Farmers in Nazi-occupied Western Europe woke up to something strange in their fields in the spring of 1941. A metal canister fixed to a three-and-a-half-foot parachute had fallen from the skies.
An attached note explained that this strange gift had been sent by British intelligence. There was a questionnaire asking for information about German troop movements and life under occupation. But how could such dangerous information get back to British spymasters?
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The answer was inside the canister. Cooing away was a British homing pigeon (Columba livia domestica). All you had to do was place your message in a tiny canister – the size of a pen top – and attach it to the pigeon’s leg. Then by releasing the pigeon into the air, the bird would do what a homing pigeon does and engage its remarkable superpower to find its way back home.
This seemingly bizarre operation was being run by a tiny team back in British intelligence. Everyone has heard of MI5 and MI6. But what about MI 14(d)? They were the group tasked with gathering information on the Nazi occupation and they were behind what was called ‘Operation Columba’ – the Secret Pigeon Service.
Operation Columba
When they started in 1941, the situation was desperate. The previous year the Nazi war machine had rolled through Western Europe, threatening even an invasion of Britain. There were few MI6 intelligence networks left, the code-breaking of Bletchley Park had yet to kick in and intelligence was hard to come by.
But could Columba deliver the goods? Many were sceptical. It was true that many a poor French family decided it was better to destroy the evidence by roasting and then eating the poor British spy-pigeon rather than risk releasing it with a secret reality that there were many who hated the Nazis and wanted to do something. On 10 April 1941 the first message came back from the village of Le Briel, South of Dunkirk. It provided details of a large munitions dump as well as movements of artillery.
The Leopold Vindictive
In July came a message that the small team at MI 14(d) would never forget. They opened the canisters in their office wearing visors because they feared the Germans might send back a message with a tiny explosive in it. But what they found inside message 37 was extraordinary. In tiny, dense writing, the author explained they were part of a group called Leopold Vindictive in Belgium. They had included detailed maps to indicate hidden German emplacements and arms depots, and details of how a château near Bruges was used as a secret communications hub. There were damage reports of recent RAF bombing raids and information about civilian morale. The Admiralty and other customers of Columba were immensely grateful.
What was more, the message was shown personally to Winston Churchill. Why? Churchill loved intelligence but did not really need to know the exact details. The real reason was this message represented much more than a collection of useful facts. It represented the spirit of resistance, confirming to Britain’s spies and its Prime Minister that there were those living under tyranny who were willing to risk their lives to reach out.
The fateful pigeon had fallen into a field near the Belgian town of Lichtervelde. It had been taken by a farmer’s wife by bicycle to a local family who ran a supply store. They were known to be ‘patriots’ and one of the brothers loved pigeons. They had then contacted a remarkable Catholic priest called Jozef Raskin. In the First World War, his artistic skills had led him to draw maps of enemy positions around the trenches. He then spent time in China as a missionary before returning to Belgium where he briefly worked as a chaplain to the King of Belgium as war began. He was a man with the right skills but also a network of contacts to gather intelligence.
British intelligence would do its best to get back in touch with Raskin and his group – sending coded messages on the BBC, dropping more pigeons and eventually even secret agents with radios in a desperate but ultimately tragic effort to work with the group. They would eventually be caught by the Nazis and pay the ultimate price for their bravery. But they were not the only ones who would take this risk in the coming years. Columba was a unique intelligence operation that provided something that no other source could: intelligence from ordinary people in enemy territory, almost in real time.
Where did the pigeons come from?
The RAF Special Duties squadron dropped more than 16,000 pigeons in an arc from Copenhagen in Denmark to Bordeaux in the south of France. The pigeons came from ordinary people who had bred and donated them as part of the war effort. For one man, who had lost his brother in the last war but was now too old to fight, handing over his pigeons meant he could feel he was doing something for his brother’s memory. Meanwhile, the children of a Nottinghamshire miner remember being late for school on Tuesdays, as this was the day their dad was down the pit early and they had to excitedly wait for someone to pick up his pigeons for some kind of secret work.
What threats did the pigeons face?
Only about one in 10 of the pigeons made it back to Britain alive. There were many hazards. We are all familiar with the Battle of Britain, in which the RAF saw off the German Luftwaffe. But there was another battle in the skies during the war – one in which pigeons were the targets. The Germans began to offer rewards for British spy pigeons and impose punishments – including the death penalty – for those using them. They also used marksmen on the coast to shoot them. But the biggest enemy was a natural predator: the hawk.
Hawks vs pigeons
Hawks and falcons – especially peregrine falcons – had been weaponised by the Germans to hunt down British pigeons. One British officer took two pigeons with him on a commando raid upon the coast of France; the pigeons’ release would signal his arrival. As he released them, he saw hawks descend from the cliffs and kill his only means of communication.
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British falcons were also killing homing pigeons as they returned. This led to the creation of one of the only units of British intelligence that really did have 007’s fabled licence to kill. MI5 set up a crack team called The Falcon Destruction Unit which was despatched to deal with the falcons. But then came a dramatic about-face. MI5 found a pigeon canister on the home front which looked like it had detached from a bird in flight. Inside was a message in German. What if the Nazis were sending back intelligence about British defences via pigeon? Alarm bells rang. And so now, MI5 decided it would need its own team of killer falcons to hunt German pigeons. They were first deployed in the summer of 1942 on the Isles of Scilly after suspicious sightings. On the one hand, they proved effective in killing pigeons. But unfortunately, no ‘Friend or Foe’ identification system had been perfected and all the pigeons they killed turned out to be British.
MI6 – having been initially sceptical of pigeons at the start of the war – would later use them to send back microfilmed intelligence reports. Other pigeons helped bring back intelligence from rural Europe, which helped spot radar stations, V1 flying bomb and V2 rocket launch sites that were not spotted by any other means. As well as helping secret agents, homing pigeons were also carried on RAF flights to communicate if the plane crashed and their radios failed.
Wartime heroes
One of the winged wartime stars was a pigeon called Winkie. When a Beaufort bomber ditched into the North Sea in 1942 after coming under fire, the crew made it into a dingy but their pigeon container fell open and the bird flew out before a message could be attached. But remarkably, when the pigeon made the 129-mile flight to return home to an RAF base smeared with oil, they were able to work out that it had come from the ditched plane. They then triangulated the last-known location with the weather along with the time of the bird’s arrival to work out where the plane came down. Search parties were given new co-ordinates and rescued four people on board. For its service, Winkie was one of the pigeons awarded the Dickin medal for bravery during the war. Other birds received the medal for daring flights or for carrying particularly important pieces of intelligence.
Some of the last pigeons to get Dickin medals were those that flew on D-Day. Gustav was the first pigeon to arrive back, in five hours and 15 minutes, carrying a message from a Reuters correspondent sent from the beach as the first landings took place. Meanwhile, Paddy, bred in Northern Ireland, was awarded for being the fastest pigeon – flying 230 miles in four hours and 50 minutes.
Pigeons did not win the war. People did. And that included the hungry, half-starved people who chose not to dine on the pigeons they found in French, Belgian and Dutch fields or, out of fear, to hand them over to their occupiers, but who instead chose to risk their lives sending a message to Britain. Soldiers, sailors and airmen also won the war. They relied on intelligence to guide them, and here again pigeons played their part, providing important information. And the birds also offered a vital emotional connection between all those people in dangerous and dark times, often far from home or hoping to reach out to those who might aid them. So next time you see a pigeon, pause before dismissing it as simply a nuisance. Pigeons may not have won the war, but they played their part.
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Top image: soldiers send a message using a carrier pigeon circa October 1940. Credit: Getty
