It was 9 January 1942, and only eighty-four hours had passed since they walked out of Colditz.
* Norman Tebbit (1931–), educated Edmonton Grammar School; Conservative MP for Chingford, 1970–92 (Epping 1970–74); successively Secretary of State for Employment, 1981–83, Trade and Industry, 1983–85, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, 1985–87; Chairman of the Conservative Party, 1985–87; created Lord Tebbit of Chingford, 1992.
5
Home Run
Half an hour later they arrived in the streets of a village. To Luteyn it ‘looked like a painting … lying asleep in the snow.’1 They were still not certain that they were actually in Switzerland. As the church bell tolled a quarter past five, they heard the tread of heavy boots on the cobbles and darted into a doorway. A uniformed man was walking towards them. His long green overcoat and pointed hat suggested he was a Swiss frontier guard. There was nothing to do but chance it. They stepped out of the shadows and called out that they were British escaped prisoners. The guard lowered his rifle and smiled. The relief was overwhelming and ‘with shouts of joy we flung ourselves upon him, shaking him by the hand and patting his back.’ Then the three of them ‘clasped each other’s hands and danced in the snow, pirouetting and leaping first one way, then the other, so that the whole street echoed with our cheering.’2
When he wrote these words in 1953, Neave stated that the hours that followed were a time of supreme importance for him that he doubted would ever be surpassed. ‘Never in my life, perhaps, will I ever know such a moment of triumph. Without weapons we had pitted our wits against the might of Nazism and cheated the Germans in all their self-conscious arrogance and cruelty.’ Again, in 1969, he described his feat as ‘the great emotional event of my life’.3
It profoundly shaped his political career and the public perception of who he was. The one thing that anyone who had ever heard of Airey Neave knew about him was that he had escaped from Colditz. Even in death, together with his association with Mrs Thatcher, it was presented as his main claim to fame. Indeed, she herself, when paying tribute to her old friend, remarked that people remembered him ‘perhaps most of all for the fact that he got out of Colditz’.
As the first Briton to achieve a ‘home run’ from the Germans’ flagship prison, he attained a celebrity that made up for the disappointments suffered in his conventional military career. In the words of Pat Reid, the castle’s second-most distinguished alumnus, he was ‘the dove we sent out of the ark’.4 The question was, how was he going to make use of it? He would have plenty of time to ponder the problem in the months of inactivity that lay ahead. From the village of Ramsen they were taken to the nearby town of Schaffhausen. Switzerland was neutral and, though Allied escapers were assured a welcome, there were still formalities to be observed. They spent several days under ‘hotel arrest’, which involved sitting in the restaurant, drinking and eating to his heart’s content, and chatting with the locals. He wrote a coded postcard to a Colditz inmate to pass the news of their success. He could not resist writing another to the commandant, showing girls in Swiss traditional costume, with a facetious message informing him that ‘my friend and I have arrived safely for our holiday’ after a pleasant journey. He delayed sending them in order not to spoil the chances of Lieutenants John Hyde-Thomson and H. Donkers, the second Anglo-Dutch escape pair selected by Reid. As it was, they made it out of the castle, only to be arrested at Ulm, where the authorities, having been fooled once, were on maximum alert.
Hotel life was starting to pall by the time Neave and Luteyn were told to pack. They were taken by train to Berne and delivered to their respective legations. This was the parting of the ways and they did not encounter each other again in Switzerland. Luteyn went initially to Curaçao, in the Netherlands West Indies, and ended up rejoining the Dutch forces in Australia. Neave’s army record contains two letters from Luteyn seeking to get in touch with him. The second, dated October 1948 and addressed to the War Office, asks that ‘as I have never heard anything from him since he left Switzerland in May 1942, I wonder if you could help me by sending me his present address so that I can start corresponding again?’ Though Neave kept up with some of his wartime army comrades, as well as with his agents in the escape lines, Luteyn does not seem to have been among them. Intimate though the experience had been, neither had really got to know the other. When Luteyn was asked many years later what sort of man Neave was, he replied that it was ‘hard to say’.5 The fact was they had spoken little during their adventure. Luteyn regarded Neave’s German as weak and that left only English, which for obvious reasons they could not use.
