There was a further opportunity in early 1944, when Room 900 began overseeing the ‘Shelburne’ operations, a series of successful evacuations by sea from the Brittany coast. Between the end of January and the end of March 1944, one hundred and eleven men were rescued at night under the eyes of the Germans. The plan was overseen by Neave and Captain Pat Windham-Wright, who had joined MI9 in September 1943 after losing an arm and winning an MC earlier in the war. Windham-Wright went with the Royal Navy Motor Gun Boats that took the men off. Neave had proposed acting as escorting officer himself, but was turned down by Crockatt. After Langley was transferred to MI9 headquarters in September 1943, Neave was the senior man at Room 900 and simply knew too much to risk falling into enemy hands.
Much of Neave’s post-Colditz career had passed in safety and comfort while those he directed were daily facing arrest, torture and death. In his early, office-bound days at MI9, he had reflected that ‘it did not seem a soldier’s life.’ Behind this disquieting thought there was a bigger concern, one that loomed over Neave’s entire time with the escape lines: the question of whether it was all worth it. Could the results achieved justify the appalling price in human suffering inflicted on the brave men and women who operated them?
One hundred and fifty-five members of Comet died resisting the Nazis. Forty-eight of them were women. Then there were the many who were imprisoned, tortured and abused but somehow survived, often to lead lives that were cut short as a result of their sufferings. The main justification for these sacrifices was that, terrible though the price was, the contribution to the war effort that resulted made it worth paying, and Neave advanced this argument repeatedly in his books. The value of a foot soldier, be he officer or other rank, was limited. The worth of an airman, however, was considerable. It cost £10,000 to train a pilot – enough, as ‘Bomber’ Harris pointed out, to put ten men through Oxford.
When fighting Room 900’s corner against the sceptics in the intelligence establishment, Neave and Langley asserted that ‘the saving of a bomber pilot’s life could be as important as blowing up a bridge … that much of the intelligence received from occupied territory had less relevance to the war than the recovery of a fully trained aircrew.’42 If that was true, then the escape lines had indeed made a major contribution to the war effort. A total of 2,198 RAF evaders got back to England through their efforts. A similar number of American airmen were also rescued. How many RAF aircrew actually returned to operational flying is impossible to quantify. What is known is that by 1943 the Air Force training machine was at full speed, producing easily enough men to supply the needs of all commands. In the case of many of the Americans, on returning to Britain their operational war was over and they were not required to fly further combat missions.
Neave did not need to strain quite so hard to validate the work of the escape lines. The resisters had made their choice alone and none needed to be persuaded of their duty. They did what they did because they were driven to it by their courage and ideals. As he rightly said, ‘They were the exceptional people … natural leaders. They had in common the ideal of service to humanity.’43 When the struggle was over, there would be no recriminations. To Neave, the survivors showed only gratitude for the support he had given them and a lasting affection.
7
From Normandy to Nuremberg
With the arrival of D-Day, Neave at last got his chance to leave his desk and the life of a military civil servant and take to the field. His writings give the impression that the landings were as much a liberation for him as they were for France. Nonetheless, it was not until 11 July 1944 that he finally set foot in Normandy. He was now a major and he was eager to get into action. However, he was forced to endure many anxious days hovering impatiently behind the front line, looking for an opportunity to bring off a series of rescue missions he had been planning since the previous autumn. It was clear that the invasion would change the nature of MI9’s operations. It was preceded by a great shift in the direction of the air effort. Bomber Command and the US Army Air Forces were diverted from their long-term work of destroying the German war industry. They were now given the task of smashing up the enemy’s transportation links to the invasion zone, with the aim of ‘isolating the battlefield’. The French countryside filled up with burned-out bombers. Those who made it out of them alive were turning up in villages and towns, seeking help from underground organisations.
