Great Escapes

by Barbara Bond

  There was also a classified TOP SECRET lecture on codes which was delivered under the title of ‘Camp Conditions’ to very limited audiences, never more than ten at a time, all of whom had been carefully selected. Those selected for this special briefing were required to practise the use of letter codes and their work was carefully checked before they were formally registered as authorized code users. Section Y was responsible for codes. The development of letter codes as a means of communication with the camps was also regarded as a priority from the start and the role which coded communication played in the escape programme developed apace. This aspect is discussed in detail in Chapter 5.

  The staff in the Training School steadily compiled a training manual which became known as the Bulletin. The Bulletin served an important role as a tool in educating potential prisoners of war about possible escape routes and the nature of escape aids, including maps, which were being produced (see Chapter 4).

  The pressures on the lecturing staff were considerable and continually increased as the war progressed. Initially both the Royal Navy and the Army had appeared uninterested in the training courses offered and, certainly in the first year or so of its existence, MI9 staff worked hard to stimulate interest and used many personal contacts to raise awareness of their work. They appeared to overcome some initial opposition from the Royal Navy and some Army commands, and by May 1944 the record shows that very significant numbers in all three services had been briefed: 110,000 in the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines, 346,000 in the Army and 290,000 in the Royal Air Force, and a total of 3,250 lectures had been delivered.

  ESCAPE-MINDEDNESS

  Escape-mindedness was the term which Crockatt coined to describe the philosophy which he sought to instil into the frontline forces which his staff regularly briefed and trained. Inculcating and fostering this philosophy was the primary aim of the training, and the rest of the MI9 team was working to ensure that the approach was supported in a very practical way. They stressed that, if captured, it was an officer’s duty to attempt to escape and, not only officers, it was a duty which extended to all ranks. Many years after the end of the war when Commander John Pryor RN came to write his memoirs of the years he spent as a prisoner of war during World War II, it is not surprising that he recalled that:

  escaping was the duty of a PoW but with the whole of NW Europe under German control and with no maps or compass it seemed a pretty hopeless task.

  Stalag Luft III (Sagan), drawn by the artist Ley Kenyon, who was a prisoner in the camp. It shows the position of Tom, Dick, Harry and George tunnels. Harry was used in the ‘Great Escape’.

  The briefings and training which MI9 provided alerted officers to every aspect of potential evasion and escape. The emphasis was on evading capture whenever possible or, if captured, to attempt to escape at the earliest opportunity and certainly before being imprisoned behind barbed wire in the many prisoner of war camps. It was standard practice for captured officers to be separated into oflags from the other ranks who were kept in stalags. Officers were, therefore, made responsible for ensuring that their men were appropriately briefed about what to do in captivity and the organization of Escape Committees became one of their principal priorities.

  It is perhaps a reflection of the extent to which the philosophy permeated the camps that by the time the Allies were landing in occupied Europe and slowly advancing east, it was felt necessary to issue a ‘stay-put’ order to prisoners of war to ensure they did not get caught up in the frontline whilst trying to flee captivity. The order was sent by MI9 on 18 February 1944 in a coded message: it directed that

  ON GERMAN SURRENDER OR COLLAPSE, ALL P/W ALL SERVICES INCLUDING DOMINION & COLONIAL & INDIAN MUST STAY PUT & AWAIT ORDERS

  Many families also wrote to their sons in the camps strongly discouraging them from any escape attempts, as a result of the Stalag Luft III (Sagan) experience when fifty of the men who had taken part in the ‘Great Escape’ in March 1944 were executed on being recaptured.

  The MI9 staff who subsequently wrote about their escapes, notably Neave and Langley, and even Evans who had escaped during World War I, all highlighted the importance of an escape philosophy. Neave described the way in which escapers had ‘to think of imprisonment as a new phase of living, not as the end of life’ and the extent to which the real purpose of the escaper was ‘to overcome by every means the towering obstacles in his way’. It was a state of mind that MI9 encouraged.

  It was understandable that some might prefer the relative safety of the camp rather than life on the run. Even for these men there were jobs to be done to support the escapes of others. It was strength of mind and purpose which was needed rather than just physical health and strength, a point epitomized by the escapes of Jimmy Langley, still suffering from a suppurating amputation wound, and Douglas Bader, restricted by his two artificial legs. Initiative, foresight and courage were needed and luck also came into it: as Evans stressed, ‘however hard you try, however skilful you are, luck is an essential element in a successful escape’, while David James noted in A Prisoner’s Progress (1947) that:

  Luck is the most essential part in an escape . . . for every man out, there were at least ten better men who would have got clear but who did not have the good fortune they deserved.

  Teamwork is the one competence which comes through all the stories and plans relating to escape. This almost certainly reflected the public school philosophy where your efforts were for school, house and team rather than for self. As an Old Wykehamist, Evans personified this approach and it is not surprising to learn that between the wars he captained the Kent county cricket team. To some extent it could be argued that MI9 was pushing at an open door in seeking to inculcate Crockatt’s philosophy into a new generation of young men. Many of them had been educated at preparatory and public schools and apparently raised on a diet of escape classics of the last war. Some of them acknowledged this when they came to write their own accounts of their escape experience during World War II, as James recorded:

  In my prep-school days at Summer Fields, I had read all the escape classics of the last war – such books as The Tunnellers of Holzminden, Within Four Walls, I Escape, and The Escapers’ Club [sic] – and as a proposition the business of escaping fascinated me.

