6
If Neave was expecting a hero’s welcome, he was soon disappointed. On arrival in London, he was subjected to a further interrogation by MI9 at an office in the Great Central Hotel in Marylebone. He remembered the dull and solid pile from his undergraduate days as a place to repair to after a night on the tiles, for a drink or a bath before taking the milk train back to Oxford. He was questioned by an earnest Intelligence Corps captain who recorded his experiences in War Office officialese. When he had finished, he showed Neave the result. The account was ‘far less exciting than a report by the CID on their observation of a public convenience’.1 To have his adventures reduced to a drab recitation of dates and places was annoying. He might not have been on the receiving end of a Gestapo rubber truncheon, but there was nothing in the testimony that could convey ‘the sheer terror of being in their hands’. He pretended not to care. He was ‘young and lucky’ and alive.
He was impatient to visit his family, now at Mill Green Park, Ingatestone, Essex, which Sheffield had inherited in 1936 on the death of his father. This was more of a duty than a pleasure. He wanted ‘to get the homecoming over and done with and then get back to London to make up for time lost’. As well as the fun to be had, he had promised some of his old Colditz comrades that he would call on their families with their news. But first, he was told, he could not leave before he had spoken to someone who was waiting for him downstairs. On his way to the rendezvous he ran into Hugh Woollatt.2 It was their last meeting. Woollatt was killed in Normandy in 1944.
The man waiting for him in the lobby was Jimmy Langley, who he had last seen in prison hospital in Lille. Neave knew nothing about his escape. Now here he was, neatly turned out in his Coldstream uniform, with one empty sleeve pinned to the tunic. Pleasure at the encounter was tempered by the news that he had been summoned to lunch with ‘someone important’. Neave brightened up when he heard that the VIP was Langley’s chief at MI9, Brigadier Norman Crockatt. He remembered his encounter back in Berne with Cartwright and the attaché’s cryptic remark that MI9 ‘wanted me back’. He ‘began to feel interested’. Lunch was in the masculine comfort of Rules in Covent Garden. After Neave had recounted a few stories of POW life, Crockatt came to the point. He outlined the work MI9 was doing. The escape-and-evasion picture was changing. Until the end of 1941, most evaders were still soldiers stranded after the fall of France. Since then, the tempo of the air war had picked up and the main task now was to recover aircrew who had been shot down. With the American Air Force about to go into action over Europe, the numbers would only go up. These men were highly and expensively trained warriors, whose return to action would advance the struggle.
To sustain the escape lines on the ground, the organisation had begun to train its own agents and to establish new routes to Spain. Crockatt mentioned the problems facing the Pat Line as a result of Cole’s treachery. The Gestapo were on to it and it was not expected to last much longer. The men and women in the field needed money and communications. If Neave wanted to help them, Crockatt was offering him a berth working with Langley in MI9’s secret escape section. Neave agreed immediately, telling him that ‘it’s the one job I should like to do. I have become used to the atmosphere of escape, and I would do anything to help the people over there.’3
This was a big decision to take without any time for reflection. Yet Neave never seems to have reconsidered his choice. From an early age he had been attracted to the idea of soldiering, joining the Territorials when uniforms were at their most unfashionable. Things had not turned out as he would have hoped. The one thing he had proved good at was escaping. He had the temperament for it. And undoubtedly he wanted to do what he could to repay those who had sacrificed their lives and liberty to help him get back home. But this was still a big step. By accepting Crockatt’s offer, he was turning away from the sharp end of warfare and accepting what was probably going to be a largely desk-bound role. Hugh Woollatt was returning to his regiment, taking his place in the line again. Jimmy Langley would perhaps have preferred to do likewise, but he was minus an arm. Joining MI9 meant saying goodbye to Neave’s dreams of martial glory. It was an understandable decision, but still a surprising one.
Why had Crockatt wanted him? In Neave’s account, after accepting the offer he went on to say, ‘I am very pleased, sir, that you think I am suitable.’ Crockatt had replied sharply, ‘Don’t be modest. You are one of the very few who has had such experience – not only of escape from Germany but of the Resistance as well.’ This was partly true. There were not many escapers at this point, but plenty of evaders who had made it back and knew far more about the workings of the Belgian and French resistance groups than Neave. And, if being an escaper was an important qualification, why choose Neave and not, say, Woollatt, who had also pulled off a dramatic home run? Espionage in Britain was often a family affair. Jimmy Langley’s father had been in the secret service. The intelligence community preferred to recruit from among those they knew and felt comfortable with. If Neave had any family connections, he was too discreet to say so. The die was cast. Crockatt told Neave he would be assigned to the department called IS 9(d), based at Room 900 in the War Office in Whitehall, working alongside Langley. The ‘IS’ stood for Intelligence School, a meaningless designation at this point. Here Neave’s example will be followed and the outfit will be known simply as ‘Room 900’. His broad job description was to ‘look after secret communications with occupied Europe and training of agents’. The post came with a promotion. He would start as a captain. It was all very gratifying. He left Rules savouring the prospect of ‘another great adventure’.
