MI 9’s original vast single room in the Metropole Hotel was hardly suitable for the sort of business its staff had to transact, and they had to work in it long before the open-plan office became fashionable. At least they worked fast, in the breathing-space afforded by the lull in actual fighting.
On 5 January 1940 Evans, not even yet formally a member of the department delivered a model lecture to half-a-dozen colleagues, some of whom in turn were lecturing to army and air force audiences in France before the spring was out. Evans was never much of a man for being told what to do, instead of deciding for himself, and he soon gave up air force liaison altogether in order to devote himself to the business of collecting a strong team of lecturers from among the escapers of the previous war. He assembled ten others who, like himself, had succeeded in getting back from behind the enemy’s lines, including – before he went east – M. C. C. Harrison. All were happy to lecture on the difficulties of being a prisoner of war, on the attitude prisoners should take to each other and to their captors, and on the problems and methods of escape.
Notes for a specimen lecture, drawn from later in the war and bearing the unmistakeable stamp that Crockatt set on all MI 9 teaching, though with none of his distinction of style, will be found in Appendix 2 below. All these lectures had in common insistence on the secrecy of the subject, and on the importance of resolute and imaginative action taken firmly but not too fast. It was always stressed that the best chances of escape were to be found in the first few days or hours, even in the first few minutes after capture. This applied particularly to soldiers, 47for front-line troops might well be too busy with their current battle to bother to pursue a prisoner who simply ran off, and to airmen, for they might first fall into the hands of gamekeepers or other rural authorities who had never themselves before had the task of guarding an alert, robust adult. An evader had to begin by getting very promptly clear of the wreck of his aircraft, if he was near it; but a careful survey of the country round him, to establish if he could exactly where he was, came next on his list of priorities in Europe, and was even more advisable in Asia.
Such calls for prompt and steady action were similar enough to the aggressive doctrines already familiar in well-trained combatant units, to get MI 9’s and MIS-X’s lecturers a ready hearing from an appreciative audience. A constant difficulty with combat aircrew was to persuade them that ‘capture was not merely a remote possibility but a daily fact.’ One difficulty beset them all the same: the reluctance of old-fashioned commanders to admit that their men might ever surrender. As late as 1943 a few units, including one famous fighting formation – the British 7th Armoured Division – could be found in which no escape training had ever been given at all. General Patton’s views on the subject were transformed when his son-in-law became a prisoner; thereafter his troops got the full MIS-X treatment. Admirals were particularly stubborn in refusing to allow their crews’ time to be wasted, as they saw it, in a piece of training hardly likely to be relevant to a sea career. They were to this extent justified, that among subjects of the Crown who eventually escaped or evaded capture only one per cent came from the navy. No United States Navy escapers or evaders were recorded at all by MI 9. MIS-X knew better; but they were indeed few, all from the Pacific. Those who were eventually rescued after their ships had been sunk by enemy action – the future President Kennedy and the future Earl Mountbatten provide two famous examples, among many thousands – are not included in those MI 9 figures, for they had never been in enemy-held ships or territory; nor are the celebrated prisoners recaptured from the 48Altmark in Norwegian waters in February 1940, for they were merchant seamen.
In naval actions in winter on the high seas, the prospects of surviving to be taken prisoner were indeed slight. For sailors whose work was going to take them close inshore in light craft, the outlook was different. A few enterprising commanders, notably Mountbatten, early appreciated the need for escape training of such people as Royal Marine commandos, beachmasters, beach pilotage parties, midget submarine crews, and the crews of light coastal forces; a number of interesting escapes and evasions resulted.
For the air force, as for the army, the prospect of capture was less remote than for the crew of a great warship, and encouragement, mild at first, for MI 9’s lectures was given by high commanders. The audiences to whom they spoke were not the dullards of a peacetime regular army of the early 1900s. They were most of them young, eager men, under-informed about war, anxious to learn; angry at the political trap that had snapped round them, making them fight Nazism instead of pursuing some more peaceable career; and brought up on a different set of unspoken assumptions from those that governed the minds of their elderly commanders. Many of them had read such books as The Escaping Club, and the concept of escape as a quasi-romantic adventure was one that they could readily seize. One of the lecturers’ first and vital tasks was to be as unromantic and as matter-of-fact as could be. They had to stress the need for a would-be escaper to be severely practical: what was he going to wear, what was he going to eat, how would he carry his food, where was he going to go, how would he find his way, who was he going to be? All these were essential questions, and unless a man knew the answers to them already he had no occasion to ask the basic one, how was he going to get away from his immediate prison?
