The Man Who Was Saturday. Patrick Bishop

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