World War II. Millions dead, wounded, and displaced. The Holocaust. The Atomic Bomb. Parts of the world’s map redrawn in ways which
still have a tremendous impact on the world’s economy and politics. Across bodies of water and on land formations
around the globe, from tiny islands to giant continents, pigeons made
communication possible during World War II.
Radio technology had improved
enormously since World War I but pigeons
were still needed and in fact, the use of pigeons actually increased as the war
went on. Italy, Australia, the United
States, Germany, Britain, New Zealand, and Japan all had pigeon services. Every branch of those countries militaries
used pigeons and in many instances, the pigeons were the only means of
communication Britain had an extension
of its pigeon service called the Middle East Pigeon Service. Headquartered at Cairo, it had stations
operating in Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, and Jerusalem. The British also used pigeons in the Mediterranean,
Africa, Burma, and India and the United States used pigeons in the Pacific
theater.
Pigeons played a huge role in
Allied operations to force the Axis powers out of Africa, Sicily, and Italy. 800 American pigeons landed at Safi, French
Morocco in November 1942. Lieutenant
Tracey Prater, commander of the North African Signal Pigeon Platoon immediately
realized that 800 pigeons would not meet the needs of the Allied forces. He set up a breeding base at Casablanca. Within several months, thousands of pigeons
were bred, trained and assigned to combat mobile lofts. During
the 46 day Tunisian Campaign in the spring of 1943, when the Germans and
Italians were finally driven out of Africa, pigeons delivered 215 urgent and
secret messages. On March 18, 1943 a
pigeon named Yank delivered a message which Gordon Hayes, who served as a
pigeoneer in Africa and Italy, writes in The
Pigeons That Went to War, was
widely believed to have “saved the life or thwarted the capture of General
George S. Patton when communications between him and the 18th
British Group were disrupted.” Once the
Allies had occupied Tunisia, Bizerte became the home of a breeding base. Thousands of little yellow baby pigeons grew
into pigeons trained for the invasion of Italy.
When the Allied invasion began, 200,000 troops and 3000 pigeons were
deployed.
Just as they did on the
battlefield, pigeons excelled in the world of espionage. Operation Gibbon was a Secret Operations
Executive mission to establish a secret pigeon service in Nazi occupied
Belgium. The British needed a way to get
intelligence out of Belgium. Pigeons did
the job. Resistance workers in occupied
Europe received drops of pigeons from Allied aircraft and sent them out of
their countries with intelligence. The
British created Operation Columba to collect intelligence from people living
under the German occupation who were not spies.
Pigeons with questionnaires were dropped in small containers attached to
small parachutes. People answered the
questions and sent their answers back to Britain with the pigeons. Agents dropped behind enemy lines often
preferred to communicate with pigeons rather than radios. If agents were captured by the Germans, they
wouldn’t have the radio with them as obvious evidence that they were a
spy. The first S.I.S. agent dropped into
France in 1940 landed with a knife and a pigeon. Pigeons’ abilities as navigators and long
distance fliers made them such excellent spies that something called “pigeon
paranoia” existed in Britain. People
believed that German agents had stashes of pigeons all over the country and
were using them to send intelligence back to Germany.
Hundreds of thousands of
pigeons were by our side during our greatest folly of the 20th
century. World War II. Millions dead, wounded, and displaced. The Holocaust. The Atomic Bomb. The map of the world redrawn. But pigeons were not only by our side in baskets,
wooden cages, and four bird carriers.
They were next to men’s hearts, strapped across their chests in pigeon slings
or drum containers as these men ran towards exploding artillery shells and
enemy gunfire. A pigeon felt a man’s
thumping heart and the heaving of his chest as he took breath after breath,
with each breath possibly being that man’s last breath. Confined, the pigeon’s fate depended on that
man’s choices, the choices of the commanding officer, and the choices of
leaders in far away places. In The Pigeons That Went to War, pigeonneer
Gordon H. Hayes describes fighting through the Italian Alps in the winter of
1944-45. He and his fellow pigeoneers
saw men frozen in the snow, their pigeon strapped to their chest, frozen with
them. Think about being a pigeon
strapped to a dead man. It is
winter. You can’t move at all.
