LITMIR.BIZ

       Jimmy Langley, who organized covert escape routes for MI9, and later co-authored the definitive history of MI9.

       Jimmy Langley

      Lieutenant Colonel James Maydon Langley (1916–83), called ‘Jimmy’ by friends and colleagues, was born in Wolverhampton, educated at Uppingham and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. As a young subaltern in the 2nd Battalion Coldstream Guards, he was badly injured in the head and arm and left behind at Dunkirk: on a stretcher as he would have taken up space which four fitter men could have occupied. He was taken prisoner, hospitalized in Lille and had his injured left arm amputated by medical staff. He subsequently escaped, in October 1940, by climbing through a hospital window and managed, with a still suppurating wound and with help from French families who befriended him, to reach Marseilles from where he was repatriated, with help, through Spain to London. Langley successfully navigated by using the maps of the various French departments which appeared in every public telephone kiosk in France. The couple of times he travelled in the wrong direction resulted from the maps being oriented in a non-standard fashion, with East at the top. So Langley, too, knew the value of maps as an escape tool.

      He arrived back in the UK in the spring of 1941 and initially joined SIS. He soon transferred to MI9 but remained on the payroll, and therefore technically under the command, of SIS. In practice he became the liaison point between the two organizations and was responsible for the work of the escape lines in northwest Europe. These were the covert routes along which the escapers and evaders travelled on their journey home, being helped by members of the local communities along the way. The network was established by MI9 working from London and also through legation staff and embassy attachés. If discovered by the Germans, as many of the French, Belgian and Dutch nationals were, they were executed or sent to the concentration camps. He remained in post for the duration of the war, and subsequently married Peggy van Lier, a young Belgian woman who had been a guide on the Comet Line (the organized escape route through western France and across the Pyrenees into Spain – see page 148). Over thirty years later, he co-authored with M. R. D. Foot MI9: Escape and Evasion, 1939–1945, which came to be regarded as the definitive history of MI9. He also wrote his own account of his early life, capture, hospitalization and subsequent escape in Fight Another Day, published in 1974.

       Airey Neave

      Of others in Crockatt’s team, perhaps Airey Middleton Sheffield Neave (1916–79) is the most famous. As a young lieutenant, he was a troop commander in the 1st Searchlight Regiment of the Royal Artillery. He was wounded and captured in Calais Hospital in May 1940 as the Germans over-ran northern France. He was held in various oflags and, after a number of unsuccessful escape attempts, he was eventually imprisoned in Oflag IVC, the castle in Saxony more commonly known as Colditz. Working with his Dutch colleague, Toni Luteyn, Neave escaped from Colditz on 5 January 1942, the first British Officer to escape successfully from that infamous camp. After reaching Switzerland, Neave was repatriated through Marseilles and into Spain via the organized escape route known as the Pat Line (see page 148). After a short period of leave, he joined MI9 in May 1942 under the pseudonym (code-name) of Saturday. It is clear that his name had been on an MI9 list of targeted officers who had been specifically helped to escape, and his experience was to prove invaluable. His escape and the extent to which it reflected the value of MI9’s mapping programme are issues considered in detail in Chapter 6. His account, They Have Their Exits (1953), covered his experiences on the frontline, his capture and initial, unsuccessful attempts at escape followed by his escape from Colditz. Neave also wrote about MI9 in Saturday at MI9 (1969), which is discussed in the Bibliography.