LARRY CARR’S PARACHUTE had taken him down into Belgium just after midnight on April 28. But he was no secret agent. Before the war he had been a surveyor from Kent. That night he was part of the crew of an RAF Halifax bomber that had set out from Yorkshire on a bombing raid destined for Cologne. But as it flew over Belgium, the Halifax was attacked by a German night fighter flown by Reinhold Eckardt, one of the Luftwaffe’s top pilots and a veteran of the Battle of Britain. Carr bailed out over Hamois and came down about a kilometer from the wreckage of his aircraft. He hid his parachute and headed south using a collar-stud compass.
Half an hour later, as he was crossing a track, two Belgians approached him. One was a commandant of the gendarmerie. It was a moment of tension. Would he be arrested? They asked if he wanted to get back to England. Fortunately, it was no trap. He was taken to a house and given a meal and some civilian clothes. The commandant called the local German HQ and told them that there had been no survivors of the crash.
The next day Carr had been taken by train—changing a few times to be careful—to meet a representative of the Comet line. He would now be moved from house to house around the Brussels suburbs by Michelli’s network, learning along the way that the gunner on his plane had been betrayed by a Belgian to whom he had called out in a forest.
For those RAF men who crashed in Europe and were lucky enough to find their way to sympathizers, Columba pigeons offered a way to send news back home. One message from Le Neubourg in northern France came from a “patriotic organization” formed in 1940 that explained how a local anti-aircraft gun had shot down four bombers. After that came a message in English:
Dear Mum, I am glad to be able to relieve your minds on my whereabouts, and to tell you I am in good hands. It shouldn’t be long before I’ll be back in good old England. Already, I know of two other members of my crew being safe, Wally Jones and George Henton. They are a few miles from here and are much the same as me. I haven’t seen them yet but have received a note from each. There isn’t much else to say, only that I am in good health and happy. The chatter of an unfamiliar language gets a bit monotonous. There isn’t any more to say, so will stop. Your loving son, Stan
R.197072 Sgt Jinks, S.B.
Next comes a series of one-line messages from allied airmen hiding with Stan. Each just gives their number rather than their name. “Good luck, feeling pretty cheesed,” says the first RAF man. “Always smiling. Also cheesed,” writes the second. “Keep up the good work,” says the third. Then follows a characteristically American-sounding line from a US Air Force officer: “Doing what we can. God’s speed.” Then another RAF man: “Am okay now injuries healed up. Okay.” And finally one more RAF line: “Feeling fine, but as the rest, cheesed.” They might have been cheesed but, thanks to Columba, at least their families knew they were safe.
One Columba message had a particularly personal connection for an RAF pilot dropping the pigeons. Guy Lockhart’s Spitfire took off from Biggin Hill just after lunchtime on July 6, 1941, to escort six Stirling aircraft to Lille. But less than an hour into the flight, enemy fire shredded one of the wings, and he crashed not far from Calais. Lockhart parachuted out but was knocked unconscious when he hit the ground. Fortunately for him, he, like Carr, found help. The twenty-five-year-old was hidden for three weeks before making his way back to Britain. He was then talent-spotted by the RAF Special Duties team responsible for dropping agents and pigeons. Columba Message 214 came from a pigeon dropped in preparation for the Dieppe raid in August 1942. It was from Pas-de-Calais and a group calling itself LMN Kommando 6, a pair of brothers who had sheltered Lockhart. “He will remember the two brothers,” they wrote, providing the pilot’s home address as verification of their bona fides. They offered allegiance to de Gaulle and said they wanted to fight, offering extensive information on local German movements. The authors asked for greetings to be sent to Lockhart and two other aviators. Lockhart would have their address, they explained, so that would allow more pigeons to be sent to them. Unfortunately, by the time the pigeon made it back home on September 3, Lockhart was in no position to receive the greetings. Three nights earlier he had flown his Lysander to France to collect an agent. The pickup proved disastrous because the agent (who appeared to be drunk) had laid a flare path across a ditch, with the result that the plane sustained damage as it landed. Lockhart was forced to make a second escape from behind enemy lines through Gibraltar. He then joined Bomber Command. On his forms he had to enter the countries he had visited and for what purpose; his answer was “France. Twice. Escaping.” The third time was not lucky for Lockhart, though. In April 1944, he was shot down and killed by a German night fighter.
IN THE BATTLE of the skies, pigeons saved the lives of some RAF airmen out on their mission. Just before noon on October 10, 1940, a pigeon arrived back at the royal family’s loft in Sandringham, having been released in the Netherlands four hours earlier. It was the first to carry details of a crew that had made a forced landing on the continent.
