The London Cage - Lt. Col. A.P. Scotland O.B.E. - Part 1

The London Cage - Lt. Col. A.P. Scotland O.B.E.

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 171

June 20, 2017 

Book 50 - The London Cage
Lt. Col. A.P. Scotland O.B.E.
 Part 1 - p. 1-58
Reading Time - 1 hour

A "work" book this time... or rather, a "research" book. The London Cage was a secret interrogation centre for prisoners of war during World War 2. It was run by MI19, under the command of Lt. Col. A.P. Scotland. Results of the interrogations were used to prosecute war crimes suspects, particularly those engage in atrocities against Allied soldiers. Rumours abounded that the London Cage used coercive methods of interrogation amounting to torture, against the Geneva Convention. The London Cage wasn't on any Red Cross lists. It was a no-where place. After the war, Scotland kept some files and papers from his time at the London Cage and wrote a manuscript. It created quite a stir in Military Intelligence circles, as he revealed a lot of what went on in the cage. The final version of the book was published 7 years later and highly edited (sanitized).

We start by following Scotland as he works in southern Africa for a logistics company that supplies food to the German Army (this was between the Boer War and World War I). It ended up being easier for him to do his job if he was a member of the German Army and so he served with them for four years. Already he had a love for intelligence work and learned quite a bit about how the German Army functioned, information that he then took back and shared with the British.

Several years later, he ended up doing intelligence work during World War I, even making forays into enemy territory to gather information on troop dispositions. Given his excellent command of German, and his understanding of the German psyche, he interrogated a lot of captured Germans. After World War I, he traveled extensively and, during the 1930s, saw the rise of the Nazis as a foreshadowing of the coming war.