It was Neave who came up with an idea about how to protect them in such a swirling and unpredictable environment, and then to get them home. His great fear was that the Germans, knowing the war was lost, would abandon whatever restraints still bound them and murder any Allied airmen who fell into their hands. Rather than leaving them to stay put in safe houses in town or country, he proposed establishing camps in isolated forests where they could be sustained by local patriots, until the front lines pushed past them. Reports from agents in the field indicated there were hundreds of stranded aircrew who had come to grief in missions to attack railways, transport nodes and the Atlantic ports, scattered across the Northern half of France. There were more in the Low Countries who had been shot down on the way to or from Germany. Neave suggested setting up three camps: one in the Rennes area in Brittany; one in the east, in the forest of the Ardennes; and another south-east of Paris, close to Châteaudun. Months in advance, agents were sent in to liaise with local organisations and – equally important – to persuade the aviators that it was in their best interests to group together in hiding, when the natural boldness that came with choosing to fight in the air was spurring them to make a break for it.
The plan, code-named ‘Sherwood’, was initially considered ‘imaginative but too risky’.1 It was a complicated business to find and equip the camps and move the evaders to them, and it required resources. Furthermore, the Belgians, determined as always to maintain their independence, rebelled against being told what to do. Faced with their opposition, the Ardennes plan came to nothing. Then, to Neave’s chagrin, the airmen who were gathered near Rennes decided not to wait to be rescued and broke camp to seek their own salvation. However, the operation to rescue 120 men living under the boughs of the Forêt de Fréteval, near Châteaudun, was a triumph that Neave would savour all his life.
The arrangements for the camp had been made by Jean de Blommaert, a twenty-nine-year-old Belgian aristocrat and veteran of Comet, who had escaped to Britain in 1943 after being ‘burned’. In April 1944, he was parachuted into the area with Squadron Leader Lucien Boussa, who had previously commanded 350 Squadron of the RAF, which was manned by Belgians and equipped with Spitfires. In conjunction with the local resistance organisation and helped by farmers and tradesmen, they located camp sites and dropping zones. Late in May, airmen who had been hiding in Paris began to arrive by train at Châteaudun and were sheltered by local families. On 6 June, the day of the invasion, the first group of thirty arrived in the forest. By the beginning of August there were 152 fugitives, living in tents and eating well, thanks to the generosity of the locals.
While the battle of Normandy raged, Neave was forced to wait impotently for the lines to move. Having left Room 900 in London in the hands of Donald Darling, he was formally a member of IS9 (Western European Area), which had evolved into a joint British-American formation, commanded by Langley and a US army lieutenant colonel. Neave spent some weeks hanging round the Bayeux headquarters and making trips to the front at Caen, still in German hands despite Monty’s predictions of swift victory. Then, at the beginning of August, with the American success at St-Lô, the impasse was broken and the front began to move fast. General Patton’s Third Army swept down to take Brittany, with Neave hotfoot behind. He ‘packed his jeep, in high elation’ and led the American sections of IS9 (WEA) southwards. The road to Avranches was choked with dead Germans, mules and horses and burned-out vehicles, victims of the merciless harrying of the Allied fighter-bombers. He was on a high: ‘The exhilaration was unforgettable. The restraints of London and the beach-head were past an
d the smell of pursuit was in the air.’2
Arriving in Le Mans on 10 August, he was disconcerted to find that instead of pressing east towards Chartres, Vendôme and the camp in the Forêt de Fréteval, the Americans were now going to swing north to Alençon, to help close the Falaise Gap, where the death blow would be dealt to the German army. He had been counting on being able to call on their armour to support the rescue operation. It was difficult to know the dispositions and strength of the Germans in the area, and he had only half a dozen jeeps and a few automatic weapons to protect his party and the airmen if they ran into trouble. He drove to the Headquarters of XV Corps, north of Le Mans, to try and persuade the staff it was their duty to lend him an escort. After all, half the men in the forest were American. It was no use. He drove back to Le Mans ‘greatly depressed’, but on arrival had a remarkable piece of luck. In the courtyard of the Hôtel Moderne, where he had set up shop, was an array of armoured jeeps and, milling around them, dozens of British soldiers in maroon berets. It was a squadron of the Special Air Service, four officers and thirty-four men, under the command of Captain Anthony Greville-Bell, twenty-four years old, the son a Ceylon tea planter and already a veteran of the SAS. They had just finished their operations in Brittany and were awaiting orders. Greville-Bell, ‘a dashing young man with a DSO, ideally suited to “private warfare”’, listened enthusiastically to Neave’s proposals and sent a signal to his chiefs. The following day he received permission to escort Neave and his team to the Forêt de Fréteval. Thus began an association between Neave and the SAS that continued through the rest of the hostilities, into the Cold War period, and lasted until the day he died. The regiment’s ethos matched his own approach to warfare: unorthodox, questioning and inclined to prefer the tangential and subtle over the direct and frontal.