But before that there was a fortnight’s leave to enjoy. His father came to meet him at Ingatestone station. Neave ‘walked up to him and we said nothing for a moment. It was not a time for words.’4 The companionship recorded in the Eton diaries seems to have stiffened into something cool and formal. He had written to his parents several months after his capture, complaining about a bureaucratic glitch which had prevented him from being promoted to full lieutenant, something he was entitled to as a result of his TA service. His mother had taken up the cause vigorously, bombarding the authorities with letters, and Sheffield Neave had supported the campaign loyally. Nonetheless, the family maintain that for most of his life, relations between father and son were distant, if not hostile. One cause of the estrangement, they say, was his father’s treatment of his mother. Dorothy suffered bad health and had been desperately ill while he was a POW. She had rallied a little just before his return but would die ten months later. How Sheffield Neave dealt with the situation is not documented. However, the family say he was not a faithful husband and that at this time he had already taken up with his assistant, Mary Hodges, who he married in 1946.
Back in the family home, Neave looked out at the meadows beyond the walls of the house, bathed in moonlight. ‘There was not a sentry box in sight, no wire, no glint of steel. And yet they were with me always.’ Each night, when he heard the chimes of Big Ben before the BBC news, he ‘wondered what was happening in the camp’. He was home but his mood was melancholy, and the experience of incarceration had left him with a ‘sense of persecution’. It was a natural response, a mild form of survivor guilt, and like any decent person who has been blessed by a deliverance, he could not help thinking about the plight of those left behind and the perils facing those who had helped him on his way.
With the new job, he could start to repay the debt. The pleasures of wartime London helped him recover his spirits. Jimmy Langley had been given a flat at 5 St James’s Street, an elegant stucco-fronted building with tall sash windows next door to the wine merchants Berry Bros and Rudd, and he took rooms nearby: ‘a flat … fit for Bertie Wooster with twentyish furniture’.5 He spent freely on cigars, tobacco for his pipe and stylish shirts. He was a military man about town with a hush-hush job who, after many setbacks, was having a good war, as the MC – for which he was gazetted as soon as he completed his ‘home run’ – attested.
Yet he still functioned inside a faint fog of depression. He was out and about at the cocktail parties that abounded in wartime London, but he found that the ‘heartless chatter … became difficult to endure’.6 Neave makes no mention of any women in his life prior to this time. However, his later diaries do reveal the existence of a pre-war girlfriend. On a trip to Geneva in October 1973, he had dinner with the UK’s permanent representative to the UN there, Sir David ‘Toby’ Hildyard (an Eton contemporary), and his wife, ‘my old girlfriend Millicent Baron’.7 The Barons were Jewish, wealthy and well connected, and friends with the Rufus-Isaacs. It is probable that Airey had met Millicent through his friend Michael Isaacs. She was quite a catch. According to her daughter, ‘My mother could have had the pick of the young men about town looking for an heiress to pay off death duties.’8 Millicent ended up marrying Dickie Longmore, son of a senior RAF officer. Dickie, having followed his father into the service, was killed in action in 1943 while attacking a U-boat.
