Secret Pigeon Service

CHAPTER ONE

Birth

The pigeon that fell in the farmer’s field near Lichtervelde in July 1941 had begun its journey a day and a half earlier. Home was a loft in a large garden on Lattice Avenue, a quiet suburban street in Ipswich full of recently built houses. The bird had been plucked from its loft and handed over by its owner. Owners were told nothing of where a bird was going or what it would be doing. All they knew was that it was something secret for the war effort.

Soon the bird had company. Our pigeon and its fellow birds were driven in a van about forty miles to Newmarket racecourse. There each pigeon was placed in its own special box with a parachute attached. A tiny green Bakelite cylinder – about the size of a pen top – was placed around its leg.

Newmarket was home to a top secret RAF squadron whose job was to carry out ‘Special Duties’ for British intelligence. In the summer of 1940, MI6 had approached the Air Ministry to ask if it could help drop agents behind enemy lines. The first attempt to land an agent in Belgium using a small Lysander plane ended in disaster on 18 August 1940. The plane was unable to touch down and was lost on its return flight, killing both pilot and agent. But the RAF persisted and began to use a mix of Lysander landings and parachute drops to deliver agents. The crews were trained in the dangerous task of night-flying over enemy territory using moonlight. The hours before take-off would be spent memorizing the location of rivers, lakes, railway lines and forests. The moonlight allowed them to read their maps and guide themselves by the landmarks they could see below.

The drop of our pigeon on that July night was a minor add-on to the primary secret mission of parachuting two agents into Belgium. The pilots, Ron Hockey and Ashley Jackson, took off in their Whitley from the racecourse and headed over the Channel into Nazi-occupied Europe. Enemy searchlights lit up the plane as it reached Nieuport on the Belgian coast – not far from Dunkirk, where the previous year the little boats had played a vital part in rescuing the British Expeditionary Force from destruction. Anti-aircraft fire opened up from the ground but the pilots pressed on. They headed inland towards Charleroi, south of Brussels. As they did, they passed over a field in Ardoye, near Lichtervelde. This was our pigeon’s moment.

The flaps of the aircraft were lowered and one of the team grabbed the container. The best height from which to drop was between 600 and 1,000 feet, at a speed of about 180 miles an hour. The pigeon was rudely ejected. ‘We tried to be very humane and give them a good drop,’ an RAF pilot remembered of the process.

The plane went on to Namur and St Hubert but the crew realized they were lost and had to abandon the agent drop, returning home after a five-hour trip. The next night they tried again but the mission went disastrously wrong. The parachute of one of the agents caught in the plane as he leapt out over Belgium. He was left twirling out of the back like a puppet on a string. The crew were unable to reach him as his body repeatedly slammed against the side of the aircraft. By the time they returned to Britain, he was dead and his battered body was dropped into the sea the next night.

Crews, as well as agents, took enormous risks – their life expectancy was lower even than that of those who flew bombing missions over Germany – and with their gallows humour they enjoyed regaling each other with stories of derring-do. They found Columba a rather amusing and odd little sideshow. ‘Pigeons were dropped in a small parachute container, their heads just visible through the top of it,’ one pilot recalled. An agent might sometimes have second thoughts about parachuting into some dark, snowy wilderness but the pigeons were given no choice. ‘I doubt if any of them survived,’ the pilot reflected.

But the bird dropped near Lichtervelde did make it. The primary mission of that flight to drop agents might have failed, but the pilots would not have known that the train of events set in motion by the pigeon they had pushed out would end up with intelligence landing on Churchill’s desk. The parachute deployed and the pigeon fell gently into the dark field, ready to be discovered by a farmer the next morning.

This was Columba – the Secret Pigeon Service.

The driving force behind the use of pigeons in the Second World War were two men with experience of the previous war. One was a leading member of the ‘fancy’ – the community of pigeon fanciers in the country – whose ambition would drive deep fissures within the pigeon world. The other was a washed-up spy looking for one more chance to make a difference.

The name of Osman is to pigeon racing the equivalent of the Kennedys in American politics – a family dynasty stretching back for decades. The founder of that dynasty was Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Henry Osman. Stout, with a proud moustache, Osman had abandoned a career as a lawyer to found the publication the Racing Pigeon in 1898. In the First World War, he brought his personal passion to bear as the leading light in all matters pigeon. A hundred thousand pigeons were bred for use in the war. First deployed on trawlers commandeered to carry out minesweeping in the North Sea, one brought news of a Zeppelin heading towards Britain. Another was released by a skipper who lay mortally wounded on deck after a U-boat attack, allowing his crew to be rescued.