One of Crockatt’s principal aims at this early stage in the war was to inculcate and foster in the armed services the quality to 49which he had to give the cumbrous name of escape-mindedness: the constant readiness, if caught in enemy hands, to work for and to seize on every conceivable chance of getting out of them. His lecturers preached escape-mindedness all over the BEF, the AEAF, home forces, bomber command, fighter command, the fleet, anyone who would hear, and preached it with success. To such an extent indeed did they succeed that the phrase, ‘It is an officer’s duty to escape’, has now become more or less proverbial; and the duty to escape applied to all ranks, not only to commissioned officers. Crockatt stressed perpetually that on this point of duty there was no differentiation between ranks at all.
He knew that training was important, but believed his intelligence role to be more important still. Winterbottom, Evans and Rhodes all had a busy spring working out a satisfactory code which could be hidden in an apparently perfectly innocent letter sent by or to a prisoner of war. (Evans had plenty of energy for code work as well as lecturing.) Many officers and a few other ranks had already made private arrangements with their wives for some sort of coded interchange. Few married readers will have any trouble in reconstructing for themselves the sort of simple system that a couple could set up which nothing but a brilliant flash of intuition could ever break – provided it was well thought out and carefully used. Such systems were known in MI 9 as ‘dotty codes’, not so much because they were unprofessional efforts and therefore out of the normal run, as because they quite often used a row of dots in the heading or the text of the letter to show where the message began and ended.
With the help of a Foreign Office expert called Hooker, Winterbottom and his colleagues developed a code called HK through which several people were communicating with London from Germany by November 1940. One of them, John Parker, who had been caught in a raid on Guernsey, had much trouble in getting the Germans to grant him prisoner of war status instead of shooting him as a spy. He made up for the 50failure of his raid by extra industry in passing on his code. Like several codes developed later, HK was at once fairly simple to use, and in skilled hands unusually hard to detect. All the user had to do was to indicate by the fashion in which he wrote the date that the letter contained a message, show by his opening words which part of the code he was using, and then write an apparently normal chatty letter, from which an inner meaning could be unravelled with the code’s help. Full details of exactly how this could be done, with real examples, were published in 1971 in a book by a Scottish Jew who was dental officer in, among other camps, Colditz.1
The incoming messages when decoded were passed to Crockatt, who made up his mind what distribution they needed. Some could go straight to service technical departments such as MI 14; the Air Ministry in particular would be interested in anything bearing on the performance of Allied or of enemy aircraft, the navy’s operational intelligence centre was always hungry for movements of ships and submarines. More political matters Crockatt would probably pass to Dansey who would give them what further distribution he chose. It was a considerable intellectual burden for a man to carry alone, yet Crockatt was a man who enjoyed responsibility. He preserved his good looks and debonair ways all through the war and beyond; to act as the focal point through which so many reports passed seemed positively to refresh him.
As well as his main duty as head of a section in the intelligence directorate, he had the unruly Clayton Hutton to supervise on top of all the routine administration. ‘Clutty’ had as busy and as productive a spring as anyone. He got the British Museum to collect for him from second-hand bookshops in Bloomsbury 51about fifty true escape stories of the 1914–18 war; had them summarised by the sixth form of Crockatt’s old school, Rugby; realised from the summaries the indispensability of maps; flew to Edinburgh, saw the managing director of Bartholomew’s, and secured all the maps he wanted. Still proceeding on ‘not what you know but whom you know’ lines, he secured some silk from a friend in the textile world and struggled with a jobbing printer to transfer the maps to silk. Adding pectin, a natural gelatin, to the printer’s ink turned out to be the way to get a perfect impression. Funds ran to buying plenty of white silk, and soon most operational aircrew carried at least a silk map of Germany, about eighteen inches square, stored somewhere about their flying kit. A friend at his club put him in the way of some Japanese pulp convertible into thin non-rustling paper; more and more specialised maps resulted, some of them hidden between the front and the back of playing cards. (Some cards are on show at the RAF museum at Hendon.)