Despite the lively London social scene, Neave was lonely and often in low spirits and perhaps therefore particularly susceptible to falling in love. There is no doubt, though, that when it happened, it was the real thing. Neave’s marriage was more than an emotional fusion. It was an alliance, a partnership that would sustain him until his dying day. The romance began at one of the unendurable cocktail parties. It was a July evening and he was ‘standing in a corner talking to a red-haired girl, and laughed with her at simple things. I found in her the confidence I needed. The veil of depression was lifted – for the first time since I was a prisoner I was gay again.’ They were ‘soon in love’. According to William Neave, they met only three times before Airey proposed and Diana accepted. On 29 December 1942, they were married by the Bishop of Lichfield in St Mary the Virgin and St Chad’s, next to the bride’s family estate in Staffordshire. It seemed then that everything that had happened to him – his escape, his return and his marriage – was ordained by God, for as the bishop gave his blessing, ‘the sun came suddenly out of the clouds [and] its rays shone on the spot where we were standing in the chancel.’9
The red-haired girl was Diana Giffard. She was slim, lively and intelligent, with striking green eyes. She was three and a half years younger than him – just right – and her background fitted well with his own. She was the daughter of Thomas Giffard, who had married Angela Trollope, a kinswoman of the great Victorian novelist. The Giffards had been in Staffordshire since the Norman conquest. They lived at Chillington Hall, whose park had been landscaped by ‘Capability’ Brown. There was even a romantic link to Neave’s own recent history. The family had given shelter to one of the most celebrated evaders of British history, Charles II. To complete the perfection of the match, Diana was in the same line of business as himself. She had started her war work as a nurse at an RAF hospital, but had soon been approached by the Foreign Office and entered the intelligence world, working as a liaison officer with the Polish government-in-exile in London.10
The move may have been the result of a family connection. Diana’s aunt Sylvia Trollope worked for the intelligence services. According to Marigold Neave, she spent part of the war in Cairo doing ‘something hush-hush’.11 After their marriage, Sylvia arranged for the couple to take over her maisonette above a bakery at 39 Elizabeth Street, near Victoria Station. Agents would spend their last evening in friendly territory there, having a meal and a drink before being parachuted into occupied Europe. Others would celebrate their at least temporary deliverance, having been brought back from London when things got too hot, for a respite and to be debriefed
Diana and Airey started life together as equals, respecting each other’s qualities and abilities. Henceforth they would be a team. Their secret occupations created a certain awkwardness at home and the normal chit-chat about events in the office at the end of the day was somewhat circumscribed. Neave used to like recounting how, shortly after his marriage, he ran into his new wife in a Whitehall corridor that was restricted to those with high security clearances. There followed ‘one of those ludicrous “What are you doing here?” confrontations’.12 There were less amusing manifestations. The family tell a story of how both returned home at the end of a difficult day in a deep depression, each having lost an agent to the Germans. Only much later did they discover that it was the same one. According to Hugh Tilney, a family friend, Diana’s intelligence background ‘gave her the ability – that others didn’t have – to contradict Airey, to debate and often win in discussions with him. She was a big, powerful force for him.’13
On the morning of 26 May 1942, Neave reported for his first day of duty at Room 900. The small team there were involved in the most secret operational aspect of MI9. Much of the parent organisation’s work concerned collecting intelligence about Allied prisoners of war, mostly gleaned from interrogating returnees. This was then used for systematic briefings across the three services on how to avoid capture, or else how to escape. The headquarters were in Beaconsfield, where from 1942 the staff worked harmoniously enough with their American counterparts, MIS-X.
Neave was alongside Langley at the sharp end of the operation, nurturing the networks through which escapers and evaders could get to freedom and back into the fight. Despite what Crockatt had said, he was not directly involved in supporting escape operations. Although Crockatt was Langley’s immediate boss, he also answered to ‘Z’. In the words of Donald Darling, he was ‘very much under the watchful eye of Colonel Dansey’, and made sure his strictures were observed.14 Chief among them was that they were not to get involved in gathering intelligence, let alone in carrying out sabotage operations. That was the province of SOE, new in the game and, according to Langley, ‘not popular’.
Neave arrived at a difficult time. The Pat Line was tottering and new conduits would have to be found. That would require resources, but at this stage escape and evasion was a low priority. The corner of the War Office they occupied proclaimed their status. Before their arrival, it had been used for making the tea. The chances of getting a sympathetic ear when it came to begging flights to drop agents or equipment seemed slight, especially given the competition from other secret intelligence agencies – like SOE – who claimed higher priority.
That first morning Neave was summoned to the presence of MI6’s tricky deputy chief. Claude Dansey made him wait, scratching away with a steel-nibbed pen at some paperwork before breaking the long silence. ‘Many congratulations,’ he said. ‘The best escape – so far.’15 This gladdening opening was soon doused in a shower of cold water. Dansey began to talk of the dangers involved in the operations that Room 900 was running. He cited the precedent of Nurse Edith Cavell, the British nurse who was shot by the Germans in 1915 after being found to have hidden prisoners in her clinic in Brussels and helped them escape to neutral Holland. The implication was that Cavell was also gathering intelligence on behalf of SIS and that, by straying into the business of escape and evasion, she had compromised espionage operations.16 Nurse Cavell was greatly revered in Belgium, as well as Britain, but to Dansey she was the epitome of amateur bungling, and her story not a stirring tale of heroism but a warning of what happened when secret organisations overlapped each other, endangering security and complicating operations. He was determined that the next generation of escape-and-evasion networks would not be allowed to jeopardise grander but unspecified designs.
It seemed that, in any case, Room 900’s operations were unlikely to be on a scale that would cause problems. Dansey talked about training organisers, wireless sets, codes and couriers, but it seemed to Neave that they ‘would not be allowed many of them’.17 His first-day enthusiasm evaporated. The War Office seemed just as crazy as Colditz, though somehow less human. There was one last matter to address before lunch. He would need a code name and Langley asked him to pick one. On learning that Darling was ‘Sunday’ and Creswell in Madrid ‘Monday’, he decided to follow suit. Henceforth ‘Saturday’ would hide the identity of Captain Airey Neave.
