IN THE OCCUPIED Channel Islands a poster went up on August 3, 1941. It announced that a Frenchman, Louis Berrier, from the town of Ernes just south of Caen, had been shot by a firing squad the previous day. The poster stated that the punishment had been for a crime the Germans were already starting to worry about—the sending of intelligence by pigeon.
Above the skies, in the fields of France, the Netherlands and Belgium, and even on the cliff-tops of Britain, a battle was being fought that might be deadly both for Columba’s pigeons and for those who tried to use them. Only one in ten of the birds sent on Columba missions made it back alive. The frustration experienced by Leopold Vindictive in trying to obtain fresh pigeons was a mark not only of the inherent challenges of Columba but also of how much effort the Germans put into stopping it. Even though the operation had just started that summer, the Germans were already working to counter it. The challenges to ensure that the British birds first reached the hands of sympathizers and then found their way home with a message were immense.
Just one month after the beginning of Columba in 1941, reports had come from Courtrai, close to Lichtervelde, of birds falling into the hands of Germans rather than local sympathizers. Columba was in many ways an oddly un-secret operation. It was designed to elicit sensitive information, yet its workings were anything but clandestine. From the start, the Germans could see the pigeons with their parachutes and questionnaires. The team at MI14(d) had a phrase for this level of awareness on the part of the enemy: “The Germans are fully pigeon-minded and our continued activities can hardly make them more so.” It did not take long for Germany to develop counter-Columba tactics and become still more “pigeon-minded.”
As they did against British bombers, the Germans developed a multilayered defense against pigeons in this battle of the skies. “Our defense against the carrier pigeons was vast,” one German expert boasted. Rewards were offered. An MI6 agent reported that a notice displayed in one Belgian town offered 625 francs to anyone who delivered to the authorities any pigeon dropped by the enemy; in other places, a sliding scale of rewards was offered, the largest sums being available for a pigeon carrying a message.
As well as the carrot, there was also the stick. The point of the Channel Islands poster was to issue a warning. Others too paid the price, and the penalties were always made public. A Belgian called Julien Ferrant was executed for trying to send messages by pigeon, while in Antwerp two Frenchmen were shot for the same reason. “In future, the Courts-Martial will impose the death penalty inexorably in all cases of this nature,” a local newspaper reported. Fear had its effect on the local population. “An Italian found one of your pigeons and killed it. The coward!” a message from Florennes in Belgium read. The Germans sometimes planted a parachute and watched it from a hiding place nearby, waiting to arrest those who picked it up; occasionally they even placed a booby trap underneath. Rumors began to emerge that the Germans were planting false pigeons to trap people. “I do not sign because the Germans also drop carrier pigeons, which you must understand, take the messages to the kommandatur. Various patriots who wrote their names and addresses have been arrested,” read another Columba message.
The Germans actively hunted the birds. A Columba report from Loudun in France’s Loire Valley said that many pigeons had fallen into enemy hands after a German observation post spotted the RAF passing overhead. An hour later a hundred and fifty Germans arrived in motor cars, searched gardens, paddocks and roofs and went door-to-door asking for pigeons. Arrests were made and four birds were found. This news was brought back by one of the pigeons they did not catch.
The Germans targeted the birds directly in flight. A Columba message from northern France reported that there were “marksmen on the coast endeavoring to shoot down pigeons from time to time.” The Germans had used snipers during both the siege of Paris in 1870–71 and the First World War to try and take down birds in flight suspected of carrying messages, and similar orders were given again.
Just as in the past, the sight of a pigeon and the knowledge that it might be carrying messages seems to have rattled the Germans. “Considering the wide area covered, the dropping of our pigeons may contribute in a small way to a kind of a German-invented nerve war,” it was noted in London. A seed had been planted, whereby the British began thinking about what could be done to make use of this German fear of the pigeon. It would bear fruit later in the war, thanks to British specialists in deception.
The pigeons had many enemies, German snipers and hungry locals among them. But their most deadly foe was natural. The Battle of Britain saw the use of radar and British Spitfires fighting Luftwaffe Messerschmitts. But in the Battle of the Birds it was the pigeon against the hawk. Hawks—and especially the peregrine falcon, with its wingspan of three feet—were the pigeon’s nemesis.