Clayton Hutton’s next preoccupation was with compasses. He found a firm of instrument-makers, Blunt’s in the Old Kent Road, run by two elderly brothers with imagination, enterprise, and a highly skilled staff. He conjured up a thousand feet of steel strip for them. Within a week they had five thousand magnetised bars, nearly an inch long, ready for him and he and they went on to design numerous other types of miniature compass. Tiny brass cylinders, a quarter of an inch across, with a luminous compass needle balanced within them, could be hidden in a pipe or a fountain pen, or in the back of a service button or cap badge. Ones twice as large, painted over, formed sound bases for collar studs, which were still then commonly worn by men of all classes and would arouse no kind of suspicion; an escaper or evader could scrape the paint off with a fingernail when he needed to use the compass. As many as 2,358,853 compasses of various designs, including 1,301,937 half-inch brass ones and 91,591 studs, were made and distributed by MI 9 during the war. Five hundred of the half-inch ones were specially hand 52sewn into shirt collars and belts for the British First Airborne Division just before the attack on Arnhem.
Clayton Hutton turned his mind next to other normally carried, unsuspicious objects which might be magnetisable. People often, in those days before the Biro, carried a lead pencil attached to a breast or inside pocket by a sliding metal clip, usually made of tin. It was easy to make the clip of steel, magnetise it, and punch a tiny dent beneath it at its point of balance so that it would swing on its own pencil’s tip. Simpler still, though a shade less secure: in an age when almost everybody who shaved at all shaved with a safety razor, Clayton Hutton eventually arranged for all razor blades sold through forces’ canteens to be magnetised, with the north end of the magnet at the same end as the start of the maker’s name printed on the blade. So thereafter, anyone taken prisoner with his kit who was allowed to keep his razor – which was by no means always the case – had at least one compass with him, if he could find a piece of thread on which to swing it.
Saws came next. MI 9 produced several formidable hacksaws. One, used successfully by one of the authors to cut his way out of an improvised cell and still in his possession, measures 4 ½" x ½" is edged on one long side only, and has a hole at one end so that it can be hidden by being dropped down a trouserleg or some convenient crevice on a bit of thread or string. One was used at Arnhem, in a battlefield emergency, as a surgical saw. Some had a rudimentary grip. A species that was fitting flints into antlers to make picks in palaeolithic times did not really need a grip provided by authority, as people could usually work out their own from an odd bit of wood. The strong-wristed could use their bare hands, perhaps with a handkerchief as baffle. And a hacksaw of course could be magnetised, and swung on a thread, as easily as a razor blade.
Clayton Hutton also secured some surgical saws – Gigli saws was their technical name – which were in fact pieces of very 53strong wire with a serrated edge; readily enough concealed – in a textile cover – as bootlaces. These led him on to his most extraordinary invention: the escape boot. It looked like an ordinary fleece-lined flying boot with a strip of webbing round the ankle. Hidden in a cloth loop at the top of the boot was a small knife. If the wearer cut the webbing with the knife, he separated the leggings from a pair of respectable black walking shoes; if he slit up the seams of the leggings, he had the two halves of a fleece-lined waistcoat, waiting to be sewn together, as well.
This was a trifle too good to be true. The boot was popular with aircrew at first, because ordinary flying boots were conspicuous, and could easily draw attention towards evaders to whom all unfriendly attentions were unwelcome. Yet when converted into a shoe it still suffered from a vice of flying boots – in wet weather it got waterlogged and made running difficult; even walking in it could be tiring. Worse, if one flew at any height, it was not warm enough. Chill air seeped in through the ankle webbing, and made the wearer’s feet bitterly cold at great heights. This fault turned out incurable, and the boot was abandoned.
Several instances from the 1914–18 war led Clayton Hutton to consider convertible uniforms – that is, RAF or other service uniforms which might, by a few deft touches, be made to resemble those of the Luftwaffe or the German army. A still more ingenious device was the setting into a blanket – an obvious present for a prisoner from a doting, if fictitious, aunt – of the cutting-out pattern by which the blanket could be converted into a civilian overcoat; the pattern showed up when the blanket was washed, even in cold water. But this was later on in the war, in 1944; we must come back to Clayton Hutton’s most inventive six months in the first half of 1940.
