholly bad.

A little later, skirting a farm, they met a Polish man who recognised that they were fugitives. He wished them good luck in English but warned them to move on quickly as the German farmer was ‘very bad’. As they left they spotted him, ‘thick-set with an evil-tempered red face like the man who had driven past us. He too carried a long black whip and smoked a short cigar. We hurried away from him down a slippery path into the valley and heard him shouting to the Pole as if to a dog.’

The cruelty of the German occupation made an ineradicable impression on Neave and these memories bubbled to the surface when, four years later at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, he served the indictment on the Gauleiter overlord of conquered Poland, Hans Frank. At the same time, he was profoundly moved by the stoicism of the Poles and the sacrificial generosity they were prepared to offer to those they identified as friends. Again, it was something he never forgot. Long afterwards, in the face of Foreign Office opposition, he campaigned doggedly for a memorial to the thousands of Poles murdered by their Soviet oppressors in 1940.

At dusk on their second day of freedom, they were too exhausted to face another night in the open. They approached a whitewashed house and knocked. The door was opened by a young Polish woman, who summoned her father, a farmer who had somehow avoided eviction. He made them welcome and gave Neave a pair of corduroy trousers to replace the thin, torn ones he arrived in. Their only drawback was that they lacked fly buttons. There was shy giggling as the girls of the house removed the buttons from the old trousers and sewed them onto the new pair.

But after this interlude the smiling stopped. Neave sensed that ‘the room was heavy with their fear … I knew that the girls were watching for a glimpse of field-grey … at the window.’ There was a crash of heavy boots and a loud knock and he and Forbes scuttled to the kitchen. The visitor was a young Polish man who held an urgent conversation with the farmer. Even though Neave knew not a word of the language, there was no mistaking the tone of disquiet. He wrote later that ‘a great feeling of guilt ran through me as I witnessed their terror. Was it to destroy these simple lives that I escaped? Was it not better to endure the bitter frustrations of the Fort … all the degradation of being a prisoner? What did it matter whether I escaped or not if others were to die?’