CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
When the 2nd Platoon 280th Signal Company disembarked from SS Audacious on 12 September 1942 in Glasgow, audacious is probably not the word they would have chosen to reflect how they felt. Their pigeons, which had been brought from America, were in a sorry state from the long journey. About a fifth were sick with colds, ‘rattles’ and lameness. And it did not help that some of the company’s specialist equipment had been mistakenly shipped to Iceland. The officer who greeted the platoon informed them they would have to wait a month in a Glasgow transit camp while their birds were quarantined before finally heading south.
Eventually the men and their bedraggled birds made it to Tidworth. The company was headed by two leading pigeon officers, Lieutenant Thomas H. Spencer, previously a partner in a lumber business from North Carolina, and Lieutenant Irwin F. Salz, a New Yorker and a long-time member of the Sandy Hook pigeon racing company. In Tidworth they settled down to work with the British Army Pigeon Service, sharing birds and advice on an experimental basis. The young American birds struggled at first with the British climate even though they, like the troops, looked stronger thanks to a better diet. ‘The dampness of the English climate seemed to cause an undue amount of respiratory troubles in the American pigeons,’ it was noted. But the American pigeons – like some of their soldiers – soon began cross-breeding with the local population, often quite successfully. The goal was to take the birds into Europe.
America had pedigree when it came to pigeons. When the US military arrived in Europe during the First World War, it had quickly seen their value and had established its own service in 1917. This began with two officers and twelve men, but by the end of that war more than 330 men were involved. British owners gave 600 young pigeons to the US Army in addition to 10,000 purchased from American fanciers. In the interwar period, homing pigeons found a use with bootleggers during prohibition as the carriers of messages between ships and land. By 1938, the US Army had built twenty new lofts for a breeding and training centre at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and in June 1941 the 280th Signal Pigeon Company – out of which other units would be hived off – was stood up. A month after Pearl Harbor in December 1941, things really moved up a gear when the War Department made a call to the American fancy for help. It asked for champion racing pigeons which had flown 200 miles to be loaned, gifted or bought at the price of $5. Support flooded in from American owners, who donated thousands of birds and volunteered to work in the Signal Corps. Around 40,000 birds from domestic fanciers were shipped out to tactical units in the field. US Army pigeons were incorporated into twelve special Signal Pigeon Companies, each of which had three combat platoons using 1,500 pigeons apiece. At its peak the US pigeon corps had 3,000 men, 150 officers and 54,000 pigeons. ‘Cheer up, Men, Birds May Also Be Drafted’, read one newspaper report. There were even the same fears of German pigeon spies as those that haunted Britain’s MI5. In January 1941, America’s top code-breakers were asked for help dealing with an exhausted carrier pigeon found on Long Island carrying a message with some kind of coded coordinates and emblazoned with a Nazi swastika.
America’s pigeons soon saw action. A ‘North African Pigeon Platoon’ arrived in Casablanca in November 1942 and moved to the front, where pigeons were trained to home to a Tunisian loft. Their value was apparent when radio silence was required or to convey requests for ammunition and supply, as well as to carry important or secret messages. On 17 March 1943, a pigeon named Yank brought in the first news of the American advance on Gafsa, Tunisia. In early April, during the battle of El Guettar, four messages were carried by a single bird. Two of those were from General Patton, marked secret and urgent.
The North Africa-based pigeon company moved on to Italy after the invasion of that country began in September 1943. Pigeons were given to partisans around Bologna and as far north as Modena. They would sew birds into their coat pockets or use a special jacket devised by the Americans. The birds could then carry back messages and maps regarding gun positions and troop movements. They were also used when troops were physically so close to the enemy that using a radio would have risked them being overheard or spotted.
Units isolated in mountainous terrain in Italy found pigeons invaluable. One patrol deep in enemy territory, under heavy fire and running out of food, blankets and medical supplies for its wounded, sent back an urgent request for help by pigeon which led to a parachute drop of supplies within a few hours. American pigeons even saved British lives in Italy. The US 56th Infantry Division was trying to break the German defence’s lines at a heavily fortified village called Colvi Vecchia on the morning of 18 October 1943. It called in bombers to help. What it did not know was that earlier that morning the Germans had retreated and the British 169th Infantry Brigade had moved into the village. Attempts to cancel the bombings by sending radio messages failed. The only hope was six-month-old GI Joe, who had been hatched in Algeria. He flew twenty miles from the 10th Corps HQ in twenty minutes and arrived as the planes were preparing to take off to bomb the village. If he had arrived five minutes later, a hundred British soldiers might have been killed, as well as civilians. GI Joe would be the first non-British bird to be awarded the Dickin Medal for gallantry by animals and enjoyed the honour until 1961 when he died at the ripe old pigeon age of 18.
