I love the sheer inventiveness and daring do of the British in WWII. This is a terrific story of how they smuggled in compasses and maps to help British POWs escape from German war camps.
Silk Escape Maps Concealed in Monopoly games helped WWII prisoners escape
"It was ingenious," said Philip Orbanes, author of several books on Monopoly, including "The World's Most Famous Game and How it Got That Way." "The Monopoly box was big enough to not only hold the game but hide everything else they needed to get to POWs." British historians say it was effective enough to help thousands of captured soldiers escape. So how did a simple board game end up in a position to help out one of the most powerful military forces on the planet? Silk and serendipity.
From Kilroy was here
As he gently spread the layers of cardboard of the package, he found two slivers of metal which screwed together to form a file. He broke the little wooden red hotel to find a tiny silk map of his region folded very tightly. Under the packaged Monopoly money was real German Reich marks ready to spend and, finally, inside the Scotty dog was a tiny compass. Here was what he needed to be among the estimated 35,000 Allied POWs who escaped from German and Italian camps during WWII. The contraband in the Monopoly games is credited with at least one third of them