Down in Plymouth, Bert Woodman and his group would deliver birds by van to the local RAF station every Wednesday and Saturday to be taken out on flights. Two baskets of pigeons were given to many RAF planes in case their radio failed and they had to make a forced landing. The birds would be carried in the upper half of the plane to reduce the risk of drowning if the plane ditched in water. Inside the lid of a box were instructions on how to use a special indelible pencil to write on the container and then release the birds. The lofts of fanciers in the Plymouth group were fitted with alarm bell traps; when the bell rang they would call Bert’s wife, who would then contact the RAF signals officer.
Despite its early royal success, the RAF scheme nearly did not survive. In May 1941, there were complaints that no message had led to a crew’s rescue. Often the planes were sinking too fast and the crew, perhaps understandably, had other things to worry about than following the proper pigeon release procedure. The director of signals thought that it was time to consider discontinuing the service.
But Bomber Command came out strongly in favor of keeping the pigeons. It was not just about the number of times they had actually saved lives. It was warned that morale would be affected by the pigeons’ removal. Officers realized that crews found the pigeons a genuine comfort. In the event of the horror of being ditched at sea, why would a crew not want one more possible means of rescue, however slight? There was also something in the warmth of another creature and the knowledge that it was heading off home; its value was intrinsically more reassuring than the valves and wires of a radio set, whose message—like the bird—disappeared into the vast sky above the sea. Bomber Command had recognized that there was an emotional comfort to carrying the pigeons that exceeded their practical value. Often birds would become mascots. One air gunner would only fly with a black and white checkered bird because the first time he carried one on board he had not been fired upon once. The only crew Bert Woodman and the Plymouth fanciers were not so keen on was a group of Australians, since there had been mysterious losses of pigeons liberated on their training flights. An inquiry found the crew had developed a taste for pigeon pie.
The RAF rescue pigeons received a stay of execution in the middle of the war and were provided with a new watertight container that could be sealed in four seconds. This could be thrown from the aircraft into the water and picked up by the crew once they were in their dinghy (the container could even be used by the crew for buoyancy if the dinghy was too far away). Soon afterward, the pigeons began to show their worth. A bomber crew crash-landed in the Netherlands on the morning of February 21, 1942, and eleven-month-old Billy delivered his message the following day a little after noon “in a state of complete collapse” after having flown through a gale-driven snowstorm, making a journey of two hundred and fifty miles back to the RAF station at Waddington.
The real star was a bird called Winkie. That same month a Beaufort ditched into the sea on short notice owing to engine failure. The crew managed an SOS but the aircraft broke up on impact. An open pigeon container fell into the sea. The crew—now in a dinghy—tried to recover the container, but in doing so, the door was broken open. The pigeon became wet (which hindered its ability to fly), and it escaped before the crew could get hold of it and attach a message. A second pigeon was recovered but it was too wet to fly, so the crew carefully massaged the bird to dry it by hand and then attached their SOS message before releasing it at midafternoon. This second pigeon never made it home, but the first pigeon arrived the following morning. A radio SOS signal had been received, but it was so weak that the resultant fix was extremely vague and the ensuing air search was attempting to cover an area of seventy square miles. On the arrival of the pigeon, an NCO linked it to the missing aircraft; seeing that the bird was wet and smeared with oil, he was able to assess the pigeon’s condition, the time of the aircraft’s ditching (as established by the faint radio signal) and the weather, and work out that the bird had flown 120–140 miles. He suggested that the search should operate within a much more specific area. The search parties changed their bearings and the aircraft and dinghy were spotted fifteen minutes later, 129 miles from base. Four lives were saved. It was at a subsequent dinner in the pigeon’s honor that the name Winkie was bestowed, since in her pen she “winked” by drooping an eyelid at one of the men she had rescued—although in truth, the slow action of her eyelids was almost certainly a sign she had not recovered from the exhaustion of the flight. Only a handful of pigeons were, like Winkie, responsible for the saving of lives, mainly at sea, but many other RAF men found them a comfort in dangerous times.