Neave maintained that he and Langley were essentially a two-man band, though the IS9 files at the National Archives show another officer, Major Page, playing a large part in the management of Room 900. This reticence may be due to the fact that Page was attached to MI6 and when Neave wrote his post-war accounts he omitted the name for security reasons. At the Rules lunch, Langley had already given him the outlines of his specific brief. It was to build up an organisation in Belgium and Holland ‘in case anything happens to Dédée’.18 The obvious next question received an intriguing answer. ‘Dédée’ was Andrée de Jongh, a twenty-five-year-old Belgian woman who for the last ten months had been sending British evaders from Belgium, through France and across the Pyrenees. Her name had come up again in the meeting with ‘Z’, who had made it clear that he had doubts about her credentials.
Dédée would have no more passionate a supporter than Airey Neave, and the competition was fierce. Michael Creswell, the intelligence officer who as ‘Monday’ was MI9’s man in Madrid, was thought to have been in love with her.19 She was idolised by every young airman who struggled behind her up the rocky paths of the Pyrenees as she strode indefatigably onwards, chic and trim in her blue sailor’s trousers. Neave reported that when, during interrogation, returnees spoke about her, ‘their eyes filled with tears … she inspired not only respect, but also deep affection.’20 The line she ran became known as ‘Comète’. In his copious writings about her, Neave always credited her with having founded the organisation. Subsequent research has suggested that her father, Frédéric de Jongh, headmaster of a primary school in Brussels, has a better claim to the honour.21 Whatever the precise history, it was her energy and spirit which drove its work along.
When the Phoney War ended in May 1940, Andrée de Jongh was working in Malmedy as a commercial artist with the giant Sofina conglomerate. She answered a call for auxiliary nurses to tend the expected flood of wounded and returned to the family home, at 73 Avenue Émile Verhaeren in Brussels. She nursed wounded soldiers and British prisoners of war and, around February 1941, was recruited into the Belgian underground. In Dédée were combined a strong but gentle manner, astonishing bravery and neat good looks. It was a devastating mix, and in his subsequent telling of the Comète story, Neave gave her star billing, going as far as dedicating a book, Little Cyclone, to her exploits. It was not what she sought or wanted. When the war was over, Dédée slipped gratefully back into obscurity and spent much of the rest of her life nursing in Africa.
As he told it, in late August 1941, she had turned up out of the blue at the British consulate at Bilbao with three men in tow. She explained that one was a British evader from St-Valery-en-Caux and the others were Belgian officers who wanted to join the Allies, and they had just come over the mountains from France. She claimed with the help of friends to have set up a chain of safe houses and couriers who could ferry men from Brussels to the western Pyrenees. She was offering her organisation’s services to the British if they wanted them. All she asked in return was for expenses to be covered. Dédée was told she would have to wait for a response from London. For one thing, the expenses were not negligible. It cost money to transport, feed and shelter ‘parcels’ – as the evaders were referred to – and the Basque guides wanted payment for their services. For another, who exactly was she? Was it possible that she was a German plant? That was certainly Dansey’s first reaction when her arrival was reported to him, and he continued to make ‘dark hints’ about her reliability, until he was eventually silenced by the evidence of her magnificent record.
The Bilbao consulate was behind her from the start, as were Creswell and Darling. On 17 October, Creswell met her in Bilbao, after she had once again crossed the mountains, this time with two Scottish soldiers who had been hiding since escaping while en route to prison in the summer of 1940. He told her that the British government were ‘vitally concerned’ with recovering the crews of aircraft shot down over Holland, Belgium and France. MI9 agreed to pay the costs of getting the men across. Dédée insisted that the money should be a loan that would be repaid when the war was over. It was a way of reinforcing the line’s independence. Darling signalled his approval of the new asset to Dansey in London in a message that also repeated his doubts about Harold Cole. He received a robust reply: ‘Your summing up of the Cole and De Jongh situations is not appreciated and do not write further in this vein.’22 Dédée was initially codenamed ‘Postwoman’, in keeping with the ‘parcel’ delivery service she operated. According to a note in the MI9 files, she rejected this, as she ‘wished to be known as if she were a man’ and it was duly changed to ‘Postman’.23 Some time later in 1942, the line would become semi-officially known as ‘Comète’, Comet in English, though who named it so and why is unknown.
