Public Servant, Secret Agent: The elusive life and violent death of Airey Neave

He did not have long to wait. Military folklore says that Hitler’s decision to invade the Low Countries and France was made over lunch with von Manstein, Field Marshal of the Wermacht Gerd von Rundstedt’s chief of staff, over lunch on 17 February 1940. On 2 April, the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain confidently told the Commons: ‘Hitler has missed the bus.’ Early in the morning of 10 May, the Nazi Blitzkrieg on the Low Countries and France began. Under the brilliant direction of General Heinz Guderian, German panzer divisions smashed their way through the Ardennes, overrunning Belgium and striking deep into France. Within five days, Paul Reynaud, the French Prime Minister, was telephoning Churchill to say: ‘We have been defeated.’ It was an appalling prospect. The British Expeditionary Force numbering hundreds and thousands of men, sent to oppose any German invasion, was in danger of being surrounded and cut off in northwestern France. The war for Europe was in danger of being lost before it had begun. Still, service chiefs in London judged that Hitler’s lines of communication had become so extended that a frontal attack on the Channel ports was unlikely. ‘It was not to be believed,’ wrote war historian Michael Glover, ‘that, within two or three days, they could threaten, far less capture, Boulogne and Calais. A week earlier the idea would have appeared equally fantastic to the German High Command.’3

On 17 May, after a depressing summit in Paris with Reynaud and the French High Command, Churchill, now Prime Minister after the resignation of Neville Chamberlain, ordered his chiefs of staff to draw up plans for withdrawal of the BEF. Guderian’s panzers were racing across northern France, making for the coast and the Channel ports. Neave and his searchlight battery were in Coulogne, a few miles south-east of Calais, right in the way of the German advance. He arrived there from Arras on 20 May, having squashed himself into a tiny khaki-painted Austin Seven with his large and belligerent driver, Gunner Cooper. His troops followed behind in 3-ton army lorries. As they drove through Lens and St Omer, the tide of refugees fleeing west increased. In the ancient town of Ardres, a woman shouted that they were cowards running away from the Germans and spat at the column.

Coulogne had seen British soldiers before. In the time of Henry VIII, when the English had occupied Calais, it was an outer stronghold. In the First World War, it had been a base camp. Neave quartered himself in the Mairie, in the town square. For the first night, they were spared the bombing that had sent the French fleeing for their lives. The young lieutenant imagined that his role in the forthcoming defence of Calais would be commanding his searchlight battery. He was just twenty-four, ‘unmilitary and with opinions of my own’. However, he also later vouchsafed that he and his men were ‘ready to die, or at least expecting to die’.4 The Germans did their best not to disappoint them. As he dozed under a chestnut tree in front of the Mairie in the hot afternoon of 23 May, a German light attack aircraft scored a direct hit on the building, sending tiles tumbling down over him. It was nearly fatal. More mortar bombs exploded among the refugees, killing some of them and Neave’s dispatch rider, Gunner Branton. The casualties included a young girl. Neave noticed a British soldier gently drawing her tartan skirt over her knees to preserve decency even in death. The air raids were followed by panic rumours among the French that German armoured divisions were closing in, but a disbelieving Neave thought they might only be lightly armed reconnaissance groups. How could British High Command not know the whereabouts of Guderian and his tanks?

Searchlight detachments were ordered to converge on Coulogne, gathering a force of about sixty men for the defence of this ‘ghastly bottleneck’. Neave’s men dug trenches in the southern sector and put up rather inadequate roadblocks comprising furniture from the local school and the village hearse. Their work was hampered by the spate of fugitives from the battle zone, whose pathetic columns stretching up to half a mile long had been infiltrated by spies and fifth columnists. At one stage, Neave was forced to draw his .38 Webley revolver on a crowd of refugees threatening to break through the roadblock, prompting cries of ‘Don’t shoot, mon lieutenant!’ The German tank thrust reached them in the afternoon of 23 May but was held back for five precious hours by the Searchlight Regiment’s spirited defence of its HQ at nearby Orphanage Farm. Neave’s Bren gunners took part in this action, but almost fired on their own side until he moved them forward. After the farm came under intense artillery fire, the order to retreat towards Calais was given at about 7.00 p.m. Neave was told to go back into Coulogne to blow up a new piece of kit known as the ‘cuckoo’, a sound-location device which at all costs must not be captured. With a sergeant and a sapper, he tried valiantly with gun cotton to destroy the trailer on which the secret equipment was mounted. As they tried feverishly to carry out the order, two French aviation fuel drivers set fire to their tankers alongside. The ‘cuckoo’ blew up and Neave’s party escaped, choking on fumes from the blaze, to the Calais road.

