Great Escapes

by Barbara Bond

  Neave expressed his view very clearly in the second book he wrote, Saturday at MI9. To him, the cynical belief of the other intelligence branches appeared to be that airmen shot down by the Germans were a matter of minor importance. He strongly disagreed, describing their actions as ‘this negative campaign’. He was convinced that MI9 was simply not taken seriously enough, that it lacked influence and was afforded the lowest possible priority with the Air Ministry. He also clearly disliked Dansey’s behaviour towards MI9 and spoke of the ‘battles with Uncle Claude’.

  Execution of Edith Louisa Cavell (1865-1915), British nurse and humanitarian, sentenced to death for helping Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium during World War I. An imaginative illustration from the French newspaper Le Petit Journal, 7 November 1915. It was thought that Cavell also worked for SIS, who felt that she was betrayed because of her work helping soldiers escape, a fate SIS wished to avoid for their agents in World War II.

  MI9 had no direct representation in the War Cabinet, whereas SIS did. Menzies knew by July 1940, well before Crockatt did, of the intention to create SOE. Menzies resented the creation of this subversive organization, independent of SIS’s control. Together with Dansey, he viewed the establishment of SOE as undermining their long-held monopoly over the control of undercover work in enemy territory. They supposed that SOE would likely subvert, or at least hinder, their work of obtaining intelligence. It is very probable that this was the unstated reason for Menzies and Dansey’s offer to Crockatt in August 1940 to set up an escape route for MI9 from Marseilles into Spain. Crockatt accepted the offer and the details of the new organization were arranged by Dansey. He chose Donald Darling, code name ‘Sunday’, to establish the escape route to run from Marseilles to Barcelona and Madrid, and then via Lisbon or Gibraltar to London. Darling’s cover was as Vice-Consul, responsible for refugees and he was based in Gibraltar. Dansey also placed Jimmy Langley, who had been recruited to SIS after his successful escape, in MI9 as the main interface between the two organizations.

  Langley, later joined by Neave, was potentially SIS’s Trojan horse inside MI9, although it never quite worked out in that way. Langley later recalled that he needed courage to face up to Dansey as he always reduced him to ‘a petrified jelly’. That was quite an admission from a man who had escaped from a hospital in Dunkirk with a suppurating amputation wound and had successfully escaped through France to Marseilles and then back to London. Langley also recognized that, ‘as a late arrival in the intelligence community . . . escape and evasion was very much at the tail end of queue’.

  SIS, effectively, had control of MI9’s escape lines in Western Europe and how they operated. However, Dansey was determined that SIS’s valuable agents should never be used on what he regarded as ‘a thoroughly unproductive clandestine pastime’ and that nothing should ever be allowed to interfere with SIS’s work to collect intelligence information ‘from all possible sources, by every feasible means, the world over’. The fact that MI9 was also producing valuable intelligence must have rankled with SIS and was certainly not something which SIS was ever ready openly to acknowledge.

  When F. H. Hinsley and others wrote British Intelligence in the Second World War in a ten-year period from 1979, it was written very much from SIS’s perspective, and made very little mention of MI9, its role or contribution, throughout the five volumes. Although Hinsley and his collaborators did make some limited mention of SIS’s relationship with SOE, there is no mention of SIS’s view of MI9, and yet, as has been shown, MI9 was a source of extremely valuable intelligence and could get answers to some vexing operational questions. SIS was on standard distribution for the receipt of all such reports emanating from MI9, and yet that fact is not even hinted at in Hinsley’s ‘official’ and very detailed review of the story of British intelligence in World War II. It was as if there was a conscious decision to write the fledgling escape and evasion organization out of the history books. The record was certainly corrected by Foot and Langley when they wrote the book which has come to be regarded as the definitive history of MI9 and in which Crockatt’s personal leadership role and the challenges he faced are openly discussed and acknowledged. Their book was published in the same year that the first volume of Hinsley’s history appeared.

