Our President
Starting in 1941, an increasing number of British Airmen found themselves as the involuntary guests of the Third Reich, and the Crown was casting about for ways and means to facilitate their escape. Now obviously, one of the most helpful aids to that end is a useful and accurate map, one showing not only where stuff was, but also the locations of 'safe houses' where a POW on-the-lam could go for food and shelter.
Paper maps had some real drawbacks - they make a lot of noise when you open
and fold them, they wear out rapidly, and if they get wet, they turn into mush.
Someone
in MI-5 (similar to America's OSS ) got the idea of printing escape maps on
silk. It's durable, can be scrunched-up into tiny wads, unfolded as many times
as needed, and makes no noise whatsoever.
At that time, there was only one manufacturer in Great Britain that had perfected
the technology of printing on silk, and that was John Waddington, Ltd. When
approached by the government, the firm was only too happy to do its bit for
the war effort.
By
pure coincidence, Waddington was also the U.K. Licensee for the popular American
board game, Monopoly. As it happened, 'games and pastimes' was a category of
item qualified for insertion into 'CARE packages', dispatched by the International
Red Cross to prisoners of war.
Under
the strictest of secrecy, in a securely guarded and inaccessible old workshop
on the grounds of Waddington's, a group of sworn-to-secrecy employees began
mass-producing escape maps, keyed to each region of Germany or Italy where Allied
POW camps were placed. When processed, these maps could be folded into such
tiny dots that they would actually fit inside a Monopoly playing piece.
As
long as they were at it, the clever workmen at Waddington's also managed to
add:
1. A playing token, containing a small magnetic compass
2. A two-part metal file that could easily be screwed together
3. Useful amounts of genuine high-denomination German, Italian, and French money,
hidden within the piles of Monopoly money!
British
and American air crews were advised, before taking off on their first mission,
how to identify a 'rigged' Monopoly set – by means of a tiny red dot,
one cleverly rigged to look like an ordinary printing glitch, located in the
corner of the Free Parking square.
Of the estimated 35,000 Allied POWS who successfully escaped, an estimated one-third
were aided in their flight by the rigged Monopoly sets. Everyone who did so
was sworn to secrecy indefinitely, since the British Government might want to
use this highly successful ruse in still another, future war. The story wasn't
declassified until 2007, when the surviving craftsmen from Waddington's, as
well as the firm itself, were finally honored in a public ceremony. It's nice
to play the 'Get Out of Jail' Free' card!
I realize most of you are (probably) too young to have any personal connection to WWII (Dec. '41 to Aug. '45), but this is still interesting.
Story
verification: http://blogs.wsj.com/informedreader/2007/11/19/wwii-pows-perk-monopoly-with-real-money/
Steve Kirk
Click the below image to return