They found only relative safety in the city. Guderian’s tanks had been briefly, and inexplicably, halted the previous week on Hitler’s personal instructions. His race to the sea might otherwise have been complete by this stage of the war, trapping and capturing the BEF gathering on the sand dunes of Dunkirk just up the coast from Calais. But now he was advancing at full speed and Calais was in the way of his main objective: the British army. His initial plan was to bypass the port and take Dunkirk with the Tenth Panzer Division, but a determined counter-attack by the British south of Arras on 21 May checked his drive, and the German High Command ordered Guderian to wait on the Somme, robbing him of the impetus that could have altered the direction of the entire conflict. Taking advantage of this breathing space, the British threw reserves across the Channel into Calais, elements of the Royal Tank Regiment, the Queen Victoria’s Rifles and the 60th Rifle Brigade. Their orders were unclear and constantly changing. Meanwhile, service chiefs began emergency planning for Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of 330,000 soldiers of the BEF from the sands of Dunkirk by the Royal Navy and a flotilla of ‘little ships’.

German artillery found their range on Calais docks as these reserves were landing and the siege of Calais began in earnest. The British High Command was in an agony of indecision: whether to fight to the death in the strategic port, dominated by fortifications dating back to the sixteenth century, or withdraw. Churchill had once described Calais as ‘simply an enceinte [fortification] protected by a few well-executed outlying fieldworks … it could certainly not be counted on to hold out more than a few days against a determined attack’. Indeed, at 3.00 a.m. on 24 May, the War Office telegraphed Brigadier Claude Nicholson, commander of British forces in the port, that it had decided ‘in principle’ on evacuation. Many British soldiers, including Neave, hoped desperately that that decision would be implemented. It never was.

As Neave related in his war classic, The Flames of Calais, it was impossible to sleep on the night he bivouacked on the dunes to the west of the town. He was aware that Calais would be surrounded and that a battle was imminent. Yet, throughout the night, rumours of evacuation grew. Neave was frank. ‘Calais had become a city of doom, and I was not in the least anxious to remain. I did not feel heroic.’5 Later that day, Churchill countermanded the previous decision: a War Office telegram decreed that Calais should be defended to the end, ‘for the sake of Allied solidarity’. Nicholson was instructed: ‘Select best position and fight on.’ The garrison of Calais, recorded Glover, was deliberately sacrificed to demonstrate Britain’s commitment to her allies, ‘but it was the last major sacrifice that Britain was going to make in that lost cause’.6 British troops trapped behind the nineteenth-century fortifications could not throw back Guderian’s panzers. The best they could do was hold up the Nazi advance so that Operation Dynamo could be implemented.

On the ground, the men were beginning to realise the way things were going. They needed no explanation. ‘It was now time to forget about evacuation and show what “non-fighting soldiers could do,’ Neave reflected. With fifty volunteers from his men, he formed up with newly disembarked troops of the Rifle Brigade and marched to the eastern ramparts. As he marched, he thought of others who had moved up the line. ‘This was it. Everything before was of no consequence. But would I pass the test?’

His orders were to reinforce ‘B’ Company of the 60th on the south-west of the town centre where a German breakthrough appeared imminent. A staff officer led them through the deserted streets to the Boulevard Léon Gambetta, which was under fire from German tanks and machine gunners advancing up the Boulogne road. Neave left his men in the shelter of a doorway and stepped nervously into the boulevard. Tracer bullets and even tank shells rained down as he made for the Pont Jourdan railway bridge. He clung for dear life to the sides of the houses as he crept towards his objective. This was his first experience of street fighting, and he was not ashamed to admit that he was acutely frightened. Reaching the bridge, he was called down to the railway tracks below by Major Poole, commander of ‘B’ Company. Poole ordered him to get his men into the houses on either side of the bridge and fire from the windows. ‘You might fight like bloody hell,’ he admonished.

Neave and his men, armed only with rifles and two Bren guns, took up position in the houses and opened fire on the German positions on the Boulogne road. Their inexperience showed, as regulars of the 60th fighting at the other side of the bridge shouted ‘F—ing well look where you’re shooting!’ Amid the firing, the proprietor of a café at the end of the street, wearing the Croix de Guerre from the First World War, coolly dispensed cognac. In mid-afternoon, a British tank made a brief appearance, prompting a furious response from the Germans, a savage bombardment which pinned Neave down in the Rue Edgar Quintet, a normally quiet street with a girls’ school, but now deserted. The only visible sign of life was the face of a frightened girl at a cellar window.