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA – also found pigeons ‘very beneficial’, dropping them with teams behind enemy lines in Europe and with agents in Asia. The US developed a strange-looking contraption called the ‘pigeon bra’, which made it easier for agents to carry the birds on their person. In the fight for Papua New Guinea, US marines sent a patrol to the village of Drabito. The patrol’s radio was damaged during a firefight and so they released two pigeons to warn HQ of the Japanese counter-attack. These pigeons were shot down by the Japanese. One pigeon was left, trained by the 7th Australian pigeon section but attached to the US 6th Army. It was released during a short lull in the fighting and came under heavy fire straight away, but covered the thirty miles back in forty-six minutes. The Japanese positions were then bombed and the patrol saved.
Some of the most impressive OSS results came in Burma. A four-month-old pigeon called Jungle Joe was parachuted behind enemy lines to Allied scouts gathering intelligence on nearby Japanese troop and gun positions. He was their only means of communication, and flew back 225 miles through bad weather and over steep mountains with his information, which was said to have helped capture what was described as a large chunk of Burma. Another team from the OSS and Office of Naval Intelligence took thirty birds on an epic journey by rail, ship and air from Florida to China so they could train Chinese guerrillas in the event of a possible invasion of the Chinese coast.
The war was global and so was the deployment of pigeons. Britain’s pigeon service extended across the Mediterranean, the Middle East and West Africa from Alexandria to Bahrain, the Seychelles to Dar es Salaam. The Middle East Pigeon Service, with its HQ at Cairo, carried out operations from Turkey through Syria to Lebanon and down to Jerusalem. The Indian Pigeon Service had operated in the North West Frontier Province in the 1930s. British pigeons sent there as reinforcements must have been bewildered by the change of climate but worked successfully behind enemy lines in Burma.
In Europe, the Americans were integrated into pigeon services from late 1943. The US had already been in on the secret of the Columba operation. In August 1942, they had actually looked at developing their own version of Columba. After discussion with Rex Pearson, the Office of War Information created a mock-up of an American questionnaire. What is noticeable about the American version is that it featured pictures – small cartoons of marching soldiers, ships and gun emplacements – to illustrate the kinds of information people should send back. There was also a focus on which American radio broadcasts could be heard in Europe. But now they had arrived, the Americans were to be part of Columba itself. Once they had settled after their long journey, Lieutenants Spencer and Salz and the other pigeoneers from 280th Company were assigned Columba lofts for their use. Their mission was to prepare for D-Day. Spencer worked on plans for pigeons to be used for gathering intelligence from behind enemy lines and as a means of contact for advancing Allied forces when the use of radios was not possible.
Early in December 1943, Bert Woodman in Plymouth received orders to report to Wing House one Saturday morning. His pigeons had been shifted from RAF rescue duty to Special Section work on Columba and there was a show and lunch that day for fanciers who were contributing pigeons to the war effort. Woodman was met by Lieutenant Colonel Montgomery, who ran Army pigeon operations including Special Section. He explained that Woodman was going to be introduced to an American officer. ‘You will say nothing to anyone,’ Montgomery told Woodman, specifically saying this meant Rayner at the Air Ministry.
Having agreed, Woodman headed off in the colonel’s small van that wintry morning to a Holborn restaurant. In the Venetian room, the fanciers ate a rather tasty Viennese steak. The Special Section officers explained to them that more pigeons would be needed in the coming months. In the Drill Hall at Buckingham Gate, the fanciers then toured an exhibition of a thousand pigeons. As Woodman was walking around, he was introduced to a young American army officer. ‘Bert, meet Lieutenant Irwin Salz of the United States Army 280th Pigeon Company,’ he was told. ‘Take the lieutenant outside, find a pub and buy him a drink, he has something to ask you.’
Neither of them was a local, but eventually they found a pub and went into the snug. Salz explained that he had been sent to ask Bert if he would help supply the Americans with a pigeon service for the return to Europe. Bert quietly answered yes, and the New York and the Plymouth fancier shook hands. A special relationship had been born in the pub.
Just after Christmas, a US staff sergeant arrived by jeep at Woodman’s Plymouth Pigeon Supply Group headquarters at 18 Cecil Street, to collect pigeons for ‘Exercise Duck’, designed to test how quickly messages could be distributed after their arrival at a local loft. Woodman and his colleagues showed the American round the locality and its lofts as they sketched out their locations on a big sheet of greaseproof paper spread out on his floor. By February 1944, Lieutenants Spencer and Salz were amongst the few indoctrinated into the plans for the invasion in Normandy, so that they could work on pigeon communications. They began training birds from Plymouth lofts by tossing them first from the coast and then from US Navy ships in the Channel as far as twenty miles offshore. Some days they were taken out on landing craft, and guns would be fired to simulate the conditions they might expect to meet.
