Great Escapes: The story of MI9’s Second World War escape and evasion maps. Barbara Bond

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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       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.

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