Neave never tried to hide the terror he felt during his time in Gestapo custody. Religious sentiment plays almost no part in Neave’s memoirs and diaries, but coming back from the final interrogation he recorded that he prayed. He ‘lay upon my bed, too frightened even to move. With every noise outside the cell there shot through me an intense pang of fear.’33 The Gestapo were ‘evil and dangerous, and without humanity’. He felt ‘almost a longing’ to return to the custody of the German Army officers at Stalag XX-A. But in another respect he was more reticent. What precisely happened in those ten days? In his writings, Neave never said he had been beaten or tortured – though the sight of the whip on the wall in his first encounter with the enemy after capture made it clear to him that this is what he could expect. Nor, later, did he say as much to his children. Nonetheless, they sensed that there was a part of the ordeal that he kept to himself, something that had profoundly marked him psychologically. His youngest son, William, believes the experience was ‘hugely scarring … I don’t know whether he had nightmares because of it latterly, but I suspect he probably did.’34
Many years afterwards, in March 1979, Neave was sharing a taxi in London with Gerry Fitt, a Nationalist MP from Belfast with whom he had become friends during his time as shadow Northern Ireland Secretary. They discussed the Bennett Report into police interrogation methods of terrorist suspects, which had just been published and which concluded that abuses had occurred. According to Peter Taylor, the BBC TV journalist and historian of the Troubles, Neave ‘told Fitt that if and when he became Ulster Secretary he would institute a full inquiry into the allegations. He said he had been tortured by the Gestapo and it had left its mark.’35 He did not get the chance to make good on his promise, for the following day he was dead.
The morning after the interrogation, Neave awoke expecting that it would be his last. Instead, the guard told him he and Forbes were going back to Stalag XXa. He seized his clothes and boots ‘in wild delight, and dressed as if it were the first day of the school holidays’.36 The stay at Thorn was short. At 3 o’clock one morning, he was woken and taken to join a small group of British officers, among them Norman Forbes, gathered on the drawbridge. The others he recognised as veterans of other failed escapes. When he asked where they were going, he was told, ‘To the Bad Boys’ Camp at Colditz.’
4
The Escaping Club
The first thing that struck Neave as he arrived at the castle at the end of May 1941 was the ‘gay, Elizabethan’ high spirits of the prisoners. They ‘sauntered proudly beneath the turrets … British, French, Belgians, Dutch, Poles and Serbs.’1 It was reminiscent of Crace’s house at Eton, ‘a salon filled with wit and self-confidence’. They were the cream of the escapologists, graduates of camps all over Hitler’s empire. They would have a hard time exercising their talents in Colditz. The castle was the ancient seat of Augustus the Strong of Saxony. The thick mediaeval walls, ninety feet high, stood on a plug of rock with sheer escarpments on three sides. It was a physical definition of a fortress, and as difficult to get out of as it was to get into.
None of this deterred the prisoners. Every officer in the castle ‘had but a single thought – to escape’, and there was none of the fatalistic acceptance that had prevailed at Spangenberg and Thorn. Despite the unpromising geology, numerous tunnelling projects were under way, multinational affairs conducted by ‘boards of directors’. By the end of July, there were about fifty British and Commonwealth officers among more than five hundred prisoners. The French made up the largest contingent (approximately 250), followed by the Poles, with 150. The place was abuzz with escape-related subsidiary industries. Every object that had a potential use was exploited: ancient lead piping could be melted down to make fake German uniform buttons and a dentist’s drill was handy for cutting keys.
By the time Neave arrived, a team of twelve British officers and a Pole had been working for months on a tunnel. On 29 May, they made their bid. The tunnel led from beneath the floor of the canteen to beyond the eastern exterior wall. They believed they had an ally in a guard whose allegiance they thought they had secured with money, cigarettes and chocolate. He promised to arrange to be on sentry duty at the point beyond the wall where they planned to break surface. Their faith was misplaced. From the start, he had been reporting their progress to his superiors. Just as they thought freedom beckoned, the escapees were hauled out of the tunnel and off to a spell of solitary confinement – the standard punishment being four weeks.