On 14 August, ‘a fine, hot morning’, he set off with the SAS at the head of a column of requisitioned buses and trucks on the sixty-mile journey to the forest. At the turn-off to the camp, they found de Blommaert and Boussa and a large crowd who greeted them with cheers. If felt like ‘the departure for a seaside outing’. The airmen were lean, tanned and dressed in rough peasant clothes. Some were angry at the delay and about twenty had already departed. It was nonetheless a great moment for Neave. Sherwood had been his idea, and he had not only made it happen but been there at its execution, exposing himself at least in some degree to the risks faced by the men and women he directed. He recorded proudly that of those he helped rescue ‘nearly all went back on flying operations.’ For some of them, their liberation brought only a short respite. According to Neave, though he does not cite a source, thirty-eight of them were killed in action before the end of the war.
The following day, there appears to have been another sort of rescue operation, one that he never referred to in his writings. On 16 August, while hurrying back to rejoin headquarters, he arrived in Chartres. The city was in American hands, but there were still Germans about. He found the main square deserted, apart from three American tanks, their guns trained on the Cathedral, a Gothic jewel of European civilisation. According to the account given by Jean de Blommaert (who was with him) to Diana, shortly after Airey’s death, a Texan sergeant told them that German troops were holed up in the clock tower and his captain had just returned with orders to blast them out. Neave approached the officer and asked him if he could really justify opening fire on an architectural treasure. He was told that his orders were ‘to demolish rather than risk a single American life’.3 Neave declared, ‘I am in charge of Special Services in this sector and this is a special case. Wait five minutes before firing – no more. I’ll go and look myself, and wave my handkerchief if all is clear.’ Neave entered the cathedral unarmed, with de Blommaert behind him holding a rifle. He told him, ‘Keep your distance, so we aren’t a double target up this damned spiral staircase, and if you must shoot, try not to hit me.’ The clock tower was empty. He waved his handkerchief to the Americans below and Chartres cathedral remained intact. Neave was normally not shy about advertising his exploits. This one he never mentioned in print. Another version claims that it was an American officer with XX Corps, Colonel Welborn Griffith Jr, who with his driver carried out a reconnaissance of the streets around the cathedral and declared it to be free of Germans, sparing it from bombardment. Neave seems to have arrived towards the evening, by which time Griffith had moved on (he was killed the same day), so it may be that there were two separate incidents when the cathedral was menaced and both men share the honour of saving it.
No one reading Neave’s accounts of the days of that dangerous summer of 1944 would guess that he had just become a father for the first time. Marigold Elizabeth Cassandra Neave was born on 5 May, at Chillington Hall, her maternal grandparents’ home in Staffordshire. Fatherhood seems to have done nothing to temper his eagerness to make up for lost time. After the Sherwood adventure, he hurried on to Paris, to check on the well-being of his agents. For many, like Jean-François Nothomb, the arrival of the French and American liberators in late August had come too late. He had been betrayed by Jacques Desoubrie, a Franco-Belgian Gestapo agent responsible for the capture of hundreds of evaders and helpers, including fifty of the Comet line. Nothomb had been arrested in January and sent off to a series of concentration camps, pursued by a death warrant that mercifully never caught up with him, and was eventually freed in April 1945. On the eve of the liberation, rumours had abounded of massacres and reprisals. Neave arrived to find Paris en fête and most of Room 900’s helpers safe and well. He did, however, carry out another minor rescue operation. After setting up his headquarters in the Hotel Windsor, he came across an excited mob and intervened, ‘rescuing two Germans from an angry crowd’.4
This small episode revealed a principle that governed his post-war attitude to the vanquished. While he was in favour of the sternest justice for the chief criminals of the Nazi regime, he had no taste for mass punishments of the defeated, or the imposition of punitive terms on the population that would only nourish a future conflict. In the case of Rudolf Hess, he became one of the chief advocates of compassion, campaigning in the early 1970s for his release from Spandau prison.
