Escape Devices Hidden Under Boards Smuggled Into Camps : Monopoly Not a Game to WWII British POWs

Escape from a World War II German prison camp was never as easy as passing “Go,” but prisoners could find help in doctored sets of Monopoly games that held smuggled maps, money and steel files.

Monopoly is 50 years old this year, and its British manufacturers, Waddingtons Games Ltd., recently brought two former prisoners of war to the British Toy and Hobby Fair to celebrate the anniversary.

Retired Col. James Yule, 68, and former navy flier John Powell Davies, 64, who both spent most of the war in high-security Colditz Castle prison for recaptured escapers and important prisoners, helped Waddingtons’ executives blow out the 50 candles on a cake decorated like a Monopoly board.

“Without Monopoly, there wouldn’t be an England,” Yule joked in a toast.

Yule and Powell Davies said they weren’t certain whether anyone had ever sawed through prison bars using the slender files hidden in the doctored sets. However, the money and the maps printed on silk were useful aids.

Beyond that, said Powell Davies, “it made an enormous difference to one’s esprit to know that there were people in England trying to help one.”

Waddingtons, which received the license to distribute Monopoly in Britain in 1935 from Parker Brothers in the United States, got involved in aiding the prisoners of war because of its printing expertise. It printed maps for the military on durable silk.

Thousands of fliers who went on missions over German-occupied Europe had the maps sewn into their uniforms to use if they were shot down.

Victor Watson, chairman of the firm, said Waddingtons had a secret department that put the maps, files and money in shallow recesses on the board under the paper face. Then MI-9, the division of Military Intelligence devoted to helping POWs escape, smuggled the sets into prison camps as recreational equipment.

Yule, an army intelligence officer, was captured in Norway and sent to a prison camp there, but escaped. He was recaptured and sent to Colditz, where he and Powell were on a committee trying to organize escapes of other prisoners.

Powell Davies, who was a 19-year-old flier when he was captured, said the prison escape committees would destroy the sets after removing the escape aids to keep the guards from figuring out what was going on.

Yule said that similar material came in other recreational items and books and that the combined material aided a few escapes from Colditz, near Leipzig in what is now East Germany.

“No one had escaped from Colditz in World War I, and the Germans thought it was impregnable,” said Yule.

Even with the smuggled aids, it was about as easy to escape from Colditz as it is to amass hotels on Park Place--or in Mayfair in the British version of Monopoly. “There always were more guards than prisoners,” Powell Davies said.