There had been the inevitable battle between the Army and the RAF once Rayner at the Air Ministry eventually learnt of the plans. Rayner even proposed a test to prove his RAF birds would perform better over longer distances. But in the end, the US First Army was largely supplied by Columba’s civilian lofts in Portsmouth and Plymouth, which were well used to cross-Channel work. In all, British pigeon fanciers supplied 46,532 birds to the Americans during the war.
As the Allied armies gathered for the decisive moment, Columba continued to collect intelligence to prepare the way. Nearly four and a half thousand birds were dropped in the first six months of 1944 from the thousand lofts supplying birds. A total of 202 messages made it back despite some terrible weather. The priority lists stating where Columba pigeons should be dropped were now provided by SHAEF, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (which also now coordinated SOE). The importance of up-to-date intelligence had never been greater. ‘It is considered essential to approach the question of Columba targets entirely afresh at this critical stage. Now if ever is the time for the old lady to show her paces,’ the team wrote on 26 May. A set of priority targets was drawn up, consisting of inland areas of France and Belgium which were to be covered by a far greater concentration of birds.
The intelligence the pigeons brought back was richer than at Columba’s inception three years earlier, and it was filled with the useful minutiae that only a local could provide. A small tunnel in one place was full of mines. A train filled with ammunition passed through a specific station at the same time every day. Mines had been placed in a particular harbour. Information on the German order of battle was especially prized, pointing as it did to the movement of armour belonging to 1st Panzer Korps from Belgium to the Beauvais area.
Comment was often made on the fragility of German morale. One writer noted that many Germans possessed civilian clothes which they intended to put on as soon as the Allies arrived. There were now more details of collaborators, and a renewed push to go after them; the information was sent to Rear Echelon SHAEF ‘at their special request’. At Sequedin, near Lille, a named grocer was said to be an informer of the Gestapo who entertained them at his home. Meanwhile at La Basse, on the Rue de Lille, a certain woman was said to be a tenant of a small restaurant reserved for the Germans who denounced patriots to the Gestapo. ‘It would be a good thing to warn the inhabitants of these localities over the radio,’ the message writers said.
The intelligence had become more detailed in part because more people were now willing and able to help. Resistance had evolved since the summer of 1941 from the small, amateurish groups of friends like Leopold Vindictive. Birds were now falling into the hands of organized and semi-organized resistance groups which were growing in number, strength and confidence. In France, the Maquis operated in the countryside – young, armed men in hiding who carried out sabotage and prepared for war. The messages were now much longer and more precise in terms of intelligence. They show a far greater understanding of the value of tactical military intelligence than the early crop.
At MI5, the priority was to keep Allied plans for D-Day secret from any German spies in Britain. As a result, catching enemy pigeons mattered more than ever. The needs of espionage and counter-espionage collided around the cliffs of Britain. The Falconry Unit – with its hawks trained to go after German pigeons carrying secrets – could only cover a few miles of coast, but the desire was to expand operations to stop enemy birds. The original plan was to put the unit into action around Colchester, but the hawks’ abysmal failure to tell the difference between friend and foe led to concerns that friendly pigeons – including those from SOE, MI6 and Columba, as well as those the Army was planning to use for D-Day – would be more likely than Nazi spy pigeons to fall victim to their talons. The plan was blocked. So Richard Walker at MI5 cooked up another idea.
Homing pigeons are dedicated but sociable creatures. If they spot a flock of friendly pigeons, they will often decide to hang out with them in the hope of food or rest. Not long before D-Day, all the fanciers living within ten miles of the coast, from Cornwall to Norfolk, were approached through the NPS and asked to come to a local meeting. At each meeting, Walker turned up and asked them to assist in a scheme to lure into their lofts any single enemy birds that might be flying out of Britain. They were asked to arrange the times at which they let their birds out for their daily flight so that there were always pigeons in the air to attract exhausted enemy birds. This ‘screen’ of friendly birds was the pigeon equivalent of the chaff of R. V. Jones’s ‘Window’, so effective at confusing German radar. However, no enemy birds were caught, as there were no active German agents sending back information. ‘Had they done so it is fairly certain that the loft screen would have bagged a fair proportion of them,’ explained Walker, ever the optimist about his plans.