As the afternoon wore on, Neave began to feel the lack of combat training for battle: his reading of Clausewitz had not prepared him for street fighting. The heat from the sun and blazing buildings produced an unbearable thirst. He longed to get back to the café. He waited for the firing to lift and was about to cross the road when he felt a ‘sharp, bruising pain’ in his left side. He collapsed to the pavement, rifle clattering. A concerned soldier shouted from a window: ‘Are you all right, sir?’ Neave did not reply but pondered uselessly whether it was a sniper or a machine-gun bullet. He realised he could still walk, and, doubled-up, staggered across to the café. His most pressing fear was that the Germans would break through and he would be left behind and taken prisoner. It was a common fear shared by all. British combatants had a confused but horrific picture of the fate of prisoners taken by the Nazis. Death in action they understood but the stories of concentration camps made them fear capture even more. The café proprietor brought him a large measure of cognac, while a medical orderly inspected his wound. Through a half-faint, Neave heard him say: ‘You’re a lucky one, sir. ‘Arf an inch from the ‘eart.’

The orderly and a Frenchman helped him to his feet and began walking him to an aid post where they met a young officer of the 60th in a scout car, Lieutenant Michael Sinclair. Sinclair pointed out an improvised Red Cross ambulance. After an argument about where they should go, the French driver took Neave to the Hôpital Militaire, a former convent in the Rue Leveux, where he was diagnosed as having a ‘penetrating flank wound’ needing an operation. Neave still feared capture and was carried protesting to the operating theatre ‘where grinning French surgeons in white caps, and smoking Gauloises cigarettes, awaited me’. In his recovery ward, Neave could hear the shelling intensifying. The Germans had taken the town hall, which now flew the swastika. Beside him, a mortally wounded young Hurricane pilot begged him to keep talking. He died as dawn broke on 25 May and Neave folded his arms. Shells fell closer and closer, among the mulberry trees in the hospital garden and in the street outside, smashing the hospital windows. With the other wounded, he was taken down to the cellar while the battle raged outside. Two fellow officers of the Searchlights and several gunners were killed. At 2.00 p.m. that day, 25 May, Anthony Eden telegraphed Brigadier Nicholson with the instructions to maintain his defiant stand. On this occasion, there was no mention of ‘Allied solidarity’, the expression which had infuriated Churchill as being entirely the wrong way of motivating British soldiers to fight. This time the appeal was to Empire and regimental loyalty: ‘The eyes of the Empire are on the defence of Calais,’ Eden urged. Nicholson rejected two German proposals of surrender: ‘The answer is no as it is the British army’s duty to fight as well as it is the German’s.’ Deep in his hospital bunker, Neave heard progress of the battle as more wounded were brought in. Calais was on fire. At 9 o’clock that evening, Churchill and Eden came out from dinner and ‘did the deed’, ordering Nicholson to fight to the end. Churchill told his doctor, Lord Moran, ‘I gave that order; it was my decision, althought it sickened me to have to do it. But it was Calais that made the evacuation at Dunkirk.’ For years afterwards, Churchill was unable to speak of Calais without emotion.

As dawn broke on Sunday 26 May, it was plainly only a matter of time before the Germans overran the old town and the port area where British forces were still holding out. The evacuation had been cancelled, though some wounded were still being taken off under heavy shelling by motor torpedo-boat. Stuka raids again hit the hospital. Around Neave men lay badly hurt and blinded. He recollected that the smell of wounds and fear was overpowering. Yet the British laughed and laid bets on when the bombers would reappear. In mid-morning, their position became untenable. A Stuka’s bomb fell by the main doors of the hospital, blowing them in and showering debris on the wounded. Terrified that the next direct hit would bury them all alive, Neave decided to make a break for it. He could walk, with difficulty, and if he could reach the Gare Maritime he might be among the wounded being taken off. With the admonition of the French medical officer ringing in his ears, Neave and a corporal who volunteered to go with him crawled out beneath the great double doors into the burning streets. He had no idea how badly the situation in Calais had deteriorated. Whole streets were ablaze as they made their halting way northwards to the harbour station. Neave was doubled up with the pain of his wound and his companion limped badly. Thick smoke choked them both. At the junction with the Boulevard des Alliés, they turned east and continued through eerily silent Calais-Nord. Suddenly, shells burst around the pair as they passed the Courgain. Neave was not hit but the corporal ‘vanished in the blinding flash and dust’. Falling to the ground, Neave crawled to the side of the street. From a cellar window, an old Frenchman offered him a bottle of cognac. He drank, and lurched on alone to the lighthouse where he encountered troops of the Queen Victoria’s Rifles in front of the station, staring down their guns as he struggled to join their ranks. An officer barked at him to hurry up and listened in disbelief to his extraordinary story. Calais had been expertly infiltrated by German fifth columnists and the QVR were taking no chances. Neave’s identity card was carefully scrutinised as yet more cognac was dispensed. He looked round at scenes of devastation. Amid the debris lay the bodies of dead British soldiers. He was hurried to the first aid station below the Gare Maritime, where more wounded lay. Soon after, intense shelling forced them to find deeper cover in a tunnel under the port’s Bastion 1.

