In his later writings, Neave portrayed himself and his companions as odd fish, swimming against a tide of bien pensant leftism and pacifism. My failure to understand the merits of the fashionable intellectual notions of Socialism was regarded as a sign of mental deficiency by the dons, he wrote. The mood of the times was defensive and self-deluding, for This was an Oxford where a few brave spirits still tried to emulate the joyful irresponsibility of the twenties. In the thirties the shadows lengthened and the voice of Adolf Hitler threatened across the waters but it had little effect upon my undergraduate world.37
This outlook was seized on by the Nazis as evidence of terminal decadence among the youth of Britain, who would have no stomach for another big war. It was, of course, a great mistake. Leonard Cheshire, who despite spending the summer of 1936 in Potsdam living with a militaristic family an experience he thoroughly enjoyed took virtually no interest in politics. I dont remember anything about Oswald Mosley and the Blackshirts, he told his biographer Andrew Boyle after the war. Im sure politics meant nothing.38 Yet this seemingly flippant, pleasure-seeking man about town joined the University Air Squadron as the landscape darkened, and went on to be one of the great figures of the British war.
After Neave went down, the young men and women he encountered in London were not very different: Few cared about Hitler and even less about his ambassador von Ribbentrop. Debutantes came out and went their way. It was fashionable to be almost inarticulate on any serious subject.39 Neave enjoyed the defiant sybaritism as much as anyone, but in one respect he was stubbornly himself. At the start of his second year he joined the Territorial Army. In everyone elses view, it was an eccentric thing to do: a sort of archaic sport as ineffective as a game of croquet on a vicarage lawn and far more tiresome.40 In December 1935, the London Gazette announced his elevation from Cadet Lance-Corporal, Eton College Contingent, Junior Division OTC to second lieutenant in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. Neave wrote about his pre-war Territorial experiences in a tone of light satire over which an element of the ludicrous hovers. He described a large-scale exercise played out on the Wiltshire downs one summer: The sun beat down upon my Platoon as we hid from the enemy behind the chalk hills and listened expectantly for the sound of blank cartridges. I lay on my back beside a wooden Lewis gun. God was in his heaven and the crickets chatted merrily in the dry grass.41
The entomologists son picked out a Small Copper, a Fritillary and even a Clouded Yellow. The idyll was shattered by the arrival of a First World War vintage brigadier with eyeglasses that glinted menacingly and a bullying manner, who was refereeing the war games. He began to speak, working himself slowly into a cold, terrifying anger at the conduct of my platoon. A position had been chosen that could be seen for miles around. He had seen the men in the chalk-pit with his own eyes from his imaginary headquarters He declared that he had never seen such ridiculous positions. As for my platoon sergeant in the chalk-pit, his left flank was entirely unprotected Neave got to his feet. There was an imaginary platoon on his left flank, sir, he said boldly. Even in the emptiness of Salisbury Plain, he claimed, you could have heard a pin drop. My Colonel, white in the face, stared at the ground. The Brigadier gulped. The brass hat tried to bluster, but the spell was broken. Congratulations rained on me in the Mess and the old songs were sung far into the night. Neave had triumphed with a classic bit of Eton cheek. It was immensely satisfying, but hardly a preparation for war.
He left Oxford in the summer of 1937 with a gentlemans degree (third class), a result that can have done little for his relationship with his father. In London he joined an old-fashioned firm of City solicitors, where he dressed in bowler hat and dark suit and learned his trade processing the legal leftovers. He was set on being a barrister and obtained a pupillage at chambers in Farrars Building in the Temple. By then his pessimism about the future of Europe was proving all too justified. On 12 March 1938, Hitler ordered the German army into Austria and the following day the country was declared part of the German Reich. Shortly afterwards, Neave transferred out of his Territorial regiment, the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry, and into the 22nd (Essex) Anti-Aircraft Battalion, a unit of the Royal Engineers. The move was presumably because its proximity to London would make it easier to meet his military commitments. At the same time, his interest in politics was growing. He joined the Castlereagh, a dining club which met in St Jamess about once a fortnight while the House was sitting, to hear the candid and off-the-record views of a Tory politician. Michael Isaacs remembered a dinner in July 1939 when the guest of honour was Anthony Eden, who had resigned as Foreign Secretary the previous year over Prime Minister Chamberlains handling of relations with Italy. He had since become a major in the Territorials. He came on after drilling his [men] and spoke eloquently to us about the grim immediate outlook. We all realised that it was only a question of time 42
* Joseph Grimond (191393), educated Eton and Balliol College, Oxford; Liberal MP for Orkney and Shetland, 195083; leader of the Liberal Party, 195667; created Lord Grimond, 1983.