The Germans also began to prepare on the pigeon front for an Allied invasion. On 1 March, the Military Commander for Belgium and northern France decreed that it would be forbidden to keep pigeons in a number of districts. The rings of all pigeons killed had to be surrendered as confirmation. Forty-five thousand pigeons were moved from coastal towns to Brussels to prevent their use by the enemy. There had been some hopes in Britain that the Germans might leave existing pigeon lofts intact, but it was now clear that a stock of young English birds would have to be brought over.
As D-Day approached, the weather was bad. Cold winds, heavy rain and poor visibility made it hard for the RAF Special Duties team to drop Columba birds. Seven aircraft were lost on the nine operational nights that month (all but two before D-Day itself). On the night of 5 June, the BBC crackled with messages personnels instructing agents to carry out special sabotage operations against railways and other targets. Bert Woodman took a walk on the promenade in Plymouth with his wife that evening. Out on Plymouth Sound, he could see row after row of invasion craft, arrayed in straight lines like a company of soldiers, with a cloud of barrage balloons hovering above them.
On 6 June, Allied troops landed on the heavily fortified Normandy beaches under unimaginably ferocious and brutal bombardment. Amid the gunfire and the chaos and the blood, pigeons flew free above the men’s heads back over the Channel to bear news of the unfolding events. The pigeons had been issued from Portsmouth and Plymouth to formations in marshalling areas just before they embarked for France.
In Britain, the fanciers waited by their lofts. The wind was picking up to a gale and no one was sure a single bird would get through. Gustav was the first pigeon to arrive back, in five and a quarter hours. He carried a message from a Reuters correspondent dispatched from the beach as the first landing took place (Gustav later died when someone cleaning his loft accidentally stepped on him). Paddy, bred in Northern Ireland, was the fastest pigeon – flying 230 miles in four hours and fifty minutes. In Plymouth, alarm bells began to ring as pigeons returned to their lofts and American jeeps raced to collect the cylinders.
Not all the arrivals bore messages. Some of the saddest pigeons that returned to Plymouth were covered in human blood. The men had been carrying pigeon drum containers as they landed. They had been struck by gunfire which had ripped through the drums, freeing the birds to fly home but leaving the men who had carried the pigeons to die on the beaches.
The US First Army used hundreds of birds on D-Day, about half making it back. These carried ammunition status reports and emergency messages. In the end, radios worked reasonably well on the day of the invasion and so the need for pigeons was not quite so great as anticipated. As well as messages from troops, a select group of elite birds had been trained to wear a harness which could carry a container of 35mm film. But these never returned with their historic cargo. The combination of the weight of the container, the hostile conditions and rough handling meant they flew inland to perch and rest rather than heading home, and so went straight into the German lines, where they were shot down or captured.
Many of the pigeons that made it back from D-Day were more exhausted than they should have been. The Army Pigeon Service surmised that this was because they did not take the straightest route. Due to the smoke and noise of battle, rather than fly in a straight line of 125 miles they took a more circuitous route up the French coast to Dunkirk and then across the Channel before homing, tripling the distance. Afterwards, the APS and Rayner of the RAF inevitably battled as to whose birds had been more effective and disputed details in each other’s reports.
The Special Air Service [SAS], established as a commando unit earlier in the war, proved avid pigeon users, taking 330 birds from Army lofts around D-Day. Around one in twelve of the birds they were given had already flown Columba missions. One bird sent with SAS troops on 7 June 1944 returned from near the Swiss border on 29 June after spending twenty days in a small container. Long confinement was one reason why many birds did not make it home. Another problem for the SAS was that their need for security meant they could not tell loft owners where they were going, and so could not pick the most suitable birds for the mission.
The American pigeoneers slowly accompanied their troops into Europe through shattered French villages, past the wreckage of planes and vehicles and dead horses. The friendly offer of cider and Calvados eased their path. In combat, their pigeons had to fly through heavy fire, still having to evade hawks, sometimes dazed and suffering shell-shock. The bond between men and birds remained strong – American soldiers’ reports tell of the sadness when disease meant hundreds of pigeons had to be destroyed, or of their pride when a bird was awarded his own ‘purple heart’ for returning back wounded to one of their mobile lofts (which were usually tugged around by a jeep).
The news from the front was not always good. The first word of landings by 1st British Airborne at Arnhem in September came from pigeons. They reported that the British paratroops held the north end of Arnhem Bridge and were waiting for the 2nd Army to arrive to support them. But the reinforcements were delayed and German resistance was much heavier than they expected. On 19 September at 10.30 a.m., a pigeon named William of Orange was released to fly from Arnhem to London. Travelling 260 miles, 135 of them over sea, in a speedy four hours and twenty-five minutes, it carried a message that the situation in Arnhem was desperate. The troops urgently needed resupply. Thanks to the pigeon’s message, an effort was made to do just that. The aircraft had to take off from the Midlands as the south was covered in a blanket of fog. By the time it arrived, the drop site to which it sent the supplies was in the hands of the Germans. By the next day things were even worse; the British troops were nearly out of food and ammunition and under heavy fire. Eventually they would have to withdraw from what had indeed been a bridge too far.