In action the falcon is a fast, vicious, carnivorous predator of the skies—part Spitfire, part dive bomber. If a pigeon crosses its path, the falcon can swoop down vertically at a staggering two hundred miles per hour and then, at the last moment, pull up to strike with its rear talons, sometimes with such force it can take the pigeon’s head clean off. If it misses, the avian equivalent of an aerial dogfight would still take place between the two. In this engagement, the poor pigeon usually comes off worse.
The Germans were quick to weaponize the hawk. Before the war, a British falconer on holiday in Germany had come across what he described as a set of “princely mews”—the buildings used to house hawks—which was controlled by the state. The countless birds were, he said, looked after by a team of uniformed men who were exempted from regular military service. Hermann Goering, the man in charge of the German air force, was also the guiding hand of its hawks. An amateur falconer, he adored the imagery of being seen with the powerful predator on his wrist more than the actual work of training one. German hawks were specially bred and flown along the coast from Belgium, France and the Netherlands to catch and kill Columba birds as they headed for Britain.
British agents undercover in Europe sometimes even witnessed firsthand the power of the hawk. One British officer took two pigeons with him on a commando raid upon the coast of France. Radio silence was required for the operation, so the pigeons would be used to signal his arrival. He released them at six thirty in the morning, but as he watched them swirl above him in order to orient themselves, he saw a terrible sight. Hawks descended from the cliffs and swooped on his only means of communication with home. Both pigeons were dead within seconds. How many pigeons perished this way, and how many valuable messages were lost, is unknown.
A few brave pigeons did escape the talons of the falcon. Fanciers supplying Columba complained that their birds were returning with gashes. But the dangers from hawks sometimes lay closer to home, on British shores. One pigeon carrying a message from Pontivy with useful details of troops in the area was found by Pembrokeshire police after having been killed by a local falcon. A messenger pigeon named Mary, released with a message for the army, came back after four days, ripped open on her neck and on the right of her breast by a British hawk. Her owner cleaned her up and tenderly put seven stitches in her. All this meant that Columba offered a new card for pigeon owners to play in their long-standing war on British hawks.
Pigeon owners had been complaining for years about the carnage wreaked by falcons. The falcons enjoyed protected status, but pigeon owners were desperate to persuade the government to license their destruction in order to protect their precious pigeons. With its newfound role as part of the war effort, the fancy seized its chance. In February 1940, a Plymouth fancier wrote to officials that one of his pigeons on NPS duty in a training flight along the English coast had returned “distressed and scared” after an encounter with a hawk. The local pigeon officer confirmed that there were peregrine falcons in the hills surrounding Plymouth and that losses during training flights were running at 40 percent. That month the secretary of the NPS forwarded to the Air Ministry a grisly package of five pairs of feet and rings collected from a nest of hawks on the Cumbrian coast to make his point. Stories even surfaced of mysterious hawks spotted in Dorset, owned by suspicious characters who had links to Germany before the war. MI5, perhaps knowing pigeon owners were on the warpath and might be behind such tales, decided it was probably not worth an exhaustive investigation.
A very British civil war broke out, one that pitted two sets of bird lovers against each other. Pigeon lovers wanted the peregrines dead. But there were those who preferred the elegant hawk to the humble pigeon. The Scottish Society for the Protection of Wild Birds complained about the way in which “the homing pigeon fraternity in the past have indulged in the wildest and most extravagant assertions,” blaming falcons for every failure of a pigeon to return. Some suggested that the number of pigeons lost to falcons was small compared to fog and ice. This might be true, an official replied, but there was not much that could be done about such impediments. “We find it difficult to deal with ice and fog unless the Treasury means to suggest that we fit de-icing apparatus to pigeons,” he wrote sarcastically.