His most widespread aid, for which thousands of people who had never heard his name were grateful, was the escape box: a pair of flat transparent acetate plastic boxes, one fitting closely inside the other, filled with malted milk tablets, boiled sweets, a 54bar or two of plain chocolate, matches, a few benzedrine tablets for energy and a few halazone tablets for purifying water, a rubber waterbottle to hold about a pint, a razor (with magnetised blade, of course, as well as soap), a needle and thread, and a fishing hook and line. Few if any fish were caught, but the line was invaluable if one’s braces (suspenders) broke, or if one’s arm needed a sling. The original model for the box was the flat tin of fifty cigarettes, which became harder to get in the spring of 1940 because Clayton Hutton had just bought 10,000 of them from W.D. and H.O. Wills; this proved not quite large enough. The end product would fit comfortably in the outer front map pocket of battledress trousers or in the lower side pocket of a service dress tunic; more comfortably still, after an ingenious American pointed out in 1942 that it needed to be slightly curved to fit the human frame, and that rounded corners would damage uniforms less. In a final refinement Halex Limited, the manufacturers, produced a single plastic box with a watertight screw-neck top, including a compass built into it, so that the user could find his way without having to unpack any of his intricately assembled set of goodies. This did not turn out well; too many of these boxes leaked. After the war, surviving boxes made admirable sewing- or button-boxes for airmen’s or commandos’ wives.
These boxes were automatically distributed to aircrew going on operations, one per man, as soon as station IOs had grasped the system and enough had been manufactured; that is, more or less universally in the RAF from the autumn of 1940 and in the USAAF from the middle of 1942. Fleet Air Arm pilots in aircraft carriers were supplied at their admirals’ and captains’ whim. In theory, a box would keep a man going for forty-eight hours, while the hunt for him flared up and then died down, and he lay hidden. 55
56With the boxes, those going on flights overland received also a coloured purse containing currency for any country that was to be flown over, and a small brass compass, and the relevant silk map, and a hacksaw file. Purses were of course accountable, as they contained money, and were supposed to be collected by the IO – automatically, again – at the debriefing at the end of each flight. The whole process soon became one to which everybody got used, and in which people trusted warmly. There is even a tale that once, when by one of those muddles familiar to anybody who has been any sort of junior manager the escape kits failed to turn up at a newly-opened airfield in Tunisia, USAAF aircrew there refused duty until they did: they were not delayed long.
There was also a Polish squadron IO who, when his squadron’s tour of duty was over, persuaded a foolish bank clerk to change all the money in its purses for sterling, and gave a stupendous party on the proceeds. When Crockatt remonstrated, his excuse was, ‘Well, sir, I thought you would like us to celebrate the fact that none of us had to use the money’. Crockatt took no further action; but he delighted to tell the story to visiting potentates.
This too lay some years in the future in the early months of 1940 when Russia was supporting Germany, France was still unbeaten, and America, Italy and Japan – to speak of no smaller powers – were all still neutral. Crockatt and all his staff had to begin by operating in a void, and it is a tribute to the soundness of their judgement that hardly any of the decisions they took in this opening, theoretical phase needed to be reversed.
Premises were an obvious problem. As the country gradually adapted from peace to war, many large private houses and hotels that could no longer be privately staffed were requisitioned and many hutted camps were built. MI 9’s immediate need was for interrogation centres. Rawlinson’s MI 9a had a hutted camp at Cockfosters in north London for any German airmen who might be shot down over Great Britain, and MI 9b secured a floor of the Great Central Hotel at Marylebone station. An eyewitness account from two years later by Airey Neave is too good to leave unquoted:
Before the war, the Great Central Hotel held a strong attraction for me. Not that there was any romantic experience to 57record – a drink or two, a hilarious bath at four o’clock in the morning before taking a milk train from Marylebone in white tie and tails.
I was drawn to the magnificent dullness and solidity of the hotel. I liked the brass bedsteads, the marble figures on the stairs and the massive afternoon tea. Outside this refuge my young world was threatened by Hitler. Inside, I could pretend that I belonged to a safer age.
We were directed to the reception desk where two years before a splendid blonde in black had been on guard.
Now there was a sergeant at the desk.
‘What is this place, sergeant?’
‘The London Transit Camp, sir.’ He studied me politely. ‘Where are you from, sir?’
‘Germany.’
He did not bat an eyelid.
‘Quite so, sir. Then it will be MI 9 you want. They are on the second floor.’
I climbed the wide stairs, with my cheap suitcase, still feeling I was a prisoner arriving at a new camp. The corridors were stripped and bleak. Everywhere I could hear the sound of typewriters and the bustle of troops in transit.
I entered what had been a large double-bedroom, which now served as an office for the interrogation of returned escapers by MI 9. In place of the brass bedsteads were trestle tables and wire baskets. For half an hour, I gloomily watched the rain falling in Marylebone Road, and the mist obscuring the distant barrage balloons.