As the Allies began to push through France, messages flooded in to Columba as if a dam had burst. Extra drops were organized behind enemy lines to gather intelligence, and people were now willing to take more risks. ‘We await you impatiently and hope to see you soon to get rid of the dirty Boches who have poisoned our country for four years now,’ wrote a pair of 22-year-old Frenchmen who signed themselves Lulu and Riri and riskily identified the small locality thirty miles from Chartres where they lived. ‘Come and liberate us soon and bring cigarettes, tea, sweets, etc. Kick the Boches out of here,’ read another message. Some, excited by D-Day, started to fight too soon and would die as the German grip took longer to loosen than they had anticipated. Columba carried messages that described members of the resistance being killed and one girl being tied to a wheelbarrow and beaten for having a radio transmission set.
The French resistance shifted from sabotage to more organized warfare. They provided updates through Columba on supplies sent by parachute, with references to which containers were the most useful – they said they now needed less explosives and more equipment that would be useful for guerrilla warfare, rather than the sabotage of the past. They also pleaded for battery-powered radio sets to be used in the field and even for bicycle tyres for messengers, since this was the only means of getting around. One group said a German motor car had been fired on by the resistance, killing a colonel and wounding a general. In reprisal, the Germans hanged eleven young people whose bodies were left exposed for days in the streets of Carhaix. A pigeon with a message from ‘Julien and Jacques’ dated 4 July 1944 provided detailed intelligence. ‘Do not worry, dear Allies. We have been standing firm for 4 years now and we know all the defeatists, collaborators and especially the turncoats. We shake you by the hand. Together we shall win.’ It warned that one group of Maquis had been discovered by the enemy; thirteen were killed, despite an ‘energetic defence’. They also warned that ‘Your supplies by parachute on the night of 29th–30th June fell in the hands of the enemy.’
One of the more startling messages came on 13 July from an organized resistance group in Brittany who wrongly thought they were being deceived. ‘As we suspect that this is a German pigeon, we are sending you some news which you will find interesting,’ the group wrote, explaining that they were now well supplied by the Allies and were making preparations to ‘teach you the lesson which you deserve’. They claimed that there were deserters from a German army which consisted mainly of teenagers. ‘In the end you will pay your debts to the prisoners, the families you have shot and those you have tortured.’ It offered a warning as well to the Germans. ‘For us, as from today, 10 Boches for one Frenchman, Suffering for suffering, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Remember that we FFI [the French Forces of the Interior, as de Gaulle christened the resistance] will go and occupy Germany and make you pay. Already we have done in many Boches and know that we have the arms we need you will learn very shortly.’ It was signed ‘Marag’ – a chief of section of a group of Bretons – and ended with the phrase ‘Mort aux Boches’. This message was noted to be sent to MI6, no doubt interested in who this highly motivated group of partisans might be.
Out of the blue, the Columba team at MI14 received a letter from their old colleague Rex Pearson soon after D-Day. He had not given up. On 16 June, Pearson wrote a personal letter to Brian Melland from the BBC, where he was still working. ‘Forgive me for being so importunate – I think that’s the right word,’ he began. ‘This is a chance of a lifetime and more and if you can get me sent over I’ll guarantee good results within eight weeks.’ His suggestion was to avoid the Channel crossing by having pigeons return with messages to a base in Normandy. They could be delivered by plane or even, he suggested, by balloon as he had done in the First World War, as this would provide independence from the RAF. The rates of return of Columba would be improved enormously, he was sure. ‘Will you have lunch with me on Monday or Tuesday,’ he ended pleadingly. Melland replied on 19 June with thanks and explained that the idea of using Normandy as a base was already being discussed. ‘I’m afraid I’m booked for lunch tomorrow Tuesday, but may I give you a ring when the position is firmer?’ he wrote.
Pearson was no longer in the loop and so could not know that the idea of basing Columba in France had indeed already been looked at. The aspiration had been to open a base in France in August so flights could start in October. But that proved difficult because of the initially uneven speed of the Allied advance, followed by a rapid German retreat once the Allies broke out of Normandy. Instead, Columba continued to run from Britain, with Kleyn sending lists of priority areas to match the locations where the Allies were preparing to fight their way through.