FOR R. V. Jones, the struggle to stop the German night fighters that were inflicting such a terrible cost on Bomber Command was a top priority. His task was to try to understand the nature and location of German defenses against the RAF so that they could be countered and men like Larry Carr might avoid being shot down. Jones went to see Page, head of the Belgian section at MI6. “Tell me what you want,” Page said with a wave of his hand, “I will get you anything.” Jones suspected it was an idle boast, but Page began to deliver. In February 1942, his Belgian agents produced a report about an object thirty-five kilometers east of Brussels. Using the information, Jones sent in aerial reconnaissance to get pictures. It was a radar installation code-named Freya, and there was also in the vicinity a large paraboloid about twenty feet in diameter with other structures around it. This was what would be called a “Giant Wurzburg.” A combination of sources led Jones to understand that the Germans had constructed a vast ground-based interception system. Freyas and Wurzburgs allowed the Germans to fix the position of both enemy aircraft and their own at long and short range. They could help target gunfire and guide a night fighter directly onto the tail of a British bomber.
Mapping these defenses was vital. Scattered as they were across northwestern Europe, however, finding the sites was a challenge. The one advantage was that the installations looked very unusual if you got close enough. A Giant Wurzburg or a Freya looked distinctive because no one had ever seen a radar dish before. Locals struggled to describe them, often calling them “inverted umbrellas.” Jones asked resistance agents to pass on information if they saw any buildings that might be searchlight or radar stations so they could be photographed from the air. One Belgian agent managed to steal a map of searchlight locations. But getting agents’ reports out remained problematic. They were sometimes smuggled out on the express train that ran from Lille to Lyon, the fireman hiding them under the coal so that they could be shoveled into the fire and burned if a search began. But the final leg back to Britain proved harder. Page told Jones that at one point there were fifteen hundredweight of reports waiting in Lisbon to be taken by plane back to England. They needed to get the reports back faster. The answer was pigeons.
Columba would provide Jones with some of the vital intelligence he craved. He had asked locals to spot any large structures with rotating aerials that looked unusual, and soon replies to his questions were starting to arrive at MI14(d). On June 5, 1942, a Columba message came back. The writer said he thought the bird had been meant for Belgium rather than the Netherlands but decided to provide some details anyway, and he reported news of a camp at Opperdoes with a great many “technical installations, listening-in-apparatus, jammers . . . From this camp, the night fighters get their instructions,” the author wrote, helpfully providing a map that showed the precise location. “Do come over this way and do not fly so high so we can see that you are British.” Jones and the Air Ministry considered this message “first class.” It was just the start. “Pigeons drew first blood on three night fighter control stations,” Jones recalled.
One of the Columba messages Jones valued came via a strange route. An English racing pigeon bred in Barrow-in-Furness was blown over to the Netherlands in July. It was taken to two Dutch patriots on July 21. They could see it was a British pigeon and so named it Tommy. It was exhausted, so they tended it carefully until it was ready to return to its home in Lancashire, where it arrived on August 9. A message was attached in which the authors said friends wanted to send their greetings to Winston Churchill as well as to the queen of the Netherlands, who was in exile in Britain. She should be told the opposition in the country was “at the highest grade it has ever been owing to the latest German measures against the hostages and the Jews.” But after the salutations came hard military information. The authors explained that near the village of Sondel in Friesland was an enormous installation designed to hear approaching British aircraft. It had a diameter of ten meters and they had learned that it could hear British planes when they approached the coast. There were enormous cables to carry information from this facility to an airfield where German fighters could be launched in response. A British plane had been shot down on the night of July 25 after dealing with two German planes, but the crew had since been arrested. If Tommy the pigeon was found, they asked for a message to be broadcast on the Dutch bulletin of the BBC. “Long live Great Britain. Long live the Allies. Long live the queen,” they ended, before a special greeting to some friends, which was followed by the rather wonderful signoff: “Cheerio!!!!! Twee Geuzen” (Two Pirates).
The bird had brought details of one of the main radar posts in the Netherlands, one that Jones and London had not been aware of before. And more information was soon to follow. Message 235 came from a pigeon found at five o’clock on the afternoon of September 27, 1942, on an island south of the Hook of Holland, which made its way back to the Isle of Wight three days later. The author gave his name as Smuggler. Perhaps that was why he was so observant about details of coastal defenses. The crucial point for Jones came with one line: “At Oostvorne there are wireless masts made to rotate, situated in the dunes.”
Jones found this detail invaluable. And Britain made use of it. A month later, Rex Pearson at the War Office wrote to Commander Cyril Tower at the Admiralty saying that he understood that the location station “has since been quite satisfactorily dealt with.” The Admiralty said it wanted the locations of more radar stations on the coast.