By the time Neave took over responsibility for Dédée and Comet, its modus operandi was established. The line passed from Brussels to Paris, then to Bayonne and St-Jean-de-Luz, in the Spanish frontier sector of the Occupied Zone. The evaders – by now mostly airmen – were escorted by young men and women couriers. At each stop-over they were sheltered in safe houses by quiet patriots whose commitment carried appalling risks. The chances of detection while travelling were high. The sight of well-nourished, fit young males in civilian dress was unusual in the middle of a total war, and few of the evaders had the language skills to sustain a cover story if they were challenged. Nonetheless, at the outset, Comet produced remarkable results. In the first three months that Neave was at MI9, Dédée and her Basque guide, a tall and immensely strong forty-four-year-old called Florentino Goïcoechea, escorted fifty-four men over the Pyrenees. They made for Bilbao or San Sebastián, where the consul would send a message to Creswell in Madrid. He then drove two hundred miles to meet her. Every week, he sent a report to Neave about Comet’s activities.
Neave was fortunate to be working with two consummate professionals. Like Darling, Creswell was an intelligence officer who dipped in and out of diplomatic posts to cover his activities. He was warm, adventurous and a brilliant linguist. His family had been linked to Gibraltar for generations and he spoke flawless Spanish and French, as well as German. He knew the enemy well, having served in the Berlin embassy in the years before the war and got close to the Nazi hierarchy, shooting game in the mountains with Goering. He was an amateur aviator who flew several times over the Pyrenees and loved motor cars, thinking nothing of driving from London to Gibraltar on a whim.24 His buccaneering approach was matched by a fine understanding of the game in play. For all her spirit and energy, Dédée would need every bit of help she could get.
The initial chaos following the fall of France offered multiple opportunities for British servicemen to evade or escape, and the risks for those who helped them were relatively small. By the end of 1940, German control had tightened over Belgium and occupied France and the Reich’s multiple security organisations were active and efficient. Even as Dédée was making contact with the British in Bilbao, the Gestapo were knocking on the door of her father’s house in Brussels asking questions about her. Three months later, in February 1942, it was the turn of the secret police of the Luftwaffe, who had a direct interest in shutting down an organisation that existed to ferry shot-down airmen back to their squadrons. Unable to lay hands on Dédée, they arrested her elder sister, Suzanne Wittek. Frédéric was away, just across the French border in Valenciennes, organising couriers. It was clear that Brussels was now too hot for either of them, and from then on father and daughter would operate from Paris.
The new chief in Brussels was Baron Jean Greindl, who belonged to a wealthy family that had made its money in the Congo. He was now a director of a Swedish Red Cross canteen in Brussels that fed and clothed the city’s poor children, and provided a useful cover for Comet’s activities. By summer 1942, the majority of its clients were airmen, mostly British but later with a heavy addition of Americans. The destruction of German cities was hotting up under the direction of Air Marshal Arthur Harris, and Bomber Command’s losses were mounting. A surprising number of aircrew were able to struggle free from their stricken machines, brought down by flak and night-fighters as they came and went from their targets. In Holland and Belgium, many found refuge among country dwellers, who passed them on to local resistance networks, to be taken to Brussels and fed into the Comet line.
From there, small groups of three or four were taken by train to Paris, where Dédée and her team took over. She was helped by Jean-François Nothomb, another young Belgian, and Jeanine de Greef, whose mother Elvire was the linchpin of the operation in the south-west. Madame de Greef, also Belgian, was as remarkable in her way as Dédée. She was small and endlessly resourceful, hard-wired to resist fear and gifted with an uncanny ability to bluff. She and her husband, Fernand, had left Belgium after the German invasion, ending up in the town of Anglet, in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department, ten miles from the Spanish border. Fernand was employed as an interpreter at the local German administrative headquarters and was well placed to gather information and documentation. They were helped by an Englishman, Albert Johnson, who had worked as a chauffeur in Brussels before the war and somehow ended up joining the de Greefs’ circle at Anglet.
The Paris trio would escort their charges on the overnight train to Bayonne. From there they were in the hands of ‘Tante Go’, as Madame de Greef was known, who directed them to a safe house on the border, ready for the crossing. The psychological stress of the journey was now replaced by the physical ordeal of the climb. Neave painted a picture of how at nightfall they would set out from some remote farmhouse, led by Florentino Goïcoechea, a man of the mountains who, sustained by frequent pulls on a bottle of cognac, powered up the rocky tracks, deaf to entreaties to slow down. Further impetus was provided by Dédée, who, as the vice consul at Bilbao, Arthur Dean, described in a report to London, ‘with her own haversack on her shoulders, literally drives the men through the eight hour struggle’.25
It was hard enough in summer, when the unavoidable barrier of the Bidassoa river was on its ribs, but in winter the journey was potentially lethal. The river became a frothing torrent and one Belgian courier, Count Antoine d’Ursel, Jean Greindl’s successor in Brussels, was swept to his death in December 1943.
