Interesting piece of information

(You'll never look at the game the same way again!)

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 showing
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 got the idea of printing escape maps on silk. It's
durable, can be scrunched-up into tiny wads, and 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 located. 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: 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
currency, 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.

Cool story. I wonder if any of the rigged games survived the war and are still in existance?

Bravo!

Rich

Outstanding!

http://abcnews.go.com/Technolo...ape/story?id=8605905

I did learn something again about this period and I learned it on AR!

I am sure that Edmond will know the story of Josephine Baker in WWII. But for those that don't here is some of it:

After the "Fall of France" she set about visiting those POW Camps that contained French POWs held by the Germans.

And at the end of her visit would have a large photograph taken of her with all the French POWs at around her.

The Germans I suppose were happy to encourage this as it showed how well prisoners of war were treated by the Germans.

What they didn't know was that the negatives of those pictures were then used as the tool to create false identity cards!

The silk maps, BTW, and I have seen originals DID NOT have locations of "safe houses" marked on them! That would have been a certain death sentence when maps were discovered by the Gestapo.

But yes the Monoploy board story is 100% true.