CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In May 1943, a pigeon on Special Section duty returned to its loft in Oxfordshire. Home was not the suburban terrace of most working-class pigeon fanciers but a creeper-covered Victorian house on the village green in Tackley. The pigeon had originally been bred by a Barnsley fancier, but its home was now with Mary Manningham-Buller. Tending to a secret loft was not solely the province of men, nor even of the working class, although the sport had traditionally been a male-dominated environment. ‘I suspect that many a man found peace and quiet with his pigeons away from the woman’s world of kitchen and scullery,’ wrote a member of the Osman family. But, during the war, women often ended up looking after lofts and collecting messages if the men were away. In Manningham-Buller’s case, her husband Reginald was elected to Parliament (he would become attorney general, while his daughter, Eliza, would later become the head of MI5). During the war Mary was largely alone in the picturesque village with her pigeons.
As well as the presence of the pigeons and a strange corporal, the neighbours may have wondered about the motorbikes roaring up to the house to collect messages. The same pigeon that arrived in May 1943 would make a number of journeys from behind enemy lines, a performance which would win it the Dickin Medal. Manningham-Buller’s pigeons – which returned from France twenty times – were particularly valued since some brought back news relevant to an urgent priority for British intelligence, the hunt for Germany’s most advanced weapons.
It was one sign of Columba’s shift of gears in the mid-war period and its move towards a more focused role rather than the random appeals for information it had begun with. The first attempt to target intelligence gathering had come in August 1942 when a batch of Columba pigeons was specially dispatched to establish reactions to the Dieppe Raid. Allied troops, mainly Canadian, had been trying to probe German coastal defences (the kind of attack on the Belgian coast for which Leopold Vindictive’s maps would have provided invaluable assistance had they reached London). The losses proved terrible. News of the raid was brought back by a pigeon called Beach Comber, but MI14 and Columba had been tasked with gauging German reactions. A special questionnaire was drawn up to ask about the nature and extent of any damage, the effect on enemy morale and the effectiveness of a warning for locals broadcast on the BBC. ‘There was an extraordinary wave of hope on the day of Dieppe,’ one Columba return said.
The wake of the Dieppe Raid saw a particularly lengthy message arrive from someone who signed themselves with the intriguing codename ‘The Father Christmas of Normandy’. ‘Your disembarkation at Dieppe made the French people very happy,’ they wrote on 27 August. Drivers of motor lorries were told at gunpoint to drive over reinforcements, they explained, but he and friends had managed to stop some troops being captured. There was plenty of useful information about German positions and listening posts, but also some interesting personal appeals. These included a request for a message to be sent over the BBC that a particular gendarme in the area would do well to lie awake and think of his future after the war ended. The author promised that there was a ‘strong nucleus’ of men ready for action who just needed support in terms of weapons and radios (as well as ideally some coffee, chocolate, tinned food and cigarettes). If the material could be dropped, then a message should be sent out on the BBC saying ‘Father Christmas of Normandy will see his children tonight.’
Dieppe was the first of four occasions on which aircraft were specifically sent to carry out Columba pigeon drops. The other three specific missions were carried out in support of ‘Crossbow’ – the hunt for intelligence on V1 and V2 rockets.
By December 1942, messages tallying with earlier rumours started to reach R. V. Jones from human sources about the possibility that Germany was developing rockets to hit Britain. Finding out about these rockets became a top priority for Jones and his colleagues, who were desperate for information while the weapons were at the research stage and before they were put to deadly use. At first there was little more to go on, but from March 1943 transcripts were made of the conversations of captured German officers held in Britain. In a highly productive intelligence operation, the interrogation centre in which they were held was bugged. This provided real gems, including a conversation between two generals about progress on the ‘rocket business’. ‘They’ve got those huge things which they’ve brought up here,’ one said to the other. ‘They’ve always said they would go fifteen kilometres into the stratosphere and then … You only aim at an area.’ Turf wars complicated the hunt as Jones had to play second fiddle to a team led by the Conservative politician Duncan-Sandys (who was married to Churchill’s daughter).