Neave’s devotion to Dédée is not hard to understand. Who could not be moved by her character and qualities? In some ways they were an exalted manifestation of those that he would admire in Margaret Thatcher. Certainly, Dédée’s example persuaded him that women were at least as valuable as men in the work of Room 900. In January 1944, when he was finding it difficult to identify candidates with the strength of character and qualities needed to operate as IS9 agents behind enemy lines, he contacted his colleague in the London-based Belgian Security Service, Captain Delloye, with a suggestion. ‘It seems to me that we can make use of the opposite sex,’ he wrote. ‘Women make good guides.’26 Soon women were being trained in parachuting, coding and all the other arts of the trade to the satisfaction of their male supervisors. ‘She is in my opinion a very good type of guide and will be very useful as such,’ was the verdict on one trainee. There was no one, though, to touch Dédée in Neave’s esteem. She was a pioneer who had begun her adult life making her way in the very male world of Belgium’s biggest business enterprise. She was quick-thinking, arriving at decisions and acting on them in a way that contrasted completely with the dithering female of stereotype. But for all that, she remained very much a woman.
Comet’s successes brightened the summer of 1942. They were reinforced by some coups pulled off by the Pat Line. At the April 1942 meeting in Gibraltar between O’Leary, Darling and Langley, it had been agreed to try a more direct method of exfiltrating servicemen from the south than the arduous mountain route. Between July and October, O’Leary’s team pulled off three well-executed seaborne operations. By now the escape line’s activities had caught the attention of the Air Ministry, who began requesting help to get specific airmen back into the fray. The first concerned an RAF celebrity, Whitney Straight, an American by birth and a Grand Prix racing driver before the war, who flew fighters in the Battle of Britain. After being shot down near Le Havre on 31 July 1941, he made his way south but was captured within sight of the Spanish frontier. He gave a false name and claimed to be a soldier. According to Neave, ‘Had his true identity become known, the chances of getting him back would have been remote.’27 Room 900 was under pressure from the Air Ministry for action and in June O’Leary engineered his delivery, along with another thirty-four airmen, to a beach where a British trawler was waiting to take them to Gibraltar. There was another sea evacuation in September following a mass breakout from the internment camp at Fort de la Revère, near Nice, and one more a month later.
Though there was much good news that summer to boost the standing of Room 900, the winter brought a crop of disasters. In November, a concerted attack by German intelligence on the escape networks began. On the 18th, a trusted courier turned up at the home of the Maréchal family in Brussels with two men in civilian clothes, who he introduced as American airmen. Georges Maréchal, his English wife, Elsie, and their daughter, also Elsie, were all Comet members and had given shelter to fourteen Allied airmen.28 Though the guide did not know it, the ‘airmen’ were Abwehr agents. The Maréchals were arrested and, according to Neave, ended up in the hands of the Gestapo. The ‘bastards beat eighteen-year-old Elsie until she was covered in bruises’.29 In two days, nearly a hundred people connected to Comet were in German hands.
The line was hopelessly compromised. In early January 1943, after her twenty-fourth trip from Paris to Bilbao, Dédée returned to Paris, where she persuaded her father that it was time to leave the country. They set off for Bayonne on the 13th, with two other helpers and three RAF aircrew. The Bidassoa was in flood and it was decided it would be too dangerous for Frédéric de Jongh to make the crossing. He was to stay with ‘Tante Go’ in her villa in Anglet and Dédée would return for him after delivering the airmen. The party struggled through a torrent of mud, up a stony track, to a remote house in the mountains near the village of Urrugne. It was the farm of Françoise Usandizaga, who lived there with her three children and had often fed and sheltered Dédée’s parties before they began the trek across the frontier. Even Florentino felt the night was too wild to make an attempt. He left for his home, saying they would try again tomorrow. At noon on 15 January, according to Neave, they heard the sound of a car grinding up the track. Minutes later, German police were at the door.30 Dédée, Françoise and the airmen were arrested. The evaders were taken off to a series of prisons, where they were subjected to brutal Gestapo interrogations. Françoise ended up in Ravensbrück, where she died on 12 April 1945. After a long calvary, Dédée spent the remainder of the war in Ravensbrück and Mauthausen, but survived. Her father returned to Paris, where he was betrayed in June 1943 and executed with two other resisters on 28 March 1944.
Despite these blows, Comet staggered on. Within a fortnight of Dédée’s departure, Johnson and Nothomb led another party over the Pyrenees. On the same day, far away in Brussels, Jean Greindl was arrested, tortured and sentenced to death. An accident of war pre-empted the execution when he was killed in an American bombing raid on Brussels-Evere aerodrome seven months later.