After the Stuka and artillery bombardment of the morning of 26 May, it was only a matter of time before the Germans took Calais. Guderian arrived in person to direct the attack, and street by street British forces were pushed back into an enclave around the port. The Citadel fell at 4.30 in the afternoon, and the commanding officer, Brigadier Nicholson, was taken prisoner. He did not surrender his forces, however. In fact, the garrison never surrendered. Split into small groups, the men were hunted down piecemeal and killed or captured when their ammunition ran out. The Gare Maritime was evacuated, soldiers taking refuge in the dunes. Some remained on top of Bastion 1, above Neave, firing on the Germans, but their position was untenable and they surrendered. Lying in one of the underground rooms, Neave could hear the hoarse shouts of German under-officers and the noise of rifles being flung to the floor of the tunnel. Through the doorway came the enemy, field-grey figures waving revolvers. A huge man in German uniform wearing a Red Cross armband put him gently on a stretcher. He was a prisoner of war. It was a sad ending to a desperately fought battle.

Outside the bastion, British troops were ordered to scatter and try to escape in small parties, an instruction interpreted as ‘every man for himself’. Just before 8.00 that evening, Eden messaged his officer commanding: ‘Am filled with admiration for your magnificent fight which is worthy of the highest tradition of the British army.’ The message never arrived. By then Nicholson was a prisoner and the gallant stand of his men was over. Less than three hours later, troops of the BEF began disembarking at Dover from the beaches of Dunkirk.

The wisdom of the decision to hold Calais to the last man has been hotly debated for sixty years. Neave, who endured the entire bloody nightmare (and whose courage earned him a Military Cross), was naturally partisan, and devoted his most polemical book to the issue. The stand at Calais against impossible odds can be compared with other actions in the history of war, he argues. ‘All through the episode there runs a thread of poor intelligence and indecision.’ Reinforcements were landed too late to do little more than block the town entrances. Tanks were deployed, but not in numbers to hold back the Blitzkrieg. Neave blames those who failed to supply the War Office with up-to-date information on Guderian’s dash for the coast, during which he was pursued and bombed by the RAF. ‘Coordination of intelligence with the RAF had evidently a long way to go,’ he remarked tersely.

Neave also complained of an air of defeatism in the War Office, whose top echelons had evidently decided that most of the BEF had already been lost and troops were needed much more urgently for the Home Front than in the defence of Calais. The fault for the loss of Nicholson’s brigade, he insisted, lay with ‘higher authority’, the General Staff which was obsessed with getting the BEF back to Britain and had no plan for Calais. ‘Indeed, it was not clear who was in charge of the operation.’ In addition, few commanders ‘since the days of Balaclava’ had issued such suicidal orders as Lieutenant-General Sir Douglas Brownrigg, Adjutant-General of the BEF, who had ordered tanks to attack Boulogne when it had already been lost. Given Neave’s ancestry perhaps the reference to Balaclava was not the most appropriate.

Churchill was in no doubt that the last stand at Calais was vital for the success of Operation Dynamo which allowed the British army to fight another day. In the British press the defenders were lionised as heroes. Writing in The Times, Eric Linklater argued that the death struggle waged over four days halted panzer troops who would otherwise have cut off the retreating BEF: ‘The scythe-like sweep of the German divisions stopped with a jerk at Calais,’ he wrote. ‘The tip of the scythe had met a stone.’ Guderian himself and the respected historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart disagree with this poetic verdict. In his war diaries, the German general insisted that the heroic defence of Calais, while worthy of the highest praise, had ‘no influence’ on the development of events at Dunkirk and did not delay his advance. Neave is withering on this point. ‘One thing is indisputable, the Tenth Panzer Division was delayed at Calais for four days and not by Hitler,’ he wrote.7 Guderian, he claimed, was covering up for his failure to take the port earlier, as he had planned.