Edward Heath (19162005), educated Chatham House School and Balliol College, Oxford; Conservative MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup, 195083; Leader of the Conservative Party, 196575; Prime Minister, June 1970March 1974.
Hugh Fraser (191884), educated Ampleforth and Balliol College, Oxford; Conservative MP for Stafford and Stone, 194584.
2
Blooded
In May 1940, Airey Neave got his first real taste of war. The experience was bitter and depressing. The defence of Calais repeated some familiar tropes of British military history. It showed the countrys politicians and generals at their worst and the troops they directed at their stoical best. The four days of fighting affected Neave profoundly. Almost everything he worked at thereafter was in some way shaped by what he saw and felt in the ports burning streets and shell-spattered ramparts.
Neave spent the Phoney War in mundane roles that underlined the truth that, much as he exalted the soldiers calling, a lot of military life was simply tedious. By transferring out of the infantry to a Royal Engineers anti-aircraft unit, he had removed the possibility of commanding front-line troops in battle. In the autumn of 1938, at the time of the Munich crisis, for reasons that are unclear, he switched to the Royal Artillery, and was assigned again to an anti-aircraft unit. Instead of firing guns, they operated searchlights. Their job was to dazzle dive-bombers and low-flying aircraft and to illuminate targets for the ack-ack gunners. It was not for this that he had studied Clausewitz. As he admitted ruefully, it was hardly a shining form of warfare.1
2
Blooded
In May 1940, Airey Neave got his first real taste of war. The experience was bitter and depressing. The defence of Calais repeated some familiar tropes of British military history. It showed the countrys politicians and generals at their worst and the troops they directed at their stoical best. The four days of fighting affected Neave profoundly. Almost everything he worked at thereafter was in some way shaped by what he saw and felt in the ports burning streets and shell-spattered ramparts.
Neave spent the Phoney War in mundane roles that underlined the truth that, much as he exalted the soldiers calling, a lot of military life was simply tedious. By transferring out of the infantry to a Royal Engineers anti-aircraft unit, he had removed the possibility of commanding front-line troops in battle. In the autumn of 1938, at the time of the Munich crisis, for reasons that are unclear, he switched to the Royal Artillery, and was assigned again to an anti-aircraft unit. Instead of firing guns, they operated searchlights. Their job was to dazzle dive-bombers and low-flying aircraft and to illuminate targets for the ack-ack gunners. It was not for this that he had studied Clausewitz. As he admitted ruefully, it was hardly a shining form of warfare.1
The first six months of hostilities were spent in a field in Essex preparing for an invasion that never came. After a training stint in Hereford, he set off in February 1940 to Boulogne to join the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), in charge of an advance party. The searchlight men ranked low in military esteem. A remark by a Guards officer that their equipment was quite Christmassy rankled. Yet although he might have preferred a more dashing outfit, Neave liked his comrades, and his accounts of his service with them are affectionate and respectful. By the time he reached Calais he was a troop commander with the 2nd Searchlight Battery of the 1st Searchlight Regiment (RA), in charge of about eighty men. They included a high proportion of older men with First World War experience. Most were industrial workers with a few clerks and professional men All were vocal and democratic.2
They did not see themselves as front-line soldiers, and with good reason. When they arrived in France they were virtually untrained in infantry tactics and were armed with rifles that most of them had never fired. Their other weapons were some old-fashioned Lewis machine guns and a few Bren guns for use against aircraft. As defence against the German armour that spearheaded the Blitzkrieg, they had the Boys anti-tank rifle. It fired slim, .55 calibre rounds at a rate of ten a minute that could penetrate a light tank at 100 yards but were little use against the Panzer IIIs in the divisions bearing down on the BEF. In any case, no one in the unit was qualified to operate it.