The Pat Line was collapsing too. In February 1943, Louis Nouveau was picked up, betrayed by French Gestapo agent Roger le Neveu, who passed himself off as a patriot. The number of his victims is unknown. His biggest scalp was Pat O’Leary himself, arrested in Toulouse on 2 March. Despite passing through the horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau, both Nouveau and O’Leary survived the war. Hundreds of others did not.
For all that the escape lines suffered that winter, the damage done to SOE by German counter-intelligence operations was even worse. In June 1942, the Abwehr captured an SOE agent equipped with a radio transmitter. Armed with the correct codes, they conducted a long dialogue with the unsuspecting organisation in London, in an exercise known as Operation North Pole. More than fifty Dutch agents were parachuted into Holland and into the arms of the waiting Germans. Forty-seven of them are thought to have been killed.
The men and women who operated the Pat and Comet lines suffered greatly for their heroism. From the outset, it was known that there would be no mercy from the Germans and even a spontaneous act of humanity towards their enemies could bring death. The MI9 files are full of grim messages that filtered back concerning the fate of humble helpers. Neither age nor sex gave any protection. ‘Emile Fraipont, Celeste Fraipont and Lucie Vis, all from Liège, were condemned to death for having given hospitality to a British airman whose aircraft was shot down on Belgian soil,’ reads one report passed on by Belgian security. ‘Emile Fraipont was 70, his wife 68.’31
The resisters were fighting an unequal struggle and it was inevitable that what successes they had should come at a high price. They were facing an enemy that was lavishly funded and resourced and intelligently directed, and which acknowledged no constraints on its behaviour. The German secret and police services were clever and manipulative, operating from a standpoint of utter misanthropy and cynicism. They could draw on the scum of the countries they conquered – the criminals, misfits and sociopaths for whom German occupation had provided a playground for their malignity. Dédée and O’Leary and the hundreds who helped them understood the need for guile and ruthlessness. But their motives were noble and their functioning depended ultimately on trust and faith in human decency.
There were other factors that handicapped them, some self-inflicted. The Pat Line did not receive a radio and operator to link it to London until April 1942, relying instead on a slow and laborious system of couriers and ‘messages personnels’ broadcast on the BBC. As Neave reflected, had a radio been provided, Cole’s treachery might have been uncovered sooner. Dédée refused a radio operator on principle, fearing that Comet would then come under increasing London control and its independence would be curtailed. Neave did send an agent and transmitter to Belgium in February 1943, but a month later he was found dead in unexplained circumstances.
Despite the dangers, Comet members could show abysmal ignorance of basic security procedures. Their fatal amateurism was revealed in the Maréchal disaster. In Neave’s account, Jean Greindl was alerted by young Elsie Maréchal to the arrival of the suspicious ‘American’ visitors. He told her to return home and ‘stop these men from leaving at all costs. Interrogate them carefully.’32 When she got to the house, the Germans were waiting. Having heard no more, Greindl sent another member of the team, twenty-five-year-old Victor Michiels, with instructions to watch the house but not to approach it unless he was certain there was no danger. He observed the house for half an hour, then knocked on the door, whereupon German Field Police emerged from the shadows. When he ran off, they shot him dead.
The following day, one of the Paris team, Elvire Morelle, arrived by train in Brussels and, having received no warning of the disaster, went straight to the house, where she was arrested and hauled off to the Gestapo.33 The losses angered Neave and Langley’s overlords. Neave claimed that ‘the very existence of Room 900 and its contacts with underground escape lines was threatened.’34 They were ‘subjected to violent criticism of the potential dangers of escape work to military information and sabotage’ – that is, to MI6 and SOE operations. Crockatt, as head of MI9, defended them, arguing that without some degree of direction from London, the dangers to security would be even greater. He also pointed out that despite the casualties the lines had sustained, their efforts had resulted in the return of a large number of airmen to carry on the fight. Crockatt enlisted the help of the Air Ministry to press the point. With this intervention, survival was secured. By May 1943, even Dansey, ‘destructive at first, and determined to put up the shutters at Room 900, was … appeased’.35
Despite Neave’s indignation, the attitude of Dansey and others does not seem entirely unreasonable. Even when hindsight and the harsh demands of warfare are taken into account, some of Room 900’s actions seem misjudged. Neave himself placed inordinate faith in a woman whose behaviour and manner set alarm bells clanging elsewhere. Mary Lindell appealed to his sense of the romantic. She was an Englishwoman in her mid-forties, married to the French Comte de Milleville and living in Paris when the war started. She was arrested by the Gestapo for helping escapers in 1941 and sent into solitary confinement at Fresnes prison, but was later released. In July 1942, she turned up in London, having reached there via Barcelona. She offered her services to Room 900, saying she was prepared to go back to start a new escape line.
