MI9, the British escape service, was a semi-secret branch of the military intelligence directorate in the war office, founded in December 1939 at the suggestion of the future Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, who was then in charge of security for the
British Expeditionary Force. Its head, Colonel Norman Crockatt, decorated and wounded in the
First World War, combined common sense, courage, and discretion. Having been brought into MI(R), a predecessor of
SOE, by its chief, J. C. F. Holland, he worked under the wing of
Dansey at MI6.
Crockatt's staff were mostly recalled regular officers, like himself; they included a sailor and an airman. The air ministry later regretted that it had not taken up a suggestion that the branch might come under its own control, for many of MI9's customers were airmen. Crockatt settled his headquarters at Wilton Park, Beaconsfield, west of London, and sent his staff out to lecture men in uniform. He was later promoted brigadier, and made a deputy director of military intelligence.
MI9 had several aims: to secure intelligence about the enemy, from repatriated
prisoners-of-war and by coded correspondence with those still in POW camps; to assist prisoners to escape, by advice given beforehand and by smuggling escape gear in to them; to train the armed forces in methods of escape and evasion; and, eventually, to organize groups of helpers abroad to assist escapers on their way home. None of the smuggling was done in
International Red Cross food parcels, on which scores of thousands of prisoners of war depended, towards the end of the war, for their continuing health.
Aircrew undertaking operational flights, or commandos going on raids, were provided by MI9 with purses, each containing some £10 worth of the local currency of wherever they were going, a small hacksaw, and a small compass: this would give them a start in making a getaway. They carried maps printed on silk, for durability and ease of concealment.
Gradually, with heroic help overseas, MI9 was able to build up lines of helpers, who were prepared to undertake the sheltering of fugitives on their way out of occupied territory. These lines worked particularly well in Belgium and France; attempts were also made in the more spacious and more suspicious lands of south-eastern Europe. In the Far East much less could be done, because escapers of Caucasian descent were immediately recognizable as non-natives (but see
British Army Aid Group).
If an escaper or an evader (someone who had never been in enemy hands) was caught while travelling along one of these lines, he had only to produce his identity discs to establish his status as an Allied combatant, covered by the
Hague and
Geneva Conventions, and could legitimately expect to be sent, or to be sent back, to a prisoner-of-war camp. His helpers were much more harshly treated: the best they could hope for was a prison sentence, and a great many of them were killed. It was reckoned in MI9 that every one of the 2,000-odd aircrew safely brought out of western Europe to fly again had cost a helper's life. The German security services devoted much effort to trying to break escape lines up; and they ran one or two bogus lines themselves, for the sake of the intelligence they could glean from them about Allied air order of battle.
A grand total of more than 33,000 men from British, American, and British Commonwealth forces got back to the Allied lines after being inside enemy territory, whether as escapers or as evaders. A substantial proportion of them—not recoverable exactly from the surviving statistics—did so with the help, known or unknown, of MI9 or of its American equivalent MIS-X.
Escape stories, many of them hair-raising, form a distinct and distinguished part of war literature. They seldom if ever mention MI9, because it was so secret at the time that few prisoners had ever heard of it. When they mention maps, tools, or wireless sets, without stating a source for them, they can reasonably be supposed to have come from MI9. The author of a best-seller from the First World War, A. J. Evans, who had written
The Escaping Club, served on MI9's staff. He joined the unit called IS9 (WEA) which accompanied
Eisenhower's armies during the fighting in north-west Europe. IS9 (CMF) was a similar unit working in Italy; IS9 (ME), based in Cairo, covered the eastern Mediterranean and south-east Europe, and provided cover for ‘A’ Force (see
deception). All three IS9 units came under Crockatt, an early believer in the slogan ‘small is beautiful’; the whole of the staff under him did not number as many as 300, but they exercised a disproportionately large influence on the course of the war.
Not only did they make escapes and evasions more easy, as they had been meant to do; they provided for thousands of prisoners-of-war, directly and indirectly, some degree of hope, and thus made prison endurable, whether the men concerned were directly involved in escape projects or no. Whether they also provided a significant body of intelligence remains an official secret.
M. R. D. Foot
Bibliography
Foot, M. R. D., and and Langley, J. M. , MI9 (Boston, 1980).
