Читать книгу Public Servant, Secret Agent: The elusive life and violent death of Airey Neave - Paul Routledge - Страница 10

Neave was sentenced to the usual twenty-eight days’ solitary confinement for his escape attempt. Several weeks elapsed before he could serve his term in Colditz town gaol, and he spent the time staring disconsolately from the British quarters as the weather turned colder. In early October he was taken under guard along the route by which he had tried to reach freedom. The sentries joked that the new white barrier at the final gate was a tribute to his audacious bid. His books and tobacco wrapped in a blanket, Neave was in no mood for entertainment.

Then, by his own account, he spotted another way out of the castle. Looking over the parapet of the moat bridge, he noticed a rough pathway leading across the tumbled stones of the dry moat towards the German married quarters. A small wicket gate stood half open in the moat bridge wall. If he could gain access to this gate, he was free of the barbed wire, with only a fence round the married quarters and a 12-foot high wall around the park beyond to negotiate. Excited, Neave crowed with delight, puzzling his guard with his air of elation. Neave’s version of events is contested by Pat Reid, who said he himself had spotted the small garden gate on his arrival at Colditz a year earlier. The energetic Dutch, always on the lookout for escape possibilities, also claimed to know of its existence.

Banged up in his municipal cell, Neave still thought of escape. The tiny barred window was beyond reach. He climbed on to the massive East European-style stove and contemplated cutting through the ceiling, breaking out of the roof and letting himself down to the gravel courtyard with a blanket rope. Thus occupied with thoughts of flight, he was surprised by the gaoler who roared with laughter: ‘So soon, Herr Leutnant! You must stay with us a few days longer.’ Next day, they moved him to a cell on the ground floor. He endured his spell of confinement remote from the worsening fortunes of the war, smoking on his bunk in the company of Jane Eyre and the Duchess of Wrexe. On his way back to the castle twenty-eight days later, he noticed again the little wicket gate, which by now appeared in his dreams as ‘the gateway to the land beyond the Blue Mountains’.

Some weeks earlier, Pat Reid had also had an inspiration. A trained engineer, he understood architectural drawings and had the happy knack of mentally being able to take buildings to pieces and put them back together again. It occurred to Reid that the wooden stage of the camp theatre, on the second floor of a building occupied by the most senior Allied officers, offered escape potential. It was constructed over a room leading to the top of the German guardhouse outside the prisoners’ courtyard. This corridor was sealed off from POW quarters by heavy locked doors and bricked-up windows, but it might be accessible from above. Together with ‘Hank’ Wardle MC, a Canadian in the RAF, he reconnoitred the theatre and found that by removing wooden steps from a dressing room he could move freely about under the heavy stage. There were no floorboards, only rubble on top of a lath-and-plaster ceiling over the corridor.

Reid and Wardle sawed a 2-foot square through the ceiling and found the room below disused and empty. To disguise their activity, they constructed an ingenious device known as ‘the shovewood’. This was a plaster-covered hatch fixed from above with turnbuckles resting on the ceiling joists. It was virtually invisible from below, and in any event no guards ever went there. This was Neave’s ‘magic entrance’. As Reinhold Eggers later lamented: ‘We had left the prisoners a very simple barrier, no more than a floor-ceiling between their quarters plus a door into a passage on our side to get through.’¹ Reid clambered down on a rope made from a mattress cover, padded down the corridor in carpet slippers and picked the lock of the door. Beyond, a passage ran over the courtyard gate – the most difficult barrier to negotiate – and ended at another locked door. This yielded easily to his skills and Reid found himself at the top of steps leading into an attic above the guardhouse. The sounds of laughter and noisy drinking drifted up from the German Officers’ Mess below. If an escaper could disguise himself as a German officer, the guards at the gate would scarcely give him a second glance, because this time he would be approaching from the right direction.

What is more, the prisoners were planning to put on a Christmas pantomime within weeks, offering the perfect opportunity to mount an escape. Reid began a search for the right officers. He quickly whittled his list down to six, including Neave. He told them ‘casually’ that he could get them out of Colditz if they could acquire convincing German officers’ uniforms. Neave and Lieutenant John Hyde-Thomson, who had already tried to get out in a consignment of palliasses, were finally chosen to make the break, in company with two Dutch officers.

