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New York Post
3 days ago
- New York Post
How World War II POWs rolled the dice on Monopoly to win their freedom
In the bitter winter of 1941, British military prisoners in Nazi-occupied Germany huddled around a Monopoly set, dazzled by the contents that awaited them. They didn't pluck Community Chest cards. They looked past the thimble and race-car tokens, ignored the tiny houses and phony deeds. The real treasures were hidden within the board and its packaging: tools that could be the difference between making a daring escape and staring down a firing squad. To unsuspecting captives and guards patrolling nearby, it looked like any other edition of the board game ubiquitous in homes across the United States and Europe. But for Britain's covert MI9 intelligence unit, this doctored Monopoly set was a Trojan horse — one of many that helped Allied troops break out of prisoner-of-war camps and find their way to safety during World War II. 'While Monopoly is considered a plaything . . . its role during the war belied any triviality,' writes Philip E. Orbanes in 'Monopoly X: How Top-Secret World War II Operations Used the Game of Monopoly to Help Allied POWs Escape, Conceal Spies, and Send Secret Codes' (Harper, July 15), his fourth book focused on the iconic tabletop game. 4 British army officers enjoy a game of Monopoly in 1942. Getty Images These deceptive parcels, smuggled among authentic games, often included forged identification, a miniature compass, fake uniforms, real currency and coded messages from back home. They served as 'Get Out of Jail Free' cards for thousands of Allied prisoners. 'Monopoly was selected to smuggle escape aids because its game board was large and accommodative — and because the vast majority of service men and women knew and desired it,' writes Orbanes, former head of research and development at the game's American originator, Parker Brothers. The scheme was conceived in the mind of Christopher Clayton Hutton, a World War I vet and amateur illusionist known as 'Clutty.' The MI9 operative believed anything — even a children's game — could be weaponized. Clutty realized Monopoly sets were manufactured in the same Leeds factory that produced silk maps for airmen. Since the fabric didn't crinkle or tear like paper, it was the perfect material for slipping past Nazi sentries. He teamed up with Norman Watson — head of Britain's Monopoly licensee, Waddingtons — to turn the game into a stealth survival pack. In a secure basement nicknamed 'the Beast,' workers hollowed out game boards and concealed instruments for escape. Abnormal markers, such as an errant red dot on the board's Free Parking corner, signified the package's intended destination and tipped off recipients in the know. Before deployment, Allied airmen were taught to spot doctored sets and wield the items to their advantage. The games arrived packaged with food and other rations sent to prison camps from fictitious humanitarian organizations, addressed to specific POWs trained to coordinate escape efforts and decode instructions from back home, which sometimes incorporated altered playing cards. The first true test of the loaded Monopoly kits came at the infamous German fortress Colditz Castle, a medieval Saxony prison reserved for high-flight-risk Allied captives. British Lt. Airey Neave and Dutch officer Tony Luteyn staged a high-stakes escape in 1941. The two men donned fraudulent uniforms, slipped out through a service shaft, scaled a tall wall and trudged through freezing conditions to flee the facility. Despite dangerous brushes with German authorities via public transit, they crossed Nazi Germany undetected, never looking back until they made it to Switzerland. 'Every British airman who made it home improved the morale of fellow airmen and provided further return on the £10,000 cost of his training — a substantial sum for the time,' Orbanes writes. The success of these escape aids inspired US military officials to adopt similar tactics, launching a Virginia-based intelligence agency called MIS-X in 1942. This organization purchased the classic board game in bulk, dubbing manipulated versions Monopoly X (as opposed to the unaltered Monopoly V, for 'vanilla') and coordinating their delivery to servicemen trapped behind enemy lines. One unidentified escaper, Orbanes notes, likened getaways to actual gameplay, 'avoiding the spaces with houses and hotels . . . until we reached safety.' 4 Fake documents, maps, money and other vital escape items could all be stashed within the hollowed-out Monopoly X game board — which escapees would then destroy to keep the secret safe. Philip E. Orbanes As the first British officer to roll the dice on the rigged Monopoly set and win, Neave joined MI9 to help coordinate similar underground operations across Europe. These networks comprised ordinary civilians risking it all to shuttle soldiers across international borders. Those everyday heroes included bada– women like Benoîte Jean, a French resistance fighter who disarmed men with her alluring looks and kept cooler than Swiss snowbanks when engaging in espionage. The Monopoly mademoiselle (code name: Nori, a reversal of the iron-shaped playing piece) stashed within a lipstick tube sensitive information about a crucial German bombing target. She escorted escaped airmen to Brussels en masse and hid microfilm messages for foreign officials beneath artificial fingernails. On one mission to inform an American intelligence official of traitors in the White House, Jean was intercepted by a major in Hitler's military-police unit who attempted to coerce her into accompanying him to his hotel room for sex. She played along just long enough to gain the upper hand. Then Jean mounted the Gestapo officer and drove his dagger into his neck. 'Tears filled her eyes,' Orbanes writes, recreating the act of self-preservation, 'and her breath came in spasms as he died.' 4 French resistance fighter Benoîte Jean stabbed a German officer with his own dagger. Courtesy of Waldemar van Zedtwitz For all the wartime bravery and ingenuity 'Monopoly X' uncovers, there was also a snake. Enter Harold Cole: a British army deserter loyal only to his own interests. After leading scores of stranded soldiers from Belgium to Marseille, the smooth-talking Cole became a double agent, feeding German intelligence agents information about resistance members and safe houses. 