Great Escapes Read online

  i) To facilitate the escape of British prisoners of war, their repatriation to the United Kingdom (UK) and also to contain enemy manpower and resources in guarding the British prisoners of war and seeking to prevent their escape.

  ii) To facilitate the return to the UK of those who evaded capture in enemy occupied territory.

  iii) To collect and distribute information on escape and evasion, including research into, and the provision of, escape aids either prior to deployment or by covert despatch to prisoners of war.

  iv) To instruct service personnel in escape and evasion techniques through preliminary training, the provision of lecturers and Bulletins and to train selected individuals in the use of coded communication through letters.

  v) To maintain the morale of British prisoners of war by maintaining contact through correspondence and other means and to engage in the specific planning and execution of evasion and escape.

  vi) To collect information from British prisoners of war through maintaining contact with them during captivity and after successful repatriation and disseminate the intelligence obtained to all three Services and appropriate Government Departments.

  vii) To advise on counter-escape measures for German prisoners of war in Great Britain.

  viii) To deny related information to the enemy.

  The original Conduct of Work No. 48 for MI9, produced by the Directorate of Military intelligence (DMI) and issued to MI5 and MI6, as it appears in Per Ardua Libertas, a photographic summary of MI9’s work, produced by Christopher Clayton Hutton in 1942.

  The responsibilities included a mixture of operations, intelligence, transport and supply. The newly formed section was initially located in Room 424 of the Metropole Building (formerly the Metropole Hotel) in Northumberland Avenue, London, close to the War Office’s Main Building.

  NORMAN CROCKATT

  The newly appointed Head of MI9 was Major, later promoted to Colonel and eventually to Brigadier, Norman Richard Crockatt (1894–1956), a retired infantry officer who had seen active service in World War I in the Royal Scots Guards. Crockatt had left the Army in 1927, worked in the City and was in his mid-forties at the outbreak of World War II.

  Whilst he had been decorated in World War I (DSO, MC), he had never been captured and, therefore, had no experience of being a prisoner of war. He proved, however, to be an admirable choice to ensure the fledgling section made good progress in its infancy and throughout the war, being ‘clear-headed, quick witted, a good organizer, a good judge of men, and no respecter of red tape’ (as recorded by M. R. D. Foot and J. M Langley in their definitive history MI9: Escape and Evasion, 1939–1945, hereafter referred to as Foot and Langley). These qualities were to stand him in good stead for the work he tackled in the next six years. He also recognized the importance of keeping his section small, concentrated in its activities and low profile among other intelligence sections, attributes which appeared to ensure that when the time came to expand its activities, it received little opposition from those competing for military priorities and budgets. Crockatt realized the value of having the experience of former prisoners of war, especially those who had successfully escaped, and appointed many with that experience to the small cadre of lecturing staff based in the Training School established by MI9.

  Brigadier Norman Crockatt in the MI9 headquarters at Wilton Park near Beaconsfield in 1944.

  The initial budget given to Crockatt to set up the entire section was £2,000. In present day terms, this equates to a sum of approximately £90,000. He embarked on a recruitment campaign and, by the end of July 1940, the complement of officers in the whole of the MI9 organization had risen to fifty. By that time, Crockatt was looking to move his organization out of London and by September 1940, he had selected Wilton Park, near Beaconsfield, as an appropriate location. After necessary refurbishment and the installation of telephones, most of the MI9 staff moved there on 14–18 October and occupied No. 20 Camp at Wilton Park.

  ORGANIZATION

  The section was initially organized into two parts: MI9a was responsible for matters relating to enemy prisoners of war and MI9b was responsible for British prisoners of war. The former subsequently became a separate department, MI19, to facilitate the handling and distribution of the intelligence information emanating from the two groups. On separation, the remaining MI9b was re-organized into separate sections and the staff complement was significantly increased:

  Section D was responsible for training, including the Training School which was established at the Highgate School in north London, from which the staff and pupils had been evacuated. It was subsequently designated the Intelligence School (IS9) in January 1942.

  Section W was responsible for the interrogation of returning escapers and evaders, including the initial preparation of the questionnaires which the interviewees were required to complete. The principal aim of the questionnaires was to identify information for use in the lectures and the Bulletin. The section was also responsible for the preparation and distribution of reports and for writing the daily, later to become monthly, War Diary entry.

  Section X was responsible for the planning and organization of escapes, including the selection, research, coordination and despatch of escape and evasion materials. Because of the small numbers of staff, the section was unable to spend much time on this activity until January 1942 when its establishment was boosted. At that point, they were also able to increase the volume of information to Section Y for transmission to the camps.

  Section Y was responsible for codes and secret communication with the camps. The development of letter codes as a means of communication with the camps was regarded as a priority from the start and the role which coded communication played in the escape programme is discussed in detail in Chapter 5.

  Section Z was responsible for the production and supply of escape tools, including all related experimental work.

  It is primarily these last three sections whose activities largely, but not exclusively, form the focus of this book.