In Berne, Neave was put in the charge of the military attaché, Colonel Henry Cartwright, a veteran World War One escaper, and co-author of Within Four Walls, a book about his exploits which Neave had read and absorbed as a small boy.6 Neave was kitted out in an ‘awful green tweed suit’ and sent for examination by Swiss doctors, one of whom, Dr Albert d’Erlach, was a Red Cross official who had examined him exactly a year before in Colditz.7 In 1945, the War Office was still pursuing Neave for the cost of the consultation. There was nothing wrong with him, but he was ordered to rest for three weeks. He passed it in d’Erlach’s chalet near Gerzensee. He was too preoccupied with all that had happened to read books. Sitting before the fire, looking out at the snow flakes drifting down, he ‘felt a great restlessness. My success in reaching Switzerland was the summit of all my hopes. I had not turned my thoughts to the future in store for me … Nothing could ever equal that matchless moment in the streets of Ramsen. I waited, hoping that the end of my adventure would not bring disillusionment.’
But there was yet more hanging around. He was still under Swiss supervision and spent the next two months in the university town of Fribourg, where he stayed in a hotel under loose police supervision. There he lived a life of ‘mild dissipation’, drinking absinthe, hanging out with Polish officers who were interned in the neighbourhood and chasing girls. This activity carried more than the usual risks. Switzerland was an island of civilisation in a sea of Nazis and Fascists and their stooges. Enemy agents were everywhere, some of them, it was assumed, the convivial females hanging around on the student party circuit.
At last, he received word that he might soon be going home. On 15 April 1942, he was summoned to Berne to see Cartwright, who told him, ‘We’re sending you back first, Neave. MI9 have asked for you.’ He added mysteriously, ‘There is a reason, you know.’8 He and another Army officer, Captain Hugh Woollatt, were to be sent across the Unoccupied Zone of southern France, controlled by the collaborationist Vichy regime, then across the Pyrenees to neutral Spain. He knew ‘little or nothing of MI9. Nor could I understand why they should want me back.’ Nonetheless, this was a welcome surprise. There were eight other British escapees cooling their heels in Switzerland. Woollatt had been waiting since September, when he had reached Switzerland after tunnelling out of Oflag V-B at Biberach, near the Swiss border.
Neave’s ignorance of the organisation called MI9 was understandable. They were new boys in the complex world of military intelligence (for which the initials stood) and had struggled to win the blessing of the big players controlling the war effort and to secure a proper staff and budget to pursue their aims. By the spring of 1942, they were firmly in business but the outfit’s existence had yet to become widely known among the prisoners it was primarily designed to help. MI9 officially came into being on 23 December 1939, under the command of Major Norman Crockatt, a handsome, urbane former regular infantry officer, who had won an MC in the previous war and brightened up the corridors of Whitehall by choosing to wear the tartan trews and bonnet of his regiment, the Royal Scots. According to Crockatt, the organisation existed to ‘facilitate escapes of British prisoners of war, thereby getting back service personnel and containing additional enemy manpower on guard duties’. Secondly, it was to aid ‘the return to the United Kingdom of those who succeeded in evading capture in enemy occupied territory’.9 It was further engaged in ‘col
lecting and distributing information’, ‘assisting in the denial of information to the enemy’ and ‘maintaining the morale of British POWs in enemy camps’.
The team around Crockatt was as diverse and unorthodox as the branch of warfare they were waging demanded. Among them was Christopher Clayton Hutton, an idiosyncratic but forceful character who had once challenged Houdini to escape from a packing case manufactured by his timber merchant uncle. Houdini, having bribed the workmen at the mill to use fake nails, won. ‘Clutty’ was put to work devising escape kits for issue to airmen. They included maps printed on silk handkerchiefs, miniature compasses, benzedrine pills and concentrated food tablets. He also designed uniforms and boots that could be converted to look like civilian attire. Tens of thousands of the kits were issued as standard to aircrew operating over occupied Europe following the fall of France.