'Cole's heart was as black as a winter's night,' Orbanes writes. 'And just as cold.' Equal parts charming and deceptive, the Monopoly-obsessed turncoat (code name: Top Hat) routinely evaded capture or talked his way out of dangerous situations. His betrayal was so damaging to Allied escape missions, he was targeted in a 1944 failed assassination in Paris. The would-be shooter was a British captain and former POW who became romantically involved with Jean after she led him to freedom. But the Top Hat's demise came two years later, after he weaseled his way into the postwar American occupying forces to rip off fugitive Nazis. He was shot dead in a standoff with a French policeman who'd become hip to his treacherous track record. 'The heroics and flaws of many dissimilar people were linked by Monopoly's secrets,' Orbanes writes. Still, no one traitor could undermine Monopoly's massive success in helping liberate captured soldiers. Perhaps the operation's greatest achievement is it remained confidential, operating under the noses of Nazi guards until Germany surrendered to Allied forces in 1945. Servicemen who received the doctored sets protected the secret by stringently destroying and disposing of them after extracting their gifts. When the war ended, the classified British and American agencies that used Monopoly for spycraft destroyed records of their existence and obligated privy parties to keep quiet. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and members of Congress were ignorant of the operation. 'Parker Brothers — the firm that had made Monopoly a household name — would not know, until decades later, that its game was used to smuggle escape aids,' Orbanes writes. 'Something stirs the heart when contemplating how an 'innocent' means of home entertainment affected a global struggle.'
Winnipeg Free Press
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Gaming the system
If necessity is the mother of invention, then in war intrepid is its father. So it was in the 1940s when the ultra-secret British Military Intelligence (MI9) and America's equivalent (MIS-X) employed, of all things, the board game Monopoly to help free Allied airmen shot down in World War II and sent to prison camps in Germany. Philip E. Orbanes' Monopoly X celebrates strategic thinking over brute force. Authored by a leading expert on the game, the book is assertive, direct and unapologetic. Orbanes is a superstar of Monopoly and has written several books about it, including Monopoly: The World's Most Famous Game… and How It Got That Way. In 1992, he judged the Monopoly World Championship in Berlin. The game has been published in 47 languages. Some 1 to 1.5 billion people have played it. Monopoly served a covert role during wartime; military intelligence were able to hide all kinds of information inside the game. They used doctored sets of the board game to secretly pass escape routes, codes, money, tools and other vital information to prisoners. The parcels were from fake aid agencies the Allies created. Among the names used were Prisoners' Leisure Hours Fund and Licensed Victuallers Prison Relief Fund. The Monopoly the Germans saw in these phony parcels, even if they opened them and then opened the game within, would still look as it should. It was a brilliant triumph of hiding something in plain sight, and was still a secret long after the war was over. In Monopoly X you can taste war and its unrelenting worry. Here and there it is like a dispatch from the front: tense. There is in this wartime saga a rainbow of emotions and conduct: heroism, cowardice, conceit, betrayal, jubilation, contempt and, above all, fear — the constant fear of the Gestapo. The book mainly details the dangerous journeys of airmen aided by spies and locals. Monopoly equipped them. (Notably, for every airman who escaped from the Nazis and made it to freedom, one helper lost their life.) The people who risked the most were not the escapees, but the men and women who helped them. If discovered, they would be tortured by the Gestapo before being executed or turned over to concentration camps. But the heroes and heroines of the underground were tough. Benoîte Jean (code-named Nori), for example, was being raped at knifepoint by a German officer. She flipped him onto his back, grabbed the dagger out of his hand and stabbed him in the neck. He gurgled as he died. Andrée de Jongh (code-named Dédée) took the same chances as Nori but got caught. She was sent to Dachau concentration camp. There a dying woman insisted they switch names. It worked, and saved Dédée's life. After the war, Dédée moved to Africa and for many years helped lepers in four countries. Another tough customer was Lee (Shorty) Gordon, the first U.S. airman to escape and make it. When he got home, he was booked to tour cities to boost morale and sell war bonds. The public loved him like a rock star. Then there was an escaping American who broke his leg jumping from a train. The break was so severe the upper leg needed to be severed. But the old doctor they summoned didn't have a saw with him. However, the patient did: a Gigli saw rapped around the inside of his cap. The Gigli was a coarse-surfaced steel wire smuggled into his prison camp in a set of Monopoly. A hot poker cauterized the stump. Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. The Monopoly scheme originated through a collaboration between Waddington Games, the manufacturer and distributor of the British edition of the Parker Brothers game, and Intelligence officer Christopher Clayton-Hutton, an eccentric genius in MI9. The Monopoly idea came from him. Waddington was able to print on silk so that maps could be hidden under the board's paper covering. Other parts of the game were hollowed out and metal files, saws and compasses added — compasses that wouldn't rattle in the Monopoly parcel. Parker Brothers, the firm in the U.S. that made Monopoly a household name, didn't know anything about the smuggling. Says Orbanes, 'The use of games, especially Monopoly, to smuggle in aids for the escape of POWs was a uniquely effective, deceptively simple strategy. The Monopoly secret outsmarted the murderously efficient Nazis and intelligence agencies.' Barry Craig is a retired journalist.