  KEY STAFF

  Christopher Clayton Hutton

  Christopher William Clayton Hutton (1893–1965), known as ‘Clutty’ by all who worked with him, was appointed on 22 February 1940 as the Technical Officer to lead Section Z. He was the boffin, the inventor of gadgetry. His fascination for show business, particularly magicians, was apparently regarded as sufficient qualification for the post he was given as the escape aids expert in MI9. It was his innate interest in escapology and illusion which was to prove the source of his imagination and ingenuity. Whilst working in his uncle’s timber business in Park Saw Mills, Birmingham prior to World War I, he had challenged Harry Houdini to escape from a packing case constructed on the stage of the Birmingham Empire Theatre. Houdini escaped, for, unbeknown to Hutton, he had bribed the carpenter. In the inter-war years, he worked as a journalist and later in publicity for the film industry.

  Christopher Clayton Hutton, who led MI9’s Section Z from 1940 to 1943, where he developed many ingenious escape aids and initiated the escape and evasion mapping programme.

  Hutton had served in the Yeomanry, the Yorkshire Regiment and as a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I. Realizing that another war with Germany was imminent, he tried to volunteer for the Royal Air Force and, subsequently, for the Army. When these approaches did not receive the encouragement he sought, he wrote a number of times to the War Office seeking an opening in an Intelligence Branch, an approach which eventually resulted in his appointment to the newly formed MI9 under Crockatt’s leadership.

  ‘Clutty’ was regarded as both enthusiastic and original in his approach to the task to which he was appointed. He is variously described by his contemporaries as ‘eccentric’, ‘a genius’ and by Foot and Langley as ‘wayward and original’. He wrote an account of his time in MI9, which ended during 1943 as a result of illness, under the title Official Secret (1960), but the publication of the book was not straightforward (see Chapter 9)

  Crockatt
very quickly recognized the value of having those who had experienced the reality of escape and was also conscious of the need to have representatives of all three Services in his organization. To this end, he appointed two Liaison Officers from the Royal Navy and the RAF.

  Johnny Evans

  From the RAF he appointed Squadron Leader A. J. Evans, MC (1889–1960). Johnny Evans, as he was always called, was an inspired choice. Appointed in January 1940, Evans very rapidly became a most valuable member of the MI9 team, becoming one of the star performers as a lecturer at the Training School. He had been an Intelligence Officer on the Western Front in World War I and had then been commissioned as a Major into the fledgling Royal Flying Corps (RFC). Shot down behind German lines over the Somme in 1916 and captured, he was eventually sent to the prisoner of war camp at Clausthal in the Harz Mountains.

  For Evans, remaining in captivity was apparently never an option. Whether this in any way reflected his upbringing and public school education at Winchester is unclear but it certainly did not reflect military training at the time. He escaped, only to be recaptured. On recapture he was sent to the infamous Fort 9 at Ingolstadt, north of Nuremburg, the World War I equivalent of Colditz in World War II. It was the camp to which all prisoners of war who had attempted to escape were sent and was located over 160 kilometres (100 miles) from the Swiss frontier. Evans described in considerable detail both his failed escape and his eventual successful escape in his best-selling book, The Escaping Club, published in August 1921, and reprinted five times by the end of that year. It took him and his companion almost three weeks to walk, largely at night, to the Swiss frontier which they crossed at Schaffhausen, west of Lake Constance.

  Johnny Evans, from his classic book, The Escaping Club, published in 1921.

  Evans described the attitude of the men in Fort 9 and the extent to which they spent their time in the all-consuming occupation of plotting to escape. It really was a veritable ‘Escaping Club’ where failed escapers were only too ready to share the knowledge of their experiences outside the camp with their fellow inmates. Evans described the receipt of clothes and food parcels from family and friends in which maps and compasses were also hidden. This was apparently accomplished by the prior personal arrangement of using a simple code in correspondence detailing the specific needs, maps, compasses, saws, civilian clothing and the like. Maps arrived in the camp secreted inside cakes baked by his mother or in bags of flour, and compasses inside bottles of prunes and jars of anchovy paste. The maps were copied in the camp so others could also use them and were then sewn into the lining of jackets.

  Sketch map of Fort 9 Ingolstadt showing the escape routes of Johnny Evans

  It is fascinating to consider the extent to which Evans brought these experiences to bear in his work for MI9 and understandable that his book was dedicated:

  To MY MOTHER who, by encouragement and direct assistance, was largely responsible for my escape from Germany, I dedicate this book which was written at her request.

  He went further, however, spending time prior to the outbreak of World War II visiting the Schaffhausen area of the German–Swiss border, across which he had made his own successful bid for liberty in World War I, photographing the border area and making copious notes. It cannot be coincidence that the MI9 Bulletin contained two large-scale maps of the Schaffhausen Salient, together with ground photographs of the local topography, showing distinctive landmark features, for example the stream and footpath where the German border guards patrolled. MI9’s map production programme also included sheet Y, a large-scale map of the Schaffhausen Salient which carried very detailed notes of the topography and landscape features to help escaping prisoners of war (see Chapter 6 for the significance of this map in the MI9 programme and Appendix 1).

  Jimmy Langley, who organized covert escape routes for MI9, and later co-authored the definitive history of MI9.