There were compelling reasons for cooperation with the Dutch. First, their command of German was much better than that of the British, second, their long blue-green army greatcoats bore a striking resemblance to the Wermacht uniform, and third, they were inveterate escapers. They had already made four ‘home runs’ via Switzerland. This Anglo-Dutch entente had been operating for some months through Reid and his opposite number, Captain van den Heuvel, invariably known as ‘Vandy’. He finally settled on a brave young officer of the Netherlands East Indies Army, Second Lieutenant Toni Luteyn, to accompany Neave. In 1940, the Dutch army had capitulated to the invading Germans. Its officers were required to sign an oath of non-combatance, or face internment for the rest of the war. Virtually all signed, with the exception of a contingent of sixty-seven colonial army cadets who had just passed out of Breda Military Academy. Luteyn, aged twenty-three, was one of them. He was interned in a camp at Zossi on the Dutch – German border, but when one of them escaped they were moved deeper inland to Oflag VIIIc in Poland. After more escapes, the whole lot was dispatched to Colditz in July 1941, arriving soon after Neave. Until now Neave and Luteyn had scarcely met. They were thrown together by calculation rather than friendship. Despite being the younger of the two – he was only twenty-four – Luteyn was the senior partner because of his command of German. ‘We had some exercises, because Neave did not speak German, except jawohl,’ Luteyn said years later, ‘but going through the guardroom there was quite a chance somebody would talk to us, and they would talk to the highest ranking officer. So I was “promoted” to Hauptmann and he was a first lieutenant. We practised that exercise for a week in the courtyard. He had to march on my left-hand side. If he didn’t wheel to my left, I shouted at him.’²

Meanwhile, both would-be escapers were rehearsing for the camp pantomime, Ballet Nonsense. Neave later dismissed the ‘pathetic futility’ of the entertainment, insisting that although such performances keep prisoners from brooding on their fate, the actual performances were ghastly. But at the time he threw himself energetically into the show, writing and producing a three-act sketch with the improbable title ‘The Mystery of Wombat College’, which was clearly based on his experiences at Eton. Neave played the principal character, the unpleasant headmaster Dr Calomel. The other parts were equally nasty, as befitted the obscene dialogue and cynical performance. The chaplains complained about the ‘unsuitability’ of the sketch and Neave thought it a ‘wretched little piece’ but it brought the house down in Oflag IVc.

A photograph of the full cast shows him striking a pose in gown and mortar board of black paper and steel-rimmed spectacles, made up to look like a beetle-browed, leering Groucho Marx. While Neave busied himself on stage, Reid and Wardle were hard at work beneath his feet creating the ‘shovewood’ escape route through which they planned to send several Anglo-Dutch teams. Neave and Luteyn would go first, followed twenty-four hours later by Hyde-Thomson and Luteyn’s fellow officer Lieutenant Donkers. At one point in rehearsals, when Neave was pacing the boards in a scene where Dr Calomel expels the son of a duke, Reid and Wardle emerged from beneath his feet, covered in dust.

Neave acquired a Netherlands Home Army uniform overcoat, which he hid, wrapped in sacking, beneath the floorboards. The prisoners had hundreds of these hides, some of which are still giving up their secrets today, sixty years later. With the help of camp experts, he then set about converting it into a German officer’s uniform. Epaulettes, fashioned from linoleum cut from the bathroom floor, were painted silver to match the officers’ silver braid. He gave himself a gold regimental number. Neave promoted himself to Oberleutnant Schwarz and Scarlet O’Hara carved gold wooden stars to denote his rank. O’Hara was one of the unsung heroes of Colditz who sat in their primitive quarters day after day helping others to escape. The selflessness of men like him helped twenty officers to escape from the ‘impregnable’ fortress, eleven of them British – the best escape record of any camp in Nazi Germany.

