Читать книгу Great Escapes: The story of MI9’s Second World War escape and evasion maps - Barbara Bond - Страница 17

As Christopher Clayton Hutton indicated in his book, Official Secret, MI9 initially worked in isolation from the military map-makers and chose rather to approach commercial map publishing firms directly for help. As previously described, Hutton had contacted the firm of John Bartholomew & Son Ltd in Edinburgh at the suggestion of Geographia in London. It was Ian Bartholomew, the Managing Director, who gave Hutton his first lesson in map-making. Hutton himself indicated that ‘thanks to the assiduities of the managing director and his staff . . . I learned all there was to know about maps’. Hutton was given copies of many of Bartholomew’s own maps of Europe, Africa and the Middle East, which then formed the basis of MI9’s initial escape and evasion map production programme. The waiving of all copyright charges for the duration of the war was a considerable financial gesture from Bartholomew since MI9 went on to produce in excess of 300,000 copies of the maps (details of the print runs are given in Appendix 1).

The maps are readily identifiable as using Bartholomew mapping since they are identical, in specification, colour and font style, to the company’s maps of the time. They are generally small-scale (1:1,000,000 or smaller), produced in three colours (red, black and grey/green) and without elevation detail. A few of the maps carry confirmation of their source since they clearly show the Bartholomew job order number relating to the original paper map along the neat edge of the silk map. The alpha-numeric code A40 which appears in the northwest corner of some copies of sheet F was very much a Bartholomew practice. The company introduced this code in the early part of the twentieth century, mostly on their half inch-scale mapping. The formula is a letter (either A, for January–June or B, for July–December) followed by a two-digit number representing the year of printing, so A40 indicates that the original paper version of this map was printed between January and June 1940.

Sheet K3, printed on rayon, was based on Bartholomew mapping, primarily showing northwest Africa.

Summary of Bartholomew series used by MI9

◊ 59 sheets identified with similar numbering

◊ 44 sheets based on Bartholomew maps

◊ 15 sheets use a similar numbering system but not based on Bartholomew mapping

◊ Coverage includes: Europe, Russia, Turkey, Middle East, North and East Africa, Scandinavia, South East Asia

◊ Scales: detailed maps 1:16,000 to 1:600,000 and regional maps 1:1,000,000 to 1:6,000,000

◊ Print dates identified: 7 January 1942 to 9 August 1943

◊ Printed on: tissue, silk, paper, man-made fibre (MMF), rag lithographic paper, bank paper

◊ Bartholomew-based sheets printed largely in three colours: black, red, grey/green

◊ Copies printed: 348,570

For full details of the maps, see Appendix 1.

The existence of a direct link between MI9 and Bartholomew is shown in a company memorandum dated 3 August 1940 from Ian Bartholomew to the company’s London office, on the subject of ‘Captain Clayton Hutton’ indicating that a letter had been received from him thanking them for the prompt attention in sending the plates MI9 had requested. Hutton’s original letter is not in the file. The memorandum indicates that Bartholomew not only handed over printed paper copies of the maps but also provided printing plates for their on-going reproduction. Further confirmation is contained in the first version of Hutton’s memoirs to be published (under a pseudonym) by the inclusion of black and white photographs of two silk maps which can be readily identified as sheets A and C in the MI9 inventory. The link between MI9 and Bartholomew is also confirmed by the existence in a contemporary Air Ministry file of a printed copy of a map which was identifiable as sheet A/Germany carrying a clear imprint of the Bartholomew company.