A week after D-Day, residents of Britain heard a new, terrifying sound. The buzz of an engine overhead which suddenly spluttered out. Next came silence. Then an explosion. In response to the arrival of the Allies on the Normandy beaches, the Germans first unleashed their V1 – one of the earliest just missing MI6 HQ at Broadway. A few months later came the V2 rockets. In London, Churchill grew deeply concerned about the possible impact. Did London need to be evacuated?
Columba offered help in minimizing the deadly toll of the rockets. The challenge was to find their launch pads. In July, eighty-nine Columba messages which returned gave information which helped identify ten flying bomb emplacements. One message lists two ‘flying torpedo’ emplacements in their area, another lists four. As with night-fighter radar, the strangeness of the new technology made the launch sites distinctive enough to be spotted by locals.
The Columba returns helped provide targets for the RAF and Allies to strike as they desperately sought to stem the tide of rockets. At the start of August, a message from Totes in Normandy from a local Frenchman who signed himself Le Favue provided some of the richest information. He detailed targets for railway lines used by the Germans, but also specified emplacements for what the author called ‘robots’ with their runways in the sports grounds of a college.
Totes was one of the sites targeted by Allied planes as the location of German V1 positions, and as the French writer then explained there was an addendum in English from ‘your captain’ and some of his colleagues who ‘reached us from the sky’. The crashed airmen – from the Royal Australian and Canadian Air Forces as well as the US Air Force – went on to use the pigeon message to pass on their own detailed wealth of intelligence about German anti-aircraft positions and infantry movements as well as V1 sites, knowing enough to explain what type of catapult was being used for take-off. They explained how Germans had originally said London would be ‘kaput’ in ninety-six hours after the launches began but after a week recognized that many were failing. They also explained that the V1 flying bombs were proving only partially successful. Of the first four fired from one position, two fell within 200 yards and another not much further off. Only one successful shot per installation per day seemed to be the average.
The airmen even critiqued their own side’s bombing tactics:
The use of heavy bombers at high levels on ‘No Ball’ [V1 launch sites] and other pin-point targets is to be deplored as they very, very seldom hit any military targets, but do a great deal of damage to French property and make many enemies. As instance on the afternoon of 14th July, many Lancs. [Lancaster bombers] came over and bombed above cloud. The markers went down near the little factory but the heavies let go up to five miles off and bombs fell uselessly in the fields and villages and caused much damage. I saw at least ten sticks fall that did no military good whatever … On the roads, the fighters are hitting a lot of French civilian traffic, but are doing good work keeping the Hun quiet.
The team went on to ask for more pigeons to be dropped in specific nearby fields where locals would be helpful. ‘We are told to wait here for “Monty”,’ the message concluded, a reference to General Montgomery, then pushing through France.
The bleakest messages are those that detail civilian casualties from Allied bombing raids. ‘I would ask you, my friends,’ wrote a French farmer who found the pigeon in his beetroot field in Mayenne, ‘to warn the population a few minutes before the bombing because you kill many civilians who are your friends. Very few Germans get killed. It is nearly always the civilians who suffer from your aircraft. If you circle before dropping your bombs, the population would have time to withdraw from the town, thus avoiding many French victims. You must spare your friends and kill the Germans.’ The farmer ended with a plea for liberation as soon as possible since all his friends had been taken by the Gestapo. ‘Please send us arms, rifles, revolvers and ammunition by parachute,’ he wrote, signing himself Jean du Coin Larue. Numerous messages contained pleas to respect the white flags that civilians sometimes flew (despite the risk of a fine) since they were being hit.
Others too warned of the dangers of Allied aircraft hitting civilian targets. In some messages, anger comes through. ‘Aviators should be very, very, very careful,’ one author who called himself the ‘refugee boar’ from Parthenay, Deux-Sèvres, wrote in a long message in July 1944, explaining how four fighter bombers targeting a viaduct failed to hit it or kill a single German but did kill a mother of four children. The author provided extensive details of which bombing raids over the previous two months had missed and instead killed civilians. A dairy truck had been hit, and soon afterwards a father of seven was killed by fire from an aircraft. ‘The military results obtained have not warranted the losses and destruction suffered by the French population. Amongst those who are wildly anti-Boches many complain bitterly of poorly aimed Allied attacks.’ The writer provided detailed suggestions on how to be more effective – for instance, that trains should be attacked between stations and from the side so the driver and his fireman (who were always French) were not hit. One message from the Netherlands said, ‘I implore you not to shoot on trains and vehicles with innocent people. Last week about 250 people were killed or wounded in Holland. You cannot call this fair play and the war cannot be won that way. It is not an act of heroism to shoot on trains with civilians by low flying aircraft.’