Liddell Hart argued, somewhat patronisingly, that Churchill was obliged to justify his decision to sacrifice the Calais garrison, but questioned whether it had the outcome asserted by the wartime premier. The panzer division that attacked the port was only one of seven in the area and had been deployed ‘because it had nothing else to do’. The gallant stand was nothing more than ‘a useless sacrifice’, Liddell Hart maintained. Neave was plainly infuriated by this view. He contended: ‘There was nothing useless about the stand at Calais. It hampered Guderian during crucial hours, especially on 23 and 24 May, when there was little to prevent his taking Dunkirk. It formed part of the series of events, some foolish, some glorious, which saved the BEF.’8 Glover suggests that the truth lies somewhere in between these two extremes, though strangely he finds it ‘irrelevant’. Nicholson’s brigade had to be sacrificed as a gesture to shore up the crumbling Anglo-French Alliance, even though it was already doomed. ‘At least it made an epic for Britain at a time when all was defeat and withdrawal,’ he writes condescendingly.9

At the time, however, the military merits of the battle for Calais were far from Neave’s mind. He was about to experience at first hand what he and his men had most feared: Nazi incarceration. He nearly did not make it. On the morning of 27 May, after surviving another night in the bastion tunnel, he was taken by ambulance into the centre of Calais. En route, the vehicle was rocked by a burst of shellfire that forced the crew to take cover. Ironically, this was offshore ‘friendly fire’, from the cruisers Arethusa and Galatea, bombarding the investing German forces. The ambulance restarted and he was dumped on a slab in the covered market of Calais-St Pierre as if he was a piece of meat. In this makeshift field hospital, his imprisonment began.

4 Capture

Neave hated being taken prisoner, at the age of twenty-four, at the very start of the war. It was not just fear of the unknown. German front-line troops, soldiers like himself, had behaved well towards the wounded but it was the Nazis he dreaded. Furthermore, there was a psychological dimension to his capture. A prisoner of war, he discovered, suffers a double tragedy. Most obviously, he loses his freedom. Then, since he has not committed a crime, his spirit is scarred with a sense of injustice. Neave articulated this resentment as a bitterness of soul that clouded the life even of strong men. ‘The prisoner is to himself an object of pity,’ he argued. ‘He feels he is forgotten by those who flung him, so he thinks, into an unequal contest. He broods over the causes of his capture …’1

Despite his wound, Neave determined not to fall into this psychological trap. Well-versed in the escape stories of the First World War, he quickly set himself to thinking how to avoid being sent to a prison camp deep in the heart of Occupied Europe, where escape would be much more difficult. Though hospitalised, he was still only thirty miles from England, and much of France was still free of Nazis. Flight was not impossible: Gunner Instone, of Neave’s Second Searchlight Battery, was already busy escaping through France and Spain after knocking out two sentries.

His wounds were too serious, however, to attempt an escape from the hospital to which he was moved, unless he had help. Out of the blue, a French soldier, Pierre d’Harcourt, who had evaded capture from his tank regiment by posing as a medical orderly, offered a solution. Neave could abscond from the ward he shared with four other officers by posing as a corpse. Allied prisoners were still dying, and d’Harcourt, a Red Cross volunteer, could smuggle him out of the hospital in an ambulance in place of a deceased officer. It would not be easy. German guards checked the bodies before they were removed for burial in the Citadel, where Nicholson’s men had fought so bravely. Nor do the plotters seem to have given much thought to disposing of the spare corpse. They hatched extravagant plans to steal a boat and flee across the Channel, but before their ideas could be translated into action d’Harcourt heard that the prisoners were to be evacuated further inland to Lille in late July. The plot had to be abandoned. Nonetheless, Neave found the experience of escape planning very good for morale. It occupied his fertile brain and gave him hope. The elusive d’Harcourt vanished to Paris, where he was active in the first escape lines for Allied prisoners through Unoccupied France before being captured. He spent four years in the notorious Fresnes prison and Buchenwald concentration camp before being liberated, half-dead, in 1945.