Little stories

This is how POWs got playing cards with secret escape maps for Christmas


U.S. troops and their playing cards have a long history. A large chunk of deployment is spent killing time until the action starts – and card games have long been the weapon of choice for that mission.



After more than a century, the U.S. Playing Card Company, manufacturer of playing card brands like Bee, Aviator, and Hoyle, is still the world's leading card company. In that time, the company has been very good to U.S. troops. Its original brands were decks of Army and Navy cards, later merged to one "Army Navy" brand, featuring military imagery.The USPCC even made a cheap deck so soldiers in World War I could easily purchase one for the battlefields.




It was the company's signature brand, Bicycle, that did the most for troops in the field. During World War II, Bicycle teamed up with British and American Intelligence Agencies to create a deck of cards that peeled apart when wet. The cards then revealed secret escape maps so downed pilots and captured soldiers could navigate their way back to Allied lines.



Once the map pieces were revealed, all it took was to assemble the cards in the right order to get the full map layout.The decks were given to POWs in Europe through the Red Cross' special Christmas parcels, which contained (among other things) a deck of playing cards. Cards were a common occurrence among troops, so they aroused no suspicion from the Nazi camp guards.Decks of these cards are said to have helped  at least 32 people escape from Colditz Castle and prompted some 316 escape attempts. No one knows for sure how many decks were produced, but the only two known surviving decks are in the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.