This failure reinforced Neave’s belief that tunnels were a waste of time. He nonetheless joined a Polish-led team who had sunk a shaft beneath the sickbay and for several months did his share of digging, working exhausting four-hour shifts, twice a week. It was a sort of therapy. ‘Such activities strengthen the spirit of the prisoner of war,’ he wrote. ‘They occupy his mind and body and avoid the tedium which may lead to madness. This renders all escape operations worth while, however remote and harebrained the scheme.’ He admitted there was another reason for signing up: ‘because I still had a sense of being at school, I did not wish to be left out of the second eleven.’
The reference to school was telling. The prisoners’ escape impulse was matched by a ‘common desire to infuriate the Germans’. It was the same spirit that had animated the rags and mobbings of his Eton days. Like unruly schoolboys, the prisoners were determined whenever possible to undermine authority by mockery, some of it brilliantly subversive. Neave once told Norman Tebbit* a story that he did not include in his memoirs. Following a sentence of solitary confinement, he was lying in his cell, one of several along a corridor. One end of the passage was blocked off; at the other was an iron gate with a guard on the far side. ‘[Neave] was woken in the early hours of the morning by the sound of the cell door being unlocked,’ said Tebbit.2 ‘There stood a prisoner from the cell next door – a Canadian who happened to be a locksmith in civilian life.’ The pair chatted for a while. Before calling it a night, they could not resist the opportunity to wind up the guards. ‘They wrote little messages saying, “Please wake me at 6.30. I would like scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast,” and stuck them on their doors.’
Neave was coming to believe that deception was a better way of outwitting the Germans than digging. The gap in the Germans’ defences was mental not physical and in particular, their reverence for authority. He started to think that it might be possible to deceive the guards ‘by a bold attempt to leave by the front gate in German uniform’.3 By now the prisoners knew their captors’ routines intimately. The comings and goings of the garrison were of particular interest. It was noted that anyone entering the castle’s inner courtyard picked up a brass disc at the guardhouse, which they then showed to the sentry on the gate. A workman had been persuaded to hand over one of these discs in return for tobacco, and it was added to the communal store of escape aids. Neave hoped it would be his passport to freedom.
This time he would act alone. Even the escape-happy inmates of Colditz seemed to regard the scheme as fanciful. It involved concocting a fake German uniform and bluffing his way through the controls disguised as an NCO. There were at least four guard posts to negotiate. It was 400 miles to the Swiss border, but as he admitted, ‘My plans hardly extended beyond the last gate of the castle,’4 where he hoped to steal a bike and pedal to the frontier. Bit by bit, he assembled his military and civilian disguises. The latter consisted of an old RAF tunic, boiled up in a cauldron with the lead from indelible pencils and dyed blue, and Air Force trousers. The ensemble was topped off with a home-made Tyrolean-style homburg, made out of blanket material stiffened with glue. The uniform was even more improbable. A month’s chocolate ration bought him a Polish tunic in khaki. There were no pencils of the right hue available to achieve an authentic German Feldgrau. He decided to use paint, which the Germans allowed to be sold in the canteen to create backdrops for the camp theatrical productions. An array of prisoners who had now retrained themselves as artisans provided fake insignia, a cardboard
belt with silver paper buckle, a cap and a wooden bayonet and scabbard. The only authentic-looking item was a pair of Polish army jackboots.
Neave’s disguise had no chance of succeeding in daylight. Even in darkness it was unlikely to fool anyone who gave him a cursory glance. His last escape attempt had been a physical and mental ordeal, and could easily have landed him in a concentration camp or in front of a firing squad. Yet despite this knowledge and the scepticism of Captain Pat Reid, the British contingent’s escape officer, he pressed on. ‘A hysterical impatience overcame me,’ he wrote. ‘My plans absorbed my whole life and influenced every thought and action.’
