My Dad just told me about this, and I thought I'd share it with you.
(Please forgive any typos. I am typing this off of a pamphlet my Dad gave me today called "The Grenade", which is issued weekly by The Service Club of Indianapolis, a Veterans of Foreign Wars group he belongs to)
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Starting in 1941, an increasing number of British airmen found themselves as involuntary guests of the Third Reich. Authorities were casting about for ways and means to help facilitate their escape. Now obviously one of the most helpful aids to that eventuality is a useful and accurate map, one showing not only where stuff was, but also showing the location of "safe houses" where a POW on-the-loose 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 th idea of printing escape maps on silk. It is durable, can be scrunched up into tiny wads, and unfolded as many times as needed. A silk map makes no noise whatsoever. In 1941, 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 part for the war effort.
By pure coincidence, Waddington was the UK Licensee for the popular American board game, Monopoly. As it happened, "games and pastimes" was a category of items 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 at 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. Red Cross packages were delivered to prisoners in accordance with that same regional system. 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.
* A two-part metal file that could easily be screwed together.
* 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, approximately 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.
This story was not declassified until 2007, when the surviving craftsmen from Waddington's, as well as the firm itself, were finally honored in a public ceremony. Anyway, it's always nice when you can play that "Get Out of Jail Free" card.
