Six men agreed to be sealed alive inside the Rock of Gibraltar. Volunteers, every one. If the fortress fell to Hitler they would be walled into a chamber the size of a railway carriage with food for seven years, two thin slits of daylight, and a single task: watch the enemy fleet through the rock and report it by radio until they were relieved, or until they died in there. The wall was built. The provisions were stacked. Then the war turned, the order never came, and the entrance was sealed for so long that the room slipped out of memory altogether. For half a century it was a rumour old Gibraltarians half believed. This is the true story of Operation Tracer, the stay behind plan so secret that even its own survivors kept silent for decades. In 1940 Nazi Germany drew up Operation Felix, a plan to march through Spain, take Gibraltar and slam shut the western gate of the Mediterranean. For Britain the prospect was unbearable. Lose the Rock and you lose your eyes on the Strait, the narrow channel every ship between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean must pass through. London needed a way to keep watching even after the fortress was gone. The answer came from Rear Admiral John Henry Godfrey, head of the Naval Intelligence Division and the man often credited with inspiring Ian Fleming's M. His idea was as bold as it was chilling. If Gibraltar could not be held, a tiny team would be left behind, hidden inside the Rock, radioing enemy movements while German soldiers walked over their heads with no idea anyone was there. To make the unthinkable survivable, the Admiralty turned to a man who understood endurance in cruel places. Surgeon Commander George Murray Levick had served on Captain Scott's Terra Nova expedition to Antarctica, where he and his companions survived a polar winter sheltering in an ice cave. Called out of retirement, Levick advised on how to keep six men alive, and sane, in a sealed chamber for years on end. His recommendations covered the whole human animal: psychological screening to pick men who would not crack, then diet, exercise, clothing and ways to fill endless identical days. The team even had to plan for death. If one of them died there would be no way to carry him out, so the body would have to be embalmed and kept inside the rock alongside the living. > They were not soldiers expecting to fight their way out. They were watchers who had agreed to disappear into the mountain and trust that someone, one day, would come back for them. The hide was cut into the Upper Rock near Lord Airey's Battery, in what is now the Upper Rock Nature Reserve. The main chamber ran roughly 45 feet by 16 feet by 8 feet, a single long room that would serve as home, hospital, radio station and prison. Two narrow slits were driven through the cliff, one looking west over the Bay of Gibraltar and one east across the Mediterranean, doubling as observation ports and the only source of fresh air. Power came from human muscle. A bicycle was rigged to a generator so the men could pedal to charge the batteries that ran a transmitter strong enough to reach the outside world. There was a water tank, careful food rationing, and an absolute assumption that there would be no resupply and no way out until the war decided their fate. The detail that lingers is how thoroughly the planners thought it through. The six would have followed a strict rhythm of watches at the observation slits, scheduled radio transmissions, daily exercise to stop their bodies wasting, and rationing measured to stretch across years rather than weeks. Levick's Antarctic experience had taught him that boredom and despair could kill as surely as cold or hunger, so the regime was designed to protect the mind as carefully as the body. There was a plan for the darkest outcomes too. Beyond the arrangements for embalming anyone who died, the men understood that if they ever came out it might be into a Gibraltar under enemy occupation, with no guarantee of rescue at all. They volunteered regardless. That willingness, far more than the engineering, is what makes Operation Tracer so haunting: ordinary servicemen who agreed to be buried alive for their country, then kept the secret for the rest of their lives. | Operation Tracer at a glance | Detail | | Code name | Operation Tracer; the team were nicknamed the Tracer rats | | Originator | Rear Admiral John Henry Godfrey, Naval Intelligence | | Survival adviser | Surgeon Commander George Murray Levick, Antarctic veteran | | The team | Six men: a leader, two doctors and three wireless operators | | Chamber | Roughly 45 by 16 by 8 feet, deep in the Upper Rock | | Provisions | Stores for up to seven years, with no resupply and no exit | | Built | 1941, ready by 1942 | | Rediscovered | Gibraltar Caving Group, 1996 | | Confirmed | Surgeon Lieutenant Bruce Cooper, October 2008 | The team was small and carefully balanced: an officer to lead, two medical men to keep everyone alive, and three wireless operators to send the