On a hot August evening in 1941, he was ready. At nine o’clock, he went with the others to the parade ground for the evening roll-call, his fake uniform hidden under a stifling British Army overcoat. With the order to dismiss, someone whisked away the coat and as the prisoners surged back to their quarters, he marched towards the main door of the courtyard. Producing the magic disc, he announced he had a message for Hauptmann (Captain) Paul Priem, the senior camp security officer. The guard let him through. Then it was on to the first archway. He claimed later that even in these nerve-racking moments the sensation of freedom was ‘like a drug which brought an intense pleasure, an exquisite unburdening of the soul’.5 If so, it was short-lived. Even before he reached the arch, there were shouts from the guardhouse behind. He turned back and saw the arc lights shining on his pathetic disguise. The tunic showed up ‘a shade of pea-green’. The cap was the worst: ‘It shone like a brilliant emerald in the glare.’ He felt like ‘a demon king under the spotlights in a Christmas pantomime’, but nonetheless started to run.
A shout of ‘Halt, or I fire!’ stopped him. He raised his hands and was led away at rifle point for a night in the cells, with the threat that he would be shot for dishonouring the German uniform ringing in his ears. Next morning, he was brought before the camp commandant, Oberst (Colonel) Prawitz, who found the absurdity of the situation amusing. As he stood there, ‘a sad joke in a burlesque uniform’, Neave was ordered to salute, German fashion. The commandant was not satisfied and ordered him to do it again. He spent the rest of the morning under guard while passers-by examined him ‘as if I were a newly captured animal’. There was a final humiliation. An elderly photographer was summoned from the town. He set up an antique camera and snapped him from different angles. Neave grew ‘crimson with mortification’ as he posed, ‘perspiring beneath my dyed jacket … I had reduced all escaping to a ridiculous farce, a music-hall turn.’6
The pictures are on display in the escape museum at modern-day Colditz. Far from looking mortified, Neave seems to be quite enjoying the joke, and the fake uniform is less amateurish than his self-flagellating account suggests. The Germans wrung one last laugh from the episode. That evening Priem, who, according to Pat Reid, ‘possessed a rare quality among Germans – a sense of humour’,7 announced to the prisoners that ‘Gefreiter [Lance Corporal] Neave is to be sent to the Russian front.’ It was a good joke and the castle rocked with laughter. Neave’s punishment was the usual – twenty-eight days in solitary. There was a backlog of miscreants. The castle’s punishment cells were full and the town gaol had been pressed into service to accommodate the overflow. Even there, space was at a premium and it was several weeks before there was a vacancy.
In early October, he was marched from the inner courtyard where the prisoners were housed through a succession of guarded archways and onto the bridge across the castle moat. As they crossed the bridge, Neave’s eye was caught by something that gave him fresh hope. A wicket gate in the bridge opened onto a pathway that ran down to the bed of the dry moat. There it crossed to the other bank, before disappearing by the side of a block housing married prison staff. It stood alongside the wall of the large park that adjoined the castle. If he could get onto the path, he would avoid the last guardhouse at the castle entrance. As far as he could see, there was no barbed-wire fencing on the far side of the moat. The only thing standing between an escaper and open country was the wall of the park. The prisoners were taken there for exercise twice a week and Neave knew the wall presented no serious obstacle.
He clung to this thought as he passed the next four weeks smoking cigarettes and the pipe he then affected, savouring Red Cross chocolate – a great luxury in wartime Germany – and reading novels. Like other prisoners, he found that a stretch in the cooler made quite a pleasant change from what he called the ‘twitter’ of the camp. He ‘did not feel caged and helpless’, as he had been when held for interrogation in Poland. In fact, he had ‘almost forgotten the Gestapo. Now I thought only of escape.’8
Given the terror that he admitted feeling at that time, Neave had recovered his sangfroid remarkably quickly. Despite their bad-boy status, at Colditz prisoners ‘were better treated than at Thorn’. The ambience tended to reinforce the idea that escaping was a kind of game, a gentlemanly extension of the field of conflict between honourable enemies. The prison food was grim – barley gruel with strips of hog hide or potatoes and turnip stews for lunch, and bread, spread with a little margarine and jam, for breakfast and supper. But the diet was supplemented by Red Cross parcels, shared by all, which came once or twice every three weeks. They weighed ten and a half pounds each and contained a selection of tinned meat, vegetables, cheese, butter, jam, egg and milk powder, tea or cocoa, sugar, cooking fat and, of course, chocolate.