The pigeons that returned to the loft in Mary Manningham-Buller’s Oxfordshire garden in the summer of 1943 brought more details, supplied by an agent. Work was taking place at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast, where previous reports had already suggested the rockets were being designed. The weapons had not yet struck but Jones and others knew they were being prepared. Finding any launch sites already constructed in Western Europe was a priority. On Christmas Day 1943, MI14(d) received a specific request from MI14(h) for ‘Crossbow: Pigeon Intelligence’. They were told to organize drops at precise spots in northern France. Cherbourg and Pas-de-Calais had been identified by Jones as possible locations. The race was on to find what were called ‘ski sites’ because the launch pads had been identified as looking like ski-boards. The search involved both aerial reconnaissance and pigeons; indeed these were the largest ever drops for Columba. Brian Melland sent over to Kleyn three specific drop points on the French coast to be passed on to the teams at Tempsford. The aspiration was to drop eight hundred birds in all. Two hundred pigeons were dropped from each Halifax bomber, which meant it took the dispatchers twenty minutes to release them all from the hatch. This, everyone knew, was risky for the crews.
R. V. Jones may have come to appreciate the role of pigeons, but his colleagues at MI6 were only just realizing they could carry back useful intelligence. MI6 gradually began to appreciate the value of pigeons carrying microfilms on which maps and drawings could be sent. Some of the most advanced work on this was carried out by the Middle East pigeon section in Palestine. But it was the Dutch section of MI6 that eventually made most use of the technique: ‘On one occasion a most valuable packet of microfilms of enemy operations was brought back at a critical moment by this means,’ MI6 noted. It was carried by Scotch Lass, trained at RAF Felixstowe, which was dropped with an agent in the Netherlands in 1944. Even though the bird was injured, hitting telegraph wires in the semi-darkness when it was released at early dawn, it managed to carry back on the same day, over a distance of 200 miles, thirty-eight microphotographs ‘of the utmost value’.
MI6 had finally cottoned on to the value of pigeons. But it was late to the game – too late for Joseph Raskin and Leopold Vindictive. Raskin had his microfilms of the German coastal defences ready for a pigeon three years before Scotch Lass made her flight.
As Raskin and his friends languished in prison, Columba was entering its final, critical phase preparing for the liberation of Europe. Leopold Vindictive were waiting – hoping – that this might come in time to save them from whatever fate Nazi Germany had in store. At the very moment they awaited their trial, hundreds of extra Columba pigeons were being dropped in specific locations in northern France, suggesting invasion was imminent. The purpose, though, was not liberation but deception.
At 3.15 p.m. on 9 July 1943, a major ‘Pigeon Conference’ was held in Room 254 of the War Office. Around the table sat representatives from the senior military commands, as well as Brian Melland from MI14. Brigadier Kirkman, Deputy Director of Military Intelligence, gave an overview of Columba. It was still proving its worth. ‘It is desired to state how highly this source is appreciated,’ GHQ Home Forces had written the previous month. ‘It will become increasingly valuable as the time for operations approaches. It is very much to be hoped that Columba’s range and resources will be continually increased.’ German divisional movements and locations had been supplied, as had the sites of more of the radar stations that R. V. Jones was after. The RAF Special Duties Squadron had honed their dropping skills into a ‘fine art’, and operations took place every month in an arc from Denmark in the north to Bordeaux in southern France. A ‘go slow’ policy had recently been pursued in order to build up a sufficient stock of birds – which now numbered 15,000 – and also to avoid making the enemy too ‘pigeon conscious’ before the final push. Kleyn had written a detailed paper outlining the ways in which the Germans watched Columba. But was there now a way to take advantage of the enemy’s pigeon-mindedness?
The Columba team had been aware from the start that their pigeons could be used to trap locals as their opponent became ‘pigeon-minded’. They had also heard that the Germans sometimes put their own pigeons in Columba baskets so that a pigeon would fly to a German loft with its message. One woman observed a fat German placing a basket in her garden. She subsequently took the pigeon out and attached to its leg a rude message to the Gestapo. ‘She was arrested,’ MI5 reported.