Pigeon use quickly expanded across all the services. The Army used them for communicating short distances from the front line, especially when cables had been cut or visual signalling was impossible owing to smoke, or when a runner carrying a message might be shot. ‘If it became necessary immediately to discard every line and method of communications used on the front, except one, and it were left to me to select that one method, I should unhesitatingly choose the pigeons,’ wrote Major General Fowler, Chief of Signals and Communications of the British Army, after the war. ‘When the battle rages and everything gives way to barrage and machine gun fire, to say nothing of gas attacks and bombings, it is to the pigeon that we go for succour.’

Belgium had the best pigeon service but had destroyed many of its birds at the start of the war to prevent them falling into German hands. The French released five thousand birds during the Battle of the Somme. The Americans took home and eventually stuffed one bird that had arrived badly wounded with a message that saved a battalion trapped behind enemy lines.

The British Army Pigeon Service was disbanded not long after the war. But as the 1930s turned darker and the threat of another war loomed, there were those from the fancy who saw themselves as voices in the wilderness, just like those calling for rearmament with tanks and aeroplanes. They urgently pressed the authorities to prepare to make use of pigeons once again. The leading advocate was Alfred Osman’s son, William. His poor eyesight meant he had been rejected from regular service in the First World War but he had worked with his father. On Alfred’s death in 1930, William inherited his father’s mantle as editor of the Racing Pigeon and leading proponent of the birds’ value in times of war. In 1937, he wrote to the Secretary of the Committee on Imperial Defence saying it was a mistake not to prepare pigeon plans. The Army said it saw little need, apart perhaps from their use for contact with isolated garrisons. The RAF thought they might need a hundred or so birds as an alternative means of communication – for instance if a plane crashed or a radio was jammed. But that could be organized when war began.

Osman kept pressing. At over six foot, he had the bearing of an old-fashioned military officer and the manner to go with it – abrupt in a way that could easily be interpreted as rude. He did not suffer fools gladly. The next year he attended a meeting of the Committee on Imperial Defence, explaining that it was a blunder not to have maintained a compulsory register of pigeon owners. His profound knowledge of pigeons was clear but there was also an element of self-interest – he proposed that an appeal for volunteers could be made through the Racing Pigeon, the newspaper he edited. It was agreed that a committee of four – including Osman – should start a National Pigeon Service, the NPS. It was to be riven by bitter infighting.

An immense voluntary effort was at the heart of Britain’s wartime pigeon operations. It is hard to appreciate just how popular a sport pigeon fancying was at the time. There were a quarter of a million people involved, with at least 70,000 lofts, mainly concentrated in working-class areas. At the outbreak of war, all pigeons had to be registered. In Plymouth, Bert Woodman went to the city police to collect his permit to keep his pigeons. A middle-aged local food factory manager, he was typical of the working men who would play their part. The regime was strict: all foreign birds and those without a ring which identified their owner were destroyed. ‘There was a terrible slaughter,’ Woodman remembered. Registration was about control, but it also offered a route for those like Bert Woodman to volunteer for the new NPS. Two thousand signed up at first, but the membership would grow to include 18,000 lofts. NPS members agreed to offer at least twenty birds a month for national service and membership was the only way a fancier could legally obtain food for his pigeons. Members were organized into local pigeon supply groups led by a pigeon supply officer – Bert Woodman would take on the role in Plymouth, where he also acted as adviser to the police. Membership offered a way to make a difference and was one of the many ways in which the Second World War became ‘the people’s war’ in which so many contributed. For one man, too old to fight but who had lost his brother in the last war, handing over his pigeons meant he could feel he was doing something for his brother’s memory. Meanwhile, a Nottinghamshire miner’s children remember always being late for school on a Tuesday, as this was the day their dad was down the pit early and they had to excitedly wait for someone to come and pick up his pigeons for some kind of secret work. Pigeon keeping had been a largely male pastime, but many women also took over a husband’s or son’s loft as their loved ones served far away.