  It is clear from their post-war accounts that many escapers spent every waking moment of captivity plotting their escape. Some identified the very human traits which they believed could most aid them. Gullibility (of the captor) and audacity (of the escaper) were high on the list, as was luck. There was a psychology attached to escaping, as James recognized:

  I came to the conclusion that escaping was essentially a psychological problem, depending on the inobservance of mankind, coupled with a ready acceptance of the everyday at its face value.

  The Germans were apparently well aware of this philosophy and the extent to which it sustained British prisoners of war and constrained their own resources in guarding those captured and seeking to prevent their escape. Once the Allies had landed in mainland Europe and started to advance east, they captured not simply German troops but also a number of key German documents amongst which was a document identified as GR-107.94. It must have made fascinating reading for MI9 as it revealed the extent to which the Germans were well aware of their work. It is a lengthy document and relates entirely to the escape methods employed by Allied Flying Personnel. It was dated 29 December 1944 and described the escape philosophy, the duty to escape, and the maps provided on silk and thin tissue. It goes so far as to list nine maps which they knew had been produced. Whilst it reflected the extent to which the Germans were aware of what they were up against, it also indicated that, if they were aware of only nine escape maps when MI9 had by that time produced over 200 individual items and over one and three quarter million copies, they had arguably only discovered the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

  2

  BACKGROUND TO THE MAPPING PROGRAMME

  ‘For some time our engineers have been working
on the problem of printing maps on cloth . . . the necessity of a durable material for maps was impressed on me a number of years ago . . . I was sent with my troop on an independent mission . . . about the second day, due to folding, use and the action of the elements, my map was almost illegible and I was travelling by a cavalryman’s knowledge of the terrain.’

  (Lieutenant Colonel J. C. Pegram, Chief of the Geographic Section of the US War Department, in a letter dated 18 October 1927)

  The story of the mapping programme has to be set in the climate of the times. The young men of the inter-war period, and especially the officers, most of whom had been educated in the British public school system, had been raised on a culture of escape stories from the Great War. They had read many of the books which had been written by the great escapers from World War I, people like Durnford, Evans and others. They had also been made more aware of the relevance of geography in their curriculum, of map reading and navigational skills. Their education had also sought to instil the standard British public school behaviour of team, country and King before self. They were avid readers of Boy’s Own Paper and many had belonged to Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout movement. Recognizing this, Christopher Clayton Hutton identified all the available literature, a total of fifty books (through a visit to the British Museum Reading Room) and purchased second-hand copies. He enlisted the support of the Headmaster at Rugby School, his alma mater, who allowed the sixth form to carry out a review of the books. The review was completed in four days, and led directly to Hutton’s decision to make maps a priority, for it would appear difficult, if not impossible, to escape from enemy-occupied territory without a map. It was this simple fact which appeared to be the catalyst for Hutton’s visit to the War Office Map Room. The staff there could not apparently help in meeting his initial request for a small-scale map of Germany.

  The section responsible for operational maps and geographic matters, MI4, was by that time located in Cheltenham. It had moved from London in September 1939, apparently to make space to accommodate those branches whose presence in Whitehall was deemed to be essential and also to afford protection from possible air attacks to the sizable map collection which was also relocated to Cheltenham. Brigadier A. B. Clough, in his history of the military survey organizations during World War II, Maps and Survey, published in 1952, made it clear that the absence of MI4 from London ‘had the serious effect of putting it out of daily touch with the General Staff at a critical period’. MI4 remained physically distanced from all War Office operations, intelligence and planning staff and also from the Air Ministry Map Section, which had been moved to Harrow. It is, therefore, likely that the War Office Map Room visited by Hutton was simply a small reference collection and not the main operational map collection of MI4 which would certainly have held the maps he sought. Hutton’s lack of contact with the military map-makers is likely to have been to the longer term detriment of the escape and evasion mapping programme.

  During a visit to the commercial mapping company, Geographia Limited, on London’s Fleet Street, he discovered the existence of ‘a famous Scottish firm’ which proved to be John Bartholomew & Son Ltd of Edinburgh. This renowned cartographic company was established in 1826 by John Bartholomew, built on his and his father’s experiences as apprentices to the Edinburgh engravers, Lizars, from the last years of the eighteenth century. By the late nineteenth century it had acquired a world-wide reputation for its maps. Hutton was also fortunate that the firm was headed at the time by John (known as Ian) Bartholomew who had had a distinguished military career in World War I, serving as an officer in the First Battalion, Gordon Highlanders, experiencing the worst of trench warfare and winning the Military Cross at Ypres in 1915.