There was a pause in Brussels, where he was relieved to find more old Comet hands still alive. Then it was on to Holland, where the headlong Allied advance had come to a sudden halt and the debacle of Arnhem had brought an unwelcome opportunity for him to put his expertise to work. The failure of the airborne operation on 17 September to capture the bridge over the Lower Rhine had left several hundred troops from the British 1st Airborne Division and attached units cut off behind the German lines on the east bank, where they were being sheltered by the Dutch resistance. Neave arrived in the first week of October and set up headquarters on the outskirts of Nijmegen. He claims that while there he made a ‘discovery which revolutionised the situation of the airborne survivors’.5 The power station at Nijmegen was linked by a telephone line to transformer stations across the Rhine in enemy-held territory. He learned this from Dutch resistance workers on the liberated southern bank who were using it to stay in touch with their people on the other side, so the discovery was hardly his own. However, he seems to have seen its potential for organising a rescue operation. Many of the stranded troops were thought to be hiding around Ede (to where the phone link extended), twenty miles from Nijmegen.
Neave wrote that when he proposed a plan to his superiors, the ‘cold feet department’ were ‘horror struck’, believing the Germans must surely have tapped the line. However, the resistance continued to insist it was secure, and soon they were getting a nightly report from an anonymous British officer, later revealed to be Major Digby Tatham-Warter of the 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, who had been wounded at Arnhem and captured, before escaping from hospital, with information about the number and state of health of the evaders. They received further intelligence from agents Neave had sent to Holland to set up escape lines for Allied airmen long beforehand.
By now, Neave had b
een joined by a congenial brother-in-arms. Major Hugh Fraser had been seconded to IS9 (WEA) from the GHQ Liaison Regiment, a reconnaissance outfit also known as ‘Phantom’, which was charged with scouting the front lines. Fraser was a member of the Scottish warrior clan and the younger brother of Lord Lovat, whose exploits at the Dieppe Raid and commanding the family regiment, the Lovat Scouts, at D-Day had made him a legend. He was sardonic, relaxed, brave, modest and good fun.
The two got on well and respected each other, and they remained close friends until Neave’s death. Fraser too became a target for Irish Republicans, who in 1975 planted outside his house in London a bomb which went off, killing his neighbour, Professor Gordon Hamilton Fairley, a pioneering cancer specialist. It is perhaps difficult to think of someone so emotionally restrained as Neave inspiring deep affection in another man of his class and outlook, but the bond between them was strong. In the opinion of the historian Antonia Fraser, Hugh’s wife of twenty-one years, ‘Hugh loved Airey.’6 Another member of the team was less satisfactory. Captain Peter Baker had also arrived from Phantom, where he served with Fraser. He was exuberant and bold, qualities that Neave normally admired, but also a fantasist, chancer and glory-hunter. During the Forêt de Fréteval episode, Neave had already had to prevent him from casting off his uniform and heading to Paris in advance of the troops with the aim of scoring a sensational journalistic scoop for an American newspaper.
Any escape plans were dependent on the resourcefulness and bravery of a large network of Dutch resisters from across the social spectrum who sheltered and helped organise the disparate bands of survivors from the Arnhem operation. Among them were several senior Airborne officers, including Brigadiers Gerald Lathbury and John Hackett and Lieutenant Colonel David Dobie, who thanks to the Dutch underground were eventually reunited. Their initial appreciation of their situation had included a plan to stay put in order to carry out behind-the-lines operations in partnership with the resistance when the Allies made another attempt to cross the Rhine. The first thing to do was to establish contact with headquarters.
The Man Who Was Saturday Page 15