Forbes
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Secrets And Scones: A Spy Themed Afternoon Tea Launched In London
A watch you can eat. Raffles London London doesn't exactly have a tea shortage. You can sit in Mayfair with a £12 cup of something floral, eat cucumber sandwiches in Belgravia, or sip Earl Grey under a chandelier that could concuss a small child if it ever came loose. That's all fine. Predictable, even. But now? There's a tea service in town that's a bit more… covert. Raffles London, which recently opened in the old War Office building (yes, that one), is now hosting an afternoon tea called Secrets & Spies. And before you roll your eyes—no, it's not a costume party. Nobody's handing out trench coats. You don't need a code word. It's actually very restrained, and more to the point: it's really good. The War Office, for anyone who missed that particular history class, was where Churchill worked, where MI9 was born, and where a fair number of young intelligence officers were quietly ushered in, briefed, and then sent off to play dangerous games in occupied Europe. It's heavy stuff. And now, weirdly but wonderfully, it's where you can get scones. The tea's held in The Drawing Room, which is all velvet and quiet lighting—basically what you'd expect if you imagined a very rich relative's living room and then doubled the ceilings. You sit down, you're handed a menu, and if you squint just slightly, you can almost hear old war secrets still echoing in the corners. Let's talk about the food. It's themed, yes, but not obnoxiously so. The standout is a dessert called Time to Spy, a blackcurrant-and-dark-chocolate cake that looks like a pocket watch—more specifically, like the kind spies carried in the 1940s. You almost don't want to eat it. But then you do. Other sweets are inspired by real women who served in the Special Operations Executive during World War II. Noor Inayat Khan. Odette Sansom. Violette Szabo. These aren't made-up characters—they were real, brave, terrifyingly cool women who worked behind enemy lines and often didn't come back. Each dessert nods to one of them through flavor or design. It's subtle, not sentimental. If you catch the references, great. If you don't, you'll still get a really nice tart out of it. The savory food leans traditional but with a few small changes that make it feel more thoughtful. The chicken sandwich, made with high-quality poultry, is paired with parmesan instead of the usual mayonnaise, which keeps it lighter while still adding flavor. The smoked salmon has been cured with beetroot, and it's served with lemon confit and horseradish cream, which adds a bit of brightness without overpowering the other flavors on the plate. Cucumber sandwiches are there too, of course, but in this case, they're layered on rye bread and softened with cream cheese and a little mint, which makes them more refreshing than expected. The ham is honey-roasted and served with caraway bread and a slightly tangy spread that complements the richness of the meat. Even the egg sandwich has been given a bit more care, using Arlington eggs and a grain mustard that adds texture and just enough bite to make it interesting without complicating it. Rather than overwhelming you with too many choices, the tea selection offers a carefully curated range that has been thoughtfully chosen. The house blend, created especially for The OWO, combines black tea with a touch of rose petal for a floral note that doesn't feel overly sweet or perfumed. There's also a Churchill blend, which leans toward a smoky profile, thanks to the lapsang, and includes a hint of ginger to add warmth. In addition to those, you'll find familiar names like Darjeeling and Earl Grey—nothing surprising, but all of it well prepared and served with quiet confidence. What really gives the whole experience its character, though, is the room itself. The Drawing Room still carries the feel of its former life as part of the War Office, not through obvious decoration or forced storytelling, but in the quiet way the space holds its history. You notice it in the layout, in the weight of the architecture, and in the small moments—like sipping tea while sitting just a few feet from where military briefings once took place. Will you leave changed? Probably not. But you'll leave charmed. And maybe—just maybe—you'll look over your shoulder as you walk out, half-expecting to spot a trench-coated figure watching from the corner. Because in this room, secrets aren't just part of the décor. They're baked right in.