The fancy won an early victory. In order to avoid fortune-seekers there would be no “price on the head” of falcons, but Defence Regulation 9, issued in July 1940, designated a series of counties where a strip ten miles deep would be purged of falcons. About a hundred people, usually ornithologists but sometimes gamekeepers, were given permits to destroy them. One individual covered over two thousand miles and killed seventeen peregrines in one month, but the process was haphazard and there were questions as to whether some were taking advantage of the petrol allowance. So instead a mobile unit was established to replace the ornithologists. This special crack team was called the Falcon Destruction Unit, and it could be sent to a particular area at the request of any government service. The 007 of the bird world, it had a license to kill. It also had the wheels to go with the mission. The group of five men drove around in an open touring car, an American Packard generally agreed to be an absolute beauty by those who saw it—including Bert Woodman of the Plymouth Group of fanciers—as the unit worked along the north Devon cliffs. Attached to the car was a caravan in which the men could sleep. Around a fire in the evening, the oldest of the group, a retired Irish colonel and champion shot, would regale the others with stories of his freebooter and marauder ancestors. By day, the men would scour the cliff-tops for a nest, using ropes to climb down to it. Then they would lay spring traps among the debris at the bottom. When a falcon landed, its talons would become trapped. The men, wearing thick leather gauntlets, would then go down in a sling to retrieve it. The Irish colonel would be ready with a shotgun if it escaped. Tragically, one of the men fell off a two-hundred-foot cliff and was killed during their work.
The unit was soon in heavy demand as requests flooded in from a variety of sources, including the Army Pigeon Service as it tried to protect the Columba birds. For Columba’s team—and especially the volunteer pigeon fanciers who supplied the birds—it was clear the hawks were a menace that had to be dealt with. But in the battle of the skies between hawk and dove, the worlds of intelligence and counterintelligence would collide. Columba’s work gathering intelligence was not the only pigeon game in town.
Using pigeons as spies cut both ways. If Britain and Columba could use pigeons to communicate with agents undercover and gather intelligence, could the Nazis do the same? Were Nazi pigeons stealing British secrets? Enter MI5, Britain’s spy—and pigeon—catching service.
Spy fever gripped Britain when the war began, and pigeons inhabited the nightmares of some MI5 officers. In the First World War, even regular everyday pigeons on the streets of British cities had been eyed with suspicion. “It was positively dangerous to be seen in conversation with a pigeon; it was not always safe to be seen in its vicinity,” wrote one official. One foreigner was even arrested after a pigeon was seen flying from where he had been standing in a park; it was assumed he had liberated it. The same spy hysteria, whipped up by the media but also based on a sliver of truth, resurfaced at the beginning of the Second World War. This was one reason for the registration of all pigeons at the start of the war and the wholesale slaughter of any foreign birds whose background could not be accounted for. Pigeons were under “very strict surveillance, and a deadly weapon of espionage was rendered useless from the start,” Bert Woodman claimed. But the anxieties persisted despite the strict controls.
On August 29, 1940, Guy Liddell, head of counterespionage at MI5, received a phone call from the Admiralty. Invasion fears were still at fever pitch and there was concern that German spies were either already in Britain or on their way. The Admiralty said a carrier pigeon had been captured by the Portland signal office. It carried a message: “Beach Hotel. The barmaid’s drawers are pink. Sutton on Sea from Rogues Roost Louth.” Was this evidence of German espionage, preparing for invasion using some bizarre code? “There was no other means of identification on the bird,” Liddell noted in his diary. Two days later the mystery was solved when Liddell had dinner with David Boyle, a senior MI6 officer. “He has, I think, solved the mystery of the message about the barmaid’s drawers. The pigeon was probably one of his, as he has communication not only by wireless but by pigeon to a loft at Willesden.” Quite what the code about the barmaid’s drawers actually meant was not revealed.
Not all the fears were misguided. Germany had launched Operation Lena to penetrate Britain by sending in undercover agents—sometimes by parachute, sometimes hiding among refugees from the continent. Most were of low quality and were relatively easy to find, especially after Bletchley Park broke the codes of German intelligence. But there were signs that someone in Britain was secretly using pigeons. A cylinder was found with a message in numerical code with a preamble in German. It was suspected that the pigeon had arrived via a German U-boat and a neutral freighter. It referred to army, naval and air matters and had apparently become detached from a bird in flight that had been released from London. This was not the only time during the war that fears of Nazi pigeon spies would surface.
In October and November 1941, a loftman in the army pigeon loft on the Scilly Isles saw something suspicious. Pigeons were flying low from the northwest and heading south toward the French coast. A number of pigeoneers made eleven sightings in all in the following months. These were men who prided themselves on being able to tell the difference between a wild and a homing pigeon. They were sure the birds they saw were homing pigeons, and they were not from the local army or RAF lofts. Each time they crossed between midday and two o’clock.