Crockatt’s mission was to cultivate a sense of ‘escape-mindedness’ in commanders and those they led. By the beginning of 1940, MI9 lecturers were trying to instil in soldiers, sailors and particularly airmen the notion that escape was not only feasible but a patriotic duty. As already noted, many of those who ended up ‘in the bag’ remained unconvinced by the argument that they could contribute to the war effort by making their captors’ lives as difficult as possible. In the light of post-war analysis, there are reasons to believe they may have been right.
But war creates a climate in which the unorthodox, even the outlandish, gets a more respectful hearing than would ever be the case in peacetime. Crockatt was remarkably effective at inserting into official thinking the doctrine that escape efforts were to be systematically encouraged and supported. Of course, not everyone was convinced. MI9 would find that it was their brethren in the intelligence community who resisted their operations most fiercely. The world of the secret agencies was notorious for its bitchiness, feuding and atmosphere of mutual suspicion. For some at the top of the senior organisation, MI6, the activities of the newcomers had the potential to endanger their own operations. Crockatt and his team would have to tread carefully to come through the minefield of rivalries unscathed.
By the time Neave reached Switzerland, MI9 was beginning to involve itself in prisoner escapes. Cartwright, as well as being a military attaché, was the organisation’s main man in the vital territory of Switzerland. According to the later account he left of this episode, Neave says that Cartwright told him, ‘MI9 have sent orders for you and Hugh Woollatt to cross the Swiss frontier as soon as possible.’10 If they were given a reason for their good fortune, Neave does not reveal it. In his case, perhaps, it was because the organisation was anxious to learn all it could about Colditz from the first Briton to have broken out of it.
Cartwright added that although ‘we have sent one or two people through before … you are still guinea pigs.’ This seems to have been a reference to Lieutenant Michael Duncan and Captain Barry O’Sullivan, who had tunnelled out of Oflag V-B at Biberach on 13/14 September 1941 at the head of a column of about two dozen escapees that included Woollatt himself. Most were recaptured. Duncan and O’Sullivan travelled together across Bavaria, where they separated. According to the official historians of MI9, ‘each knew, from smuggled large-scale maps, exactly where he wanted to go. They crossed into Switzerland in the Schaffhausen salient and were clearly aware of every twist and angle of it at the points they chose to cross; information that must have reached them from maps prepared under Crockatt’s guidance and sent in by Clayton Hutton’s ingenuity.’11 Their plan may also have been helped by information reaching them from Johnny Evans, of Escaping Club fame. This was the route he had taken when he escaped in 1918, and he had returned to the area on walking tours in the 1930s, pausing to record the landscape in sketches.12
Once in Switzerland, Duncan and O’Sullivan were entrusted to Cartwright. He sent them over the border to be picked up by the ‘Pat Line’, an escape chain that had been operating since the fall of France. In the light of this, Cartwright’s suggestion that he and Woollatt were ‘guinea pigs’ seems strange. One explanation could be that in view of the difficulties the network was then facing, the pair’s experiences would prove whether or not the Pat Line was still reliable. The journey was not going to be easy. Since the armistice signed between the Germans and the French in June 1940, the country had been divided into an Occupied and an Unoccupied Zone. The ‘demarcation line’ between them ran roughly east to west across the middle of France, swinging south before the Atlantic, so that the Germans controlled the coastline as far as the Pyrenees. The Vichy government was technically neutral and supposed to control local affairs inside the Unoccupied Zone. Its attitude towards British servicemen who had evaded capture after Dunkirk was correct according to the Geneva Conventions. They were interned, mostly in three forts on or near the Mediterranean coast, in the Gard, at Marseilles and La Turbie, just inland from Monaco.* Conditions varied, reflecting the degree of enthusiasm for collaboration among those who operated it. At Marseilles, officers only had to turn up to roll-call on Monday morning, when they were issued with rations which they sold on the black market, using the proceeds to rent lodgings in the town. They were ‘not quite prisoners, not quite free’.13
The status of escaped prisoners was more problematical and hazardous. It was illegal for aliens of military age to travel through Vichy territory unless they had diplomatic status. Any male caught trying to leapfrog to the Iberian peninsula was liable to be handed over to the Germans. The initial stages of the operation had a cloak-and-dagger quality that reminded Neave of the novels of E. Phillips Oppenheim, a bestselling inter-war thriller writer. The set-up felt melodramatic and amateurish. He was to head for Geneva, where a man reading a copy of the Journal de Genève would meet him at the station bookstall. The hotel where he then met up with Woollatt was also a brothel, with an aged procuress manning the front desk. More seriously, the cover story the pair had been given seemed ridiculously flimsy. They were travelling as Czech refugees, making for a reception centre near Marseilles. That neither of them spoke a word of the language and could not even pronounce the names on their forged identity cards did not seem to bother ‘Robert’, the slender Englishman in a pin-striped suit who organised their departure.
