Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History magazine,

Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm Aly Korthorn. On today's episode I'll be talking World War II

escapes with historian Helen Frye Helen is author of a new book,

M. I. 9, which looks at the ways in which the Secret Service

helped British servicemen escape.

From smuggling hidden gadgets into camps,

to operating escape lines running across Nazi-occupied Europe.

Your new book is a history of MI-9, and I think most people will have heard of MI5 5 and M I 6 but unless it's just me probably not

M I 9 so what was M I 9 and what did they get up to in the Second World War?

So M I 9 was as top secret as MI5 and M6 and its brief was really to deal with

prisoners of war and from our perspective, MI9 was involved in escaping evasion.

So getting our airmen and soldiers back from behind enemy lines,

back from prisoner of war camps the famous great escape stories because of course if you

think about an airman for example it took about three months to train an airman and if you're losing them behind enemy lines if they're shot down they're captured

you don't have them as part of the fighting forces and it was absolutely vital, My Nine realized that we need, particularly the pilots, so that

we could have air superiority over the German Air Force.

My Nine's brief was to make sure personnel knew that if they were captured or stuck

behind enemy lines they were never forgotten and that someone would try and bring them

home. And there was also an intelligence aspect to this as well, wasn't that?

It wasn't just about getting servicemen back into the fighting force,

it was about gaining knowledge from them.

Yeah, so this is something that is quite new, I think, in my book and incidentally it is, I was

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