  Jimmy Langley

  Lieutenant Colonel James Maydon Langley (1916–83), called ‘Jimmy’ by friends and colleagues, was born in Wolverhampton, educated at Uppingham and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. As a young subaltern in the 2nd Battalion Coldstream Guards, he was badly injured in the head and arm and left behind at Dunkirk: on a stretcher as he would have taken up space which four fitter men could have occupied. He was taken prisoner, hospitalized in Lille and had his injured left arm amputated by medical staff. He subsequently escaped, in October 1940, by climbing through a hospital window and managed, with a still suppurating wound and with help from French families who befriended him, to reach Marseilles from where he was repatriated, with help, through Spain to London. Langley successfully navigated by using the maps of the various French departments which appeared in every public telephone kiosk in France. The couple of times he travelled in the wrong direction resulted from the maps being oriented in a non-standard fashion, with East at the top. So Langley, too, knew the value of maps as an escape tool.

  He arrived back in the UK in the spring of 1941 and initially joined SIS. He soon transferred to MI9 but remained on the payroll, and therefore technically under the command, of SIS. In practice he became the liaison point between the two organizations and was responsible for the work of the escape lines in northwest Europe. These were the covert routes along which the escapers and evaders travelled on their journey home, being helped by members of the local communities along the way. The network was established by MI9 working from London and also through legation staff and embassy attachés. If discovered by the Germans, as many of the French, Belgian and Dutch nationals were, they were executed or sent to the concentration camps. He remained in post for the duration of the war, and subsequently married Peggy van Lier, a young Belgian woman who had been a guide on the Comet Line (the organized escape route through western France and across the Pyrenees into Spain – see page 148). Over thirty years later, he co-authored with M. R. D. Foot MI9: Escape and Evasion, 1939–1945, which came to be regarded as the definitive history of MI9. He also wrote his own account of his early life, capture, hospitalization and subsequent escape in Fight Another Day, published in 1974.

  Airey Neave

  Of others in Crockatt’s team, perhaps Airey Middleton Sheffield Neave (1916–79) is the most famous. As a young lieutenant, he was a troop commander in the 1st Searchlight Regiment of the Royal Artillery. He was wounded and captured in Calais Hospital in May 1940 as the Germans over-ran northern France. He was held in various oflags and, after a number of unsuccessful escape attempts, he was eventually imprisoned in Oflag IVC, the castle in Saxony more commonly known as Colditz. Working with his Dutch colleague, Toni Luteyn, Neave escaped from Colditz on 5 January 1942, the first British Officer to escape successfully from that infamous camp. After reaching Switzerland, Neave was repatriated through Marseilles and into Spain via the organized escape route known as the Pat Line (see page 148). After a short period of leave, he joined MI9 in May 1942 under the pseudonym (code-name) of Saturday. It is clear that his name had been on an MI9 list of targeted officers who had been specifically helped to escape, and his experience was to prove invaluable. His escape and the extent to which it reflected the value of MI9’s mapping programme are issues considered in detail in Chapter 6. His account, They Have Their Exits (1953), covered his experiences on the frontline, his capture and initial, unsuccessful attempts at escape followed by his escape from Colditz. Neave also wrote about MI9 in Saturday at MI9 (1969), which is discussed in the Bibliography.

  Airey Neave was the first British officer to escape from Colditz.

  THE TRAINING SCHOOL AT HIGHGATE

  Section D of MI9 was responsible for training and briefing the Intelligence Officers who attended courses at the Training School in Highgate and who then returned to their individual units to provide training to operational crews. Certainly in the early years, these training courses concentrated on the RAF whose crews were constantly overflying occupied Europe. The lecturers engaged were largely those who had personal experience of escape in World War I. Their remunerati
on was set at two guineas (£2. 2s. 0d.), the equivalent of around £82 today, for each lecture they delivered and they were also provided with travel and overnight hotel expenses when they travelled to deliver lectures at operational units. As early as January 1940, a conference was organized in Room 660 of the Metropole Building to hear a lecture delivered by Johnny Evans. By the end of February 1940, lecturers from the Training School had delivered their training lectures to seven Army Divisions, and five RAF Groups, and were undertaking a tour of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF).

  The content of the general lecture given to officers and senior noncommissioned officers (NCOs) included emphasis on the undesirability of capture, instructions on evasion, conduct on capture and a demonstration of some of the aids to escape which were issued to units prior to deployment. The lecture emphasized that the job was to fight and avoid capture. If captured, it was their first and principal duty to escape at the earliest opportunity. Later on in the war, with the increasing numbers of prisoners of war and the increasing organization of Escape Committees in the camps, the lectures were updated to include mention of the Escape Committees, which were the responsibility of the Senior British Officer in each of the camps.

  Those attending the training courses were told that money, maps, identity papers, provisions and many other escape aids would be made available through the Committees. The officers and NCOs who attended the lectures were then responsible for cascading the briefing down through the ranks, but they were, initially at least, specifically directed not to mention the aids to escape as they were only available for issue in limited numbers. It was recommended that they deliver the lecture as an informal talk, classified SECRET, and to audiences which should not exceed 200 at any one time. Later on, and certainly by early 1942, a supply of aids for demonstration purposes was provided to local commands.