The Swiss authorities were in on the plan. Early on the morning of 17 April 1942, Neave and Woollatt were given a police escort to a cemetery on the western edge of town, where they crouched down among the headstones to await sunrise.14 Just before dawn, they vaulted the wall and negotiated a barbed-wire barrier on which Neave ripped a large hole in his trousers. Safely across, they headed for a crossroads with a signpost to Annemasse, the French border town just south of Geneva, where they had been told to wait for an elderly gentleman riding a bike, dressed in blue overalls and beret, with clogs on his feet and a clay pipe clenched upside down in his mouth. Even at this hour, the road was busy with men cycling to work, many of whom fitted the description. Eventually, one dismounted and introduced himself. ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I am Louis Simon, formerly of the Ritz Hotel, London. Would you care to follow me to the frontier post?’15 Such surreal moments were far from rare in the strange universe of escape and evasion.
From now on, Neave and Woollatt had little choice but to place their trust in each new figure who popped up to help. It required a considerable leap of faith. Neave’s experience of the French had been contradictory. There was the memory of the defeatism shown by many French troops during the fighting at Calais, and the stories of collaboration and fifth columnists. Even in Colditz there had been a shameful episode when some French officers had demanded that the Jews among them be moved to separate quarters. Neave had spoken out vociferously against this betrayal.
The example shown by Louis Simon, and many other men and women like him, was an uplifting antidote to the contempt and bitterness that many British servicemen felt towards their former comrades as a result of their experiences in the Battle of France. Jimmy Langley was one of many evaders and escapers who found ‘every
sort of readiness to help … among the poorer sorts of people and every sort of reserve among most of the rich’.16 Many of those who fed, clothed, sheltered and guided the fugitives were women. After Louis had shepherded them through the frontier post at Annemasse, they were handed over to a ‘young, sad-faced French woman’ called ‘Mademoiselle Jeanne’, who led them to the next safe house, a short distance away. As they waited in the kitchen, Neave was struck by her ‘mystic devotion and courage which placed her far above the desires of the world’.17 This was an early encounter with one of the many extraordinary women he was to meet over the next few years. They were uncategorisable: some ‘virginal and fanatical’ like Jeanne; others warm and desirable like Andrée de Jongh, who would loom large in the time to come, to whom Neave, among many others, was passionately devoted. What they shared was a courage and resourcefulness that men of his upbringing did not readily associate with girls.
Before he escaped, women seem to have played little part in Neave’s life, romantically or professionally. In his copious writings there is no mention of pre-war girlfriends, and the studied loucheness of his undergraduate days and early London bachelor life does not seem to have extended to floozies, though he does seem to have had one pre-war liaison, as will be seen later. Whatever his previous view of women, his experiences en route to London left him with a strong regard for female stoicism and resolve. This outlook shaped his approach to his work at MI9, and had its effect many years later on British politics and history.
A variety of helpers handed Neave and Woollatt down the line to the staging post at Marseilles, where they were to pause before crossing the Pyrenees. Alex, a flash young black-marketeer, could not have been more unlike the ascetic Jeanne, yet he was just as trustworthy and patriotic. He and another young resister, Pierre, escorted them on the overnight train west. Pierre’s wife radiated fear when Neave and Woollatt turned up at their door, but she battled against her nerves and served them a meal before departure. Her behaviour won Neave’s sympathy. Bravery came in many forms, and she was ‘courageous in her weakness, seeking to struggle on for the sake of her husband’.18
The Man Who Was Saturday Page 11