  MI9 and the Air Ministry

  SIS was not, however, the only branch of Government service which wanted to control MI9. In 1943 the Air Ministry proposed that Crockatt be replaced by a senior RAF officer and that all MI9’s responsibilities should be placed under their jurisdiction. It was rumoured that the debate went to the highest levels of the War Cabinet and that Churchill himself ruled that MI9 should remain under War Office control. The fact that there were competing players seeking to control MI9 probably made it doubly difficult for SIS ever to mount a successful takeover. It must also have made life for Crockatt far from comfortable, working daily in the knowledge that others were seeking to exert influence and control over his every move.

  MI9 and SOE

  Contacts with other secret departments, such as SOE, were arguably not made early enough, although a useful and mutually beneficial relationship was eventually created. Neave provided very specific evidence of this when he described MI9’s support to Operation Frankton (popularly known as the Cockleshell Heroes), SOE’s daring Commando raid on German shipping on the River Gironde in Bordeaux in December 1942. He indicated that, after the success of the raid, two of the survivors made for Ruffec and the escape route which had been pre-planned with MI9:

  With the aid of special maps and compasses with which they had been supplied by MI9 they continued marching until, at dawn on December 18th, weak and hungry, they reached Ruffec. They had walked nearly a hundred miles.

  Bill Sparks of the Royal Marines, c.1943. He was one of the survivors of Operation Frankton, an SOE raid on shipping in the German occupied French port of Bordeaux in December 1942. MI9 provided special maps, compasses and escape route details.

  Internecine intelligence disputes

  In his own end-of-war summary, Crockatt indicated his own awareness of the sensitivity which attached to MI9’s relationship with SIS. He knew that SIS senior officers hated SOE since the turmoil and unrest fomented by SOE made life for SIS agents in area ‘awkward’. Whether or not SIS was aware of MI9’s support for SOE is not known, but had they been, it would likely have confirmed their worst fears. Similarly escapers, evaders and their local helpers were ‘anathema to SIS officers of the old school’. Potentially MI9 might disrupt their work of obtaining intelligence. The fact that the simmering internecine hostilities which existed between SIS and MI9 never actually broke out into open warfare was almost certainly due to Crockatt’s low-key behaviour.

  There appeared to be no structures in place, however, to minimize the tribalism and perhaps frictions were inevitable. It is certain that personalities also played a part, as highlighted by both Neave and Langley in the case of Dansey. In the Conclusion to his unpublished thesis, ‘Beset by Secrecy and Beleaguered by Rivals’, Thomas Keene made some very pertinent remarks about the lamentable frictions which existed between SOE and SIS. He has also highlighted the extent to which the clash of interests and lack of clarity in the demarcation between the two organizations was never resolved, as it should have been. The same situation was also commented on by Leo Marks who indicated, in Between Silk and Cyanide, the extent to which SIS resented SOE since it threatened its monopoly: he described the mutual antipathy as having ‘the growth potential of an obsession’. Those same views can be applied to SIS and MI9 as precisely the same situation undoubtedly existed between those two organizations. Since there was never any overall control of the two organizations by a single Minister of Cabinet rank, only Churchill could have resolved the matter. It is clear that Churchill, an escaper himself during the Boer War, had a particular interest in the work of MI9, reflected in the personal letter sent to the prisoners of war, hidden inside cigars, a letter clearly designed to help sustain morale in the camps
. The extent to which the Prime Minister’s personal support, in the same way he supported the role of Bletchley Park, could have been Crockatt’s saviour is not known and does not appear to be reflected in the records. It might have made Crockatt’s task easier, had the Prime Minister sought instead to ensure that inter-departmental conflict was stopped by clearer means of demarcation. In the final analysis, the various secret organizations should have been demonstrating a vested, joint and coordinated national interest in winning the war, rather than fighting internal battles.

  Winston Churchill was a supporter of MI9’s work. His personal minute to prisoners of war was smuggled into the camps in cigars or using invisible inks printed onto cotton handkerchiefs.

