Odd this day
Today is the 85th anniversary of the formation of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence Section 9 — or MI9 — so it’s time to celebrate (some of) their secret and frankly preposterous work.
They were “tasked with assisting evaders and escapers”, in the words of the Imperial War Museum. One of the interesting things about that is that not everyone thought they should. As the IWM tells it:
Major Norman Crockatt … very ably ran this new department and the difficult task of negotiating the hidden intelligence world, together with traditional government bureaucracy and personal politicking. The Air Ministry had begun formulating plans to assist downed aircrew shortly after the outbreak of the war, while the War Office opposingly believed that thinking about capture was defeatist, and the Admiralty initially ignored it as a possibility.
Those inside the section were dedicated to their task, though.
‘Escape-mindedness’ was the central philosophy of M.I.9.
Two prominent escapees, James Langley (captured at Dunkirk) and Colditz absconder Airey Neave, ran Room 900 — a network across Europe which helped Allied fighters not to get caught, or not to stay that way if they were. Then there were the people who invented cunning gadgets to help soldiers evade or escape — Christopher Hutton and Charles Fraser-Smith, who really were known as Q.
It’s their work I want to concentrate on, or at least one element of it, because it’s extraordinary. Basically, most of what the fictional ‘Q’ branch in the Bond films created wouldn’t look out of place at MI9. (Apart from that bloody invisible car, maybe.)
There were playing cards you could peel apart to reveal maps; cigars containing maps and compasses; standard cotton handkerchiefs which, when washed with a particular chemical, revealed maps; and there were maps hidden in books. There were compasses hidden in buttons.
MI9 set up fake charities to send these supposedly humanitarian packages to prisoners of war — using these separate organisations, because getting this stuff included in Red Cross parcels would have compromised that organisation’s work, and potentially stopped their essential food supplies getting to POWs. The front organisations had convincing but entirely fictitious London addresses, and names such as
the Prisoners’ Leisure Hours Fund, a “voluntary fund for the purpose of sending comforts, games, books, etc. to British prisoners of war”; the Lancashire Penny Fund and the Licensed Victuallers’ Sports Association, which claimed to be “suppliers of games and bar requisites to hotels, restaurants, sports clubs and licensed premises”.
And these were just a few of the things they offered. There were also pencils, sandals, and gramophone records with maps in, and gold tooth fittings which concealed a compass.
And there really were uniforms which could be reversed to look like a suit.
The California Map Society has a particularly beautiful example of one of their maps:
The thinking behind putting them on silk (or rayon, or tissue) was simple: paper rustles, which can give the game away if you’re hiding. Printing on silk is difficult, though, because the ink tends to run, so Hutton had to invent a new ink containing pectin, which didn’t. (This does, indeed, mean the war effort was helped by stuff normally used to make jam.)
Perhaps the best bit of the story is that they obviously needed people to make this stuff for them. John Waddington of Leeds were already in the playing card business, so they made those. Waddingtons also, of course, made board games — so maps were also secreted into Monopoly sets. As History Extra tells it:
There had to be a way of differentiating which boards carried particular maps, thus a system of coding ensured that the appropriate games were sent to prisoners of war in the appropriate geographical area: for example, those boards containing maps of Norway, Sweden and Germany had a full stop after ‘Mayfair’, and those containing maps of northern France, Germany and associated sections of the frontier carried a full stop after ‘Free Parking’.
And arguably best of all:
Currency was also needed by those planning to escape — the Monopoly money provided an ideal hiding place for local currency — real currency notes were interleaved with the monopoly notes.
Maps were also sneaked into Ludo, Snakes and Ladders, draughts, dart boards, table tennis sets, squash rackets, boxes of Christmas crackers, and cribbage, backgammon and chess sets.
Hutton worked with EMI’s development lab, and found that the lamination involved in making a record meant he could create space for as many as four maps or a combination of maps and currency. By the end of the war, they’d made more than 1.75 million copies of 240 different maps, and manufactured 1,300 records.
They even thought about what kind of music to put on them. Beethoven and Wagner were obvious choices, and (horribly, but sensibly) Jewish composers were out if they wanted to avoid confiscation. History Extra again:
While the records were perfect in every aspect of manufacture and could actually be played, Hutton saw the irony of the fact that the prisoners of war had to break the records in order to access the concealed items — thus, employing a touch of black humour, he dubbed the enterprise ‘Operation Smash-Hit’.
Also,
the Pencil Museum in Keswick has examples of pencils that appear perfectly normal and usable but which contain a silk or tissue map rolled very tightly inside the pencil in place of part of the pencil lead. In addition a miniature compass was hidden under the rubber at the top of the pencil. The pencils were distinguished by being painted dark green (as an economy, wartime pencils were unpainted) and the number stamped on the pencil indicated which map the pencil contained.
Hutton, it seems, just had one of those minds that sees a problem and finds a cunning but simple answer.
Miniaturised compasses were hidden in the buttons of RAF uniforms, both trousers and tunics. When eventually the buttons were found by German guards to be hiding compasses, Hutton simply resorted to altering the screw direction by having them manufactured with a left-hand thread, rather than a right-hand one, meaning a guard trying to open it would actually be tightening it. This proved to be a very effective change.
You may be wondering, incidentally, why some of the images above look like they’re in some sort of mail order catalogue, from which prisoners could select the escape tools they wanted. They couldn’t, obviously. That would be too silly, even for MI9 (although arguably not for a Brosnan-era Bond film). No, but those pages were from a catalogue of sorts: the 76-page Most Secret: M.I.9 Escape and Evasion Devices, also known as Per Ardua Libertas, which was produced for a very specific audience. Back to the Imperial War Museum for details…
It is believed the books were produced for an American mission to Britain in February 1942 under Major General Carl Spaatz.
This was, of course, just two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the US’s entry into WWII, so (understandably):
The Americans were keen to learn about British escape and evasion work
Very few of the originals survive, although if you’d been at Bonhams in 2013, with £5,000 or so on you, you could have picked one up.
For the rest of us, the Imperial War Museum shop has a facsimile for £15:
The team did far, far more than this. I’ve barely scratched the surface. The Operation Mincemeat film that just popped up on Netflix, for example, has James Fleet as Charles Fraser-Smith. A plot to float a corpse off Spain with fake papers on him in order to convince the Nazis that Britain was planning to invade Greece, not Sicily? Well, obviously MI9 were in on that.