To modern ears, Mary Lindell sounds like nothing but trouble. Neave’s first impression of her was of ‘fearlessness, independence and not a little arrogance’.36 To that could be added wilfulness, egomania and obstinacy, and a recklessness that endangered not just herself but others. He noted admiringly that ‘her contempt and disdain for the Germans was enormous.’ But that was surely a serious disadvantage if she was pitting her wits and her life against them.37 Lindell was to be the first woman agent Room 900 specially trained and Neave was put in charge of her. The decision to send her back seems extraordinarily rash. She told Neave that after receiving her nine-month prison sentence from the Germans in late 1940, she told the court martial that this was ‘just sufficient time for me to have a baby with Adolf’.38 After her release, she came to the notice of the German security services, who started hunting her and she was forced to go to ground. Nonetheless, her argument that if she stayed out of Paris she would be relatively safe was accepted. Not everyone was happy about it or her. Neave admitted that ‘she did not endear herself to the Establishment in London by her outspoken behaviour.’ Even he was concerned that her return ‘might endanger her own life and those of others’.39
In the third week of October 1942, she was flown in a black-painted Lysander to a landing site in the countryside near the town of Ussel, sixty miles south-east of Limoges. Neave went with her to Tangmere, the fighter station in Sussex from where operations were launched in full moon periods. She left without a radio operator. She had fallen out with the one she had been assigned, Tom Groome, and remarkably, given how vital wireless communications were to their work, Room 900 had no one else trained and available at the time. It was decided to try and parachute one in later.
She was landed without incident and arrived safely at Ruffec, near Angoulême, from where she was planning to set up a new route to Spain, as there were believed to be a number of stranded Allied airmen in the area. Her efforts to find reliable guides failed. Some time towards the end of the year, she was knocked down by a car while riding a tandem and almost killed. This meant that she was recuperating in Lyons, hundreds of miles away, when her first customers called. On 18 December, two men arrived at Ruffec looking for help. Major Herbert ‘Blondie’ Hasler and Corporal Bill Sparks were survivors of Operation Frankton, an audacious commando raid on shipping at Bordeaux docks. In breach of security procedures, they had been told to head for the town, where they might find friends. By chance they turned up at the Hôtel de la Toque Blanche, a haunt of Mary Lindell’s. She was still recovering from her injuries in Lyons but word reached her of their arrival. Despite her condition, she managed to arrange for her eldest son, Maurice, to escort them to Lyons. She went to see Cartwright in Switzerland to try and arrange for them to be moved there, but this would mean a delay to their return and London wanted the ‘Cockleshell Heroes’ back fast. Eventually, Lindell found a guide to take them to Spain. At the end of March, the pair arrived safely in Madrid, along with two RAF airmen. Her efforts had saved their lives. Under the Hitler ‘commando order’, if caught, they would undoubtedly have been shot like their comrades, six of whom were executed. But it had been more by luck than efficiency, and in November 1943 Lindell was arrested again, ending up in Ravensbrück, with no further successes to record.
Neave maintained that the old guard at MI9 were ‘unfairly critical’ of Mary’s exploits in France, but ‘being young’, he ‘was delighted with her unconventional ways’. They stayed friends in the years after the war.40
Lindell was one of two women agents handled by Neave. The other, Beatrix Terwindt, was a Dutch former KLM air hostess who volunteered for SOE. Room 900 had virtually no presence in Holland, over which Allied bombers were frequently shot down. When Neave came across ‘Trix’, he was impressed by her quiet determination and fluent French and English and decided that she was the ideal recruit to set up an escape line. SOE were willing to let her go, and on the night of 13/14 February 1943, she parachuted straight into the custody of German agents who, thanks to the success of Operation North Pole, knew all about her mission. Once again Neave had gone to see her off, helping her into her parachute harness before she climbed into a Halifax bomber at Tempsford, the special operations base in Bedfordshire. It would have been strange if he had not felt uneasy at the incongruity of a soldier in uniform sending women civilians to a destination that held every prospect of pain and death. There were occasions when the chance arose to share at least some of the perils. It had been suggested that Neave accompany Mary Lindell when she was flown to France, to make sure she was safely delivered. This would have been a breach of the standing rule that staff officers directing secret operations from London and who knew the names of agents should not risk capture by the enemy, but he and Langley did not like the idea of her going unescorted. In the end, the idea came to nothing as SOE decided to send another agent on the same flight and there were only two passenger seats in a Lysander. Years later, Neave wrote that he had ‘no hesitation in recalling my deep sense of relief’ when he heard the news.41
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.