Prisoners were woken at 7.30 and the first roll-call, or Appell, took place at 8.30, after breakfast. According to Pat Reid, thereafter they were ‘free to carry on any lawful pursuit such as reading, studying, language lessons, music lessons, or exercise’. The Poles were great linguists and were happy to provide classes in a range of languages. In the afternoon, in the courtyard they played volleyball and ‘stoolball’, a variant of the Eton wall game in which sides up to thirty strong fought for possession of a football. All methods were allowed and Reid regarded it as ‘the roughest game I have ever played, putting games like rugby football in the shade’.9 It was in the gaolers’ interests to keep their charges busy, exhausted and reasonably contented. However, the calming effect of a relatively benign regime was constantly under attack by a larger imperative.
The inmates had their bad-boy status to maintain. One First World War escape yarn, written by Alfred ‘Johnny’ Evans, an RFC pilot, and devoured by schoolboys in the inter-war years, was called The Escaping Club. That, effectively, is what Colditz had become. To maintain your credentials, you had to keep on trying. Neave felt the impulse acutely. Among the motives driving him seems to have been the conviction that imprisonment had given him a chance to shine that had eluded him on the battlefield. His failed escape from Thorn was his most notable achievement to date. A successful one would not only bring him distinction, it could also be presented as a genuine contribution to the war effort: by boosting morale, tying up German resources in the inevitable hunt and potentially yielding important information about both prison conditions and enemy attitudes and dispositions.
In their anxiety to keep the inmates out of mischief, the Germans handed Neave his great opportunity. The camp had its own theatre, housed in a large room on the second floor of a block adjoining the guardhouse at the gate to the inner courtyard. There the prisoners put on regular concerts and variety shows. In December 1941, rehearsals began for a pantomime called Ballet Nonsense, dreamed up by Lieutenants Teddy Barton and Jimmy Yule. The production values were high and the enterprise was taken seriously. Given his literary enthusiasms and taste for amateur theatricals demonstrated in the Merton Floats, it was natural that Neave got involved. He contributed a sketch called ‘The Mystery of Wombat College’, a knockabout effort that smacked of Etonian humour. He wrote the part of Dr Calomel, the unpleasant headmaster, for himself.
While preparations for the panto continued, two ardent escapers had made an important discovery. Ferreting around in the rooms adjoining the theatre, Pat Reid and Hank Wardle, the Canadian RAF flier who had been sent to Colditz a
fter a failed escape bid from Spangenberg, found a disused passageway that could be accessed from below the stage. The locked door at one end – easily picked by Wardle – led to an enclosed bridge leading to the attic of the gatehouse. As well as the guardroom on the ground, it housed an officers’ mess on the first floor. The conduit had possibilities and it was Reid who came up with an idea as to how to exploit them. He proposed that two two-man teams, composed of one Briton and one Dutchman, dressed in German uniform, should aim to enter the guardhouse from the least expected direction and bluff their way through the successive castle gates.
As escape officer, it was Reid’s decision who should get the chance. The protocol was that prisoners took their turn. However, despite the fact that he was not at the front of the queue, Reid chose Neave. Reid had been impressed by his ‘dynamic determination’. All the other escape projects had been thwarted and Reid felt a success was vitally important. ‘This young man was the man I wanted,’ he remembered many years later. ‘I chose him and pinned my faith on him and he proved it in the end.’10 It was Reid’s plan, but Neave claimed to have had a hand in the design. He wrote that ‘it seemed to me that if two men in German officers’ uniforms were to descend the stairs from the attic and emerge from the guard-house door through the passage which the door of the actual guard room opened, their appearance would not be questioned by the sentry outside. What more natural than that two officers, after visiting the mess above, should appear from the guard-room door [and start] walking towards the Kommandantur?’ – the administrative offices that enclosed the outer courtyard.11
The Man Who Was Saturday Page 9