  THE CLOSURE OF MI9

  It is perhaps indicative of the personal toll which the six years of leading MI9 took on Crockatt that he chose to retire to private life very soon after the cessation of hostilities and left the winding down of MI9 to Sam Derry, the organizer of one of the escape lines (from Italy). However, as a way of keeping in touch with those who had worked in MI9 or MI19, Crockatt did establish the 919 dining club, in much the same way that SOE established the Special Forces Club. Sadly, Crockatt’s club folded soon after his death in 1956, whereas SOE’s club survives in London to this day.

  Despite detailed and lengthy searches through the records, the date of the formal closure of MI9 has not been identified, although there is every indication that it started as early as July 1945 and its officers were demobilized in 1946. Certainly, the Branch remained active long enough to ensure that prisoners of war returning from the camps in both Europe and Asia completed short questionnaires in an attempt to learn lessons about escape experiences which might prove valuable in any future war and to identify any collaborators for possible prosecution. It also organized a lengthy exercise to get food aid to those who had helped on the escape routes and to identify those who should receive honours for the support they had given to escapers and evaders, recognizing the extent to which they had placed their own lives in mortal peril. The task was eventually completed by the Air Ministry and they decided to fund the RAF Escaping Society, which continued in existence into the 1990s, ensuring that those who been directly involved with MI9, their families, dependents and descendants, received the support they needed long after the war had ended.

  DID MI9 MEET ITS REMIT?

  Any judgement of MI9’s success, or failure, needs to be set against this background in which it was forced to operate. In seeking to make a judgement, it is fair to be reminded of the principal objectives with which they had been charged in 1939 and which have been described in detail in Chapter 1. They fell under three broad headings, namely morale of prisoners of war, the acquisition of intelligence, and escape and evasion.

  In terms of morale, the all-pervading philosophy of escape-mindedness which Crockatt and his staff tried to inculcate seemed to have improved the morale of the prisoners of war. The camp histories make much of the extent to which the involvement of the camps in the activity of planning escapes contributed to the maintenance of a mood of optimism. The time spent in planning and executing escapes kept the prisoners of war occupied through the many days, months and, in some cases, years of captivity. They felt that, despite their captivity, they were still actively contributing to the war effort. Many prisoners of war were aware that their camp was in covert contact with the War Office, although how and when communications occurred was known only to the relatively few coded letter writers or to those using the radios. News sent via the coded letters and, later on in the war, via the wireless contacts, encouraged them in their endeavours. They received news of what was happening, especially after the Allies had landed in Normandy, and started to push back the German front.

  Those at home had their morale boosted with the return of the successful escapers and evaders. This was expressed by Neave in his Introduction to Langley’s book, Fight Another Day:

  It was the sudden reappearance of airmen reported lost, at RAF Stations, that had so deep an impact. When the great raids on Germany began, and losses began to mount, these miraculous returns from the unknown encouraged the whole RAF. They knew that, even if wounded, they had a chance of avoiding capture. The lectures and escape aids of MI9 increased their confidence. More than once we took an airman back to his Station . . . the joy with which he was greeted made all our efforts worth while.

  Similarly, the families of the captured military personnel, both officers and other ranks, were alerted by MI9 to the extent to which their sons were able to continue to contribute to the war effort despite their incarceration behind barbed wire.

  Another key responsibility given to MI9 from the beginning was 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. Perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of the research behind this book has been the discovery of the extent to which MI9 was able to establish coded contact with the camps and use it, not only as a crucial link in supporting escape activity, but also as the means to encourage the camps to provide whatever intelligence they could to support the war effort. The coded letter system was often used to seek answers to some very specific enquiries about Allied losses and the state of the German war machine. The camps proved to be a remarkable fifth column and one which, to date, has received little or no recognition.

  In terms of the escape and evasion activity itself, the sheer output of the production of escape aids, leaving aside the mapping programme for the moment, was impressive. Between 1 January 1942 and 25 August 1945, MI9 arranged for the production and despatch of 423,075 escape packs, 275,407 purses, over 1,700,000 compasses and related devices, and 434,104 miscellaneous items, including such items as gramophone records and other leisure items, all previously described in Chapter 4. The list is impressive enough and becomes even more so if the whole of the escape and evasion mapping programme is added to it.