Then came the problem of the buttons. O’Hara and Neave went to Pat Reid in some distress. Neave told him the project was running short of lead. O’Hara’s reserves of lead piping – ‘thin German stuff’ – had been used up. As they spoke O’Hara eyed longingly the alcohol still that the British officers were using to make their Christmas booze. Reid took fright: ‘What are you looking at? I hope you’re not hinting.’ O’Hara demurred but pointed out that the only other source of lead piping was in the lavatory block. With only three lavatories to serve forty officers breaking one up might trigger a revolt, so the still’s lead coil was removed, melted down and poured into white clay moulds carved by a Dutch officer. ‘Oberleutnant Schwarz’s’ belt and leggings were made from cardboard, as was his revolver holster, stuffed with nothing more dangerous than newspaper. The finishing touch, a cap of an Offizier of the Third Reich, was converted from Neave’s own dress uniform cap by Squadron Leader Brian Paddon. It was an impressive sight: the shiny black peak bent Nazi-style, with a design of leaves, a red and white roundel, eagle’s wings and a swastika on the front, all made from linoleum, the whole thing finished off with white piping sewed to the edge of the brim. Neave was delighted. ‘With such a uniform I could face the arc lights once more with confidence,’ he remembered.³ Even Reid was impressed. At a passing-out test, he complimented Neave and his helpers. The uniforms would pass in any conditions other than broad daylight at close quarters.

Neave was by now impatient to go. He harried Reid about the readiness of the escape route and was told to keep his hair on. Meanwhile, rehearsals for the pantomime went ahead. Providentially, Luteyn was in the camp orchestra. Neave remembered him as a drummer, but Luteyn insists he played the double bass, which he bought from an English officer. A unique photograph of the show’s line-up confirms that in this performance he played the double bass. The escape was planned to take place a few days before Christmas. The weather was deteriorating rapidly and Neave was anxious to avoid freezing to death on a German hillside. A combination of circumstances, however, forced a delay. According to Neave, their uniforms and false papers were not quite ready but Luteyn recollects that the postponement was due to a seasonal increase in train controls because so many German soldiers were going home for Christmas. Either way, the escape bid was postponed until the new year. Ballet Nonsense was a huge success; it included a new scene at Wombat College in which Dr Calomel gave a burlesque Nazi salute three times, to the discomfiture of German officers in the audience. Chaplain Platt noted in his diary: ‘After the interval, Anthony’s [Neave’s] public school farce delighted the British and fogged the foreigners … The public school farce was redolent of masters’ perceived interest in small boys, though one could plainly see that the intention was a take-off of a well-known schoolmaster.’⁴

After the pantomime, sloshed on bootleg alcohol, the men danced, fell dead drunk to the floor or vomited. In the midst of this revelry, a German officer came in to wish them a Happy Christmas: ‘The laughter ceased abruptly and there was a silence so deliberate and terrible, that it struck the German like a blow in the face,’ related Neave. ‘He looked blankly about him, saluted and disconsolately withdrew.’⁵

Escape day was set for 5 January 1942; the phoney uniforms and civilian clothes had already been concealed beneath the stage. Reid decided to send out two pairs of escapers on successive nights, immediately after the change of sentry in front of the guardhouse, so the guard would be ignorant about officers’ movements during the previous two hours. The break would take place after the nine o’clock Appell. Snow was falling during the roll-call, but Neave was roasting under his usual combination of battledress and sweater over civilian clothes, plus RAF trousers – and the black-painted cardboard leggings. Looking over to the Dutch contingent where Luteyn was similarly attired, Neave had an overpowering sense that this was his last evening in the castle.

On the order of dismissal, Neave and Luteyn mingled with senior officers as they moved into their quarters and went straight up to the theatre above. Fumbling their way in the dark, they ducked below the stage. Reid carefully opened the ‘shovewood’ trapdoor, and the three let themselves down noiselessly on a mattress-cover rope into the room below. There the escapers discarded their British uniforms and dusted down their German disguise. Reid led the way in stockinged feet through the first door until they were across the bridge and outside the final barrier: the locked entrance to the loft above the German guardhouse. Here, the escapers put on their boots and waited, fear and exasperation mounting, while Reid fought with the obstinate lock, at one point even admitting: ‘I’m afraid I can’t get it open.’ But after he fiddled for ten minutes with his patent wire pick-lock, the heavy door creaked open.