In Belgium, Joseph Raskin’s family witnessed the power of Allied bombs. On the morning of 9 May, the air raid siren sounded in the town of Aarschot where they lived. Heavy bombers flew over the town but no bombs fell. But two and a half hours later, more US Air Force planes came, and this time they targeted the town’s important railway station and depot, close to the Raskin family house. Buildings were reduced to rubble and fires raged. The bridges over the river were destroyed.
As troops moved through Europe, the worry for Allied pigeon experts was increasingly about the presence of enemy pigeons, and about the Germans developing their own version of Columba. An observant military policeman at the harbour of Le Havre spotted birds flying suspiciously away from a hillside not long after it had been captured. A search party was sent and found a camouflaged tunnel entrance. Inside was a team of Germans who had been spying on Allied shipping in the harbour below and releasing the details via pigeon to maintain radio silence. The Germans also enlisted other locals and pigeons to spy in stay-behind networks.
André, a 33-year-old Belgian hotel proprietor from near Ostend, had returned in March from sick leave after being forced to work on the Russian front. In a café, he fell into conversation with a man who said there might be a way for him to avoid going back to the front. All André had to do was work for the man by sending messages via pigeon. A few days later he was given pigeons and forms and told to practise, using the cover name Sabot. His job was to provide details of Allied troop movements if they arrived in the town. André had been recruited into the German ‘stay-behind’ pigeon network.
Intelligence had reached Allied Command in late 1944 giving precise details of how the Germans had established these networks to provide intelligence or help organize resistance in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Germany itself as the Wehrmacht were pushed back. Captured enemy agents said there were twice as many agents using pigeons as there were those using radio sets. In a mirror image of Columba, they had been given instructions to supply details of Allied troop movements by means of pigeons which would fly back to German-controlled lofts. In Belgium the agents were located mainly near the coast. Some, Richard Walker of MI5 explained in a note, operated clandestinely out of houses with birds hidden in attics, others used birds from larger military-run lofts such as one in Brussels. ‘Personally, I consider this constitutes a very real danger,’ T. A. Robertson at MI5 wrote as he forwarded the paper to Dick White, the intelligence liaison for SHAEF (and a future head of MI5 and MI6). Troops were ordered to report any lofts they found and to wait for the Army Pigeon Signal Company to come and literally clip the birds’ wings so they could not carry messages. Riflemen were sometimes ordered to shoot down any birds suspected of carrying messages. Detailed interrogation questionnaires were drawn up for any captured Germans who might have knowledge of pigeon activities.
Captain G. F. Swann was in charge of pigeon counter-espionage for the 21st Army Group and found evidence to support Robertson’s fears as the troops advanced. This included a coded message from an agent who had since been captured, and which his interrogators could now put to him to try and gain useful intelligence on the cipher system German intelligence was using to encode their messages. Details were sent back to MI5, and Walker tried to crack the codes of the various messages received.
André the hotel owner was arrested the day Canadian troops entered his town – local patriots had suspected him all along. He tried to bluff his way out by claiming he was working for the Allied underground movement, but a message from an agent working with him was found on the roof of a building in Ostend. Similarly, Bertrand, an agent in Yquelon in France, was given 4,000 francs a month to release pigeons, but at the first sign of an American tank he got on his bicycle and made off. He was later arrested in Paris. Pigeons were used extensively by the German Army before D-Day, but in practice they found it harder to keep using them afterwards, so rapidly were they forced to retreat.
As the Allies prepared to make the final push into Germany, intelligence mounted relating to extensive pigeon preparations by the enemy in their homeland. Orders were given to Allied units that one of their first missions on entering German towns was to identify pigeon fanciers and their lofts and then interrogate them. SHAEF even made plans to bomb a particular German loft thought to be supplying Nazi networks.
Allied forces had entered Belgium at the start of September 1944. For the second time, the towns of Belgium felt the full force of war, but now the Germans were retreating rather than advancing. Hitler counter-attacked in the Ardennes in December and it would not be until February that the whole of the country was liberated, but the pace of the Allied advance in the early days surprised even those who were part of it. ‘Every time we halted, we had fruit and wine showered on us. We looked like flying greengrocer’s shops,’ one British soldier remembered. Joseph Raskin’s brothers and sisters and their children watched the Allies pass out chocolate as they made their way through. Crowds lined the streets to welcome the troops with cheers and ‘V for Victory’ signs. Flags and banners were retrieved from cellars to be flown from houses.
The Germans fell back from Brussels quickly, and by 3 September the Allied convoys were struggling to get through the crowds that thronged the street to welcome them. The cafés blazed with light that night. Champagne stored by the Germans in the cellars of the Palace of Justice was brought out. Brussels ‘fairly swam in wine’, soldiers recalled.