The senior staff at the centre – one or two of them living in what was left of London society, with a varied body of acquaintances – were well placed to check escapers’ bona fides and impressed on all of them the absolute indispensability of silence about their helpers. There was a rule, imposed by Churchill himself, that nobody could be held at the centre for longer than 58forty-eight hours before being allowed to rejoin his relatives in the British Isles if he wished to do so, unless there were grave reasons for suspecting him of some crime. If there were such reasons he had to be charged and placed under arrest.
Cockfosters and Marylebone were both virtually empty at first, but as soon as fighting began in earnest in northern and Western Europe they justified themselves. ‘Much useful information’, the war diary reported, was secured at Cockfosters about the organisation and tactics of the Luftwaffe from prisoners taken in the Norwegian campaign. There was a curious scare there in June 1940; for the coders of M1 9, keeping an eye on prisoners’ mail into Cockfosters from Germany, discovered and broke a series of code messages which seemed to indicate a German plan to release the prisoners there by a heavily armed parachute landing in the neighbourhood. This was probably only an ingenious propaganda move by Goebbels, intended to terrify the British about the insecurity of their own capital’s suburbs. Peter Fleming at any rate concluded in retrospect that the Germans never had any real intention of using airborne troops outside the projected invasion area on the south-east coast. The Cockfosters incident, a skirmish in the war of nerves, no doubt had some bearing on the dispatch of over 500 prisoners to Canada before the end of the month.
The Marylebone centre also rapidly proved its worth. The Norwegian campaign provided a small quota of escapers and evaders, but it was not till 10 August 1940 that the bulk of them were got back to London from Sweden, to which nearly all of them had made their way. Their experiences had been dictated by the severe terrain of Scandinavia and by other purely local aspects of the war. Much more of general use and importance was to be got from a score or two of officers and men, who passed briefly through German hands in May and early June 1940 – or narrowly escaped doing so – during the great Blitzkrieg in the west, and came to the Great Central Hotel when they reached England. MI 9 reacted remarkably promptly; though 59its war diary complained also that the distribution of returning troops was so higgledy-piggledy that there was virtually no way of making sure that returned escapers passed through its mesh.
About once a month the army issued a short confidential white paper called an army training memorandum. (The word ‘confidential’ was not used; the front cover was marked ‘NOT TO BE TAKEN INTO FRONT LINE TRENCHES’, a phrase from the previous great war.) The thirty-fourth issue, on 31 July 1940 – the text must have been ready some time earlier – included a two-page appendix on escape training in the light of these recent lessons learned. A copy went to every single officer in the army, so no regimental officer needed any longer to feel ignorant of the outlines of the subject, or unable to explain it to his men.
Much stress was laid on the importance of escaping quickly while still in the hands of fighting troops, and on seizing chances promptly when they were offered. It was also clear that to possess or to secure civilian clothes was of cardinal importance, since an escaper could fade into the crowd inside them in a way that was not open to a uniformed man. A warning was dropped, all the same, that ‘a civilian helps an escaped prisoner at the risk of his own life’. One paragraph is worth quoting in full:
The following points as noted by an escaper from France in civilian clothes illustrate the importance of conforming to the habits of a country from which a prisoner is attempting to break out:
Do not march in a military fashion, but adopt a tired slouch.
Try and ‘collect’ a bicycle. They proved invaluable to several escapers.
Do not wear a wrist watch. Carry it in your pocket.
Sling your haversack: French peasants commonly carry one in this way, but never as a pack on their backs.
Do not use a cane or walking-stick: it is a British custom.60
Get rid of army boots and adopt a pair of rope-soled shoes as worn by peasants, if procurable.
French peasants are generally clean-shaven, though a slight growth of beard is not uncommon.
A beret is a very effective disguise.
Village priests are likely to be helpful. Care should be exercised in approaching them and one should avoid being seen talking to them.2
A further paragraph stressed that ‘Many escapers brought back valuable military information. Escapers should notice everything they can of military importance both before and after escape.’ This was a presage of what Crockatt had always foreseen as a vital role for MI 9, the furnishing of a series of up-to-date pictures of what was going on in the enemy’s camp. The return of an officer and two cadets in a small boat from Dunkirk, guided by one of Clayton Hutton’s miniature compasses, was a striking minor feat of navigation and a small feather in the section’s cap; Crockatt was aware that there were more important things to be done when the dust of battle had settled.