Reid told Neave they must not move for exactly eleven minutes, the time it would take him to retrace his steps to the theatre. Neave accepted the order but warned he would not ‘hang around’ after that. The pair would take the first opportunity of a quiet spell in the guardhouse below. Reid reminded them of their ‘escape theatre’: on reaching the guardhouse door, they were to stop in full view of the sentry, calmly pull on their gloves, swap casual remarks and walk smartly down the cobbled ramp to the outer gates. ‘We waited ten or fifteen minutes, and went down the stone stairs,’ recollected Luteyn. ‘On the first floor, where the officer of the guard was quartered, someone had just put on the radio. The door was ajar, but he didn’t hear us, and couldn’t see us because we nipped through very quickly. If he had seen us, it would have been finished. When we came out of the guardroom, the soldiers jumped up and stood by the door. A sergeant opened the door for us. Our hearts were pounding!’⁶ Their cameo German performance was unnecessary.

They strode out to the snow-covered outer wall, Neave doing his best to adopt a Prussian military manner. Unfortunately, despite all the practice, he still marched with his hands behind his back, every inch a British officer. Luteyn hissed: ‘March with your hands at your sides, you bloody fool.’ By the gate into the outer courtyard, the first sentry saluted and said ‘Nothing to report.’ They thanked him and walked on to the second sentry by the outer gate. Luteyn ordered him to open the door which he did. They were now outside the main castle, on the moat bridge, from which the wicket gate led down into the moat and up the other side towards the German married quarters. By now it was snowing heavily and as they stumbled down a German soldier came towards them. He halted, staring at the ‘officers’. Neave hesitated and was ready to make a run for it, a reminder of his earlier sense of panic once beyond the castle gate. Luteyn, with great presence of mind, demanded forcefully: ‘Why do you not salute?’ Open-mouthed, the soldier did as he was told and the escapers hurried on up the other side of the moat and round the married quarters to a high oak fence. Surmounting this, they were at last in tree cover. Neave’s cardboard belt was ripped apart in the climb and his ‘holster’ disappeared into the snow.

The final obstacle was a high, moss-covered stone wall, overlaid with snow and ice. ‘Here, we made our first mistake,’ remembered Luteyn. ‘I helped Neave up with my hands so he could sit on it and pull me up. We should have done it the other way round, because I was much bigger and more powerful.’⁷ Every time Neave tried to pull his companion, he fell backwards in a confusion of snow and stone. Eventually, he caught Luteyn under the arms and they struggled to the top, panting heavily. They sat on the coping for a minute, then jumped 12 feet to the broken ground below. Neave was bruised, shaken and frightened. They leaned against the trees, breathing in the sharp, cold January air before Neave urged them on. They tore off their lovingly prepared fake uniforms and threw them into the river that wound its way below the woods.

In his diary entry for 5 January, Chaplain Platt recorded: ‘Anthony Neave and a Dutch officer, Second Lieutenant Luteyn, escaped ten minutes ago. It was a scheme requiring the boldest initiative and at least eight weeks’ preparation. It was carried out with the utmost secrecy, and already they are outside the castle.’ During 1941, only two British officers succeeded in getting clear of the castle, and they had both been recaptured. ‘The British are due for a success, and the seven people who so far know of Anthony’s break are fairly confident that this is it.’⁸

Clear of the castle, Neave and Luteyn set off to walk to the town of Leisnig, six miles away. They would be less noticeable in this manufacturing centre than in the town of Colditz, where they risked recognition. The plan was to take an early morning workmen’s train to Leipzig, thirty-five miles to the west. Thence, they would proceed south by train via Ulm and Nuremberg to Singen on the Swiss border, where they would walk to freedom. The imaginative Dutch had bribed a Colditz guard to secure a railway timetable, so the escapers knew that the first train left at 5.00 a.m. They thus had seven hours to kill in the freezing dark. Mercifully, although the thermometer read minus 17 degrees Celsius, the snow was abating and the moon aided their progress across frozen fields until they reached the country road to Leisnig. With rising confidence, they struck out for the station. Neave was dressed in a blue jacket. Fashioned from an officer’s uniform of the Chasseurs Alpins, this was the gift of Capitaine Boris, a Jewish reserve officer in the French regiment, in recognition of Neave’s support of the small Jewish contingent in Colditz. His RAF trousers were turned down over his Polish boots and the civilian guise was completed by a ski cap made from a blanket.