MI9 added to the maps what passed for a rather crude sheet identification system in the form of an upper case alphabet letter, often in conjunction with an Arabic number (for example C, H2, K3). However, even this practice was not consistent as the same numbering system was also applied to some sheets which were clearly not based on the Bartholomew small-scale maps. The largescale sheet of the port of Danzig (A4) at approximately 1:16,000, the large-scale map of Schaffhausen (A6) and the medium scale sheets of Italy (J5 and J6 at 1:275,000, J7 and J8 at 1:110,000) are six such examples. Sheet A4 Danzig appears to be an amalgam of the detail from a British Admiralty chart with additional ground intelligence added in the form of intelligence annotations. (This particular map will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 7.) Sheet A6 of Schaffhausen is based on large-scale, native German and Swiss topographic maps of the border area and sheets J5, J6, J7 and J8 appear to be based on large-scale, native Italian topographic maps. For the purposes of this study, however, they have been identified as one series based on the similarity of the sheet numbering system. Certainly it appears that the first small-scale map of the area was identified with a single alphabet letter, such as A, and that any subsequent map produced which was located in the same geographic area was numbered A1, A2, etc. in sequence. To prove that this was, indeed, the approach adopted would assume that, since sheets J5 to J8 all provided large-scale coverage of the Italian area, sheet J should be a small-scale sheet of Italy. This cannot, however, be proved conclusively, since no copy of sheet J has yet been found and no mention of it appears in the record.

Due to the nature of the fabrics used, the ink often bled completely through to the reverse of the sheet, as shown here with Bartholomew sheet A. Many of the maps were still printed on both sides however, making it very difficult for the escapers to decipher the detail.

Details from a selection of Bartholomew maps showing their symbology, level of detail, density of place names and scale information. They also show the problems for the user caused by show-through from the map printed on the other side of the fabric.

A further map included in this series (but which had no identifying letter) was a General Map of Ireland, produced in two sheets, printed back-to-back. This was almost certainly the map mentioned in the records as ‘Shamrock’, 500 copies being printed on fabric on 16 February 1942. There was apparently some discussion about the position of internees in the Republic of Ireland since, under the Geneva Convention, internees were held until the end of the conflict. On 5 March 1943, in a MOST SECRET internal minute from MI9 to the Director of Intelligence, a discussion between Sir John Maffey, the British representative in Eire, and the Irish Government was reported. It concerned the possibility of faking the escape of British prisoners of war interned in the Curragh. The deal fell through, apparently because the Irish Government wanted fighter aircraft in exchange. Whether the internees might be encouraged to escape anyway was a moot point since there was the distinct possibility of political embarrassment. The fact that the General Map of Ireland was produced at all appears to bear testimony to the fact that MI9 prepared for the possibility of escape and it was certainly recorded in the War Diary that nine RAF officers escaped from the Curragh Camp in Eire on 25 June 1941. Three were recaptured and six reached England. MI9 apparently wrote a special SECRET report on the escape, but this has not been identified.

Those sheets where surviving copies have been located in British record repositories and the various states in which the sheets were produced, either singly or in combination, are detailed in Appendix 1. A total of fifty-nine sheets have been identified in this initial group of the escape and evasion maps, of which over forty are clearly based on Bartholomew maps. Some of these carry the original Bartholomew job order number which has allowed them to be compared directly with the lithographic paper copy held in the company’s print archive now housed in the National Library of Scotland’s map collection in Edinburgh. Sixteen sheets which are believed to have been produced but for which no copies have been identified to date in British record repositories are listed in Appendix 2. This group is either noted on the print records, shown on adjacent sheets diagrams, represents gaps in the assumed consecutive numbering sequence or, in one case, has been spotted by a colleague at a map fair but no details were recorded.

Summary of fabric maps presumed to be based on Bartholomew originals

◊ These are maps which are assumed to have been produced based on Bartholomew maps but for which neither copies nor related records have ever been found

◊ 16 sheets identified

◊ Coverage includes Europe, Scandinavia and parts of Africa

For full details of the maps, see Appendix 2.

By autumn 1942, there was an increasing awareness that the small-scale maps being issued to aircrew were regarded by them as too small-scale. The need for better maps at larger scales gained momentum and ‘a new series gained approval’. It is not clear what this new series was, but it is likely to have been the fabric versions of series GSGS 3982 (see the following section), as they started to be produced at that time, their earliest print dates being the late summer and autumn of 1942. At this stage valuable information about the Swiss frontier was also being incorporated into a map of the frontier area produced at 1:100,000 scale.

Double-sided Bartholomew sheet K3/K4. The nature of the fabrics used for MI9 maps allowed them to be folded into very small sizes.