When the Blitzkrieg swept over the Low Countries and northern France in May and June 1940, nearly two million French soldiers and airmen became prisoners of war. So did about 50,000 people in British uniform, almost all of them from the army, and only three of them as it happened equipped with an MI 9 code.3 In addition, about 2,000 British wounded for whom there was no room in the ships were left behind 61in hospitals in Flanders, Artois and Picardy when the main Expeditionary Force withdrew from Dunkirk. So rapid and so chaotic had been the course of battle that at least another 2,000 British were left wandering about the countryside, either because they had lost their units in the confusion, or because they had deliberately absconded, sooner than obey an order to surrender. Perhaps a thousand of these fugitive evaders eventually found their way back in time to be of use in the war. One or two deserve special mention.
As the seventh Earl of Cardigan gathered up his reins to lead out the Light Brigade on its fatal charge at Balaclava, he was heard to murmur, ‘Ah well, here goes the last of the Brudenells’. He was wrong; another Earl of Cardigan fought in France in 1940 as a subaltern in the Royal Army Service Corps, was captured at Boulogne, jumped off a lorry, walked out alone southwards into Spain, and has published an account of his adventure, I Walked Alone, which is a model for anyone stuck in a similar fix. One of his recurring themes is the readiness of ordinary peasants to help him, by providing food, drink, clothes and shelter, in spite of the danger they knew they ran in doing so.
Such help was available for many other wanderers, but most of them were picked up by the local Belgian or French police and handed over to the Germans, who dispatched them to prisoner of war camps. A very few managed to go to ground, and were absorbed into peasant communities; of no more use to the war effort, but at least out of enemy hands. Of these again a few quietly stayed on after the war was over, instead of risking a trial for desertion if they returned whence they came. One trio of privates who took refuge in a French peasant’s cottage even found they were being held virtual prisoners, in the confident belief that the British secret service would one day pay a large ransom for them.
Those who were captured and then marched right into Germany, without being able to get away en route, did not all reach their prisoner of war camps in a mood favourable to the 62French or the Belgians. Many of them felt let down by their neighbours; they did not appreciate the extent to which earlier the British had let their neighbours down by failing to stand up sooner and more firmly to the Nazi menace; and they did not want to contemplate a journey back across Belgian and French territory. If escape-minded at all, they aimed for Switzerland or Sweden or south-east Europe.
However, the earliest escapers all got away on French or Belgian soil, and their plain course lay west or south. One couple walked through to Finisterre, got away from Camaret near Brest by boat, and were in England for Christmas. Hardly any others who tried to get away through Brittany succeeded this early in the war.
One lucky pair of officers, one in the army and one in the navy, did not have to walk so far. They slipped away from the column while being marched into Germany and found a small yacht on the Norman coast. With the leave of its owner – a French professor – they sailed it away, crossed the Channel, were ignored by two British destroyers on anti-invasion patrols in spite of their frantic efforts to attract attention, and sailed right up the Beaulieu River to land. The soldier, Major (later Colonel) Leslie Hulls of the Highland Division, had escaped from the Turks in 1918 and claims the unique distinction of having escaped successfully in two world wars. Two privates in the same division, called Campbell and Oliver – Campbell had never left South Uist in his life till he went to join the army at the age of nineteen in 1939 – also got out by sea, a harder way; they stole a boat near St Valéry and rowed across to Sussex.
Everyone else who got away had to turn south in the wake of the mass Franco-Belgian civilian exodus and cross as best they could the demarcation line set up between German-occupied and unoccupied France. Personal experience leads us to another instance, the case of Jimmy Langley. As a young subaltern in the Coldstream Guards, badly wounded in the arm and head, he was left behind on the beach at Dunkirk because the stretcher 63on which he lay took up space in a boat that four men could fill. He was made prisoner, still prone, and had his shattered left arm amputated. With other wounded officers he was moved to a hospital in Lille, whence, withdrawing the parole imposed on him by senior British army doctors, he escaped on 10 October 1940 by the simple expedient of getting a corporal to give him a leg up through an unguarded lodge window. The stump of his arm was still suppurating. He had hopes of an address a mile away, where the family responded marvellously, giving him plain clothes and a night’s shelter. He had money enough for fares; and after some weeks’ scarifying odyssey, turned up in Marseilles.