  THE SUCCESS OF MI9’S MAPPING PROGRAMME

  As a result of this research into the escape and evasion mapping programme, it is now possible, for the first time, to reveal an estimate of the numbers of escape and evasion maps which MI9 actually produced. A conservative figure would be that 243 individual items were produced and in excess of one and three quarter million copies were printed (see Appendices 1–9 for full details). Over half of the copies produced were of three of the sheets in [Series 43] covering Western Europe which it is believed were printed for operational use prior to the D-Day landings. Excluding this, a cautious estimate of the total printed for escape and evasion purposes would still be in excess of three quarters of a million copies.

  A critically important further finding has been the sheer scale of the covert involvement of commercial companies by MI9 in order to mount such levels of cartographic production in a wartime situation. By any measure, this appears to have been a quite remarkable effort, the more so when one takes account of the self-inflicted production challenges which resulted from Hutton’s own insularity and lack of cartographic awareness, experience or training. If numbers are an indicator of success, then certainly the programme can be deemed to have been successful. While a significant proportion of the print volume took place after D.Survey became involved, and probably reflected an awareness of the value of fabric maps in an operational situation, it is by any standard an impressive record of map production.

  Sheet 43C from [Series 43], one of the maps printed in large numbers, probably for operational use in preparation for the D-Day landings.

  It is also worthwhile considering the numbers of escapers and evaders who managed to return to the UK before victory was declared. Over 35,000 are reported to have returned, numbers which equate to the size of three Army divisions. The direct evidence that these escapers used escape and evasion maps is remarkably hard to find, however. None of the published sources which can be ascribed to Hutto
n for their information explores the mapping programme in any detail in spite of the fact that it was clearly an early priority for the newly established MI9. There are many other books which recount the detail of escape and evasion, though none appears to include detail of the maps. The escapes described range from the truly ingenious and inspirational to the bizarre and sometimes opportunistic. However, even those which describe the escape route in minute detail fail to describe the maps used or their source. Most mention maps in passing and highlight the extent to which they figured on the ‘musthave’ list of most successful escapes. Time and again, escapers include mention of the provision of money and maps by the escape committees in the oflags and stalags as part of their aids to escape but offer little or no supporting detail. Why should that be? In discussion with Professor Foot in January 2012, over sixty-five years after the end of World War II, he was surprisingly still unwilling to explain how he had managed to keep hidden the MI9 map of France and Spain with which he had been issued prior to being dropped as an SAS officer in occupied France in 1944. When prompted, he explained that all MI9’s preoperational briefings had always included the warning that the maps should never be discussed, and he insisted that he had always abided by that, although he did imply that he had succeeded in keeping his map from the Germans even when he had been captured, by hiding it inside the lining of his jacket. The map had remained in his possession and he produced it during the discussion.

  EPITAPH

  Despite the scale of activity, Langley indicated that the only epitaph he could find for the work of Crockatt, Neave, Darling and himself was that ‘it was too little, too late’. While arguably he should have known from his own experience just how true, or not, that description was, there is much to indicate that his judgement was far from balanced. Perhaps he was too close to be objective and dispassionate. As an escaper himself, he identified very closely with the fate of those who were required to spend months and often years of their young lives as guests of the Third Reich. His judgement was probably also coloured by his understandable desire to help as many as possible to freedom. He confessed that he blamed no-one for the shortcomings of MI9 and certainly not ‘Uncle Claude’ and SIS. He felt that the fault, such as it was, lay ‘in the inability of anyone to see that the apparently impossible was possible’. For Langley, it was the lack of foresight and even of imagination, which resulted in the failure to grasp the considerable potential of organized escape and evasion which he personally regarded as so self-evident. He believed that, had MI9 been granted the same freedoms and status as SOE, much more could have been achieved. It is clear that he experienced anger and frustration at what he regarded as MI9’s failures, particularly the loss of life on the escape lines of those members of the French, Belgian and Dutch resistance who were captured and executed by the Gestapo or who died in the concentration camps.