There was a bitter harvest in the following days. Wives and mothers in Brussels had to be restrained from taking out their fury on captured Germans. Some Belgian men grabbed weapons and went hunting for Nazis or for collaborators.
That included the men who had betrayed Leopold Vindictive. Pieren, the brother-in-law of Dehennin, is thought to have been shot in Brussels on the day of liberation. Leduc, the man who had arrived at the mission house of Scheut to aid Raskin’s arrest, was reported to have been killed by the resistance near Lille, although there were later reports that this was a case of mistaken identity and that he might still be at large.
Major Page from MI6 and Lepage from the Belgian Sûreté landed in Arromanches in Normandy on 11 September and arrived in Brussels two days later. In the Hotel Metropole, Page continued his work gathering intelligence, his primary targets being the identification of V2 weapon sites and an effort to run agents into Germany. Hardy Amies headed to liberated Brussels to work with the Sûreté running agents into Germany and got himself into typically Amies-style trouble. As an old friend of the editor of Vogue magazine, while in Brussels he helped one of the magazine’s star writers with a story on female members of the Belgian resistance. Amies took the writer, Lee Miller, a muse to Man Ray in Paris – and herself the subject of investigation by MI5 – to meet the ‘baby-faced’ Countess Thérèse.
The Countess had carried millions of francs in her handbag for arms, bribery and sabotage, the journalist’s resulting copy read breathlessly. Miller recounted in the story how Amies offered to take her to ‘a reception’. Fearing it would be a boring ‘hand-shaking’ event, the Vogue writer was delighted to find that it actually involved acting as the reception committee in a field for a parachute drop containing weapons. By the time the military got on to the matter, most of Miller’s article – including pictures of Amies, described as a ‘famous couturier’, had already gone to the printers. As an investigating officer noted, it seemed extraordinary ‘that a serving officer should lend his secret service background in the interests of his private affairs’ through a ‘gaudy publicity stunt’ which ‘will cause a flutter in many feminine hearts when they realise that their handsome couturier is after all, the “Scarlet Pimpernel” of this war’. The editor reluctantly agreed to delete a ‘spicy tit-bit’ about Amies’s work for SOE.
Pigeons were among the spoils of war that soldiers were given explicit instructions to seize. As they pushed into Belgium, the Americans were ordered to commandeer German lofts. The 282nd Signal Pigeon Company established its headquarters in Verviers on 12 September and captured from the Germans over a thousand birds which it then trained for its own use. Just as crack teams were sent to capture Nazi scientists, so there was a concerted effort to capture the best German pigeons to harness their skills. The 285th Signal Pigeon Company managed to commandeer one of the most famous German racing pigeons, a bird called Meister, who was then made a ‘naturalized American’ so he could be used for breeding.
When one German headquarters building in Belgium was seized, Allied soldiers made a surprising find. In the adjoining loft buildings and storage rooms were a huge number of containers from Columba. And in the lofts were birds with British rings dating from 1940 and 1941. These seem to have been local birds who had British rings re-soldered on to them in an attempt to trap locals who thought they were using Columba since the birds would fly to German lofts. This was final proof of just how pigeon-minded the Germans had become. They had taken the threat of Columba seriously enough to try to organize their own large-scale deception operations.
In April 1945, Britain’s own deception expert, Richard Walker from MI5, went to Brussels and Paris to work with the security services of liberated countries on pigeon spies. This included sharing details of ‘double cross pigeon agents’ and of how to enlist civilian fanciers to spot enemy birds, as well as the technique of using a screen of friendly birds to draw enemy pigeons away from their destination. He even offered the use of the MI5 falcon team to the French, who were worried about pro-Vichy groups who had gone into hiding in remote areas and might be communicating by means of pigeons. In Brussels, he found that pigeon fanciers were desperate to resume their sport, and their 350,000 members formed an impressive political lobby which pressed for the ban to be lifted. The war was nearly over and they wanted to get back to normal.
By then, Columba had done its work. The operation had been scaled back in late 1944 and was halted when Allied armies reached Germany. It was formally closed on 14 February 1945.
But what of the authors of Columba’s most famous missive? Lichtervelde was liberated on 8 September 1944. Gabriel Debaillie finally came out of hiding in the house – although he would struggle for many years to be comfortable in other people’s company, never talking much. There was no sign of his brother Arseen. And for the families of Leopold Vindictive in Belgium, even the ending of the war brought them no answers as to the fate of their loved ones who had disappeared. For that, they would have to wait still longer.