The Man Who Was Saturday. Patrick Bishop
[in Moscow], Sir Stafford Cripps.’28 It was a fantastic proposition. It meant a journey, via Warsaw, of 300 miles over heavily occupied territory, with a very uncertain reception at the end of it.
As it turned out, breaking out of Thorn was the relatively easy part. But to succeed he still needed help. There was plenty on hand among the soldiers in the work camp. Their ingenuity and selflessness left a deep impression. Every day a party of about a dozen made the four-mile journey from the compound to the fort to carry out maintenance work. Among them were two men who had belonged to Neave’s battery at Calais. Through the messages that they carried back and forth each day, he was able to establish a team of helpers in the work camp to put the operation into action. He planned a phased departure from Stalag XXa. The idea was that he would slip away during a trip to the dentist and get into the compound. There, protected by the inmates, he would lie low until the hue and cry following the discovery that he was missing had died down. Then he would walk out with one of the work parties and hide at the end of the shift. When the coast was clear, he would strike out eastwards, disguised as a workman – Polish or German, depending on who challenged him.
The scheme was bold and ambitious. It needed considerable organisation, precise timing and significant resources in the form of clothing, food, money and documentation. At least a dozen accomplices were needed for it to work. Protocol required that the Senior British Officer, Brigadier N. F. Somerset, was kept informed as the plan matured. Neave had decided that he did not want to travel alone. He was unable to persuade any of his room-mates, who ‘regarded my plans with friendly derision and few could be found who would even discuss them seriously.’ He asked Somerset if he could suggest a companion – one who, like him, spoke some German. Flying Officer Norman Forbes, a Hurricane pilot with 605 Squadron who had been shot down just south of Calais on 27 May 1940 while Neave was spending his first day in captivity, was an excellent candidate. He was a ‘tall, slender man with fair hair’, quick, determined and shrewd. He had also been brought up a Christian Scientist and ‘had faith in the success of our plan’.
By the second week in April everything was in place. Using barter and persuasion, he had assembled an impressive escape kit. His workman’s coat and painter’s trousers he obtained from a British officer who had ‘decided to abandon escaping to read for a degree in Law’. He was one of many who took advantage of the system, operated under the Red Cross, which offered correspondence courses resulting in valid professional qualifications. Neave procured some reichsmarks by selling Player’s cigarettes (tobacco was usually available to prisoners and a universal currency) to a Polish glazier. Rations in the shape of tinned sardines and condensed milk and chocolate came from the food parcels. All were smuggled out of the fort and down to the work camp.
Why had Neave chosen discomfort and danger over acceptance and making the most of a bad situation? Lying on his bunk bed at night as the hours to the escape bid ticked away, he struggled to explain it to himself. ‘I desired only to be free from the terrible monotony of the fort and once outside under the stars I cared little what happened to me,’ he wrote. ‘I dreamed of nights sheltering in the shade of some romantic forest alone in the world. I felt that once outside the camp I should be happy if I were only free for a while.’
On the morning of 16 April 1941, he and Forbes set off under guard for the dentist’s hut, just outside the British prisoners’ compound, four miles from the fort. Under their overcoats, badges had been removed from their battledress tunics so they could pass as ‘other ranks’. Neave left a detailed description of the events of the morning, embellished with literary touches.29 Looking through the waiting room for his turn in the chair, he could ‘see small groups of British prisoners among the pine trees pushing carts of wood, and from the distance came the strains of “Roll Out the Barrel” as a working party set off into the forest … A light breeze blew among the pines.’ The account was written twelve years after the event and it might be asked how he could remember so much. Some moments in our lives embed themselves in our memories, leaving the indelible trace of a smell, a voice, a colour. For Neave, this was surely one of them. His first escape was a landmark of his existence, the point when he at last seized control of his own destiny, in the process scoring a small but immensely pleasing victory over the enemy.
Everything went swimmingly. After his session in the chair, he made way for Forbes. In the waiting room he told the guard he wanted to use the ‘Abort’ and was allowed to go unescorted to the latrine next door. Inside, he stowed his overcoat and retrieved some lengths of wood hidden in the ceiling by his helpers to be used as props in the next phase of the escape. He was soon joined by Forbes and, at a signal from a sergeant who was keeping watch outside, they stepped out, carrying the timber, ostensibly just two ordinary soldiers engaged in some errand. It was a short walk to the main gate of the compound, where the sentry’s attention was distracted by a corporal detailed to engage him in chat, and they passed through, mingling with the other POWs. At the door of a long hut housing warrant officers, Company Sergeant Major Thornborough of the Green Howards, immaculately turned out in spruce uniform and shining boots, grinned and shook their hands. They were left to rest for a bit until Thornborough returned, telling them there was a sight waiting that was not to be missed.
Picking up brushes and buckets so as to look like orderlies off on a fatigue, they followed him across the parade ground. Their escape had been discovered and the guards were angry and indignant. ‘Around us a crowd of British soldiers were laughing and shouting sallies at the Germans,’ he wrote. ‘Furious Germans stamped around … Down the steps of the Kommandantur [administrative headquarters] came agitated German officers gesticulating at the crestfallen sentries.’ They were joined by Field Police with dogs, who set off on the hunt in the opposite direction to where their quarry had gone to earth. The satisfaction was enormous. For the first time since the start of the war, Neave had put one over on the Germans. They spent the next three days hidden in the warrant officers’ hut. There was one scare when they had to hide under their cots while the Germans conducted a search. Neave wondered why they now suspected they might still be in the camp. Thornborough had warned him there were ‘one or two stool pigeons in the camp’. It was an early lesson that in the escape business it was wise to say the minimum and trust nobody, a policy that Neave’s critics would later say he followed closely in his political life.
At six o’clock on the morning of 19 April, after a cup of ersatz coffee, he and Forbes left the camp in the middle of a party of 150 men. They spent the day at a farm, where they were put to work in a barn stuffing mattress covers with straw. During the afternoon, on a signal that the coast was clear, they climbed into the loft and burrowed into the hay. Earlier, their helpers had smuggled in two extra men on the ration lorry. When the guards counted the work party out they matched the number who had marched in. It was the final touch in a superb performance by the NCOs and men, and Neave never forgot these ‘staunch and kindly people’. They ‘ran greater risks of punishment than we did, but not one spoke of the consequences … During my stay there had been no feeling of class or rank among us, only a mutual desire to defy the Germans.’
When night fell, they climbed down from the hayloft and went to the back door of the barn, where one of the helpers had loosened the wire holding it shut. They stepped out into the starlit night and, for the first time in two years, breathed the air as free men. For the next four days, dressed in their rough clothes, they trudged eastwards. Since devising his original plan, he and Forbes had hatched an alternative. There was a German aerodrome at Graudenz, north of Warsaw. The Poles in the camp had provided enough information about it to sketch a map. Forbes was a pilot. Perhaps they could steal an aeroplane and fly to neutral Sweden. It had been tried before by two RAF inmates of Thorn, who had got as far as climbing into an aircraft disguised as Luftwaffe aircrew before being rumbled because they could not understand the instructions from the control tower.30
The trek started well, matching the fantasies he had entertained while day-dreaming on his bunk. It was ‘like walking on air’. The language is telling, a further sign of the quasi-mystical importance Neave gave to the act of escaping. Relating the story of this first attempt, he stated that ‘no one who has not known the pain of imprisonment understands the meaning of