BOOK REVIEW : Secret War Fought on the Home Front

THE ESCAPE FACTORY: THE STORY OF MIS-X by Lloyd R. Shoemaker St. Martin’s $19.95, 267 pages

Only five days after the surrender of Japan, a crew of GI’s--shirtless against the summer heat--started burning documents and “artifacts” in 30-gallon steel garbage cans on an old military base that had been carved out of George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon. Within 36 hours, all traces of an ultra-secret military unit called MIS-X had been obliterated, and one of the most intriguing tales of World War II was lost to history.

Now Lloyd R. Shoemaker, a corporal detailed to MIS-X in 1943, reveals his unit’s wartime exploits in “The Escape Factory,” a plain-spoken and low-key memoir that carries all the punch of a thriller by Ian Fleming or Len Deighton. It’s the story of how MIS-X managed to smuggle the tools for “escape and evasion” into prisoner-of-war camps in the heart of Nazi Germany and throughout occupied Europe, everything from forged identity papers and wire-cutters to cameras and radio transmitters. And Shoemaker reveals how the POWs served as front-line intelligence agents by sending out crucial information in coded letters to MIS-X.

Radio components were hidden inside baseballs, and a functioning crystal radio could be inserted into a hollowed-out cribbage board. Reichsmarks and maps were concealed in Monopoly games. A half-dozen tiny compasses could be packed in the handle of a shaving brush. Even pistols and a printing press were sent into the POW camps. As many as 300 “hot” parcels, camouflaged as packages from home and packed with “loaded” supplies, were dispatched by MIS-X into Fortress Europe.

Equally remarkable was the steady stream of intelligence passed back and forth by “code users” trained in advance to use a simple but serviceable letter code in case they were taken prisoner. Messages were encoded into what appeared to be perfectly ordinary letters from a POW to his family back home, and the MIS-X operatives sent information and instructions back into the camps by the same method: Code users at the MIS-X base, in the guise of wives or girlfriends, fathers or brothers, routinely wrote coded letters to POWs.

In a sense, the POWs served as an intelligence network, and MIS-X was its nerve center. Early in the war, for example, a POW used a coded letter to warn that the escape hatch of the B-17 tended to malfunction, and the defect was corrected in the rest of the air fleet. Even a failed escape was an opportunity for intelligence gathering--and sometimes the failures were quite intentional:

“Messages from the War Department were requesting information on where a certain Panzer unit was last seen and what activity was around Peenemunde where the V-2 rockets were launched,” one former POW recalls. “Our lads would get out and run loose around Germany sometimes for days at a time and see all kinds of sights before being recaptured and brought back to the camp.”

The soldiers who served in MIS-X wore civilian clothes and drove unmarked vehicles when they ventured out of the unit’s secret base to buy lice powder or game boards for shipment to the POW camps: “Get used to being thought of as 4-F,” an MIS-X officer warned. One soldier was given $200 in cash and sent into College Park, Md., to buy boxes of dried fruit for shipment to the POWs, but he encountered an unexpected adversary: “ ‘Hoarder!’ (the sales clerk) screamed, and smashed a tomato on his shoulder.”

Still, the intrepid and ingenious operatives of MIS-X displayed a marvelous esprit , and what comes across in “The Escape Factory” is a sense of mission that turned ordinary home front tasks into high adventure. Shoemaker, who served in MIS-X after being wounded in combat, shows us that the men of MIS-X were soldiers who served on the front line of a secret war. Thanks to Shoemaker and “The Escape Factory,” it is no longer a forgotten war.