Beginning in the early 1940s, increasing numbers of British airmen found themselves involuntary guests of the Third Reich, and the Crown was casting about for ways and means to facilitate their escape. One of the most helpful aids to that end is a useful, accurate map showing not only where stuff was, but also showing the locations of ‘safe houses’ a POW on-the-lam could go to for food and shelter.
           
But paper maps have real drawbacks. They make a lot of noise when opened and refolded, they wear out rapidly and if they get wet they turn into mush. Someone got the idea of printing escape maps on silk. It’s durable, can be scrunched-up into tiny wads and unfolded as many times as needed, and makes no noise whatsoever.
           
At that time, 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 government, the firm was only too happy to do its bit for the war effort. By pure coincidence, Waddington’s was also the U.K. licensee for the popular American board game, Monopoly.
           
As it happened, ‘games and pastimes’ was a category of item qualified for insertion into relief packages dispatched by the International Red Cross to prisoners of war. Under strictest secrecy, in a securely guarded and inaccessible old workshop on the grounds of 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 so small 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 and 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 missions, on how to identify a ‘rigged’ Monopoly set, identifiable by a tiny red dot cleverly designed 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, perhaps one-third were aided in their flight by the rigged Monopoly sets.  Everyone who did so was sworn to secrecy indefinitely, as the British government might want to use this highly successful ruse in a future war.  The story wasn’t declassified until 2007, when the surviving craftsmen from Waddington’s, as well as the firm itself, were finally honored in a public ceremony. Weblink.