Sometimes the fear of planted German birds was enough to put locals off. At one point the returns from Columba in the Netherlands dropped to zero. The reason, the team learnt, was that word had gone round the resistance that the pigeons falling from the sky were German rather than British. ‘How do they know that these pigeons actually fly to England? We know better. They are German pigeons. Gestapo pigeons,’ a clandestine Dutch newspaper reported on 2 November 1942. Reports claimed that pigeons which arrived asking for shelter for a British pilot, or connections with resistance organizations, or help for Jews were all from the Gestapo. This caused consternation at Columba HQ. They had been enjoying a fair degree of success in the Netherlands. But in the six months following the newspaper article, there were no returns whatsoever. A report passed on from the French Secret Service in London likewise raised the concern that Gestapo pigeons were posing as British birds. A source said the pigeons were being dropped with a packet of English cigarettes to prove their authenticity and asked for the name of local patriots who could help in the event of the imminent invasion by the Allies. The French resistance had developed a slogan to raise the alarm – ‘fumez les cigarettes – mangez les pigeons’: ‘smoke the cigarettes – eat the pigeons’. The MI14 team debated whether to advertise the differences between the real pigeons and the German impostors. But the fear was that a warning could confuse people. ‘It might result in the less intelligent leaving both kinds alone,’ Melland wrote, pointing out that asking people to avoid mentioning their locality would make nine out of ten messages useless.
MI14 had also understood that the Germans might be using pigeons to feed back false information to London as part of a deception operation – the type of operation they had run using radios and pigeons with the SOE agent Van Horen. An MI6 report from Chimay in Belgium on 18 October 1942 claimed that some Columba pigeons had been delivered to Germans, who sent them off with false information. From the very start, Melland had been sceptical about some of their returns. The fourteenth message received by the team came from a pigeon that had been dropped on 13 May 1941 but took twenty-five days to come back looking ‘fat and in good condition’. The writer, near Cherbourg, asked to be put in touch with local agents and made a request to drop messages at a particular crossroads. MI14 deemed that suspicious.
By the following May, the Columba team thought they had seen half a dozen messages planted by Germans. One 1942 message actually came back written in German by two ‘old soldiers’ and was described as having ‘contained only abjurations written in the purest Goebbelese’.
Because a high number of birds were known to fall into enemy hands, MI14(d) decided to treat all messages as possible plants. They carried out basic counter-intelligence checks, looking for corroboration. The Germans typically added extraneous military detail that a civilian would not know. ‘They are apt to give too much false information instead of inserting one important but false item between a lot of correct stuff which they do not mind our knowing or which they think we know already,’ it was noted. Typically, a German message would claim the sender was about to get some new, vital piece of information and needed to be put in touch with a local resistance agent. ‘Such requests are naturally suspect.’ But if the Germans had used Columba for deception, could London do the same?
At MI5, the tartan trouser-wearing T. A. Robertson (known as TAR) had been mulling over the possibilities of pigeon deception. Since many of the Columba pigeons were captured by the Germans, the service could be used for a feint. ‘It occurs to me that this is a possible means of putting deception over to the enemy by the careful framing of the questionnaires, as presumably the Germans must, if they capture some of these birds, take notice of the type of question which is being asked,’ he wrote to Major Petavel at the War Office on 24 June.
Columba was being drawn into a new operation, known as Cockade. The decision had been made that an invasion of Europe could not take place until early in the summer of 1944. But, just as the Germans had tried to keep Britain on edge in 1941–2 over its plans, so now the favour would be returned. The idea of Cockade was to draw German forces away from Italy and the eastern front by feigning to attack in France and Norway in late 1943. This was to be accomplished using tools like commando raids and agents. Columba’s role was in having extra pigeons dropped in very specific places. The original questionnaire had already been changed to ask not about preparations for an invasion of England but German preparations to defend Europe against Allied invasion. But with these new drops it would be tweaked again to focus on very specific areas like coastal defences and locations which might be used to land airborne troops. The idea was that the Germans would notice the different questions and the extra pigeons in certain locations, and that this would make them think the Allies were preparing to land at those places in the near future.
In August 1943, the total number of pigeons to be dropped was increased from 750 to 1,000, the extra 250 being dropped in the area of Pas-de-Calais. The RAF teams at Tempsford were given unusually specific instructions to release the birds at a rate of thirty per village, down a particular road. Others from the existing allocation were dropped in Brest, which formed another part of the feint (as did Norway, where the possibility of employing Columba had been investigated, although it had been deemed too risky for the RAF to fly so far for it). This all had to be done carefully, Melland explained, to prevent it being too obvious.