MI5 sprang into action with its counter-pigeon team—Section B3c—led by the dedicated Richard Melville Walker, the security service’s counter-pigeon expert. His job was to be “pigeon-minded” when it came to Germany’s activities.
A special pigeon security meeting was called. Major Frost from MI5 said that it had previously been thought that the danger of the enemy using pigeons in the UK was remote. But now there had been a change of opinion. The danger of the enemy dropping pigeons by parachute with sufficient accuracy to be used by agents hiding in Britain had to be “seriously considered,” he told the assembled group. The director of signals for the army suggested that all pigeons not used for national service could be banned, something MI5 also favored. But the civilian representative of the NPS explained to him that there were fifty thousand fanciers outside the NPS and only eleven thousand inside. In the event of invasion, the police would be responsible for the dramatic move of destroying all pigeons so that they would not fall into German hands. Bert Woodman and other NPS officers would receive a coded instruction requiring them to go about the task. But it was considered too disruptive to destroy all non-NPS birds at the present time.
THE GERMANS WERE better prepared than the British for the use of pigeons in war. They had seen the French use pigeons in the 1870 siege of Paris and had begun their own military research soon after—and, unlike the British, they had not abandoned it after the First World War. At the beginning of the Second World War, they quickly conscripted birds, as well as some of the fifty-seven thousand fanciers who were too old to fight. Where Britain had to scramble to create the NPS, the Germans already had tight control of their birds under the state-run German Pigeon Union. To own pigeons one needed a certificate of morality and good political behavior. This meant being “100 percent German”—Jews and foreigners were banned. Heinrich Himmler himself was a keen fancier, and both the army and the SS had their own birds. A secret pigeon base operated out of Spandau, where over two thousand birds were being bred and trained at any one time. At the peak of activity there were at least fifty thousand birds in German service, with six hundred to eight hundred men looking after them.
A pigeon section was attached to most Abwehr military intelligence units across Europe, but they were used most frequently in the west and the Balkans rather than on the Eastern Front. Before the war, the Germans had also organized races from England back to Germany—one such, including fourteen hundred birds, went from Lympne in Kent in 1937 and another from Croydon—and MI5 realized only later that this was highly suspicious.
The occupation of Belgium had allowed the Germans to requisition the best pigeons and lofts. Pigeons were one of the spoils of war. The German in charge of Belgian lofts, Hauptman Zimmerman, may even have flown over England in 1940 or 1941 to release pigeons on practice flights. One German pigeoneer later claimed that a bird had been flown from Harwich and another from Dover all the way back to their home in Freilassing, a trip that took twelve or thirteen hours.
One advantage Britain did have in the pigeon wars was that the Germans could not copy Columba. If they had dropped pigeons into England, it is hard to believe many people would have chosen to fill out questionnaires. (If they had, one can begin to imagine the choice phrases and epithets that might have been used.)
In response to the spy-pigeon fears, MI5 instigated a watch by all coast guard and Observer Corps posts on the southern and southeastern coasts to spot any birds flying out to sea. Richard Walker worried that messages could be concealed on the birds. Small holes could be burned in the feathers with a fine nail, a trick he was shown by a retired British intelligence officer who had studied the use of this method by the Germans in the First World War. Another method was to insert a small roll of rice paper into the hollow part of a feather after it was cut in two. Few would notice anything suspicious about such a bird.
A series of mysterious finds on the east coast in 1942–43 would heighten pigeon-spy fears. Two birds were found on a British vessel seven miles off Orford Ness, not far from Ipswich. One carried a message in German. A bird whose wings were stamped “Wehrmacht” came aboard a motor launch off Lowestoft in early December. More birds with German army stamps were found in the following days. It seemed to Guy Liddell at MI5 as if the enemy were experimenting to find out if they could train birds to fly across the North Sea for German agents. Indeed, at the end of the war, a captured German who worked at a Dutch loft confirmed he had taken pigeons out onto the North Sea to train them on that line of flight for agents who were to be dropped to spot invasion preparations. One bird with a German practice message that had landed exhausted on a British ship was nursed back to full strength and dropped over the Netherlands with a “plant,” or fake message. “Reaction, if any, will be awaited,” it was noted. Two others were adopted and given homes in an English loft. “Both birds are now prisoners of war working hard breeding English pigeons,” Walker reported.