By January 1943, Jones said that Columba had located three stations in the Netherlands “which could not be fixed by any other means.” He specifically asked for the Columba team to be thanked on his behalf. More were found by pigeon that year. It had taken a combination of intelligence sources to understand the German night fighter system—from captured maps to RAF combat reports, radio intercepts to aerial reconnaissance. But Jones specifically cited pigeons alongside these better known tools in his reports.
Columba also brought Jones news of the success of the countermeasures he was working on. Jones and others in scientific intelligence had developed a way of confusing German radar by dropping thousands of strips of aluminum foil from a plane. The strips—code-named Window—reflected back the radio waves and made it impossible to pinpoint a British plane. Jones had to push hard to deploy the technique against resistance from those who feared the Germans might develop their own version against British radar. But finally in the summer of 1943 they received the go-ahead. Columba brought a stunning insight into its effect.
On August 13, 1943, a Frenchman in Ville de Landrecies in northern France shoved a message into one of Columba’s green cylinders. Two days later the bird was back at its loft in Mitcham and the message had reached Brian Melland and the Columba team. From there it went straight to R. V. Jones. Message 486 was a cracker, second only to Leopold Vindictive’s Message 37. Extensive details of infantry movements were given, not at the level of Leopold Vindictive but still among the best that would be seen. There were precise coordinates of munitions depots and detailed assessments of recent RAF bombing raids—how two factories and a railway repair shop that had been targeted were now back up and running and needed to be struck again.
The author reported that a German ship had apparently received six hundred tons of a gas, and that French prisoners at a particular base had been provided with gas masks to work with it. There were calls for the BBC to name collaborators and warn them of their fate. Columba writers frequently asked for such broadcasts, for the BBC offered one of the few ways of exerting any power over those who betrayed their communities. A tutor at Prisches worked for the Gestapo. An insurance agent, a fruit merchant and a collector’s clerk were also named. Then there was the husband of a teacher who was a “keen collaborator” and a police spy. The writer warned that the Germans dropped their own agents disguised as British airmen to trap potential helpers. He suggested providing passwords and recognition signals that could change every fortnight or every month, and which only the chiefs of the French resistance organization would know, in order to vouch for airmen’s identity. This would “also enable us to do away with a few agents of the Gestapo,” noted the writer.
But then came the real prize. There were details of what the author called a “Radio listening-in and guiding post for night fighters.” It was located at Croix-Caluyau, and the author provided a precise description and location for the two hemispheric and one rectangular apparatus. Twenty English bombers had been shot down in a radius of around twenty-five kilometers from it, the author noted.
And finally came the detail that made Jones fall in love with the message. There was a remarkable description of events a few days earlier, on the night of August 9–10. The writer described how the British aircraft had dropped “a multitude of black bits of paper metallized by contact with a piece of tin.” The writer would not have known that this was the British Window countermeasure. But the writer managed to describe the reaction it inspired among the Germans at the base. A German operator said he detected seven hundred signals in the sky but could not localize a single one to which to respond. “The officer commanding the post was mad with rage and declared that he would prefer to be bombed by a hundred aircraft rather than submit to that flood of papers.” The writer added that a fairly large number of the bundles of paper did not scatter properly during the descent. The message ended with a request for a signal on the BBC to acknowledge receipt with the words “deux pigeons s’aimaient d’amour tendre.”
“I have never seen a pigeon carrying such a profuse message,” said Jones.
Who had sent the message on what Jones called a “heavily laden and very gallant pigeon”? Whoever it was, they must have been inside the control room of the night fighter station to hear the exact words spoken by the German, Jones thought. He believed at one point it may have been a janitor, although he also wondered if it was an agent, since the message as a whole read as if its originator was someone who knew about resistance work.
Within two days of the message’s arrival by pigeon, Jones had shown it to the secretary of state for air, the deputy chief of the air staff and the chief of Bomber Command. The revelation of the frustrations that their German opponents were facing was an enormous morale boost (and of course a vindication for the scientists who had developed Window). There was another advantage to the message. It was considered less secret than the Enigma decrypts and so could be shared more widely. “This information coming so soon after the raid was of extreme value in that it could be told at once to all our bomber crews, to their satisfaction, whereas information arriving through more secret channels could not have received so wide a distribution,” Jones said.
Columba was proving its worth. “From my point of view, the Pigeon Service produces occasional extremely valuable reports and this is one of them,” Jones wrote to the Columba team. The combination of the mapping of night fighter defenses and the use of Window proved a turning point in the air war. From that summer, RAF losses began to decrease. This battle of the skies was being won thanks in part to the pigeons of Columba. But for MI14’s most important agent on the ground, the net had closed.