Nonetheless, what they lacked in regimental elan they made up in willingness to fight. Again and again in the four days of the siege they showed extraordinary guts. Unlike the previous generation of upper-class British men who had served in the war, Neave and his contemporaries had had few dealings with people outside their social level who were not servants or tradesmen. The army had given him his first intimate exposure to how other Britons thought and behaved. It taught him that patriotism, courage and gallantry were not the preserve of the privileged.
Even after months of anticipation, the end of the Phoney War came as a shock. On 10 May 1940, the German forces that had massed along the borders of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg plunged west. The main thrust came where the least preparation had been made to meet it through the Ardennes. In three days, forces spearheaded by the Panzer divisions of Heinz Guderian cleared the forest and crossed the Meuse. On 13 May, aided by pulverising attacks by the Luftwaffe, they broke the French defences at Sedan. The armoured columns moved at a speed that surprised the Germans themselves, sweeping round behind the Allied armies arrayed around the Belgian border. On 19 May, the three divisions of Guderians XIX Corps were in Amiens, less than fifty miles from the Channel. The following day they reached Abbeville, at the mouth of the Somme, driving home a wedge that divided the Allied armies in the Pas de Calais and Belgium from the French forces to the south.
Utterly sure of his instincts and confident in his tactics, troops and tanks, Guderian was set on a move that, had it succeeded, might have brought Britains war to an end. His goal was the Channel ports, and in particular Dunkirk, which, once taken, would leave the BEF stranded and facing annihilation or surrender. Various factors combined to prevent him from maintaining the headlong pace. Not least was the caution of his superiors at Army High Command HQ, shared by Hitler himself, who feared the speed of the advance would expose XIX Corps to a devastating flank attack.
The Germans need not have worried. The Allied commanders were reluctant to credit the strength and extent of the breakthrough. The eventual move to counter it, a Franco-British drive south into the enemy flank around Arras on 21 May, achieved some initial success before being beaten off. However, it was to have important consequences. The action further reduced the appetite for risk in Berlin. Guderian was ordered to halt, dashing his hopes of a lightning victory.
On the day before the Allied counter-attack, the 2nd Searchlight Battery (2nd SL) was in Arras. That morning they received orders to move to Calais, seventy miles to the north-west. As they left, there was little sense of alarm in the British garrison. They drove off down long straight roads past Vimy Ridge and the flat fields that only twenty-two years before had been a vast killing zone. Neave travelled in the front seat of an old khaki-painted Austin Seven alongside his driver, Gunner Cooper. Cooper was large and eager to see action, frustrated at being diverted away from the defence of Arras to what looked like another spell of tedious duty. Neave was inclined to agree. He had heard that there were Germans around but he and his comrades did not believe that [they] had broken through We were confident that, at most, a few armoured cars, a few motor-cyclists or a few light tanks were threatening the Allied lines of communication.3 In fact, the countryside to the east and west was filling up with Panzers.
They spent the night under the plane trees of the market square in the mediaeval town of Ardres, ten miles south of Calais, and arrived the following morning at their destination, a village called Coulogne on the south-eastern approach to the port. Neave set up his HQ in the Mairie. No bombs fell that night and he wrote later that on going to bed he refused to believe that our role in Calais would be other than anti-aircraft defence. But then he was twenty-four, unmilitary, with opinions of my own.
Neave was being a little hard on himself. He had tried his best at soldiering, the theory as well as the practice. His failure to predict what was about to unfold was unsurprising. He and everyone else deployed in the defence of Calais were the victims of the extraordinary complacency of those in overall charge of operations, an attitude that was matched by an incompetence and vacillation that was surprising even to those familiar with the British militarys capacity for deadly muddle. Years later, he made a detailed study of the episode using official papers and the accounts of participants. There will always be debate about what effect the siege of Calais had on the shape of the Battle of France. What has never been in doubt is that the direction of the defence from on high was a disgrace.