Britain did have one possible defense against German birds. But it was the same one that threatened Columba. The Columba team and the fancy had been worried about wild hawks killing British pigeons. But what about the growing risk of German pigeons flying out of Britain with secrets? Having created a Falcon Destruction Unit, MI5 decided that it now also needed its own hawks and falcons in order to intercept and kill German pigeons. In a strange reverse, that meant creating its own elite, trained unit of killer falcons.
Falcons have been trained to hunt for sport for thousands of years in the Middle East and China. In England the sport was introduced before the Norman Conquest but had almost died out by the end of the seventeenth century and was kept alive by just a few enthusiasts. These were the small band that MI5 now needed. The director general of MI5 approved the creation of a falconry unit at what some thought the rather high cost of £200.
The Army Pigeon Service said they had a hawk expert who could trap the wild hawks that were playing havoc with Columba. MI5 approached him and asked if he would like instead to help use hawks to hunt enemy pigeons. He was enthusiastic. In June 1942, he headed out to the scenic coast of Pembrokeshire to find some young hawks. A picture in the MI5 archives shows him in a rather dashing tweed jacket retrieving a wild hawk that had been trapped in a net after it had pursued a decoy pigeon. In all he caught half a dozen on that trip.
The best method of training was to take young falcons, feed them pigeon meat and then fly them out toward live pigeons; they learned to recognize that the pigeons represented food. (The Americans even tried training hawks to associate parachutes with food, to see if they could be used to take out enemy parachutists.) A falconer could carry on his wrist a falcon with a leather hood, which would be whipped off when a suspicious pigeon was seen. More effectively, the birds could be trained over a period of three weeks to remain in the air and patrol a certain spot employing their remarkable vision. Ideally, hawks could learn to bring a dead pigeon back rather than eat it, so that any message it was carrying could be examined.
After five weeks’ training in Pembrokeshire, the hawks were ready for aerial combat, and the falconry expert and his two assistants went down to the Scilly Isles in late August. By then, reports of enemy birds had died down and the spy scare was already passing, but the team still took their task seriously. They were based at the local golf club. One would stand at the highest point of the course, while another was posted across the island, on the coast—hardly the worst job in summer—looking out for enemy pigeons, their falcons ready on their wrists to let slip. The Air Ministry supplied them with some pigeons for practice. Some hawks patrolled quite well, but one preferred to perch on a mast in the middle of the golf course. Soon the trainers let them fly out on patrol for a couple of hours on beautiful summer days to watch over the whole group of islands. The diary of MI5’s head of counterespionage records the results. “The ones in the Scilly Isles caught several pigeons but they were found to be our own,” Guy Liddell wrote. Hawks knew no nationality. No “Friend or Foe” identification system had been invented, as would be done for aircraft. The only pigeons killed were seven British birds, two of whom were carrying messages. Two of the hawks were also shot by local children. “Some boys will be little devils,” one of the trainers commented. But despite the lack of any evidence of Nazi pigeons, the case of the suspicious Scilly birds remained open and “unproved,” the ever-watchful Walker declared.
By the end of October 1942, the weather was turning and there were new reports of suspicious pigeons, this time near Swanage on the southern coast. The falconry unit had its next mission. The three-man team kept surveillance along the cliffs, falcons at the ready. Unlike their time on the Scilly Isles, now it was cold. On December 15 came a sighting—a pigeon flying fast overhead. But the trainer was caught off guard. His hand was so frozen by the cold that he fumbled and released his falcon too late. The pigeon disappeared south over the sea.
Next they let loose the falcons on patrol where they would circle an area hunting anything that came in their path. Three pigeons were brought down in the following months. A lighthouse keeper called to explain that a hawk was eating a pigeon in her garden, but this turned out to be a British rather than a Nazi pigeon. Soon after that, two of the falcons simply gave up—perhaps annoyed at the lack of food—and flew off on their own. The teams were left convinced there had been some kind of suspicious activity—the pigeons that had been spotted flew straight as if they were homing to a possible German loft in Cherbourg. The unit was then dispatched to Wales by the Air Ministry to catch some peregrines that were disrupting their pigeons.
Overall the results were not exactly an overwhelming success. “We were sent out to catch pigeons,” said one member of the team. “If they were not ‘spy’ pigeons it was not our fault.” An MI5 report at the end of the war notes that the hawks never actually brought down a single enemy bird—“probably because there never were any.”