James Langley

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Lieutenant-Colonel James Maydon Langley MBE MC (12 March 1916 – 10 April 1983) was a British Army officer who served in World War II. Born in Wolverhampton, he went to Uppingham School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards in 1936 and mobilised in 1939 with the BEF.

At Dunkirk in 1940 he was seriously wounded and lost his left arm after being captured by the Germans. He escaped from a Lille hospital and reached Marseille, where he worked as a courier for escape lines run by Ian Garrow and Donald Caskie. Repatriated in 1941 after being declared unfit for front-line service, Langley returned to Britain and joined MI6 to liaise with MI9, helping to support escape and evasion networks in German-occupied Europe. MI9 aided thousands of downed airmen and stranded soldiers in returning to the UK.

Langley rose through the ranks and, in 1944, jointly commanded Intelligence School 9 (Western European Area) attached to SHAEF. He was demobilised in 1946 and later remained in the Regular Army Reserve, eventually relinquishing his commission in 1966 with the honorary rank of lieutenant-colonel.

He received the Military Cross in December 1940, was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire in April 1941, and was mentioned in dispatches in August 1945. After the war he worked for the Fisons company and then ran a bookshop in Suffolk with his wife, Peggy van Lier, a Belgian member of the Comet Line; they married in 1944 and had four sons and a daughter. Langley died in 1983 in Suffolk. He was portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in the 2004 BBC series Dunkirk.