Other escapers and evaders found almost uniformly, with Cardigan and Langley, every sort of readiness to help them among the poorer sorts of people and every sort of reserve among most of the rich. Once they got over the demarcation line they were still liable to arrest by the local police, but were no longer at all likely to be handed over to the enemy. The Vichy government’s policy was to concentrate them successively at Marseilles, where they were lodged in Fort St Jean; from January 1941, at St Hippolyte du Fort at Nimes; or at La Turbie, just outside Monte Carlo; not quite prisoners, not quite free. In Marseilles, officers were only required to report for a Monday morning roll call at which rations were issued; most of them promptly sold their rations on the black market and lived in lodgings on the proceeds. Fort St Jean, at the entrance to the Vieux Port, had been a collecting point for the Foreign Legion. It bore Lyautey’s motto over the gate: ‘You have asked for death, I will give it you’, hardly the warmest of welcomes for a recent ally. In principle, the fort was where British and Commonwealth serving men who reached Marseilles were supposed to go; but there were other and less official parts of the city where they could try to settle. Moreover, as usually happens when many people gather after a disaster, a few of them with natural gifts for leadership emerged and began to take control. 64
One was a simple Presbyterian pastor, with no idea of controlling anybody but himself, yet with equal faith and strength of character. Donald Caskie, the minister of the Scots Kirk in Paris, had never made any secret of what he thought of the Nazis. He preached against them often; his favourite text was Hosea’s ‘they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind’. He therefore thought it prudent to leave Paris before the Germans reached it, and managed to get as far as Marseilles. There he took charge of the seamen’s mission. This soon became known in the Marseilles underworld, and beyond, as a comparatively safe spot to which British soldiers and airmen, as well as seamen, could be directed. Caskie performed a series of small miracles sheltering and feeding them, and was helped and encouraged to do so by an eminent evader from the Highland Division’s stand at St Valéry-en-Caux on the north Normandy coast, I. P. Garrow.
Ian Garrow, a tall, dark-haired captain in the Seaforth Highlanders in his early twenties, who spoke school French with a noticeable Scots accent, had shown considerable enterprise and resource in getting across France from coast to coast under his own steam. He made it his business to look after the other ranks of his own division who also reached Marseilles, enlisted Caskie’s help and was ready to assist outsiders as well. The sense that ‘Auld Scotland counts for something still’ was strong in them both. The local police soon became aware of Garrow’s and Caskie’s activities; as each was so obviously a Scot they took for granted that both of them were acting as a front for some hidden manipulator from the legendary Intelligence Service. The two were in fact entirely on their own. Caskie was inclined to trust that the Lord would provide. Garrow, a shade more sceptical, made contact with the American consul and with various rich expatriates. He also made Home splendid local friends, notably Louis and Renee Nouveau and a fearless New Zealander, Nancy Fiocca, better known from Russell Braddon’s life of her as Nancy Wake, and later one of 65the stars of Maurice Buckmaster’s ‘independent French’ section of SOE.
They were able to prepare a few makeshift escapes with the help of friends and the friends of friends and by the end of the year had laid the groundwork of an organisation that was to become famous. Langley was among their helpers, though not on a large scale. He registered at Fort St Jean, but was allowed as usual to live out and soon met Garrow who employed him – a one-armed man excites sympathy rather than suspicion – as a courier to secure money from a rich source on the Riviera. The money was deftly fitted, by a trick – without consulting Langley or Garrow – into the pockets of the gang who had arranged the Blue Train robbery, that criminal sensation of the summer of 1939. Langley went before a medical board of which Dr Rodocanachi, a strong resister, was a member, and was at once repatriated, only to get recruited in March 1941 on a cursory inspection by Dansey to replace the shadowy 4Z as P15.
The fine summer of 1940, and the several million refugees who had taken part in the exodus of May/June and were trying to struggle home, produced a brief evaders’ paradise and made life more simple also for those who escaped on the line of march into Germany. There were so many thousands of people crowding every large railway station, so many hundreds trudging across damaged main road bridges, such a flood of homeless waifs that a few more could slip into the stream without remark. Richard Broad for example, a subaltern in the Highland Division at St Valéry, was ordered by his battalion commander – just before the division surrendered – to take seven privates with him back to Scotland by any means he could find; the compass bearing of Paris was the only information he was offered to help him. ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, as the party inevitably became known, were carried through in the end by Broad’s simple courage and unwavering resource; a feat of enterprise and stolid endurance that included a spell in a nunnery at Honfleur, clean contrary to the relevant order’s rules, 66for which the Mother Superior was given papal absolution after the war.
Evaders were far more numerous at this stage from the army than from the air force, but some air force ones made more stir. The most energetic of them, Wing Commander (Sir) Basil Embry, who later rose to be an air chief marshal, had a splendid record: captured after a parachute descent over Flanders, he escaped, was twice recaptured, and twice escaped again – leaving the odd dead sentry behind him – saw Hitler enter Paris, and turned up in England a few weeks later, wearing clothes – a top hat included – he had lifted off a scarecrow in a Belgian field. His was a personality so vigorous and so forceful that people listened to him and remembered what he said, much more than was the case with duller or shyer men. His example and his energy did much to fix evasion firmly in the heads both of MI 9’s staff and of the Air Ministry’s, as one of the modes of war to which they would thereafter need to pay full heed.