But one intelligence officer raised a concern overlooked by others. What would the dropping of extra Columba pigeons mean for the villagers on the ground? Or for the patriots who picked up those birds? It would create additional anticipation of an invasion. That was unfortunate but not too serious. The much greater risk was that the Germans, if they saw more pigeons coming down and bought the idea that this was to generate more intelligence for an invasion, would increase their vigilance and hunt for members of the resistance in those places. That might lead to disaster for anyone brave enough to respond to the pigeons they found. Deception in this instance was not simply a clever wheeze but something which risked civilian lives. Ordinary people would potentially gather intelligence and risk their lives by sending it back when it was all simply part of a trick. So, did the benefit of deception outweigh the risk to those finding pigeons in the areas where nothing was actually going to happen?
These were the moral choices of intelligence work. Only a few in London seemed to worry about such consequences, and there is no evidence that their concerns had any effect on the decision to go ahead. But nor does it appear that Cockade itself had a significant effect on German thinking. There were some signs of German agitation and increased intelligence activity, but Cockade as a whole and the pigeon drops may simply have been too subtle for a German war machine which was now under strain.
At MI5, Richard Walker came up with an even more complex deception operation as winter took hold. This one he called the ‘contamination plan’. It was based on the knowledge that a stray or lost pigeon would find its way to a nearby loft rather than stay in the wild. His idea was that if some ‘second rate’ British pigeons could be disguised by putting German rings on them and then released by plane over Europe, they would eventually find their way to German-controlled lofts. The pigeon might then be given to a German agent sent to Britain; the bird – back in its home country – would fly to a British loft instead of delivering the intelligence. But the more likely outcome was that the Germans would eventually spot that something was amiss, perhaps by seeing two pigeons with identical ring numbers. They would then realize that their pigeon stock had been contaminated by imposter British birds and wonder how many more of their birds were phoney. The only thing they could do would be to recall all their birds, undermining their trust in their own pigeons. And by the time they had checked them and identified any fakes, Walker would have delivered more. It was a cunning plan, Guy Liddell agreed – the avian version of the Double Cross system.
The contamination plan might throw the Germans ‘off balance’ at just the right time. But it needed plenty of assistance. Replacing the rings was the hard part, since they were put on when a pigeon was less than a week old and the claw was still flexible. Walker tracked down a Professor Briscoe, as well as two captains (Swann and Hope), to help. Briscoe discovered that the British Aluminium Company had developed a new type of solder which had not yet been patented, but which they offered to MI5 so long as they agreed to keep it secret. It allowed them to make an invisible joint in the rings. Walker took the German pigeons that had been found on the east coast and used their Wehrmacht rings as the basis to make copies. The last challenge was to drop them. They must not materialize in a British container or parachute, so instead British parachute experts at Henlow came up with a special weighted hessian sack which could carry six or seven birds at a time before it was pushed through the floor of an aircraft. A weight forced it down, and an elastic band fixed to the aircraft pulled the bag open and turned it upside down, depositing the poor pigeons into the air from where they could fly off. In all, 350 phoney pigeons were released over Belgium and the Netherlands.
A Wehrmacht soldier who looked after pigeons was captured and interrogated later in the war. It was reported back to Guy Liddell at MI5 that one of Walker’s ‘Double Cross’ pigeons had been picked up dead in Belgium or the Netherlands. The German said it was impossible to put a new ring on the bird without the soldering being spotted. This was excellent news for Walker and Liddell. ‘He is wrong of course because this is precisely what we have done.’ It meant the Germans were unaware of the possibility of deception. But in the end, ‘contamination’, like Cockade, was a dud. When the German military officer in charge of the pigeon service was interrogated after the war, he said his lofts could never have been infiltrated since it was impossible to attach a new ring to a pigeon. No one had noticed the phoney birds.
Amidst all the deception, decoys and feints, plans for the real invasion were now gathering pace, including the role of Columba. And that meant some new arrivals in the pigeon world.