  Ian Bartholomew was only too ready to hand over copies of his company’s maps, waiving all copyright and insisting ‘it was a privilege to contribute to the war effort’. This was to prove the critical ingredient to MI9’s wartime escape and evasion mapping programme. It was this collection of small-scale maps of Europe, the Middle East and Africa which provided the backbone of the escape and evasion mapping which MI9 subsequently produced. At the time, the company was not aware of its wartime involvement with MI9, a secret which Ian Bartholomew, the Managing Director, apparently never even mentioned to his sons.

  MI9’s War Diary entry for 31 March 1940 reflects just how quickly Hutton got to grips with the task he faced: the entry indicates that even by then, just three months into MI9’s operations, available escape devices already included ‘maps on fabrics and silk, maps concealed in games, pencils, articles of clothing’. Hutton had tried to find a paper which was thin, resistant to the elements and soundless when hidden inside Service uniforms, which was what he was planning to do. After talking to contacts in the trade, he became convinced that such a paper did not exist and so turned his attention to fabric, and to silk in particular.

  John (known as Ian) Bartholomew, of the Edinburgh cartographic company John Bartholomew & Son Ltd, in the trenches near Ypres in 1915.

  A printed Bartholomew map of France at 1:2M, used by MI9 as its ‘Zones of France’ map, but with southern England removed.

  Detail from the same map.

  THE HISTORY OF MILITARY MAPS ON SILK

  Hutton was almost certainly unaware that the efficacy of silk as a suitable medium for military maps had long been recognized. Indeed, the oldest surviving silk map in the world is a military map, known more commonly as the Garrison Map, excavated in 1973 from the Han Dynasty Tomb No. 3 in Mawangdui, Changsha, in Hunan Province, China. It was one of three silk maps found on the site, the others being a topographical map of the region and a city map. The Garrison Map has been dated to the middle of the second century BC. It was unearthed in twenty-eight fragments, moisture and pressure having taken their toll during 2,000 years of burial in a small box. The fragments were restored and then a reconstruction of the map was undertaken by Chinese scholars.

  The Garrison Map covers the region between Mount Jiuyi and the Southern Ridges in Ningyuan in southern Hunan province, China. The map shows mountains, rivers and residential settlements, and in particular it indicates the locations of the garrisons, defence regions, military facilities and routes of nine army units. It is the oldest known map on silk, dating from the second century BC

  A reconstruction of the Garrison Map.

  The map carries no indication of scale but, by comparing it with modern mapping, it is estimated to be in the range 1:80,000 to 1:100,000. It has been drawn on a rectangular piece of silk which measured 98 cm by 78 cm. The map was originally drawn in three colours, black, red and blue/green, using vegetable-based tints and is orientated and marked with south at the top and the left side marked east. Water features are shown in blue/green, with some background features and place names in black but the military content of the map is emphasized in red, showing the size and disposition of army units, command posts, city walls and watchtowers. Settlements are shown, together with the numbers of inhabitants. The boundary of the garrisoned area is marked and frontier beacons (observation outposts) are shown. Topographic detail is stylized, so that mountains are shown as wavy lines rather than by any attempt to represent their real form and shape. Roads are shown with distances between some settlements clearly marked, as are river crossing points: in modern military parlance, this is referred to as ‘goings’ or terrain analysis information and was a technique also utilized by MI9 in the production of some of their special area escape and evasion maps.

  While the Chinese are understandably keen to stress the relevance of the three maps in terms of how they reflect their nation’s achievements in surveying and mapping techniques in the wider context of historical cartography during the period of the Han Dynasty, the relevance here is that the Garrison Map was undoubtedly produced for military purposes and was drawn on silk. There are later examples of military mapping produced on silk in China. Seventeen hundred years after the Garrison Map was produced, the Garrison Outline Map of Shanxi was produced during the Min
g Dynasty, although the later map was regarded by Chinese scholars as greatly inferior to the Han Dynasty Garrison Map, not least because the earlier map was drawn in colour and showed far more military detail than the Shanxi map.

  In the USA during the Civil War, General Sherman was known to have had monochrome maps printed on cloth during the Atlanta campaign. The Library of Congress map collection contains many examples of Civil War maps printed on cloth, including the map illustrated here, showing ‘Part of Northern Georgia’, produced by the Topographical Engineer Office in Washington DC in 1864.

  The Intelligence Division of the US War Department in Washington DC produced a map of Cuba in 1898 and one of China in 1900, both printed on cloth. Details of these examples were contained in a letter dated 18 October 1927, written by Lieutenant Colonel J. C. Pegram, Chief of the Geographic Section of the Military Intelligence Division to Colonel R. H. Thomas, Director of Map Publications in the Survey of India in Calcutta, apparently in response to an enquiry from the latter. Interestingly Pegram highlighted the extent to which a medium more durable than paper was a necessity when the constant use, repeated folding and effect of the elements quickly rendered paper maps unusable in the field. He indicated that their engineers were currently addressing the problem of printing maps on cloth, were improving their techniques and getting good results, although he offered no technical details to support this statement. The challenge of printing on fabric was essentially that the cloth had to be held taut during the printing process so that the image would not be distorted.