MI 9 recognised in fact that it had been a mistake to lecture so far almost exclusively about escaping and about resisting interrogation if caught. These subjects remained of course in their lecture syllabus and such films as Name, Rank and Number – of which Rawlinson had supervised the making in April 1940 – hammered home some of their lessons all over the armed forces. But from the autumn of 1940, lectures to airborne commando and RAF units all stressed evasion as well as escape.
This is an instance of how ready Crockatt was to change his mind, when there was clear evidence that he had made a mistake. Flexibility of this kind was not a leading characteristic among most of his army contemporaries, yet from it much of MI 9’s effectiveness arose.
Another basic point about which Crockatt changed his mind was where he was going to work. In Northumberland Avenue, only a block or two away from the main War Office building, his staffs were too much hemmed in by the massed bureaucrats of Whitehall. Anything unorthodox was not only 67frowned on but commented on; too many people outside his section were aware of his staff’s movements and visitors. He had already decided to move if he could when on 13 September 1940, as the Battle of Britain approached its climax, a German bomb grazed a corner of the Metropole Hotel and started a fire. The actual damage was slight but the confusion and disorganisation in the building, not to speak of the smoke and the mess, were considerable. Crockatt decided to move into the country, and three weeks later did so. His whole section took over Wilton Park, a country house on the eastern edge of Beaconsfield in the Chilterns, just north of the London-Oxford road. In those days it was fairly well into the country, though within twenty-three miles of Charing Cross.
Camp 20, Beaconsfield, was the name by which Wilton Park came officially to be known. A sizeable hutted camp grew up between the house and the lodge gates, as the original early Georgian manor turned out not to be large enough to hold everyone on Crockatt’s staff. The air was clean, there were views over beech woods, there were plenty of comfortable small houses in Beaconsfield in which married officers could live out; Crockatt’s own home at Ashley Green lay eleven miles to the north. It was a good quiet place from which to press on with secret work.
Even Clayton Hutton was content: he had ‘office accommodation that would have satisfied even Cecil B. de Mille’. Moreover, he found a private hide-out not far away on the edge of a disused graveyard, where he supposed – correctly – that none of the locals would care to come, and find out what he was experimenting with late at night; though later in the war an American colleague tracked him to it without difficulty. He pursued there various hobbies of his own, designing anti-tank grenades and a modern version of the lethal jungle blowpipe, as well as improving the escape kits he provided for MI 9.
All the staff found the move from London an advantage. In calm, quiet country air work went faster and more smoothly, 68and they were still only an hour or so away from the capital if needed for a conference. Crockatt continued a habit he had long found useful: any conversation that threatened to be awkward took place, if he had any hand in it, at Rules restaurant in Maiden Lane, off the Strand. ‘A soft answer turneth away wrath’ always seemed a good text to him; hospitality and Rules’ cook helped him out of several awkward corners and encouraged his subordinates to work with him more cheerfully than ever.
From the lawn at Wilton Park they could only too easily see the glow of the second great fire of London reddening the sky on the night of 29/30 December 1940.4
1J. M. Green, From Colditz in Code, 161–86. A single example had appeared nearly twenty years earlier in Richard Pape’s best-selling Boldness be my Friend at 155, with an indication of the system’s range and value. See the specimen code in Appendix 3.
2Army training memorandum 34 (1940), 18.
3WO 208/3242, 300. An earlier estimate – MI 9 war diary for 31 August 1940 – put the total of British prisoners at 34,000 (WO 165/39). The war diary mentioned on 31 May 1940 that a Squadron Leader Turner, who knew the code, was a prisoner. So did another RAF officer and a naval officer, both captured a few days later.
4Wilton Park’s post-war history deserves a footnote. (Sir) Heinz Koppler took it on as a government-sponsored Anglo-German discussion centre, intended to introduce young German prisoners of war brought up under Goebbels to the ideas of a freer world. He carried the name with him down to Wiston House in Sussex, where the Wilton Park conference centre continues to provide a forum for intelligent analysis of current affairs by international audiences, particularly Germans and Americans, and a European discussion centre now runs in parallel with it for the benefit of the EEC.