The Air Ministry was given the overall co-ordinating role for all matters pigeon, including the supervision of the NPS. Its pigeon section was run by the influential but insecure William Dex Lea Rayner, who was manoeuvred into the job by Osman. Another veteran pigeoneer of the First World War, Rayner had gone on to run military pigeon operations in Ireland (soldiers battling against Irish Republicans would sometimes send news by pigeon that they were under attack). He then operated his own pigeon stud list in Norwich before becoming a somewhat hard-up dance band manager. Balding, with an oval face and sharp nose, he was bird-like in looks and was determined to maintain his position as pigeon supremo. He would be at the centre of ‘pigeon politics’ and some monumental feuds. This was especially the case once the Army – rather than Rayner’s own RAF – moved into the pigeon business when it saw the particular value of the birds in intelligence work. The Army, not the RAF, would be Columba’s master.

Osman had ensured that the humble pigeon had its place in the machinery of war. But he was not inside the spy world. And the pigeon’s specific role in Columba – as a tool to get intelligence back from ordinary people behind enemy lines – was established thanks to the vision of Rex Pearson, a veteran of military intelligence in the previous war. But as the Second World War began, Pearson was a spy without a mission or role.

In the inter-war years, Pearson had – to all appearances – left the intelligence game for a career in business. In Switzerland he had become the representative for the British firm Unilever. But that was not the full picture. In the mid-1930s, he had resumed his clandestine life. He was recruited into the ‘Z’ organization. ‘Z’ was the brainchild of Claude Dansey, a powerful figure within MI6. Some called him ‘Uncle Claude’ because, at first sight, Dansey looked like an elderly uncle, white-haired and with a general air of benevolence. That impression never lasted for those who got to know him. Dansey was an acerbic, sharp operator whose penchant for secrecy and intrigue made him as many enemies as admirers and left junior officers terrified of him. He had achieved his lofty position by trusting nobody. In the thirties, he had realized that the Germans had worked out MI6’s use of the Passport Control Office in British embassies to hide its undercover officers. That made MI6 officers easy to identify. So Dansey set about building his own network across the continent, using businessmen.

The Z organization was a parallel intelligence network and Pearson – a colleague of Dansey’s from military intelligence in the First World War – was Z’s man in Zurich. Dansey himself moved to Switzerland to run the network late in the decade. But in November 1939 he returned to London to supervise all MI6’s European operations, leaving Pearson in charge in Switzerland. The results were disastrous. Chaos ensued as Pearson proved not to be up to the job. At one point he managed to send two different officers to the same rendezvous with a contact. His catastrophic performance may also have stemmed from the fact that he had a drink problem. Heavy drinking was common at the time, but Pearson’s seems to have been bad enough to have an adverse impact on his work. In February 1940, another MI6 officer was sent out to Switzerland to replace him.

Pearson returned to London, his intelligence career in apparent ruins just as the war was beginning. But in November 1940, he approached Military Intelligence with an idea. In the last two years of the First World War, he had been involved in a clever intelligence operation that he wanted to reprise. It involved pigeons. He was met, perhaps unsurprisingly, with a degree of bewilderment bordering on annoyance from the higher-ups. Pigeons were an ‘outmoded’ weapon in Britain’s armoury, he was told. But Pearson persisted, and explained to his superiors what he had got up to in the last war.

The first lesson from that war was that you could use pigeons for the core business of intelligence gathering. The intelligence the military wanted included things like the disposition and movement of enemy forces. If train-loads of soldiers were seen heading to a particular station, for instance, that might mean the Germans were about to make a push on the front at that point. Networks of agents had emerged, especially in Belgium, to collect this information in the previous war but the biggest challenge had been getting their information back from the other side. MI6 had employed couriers and specialist passeurs (line crossers), whose hazardous work involved cutting and crawling through barbed wire, wearing rubber boots to avoid being electrocuted while carrying details of German forces.

Inventiveness was at a premium. A colleague of Pearson had developed a system in which messages were written in invisible ink on banknotes and dropped in offertory boxes in Catholic churches, which were allowed to be taken across the front lines. Another officer was convinced that by standing in front of an oven and moving back and forth he could send ‘infra-red rays’ to signal with Morse code. Animals were another possibility. The pigeon with its homing instinct seemed an attractive option, and it was soon employed to carry intelligence back from agents.

But Pearson explained that he had been involved in a further innovation. What about not only using pigeons to send back intelligence from existing agents, but to actually recruit people to gather intelligence in the first place? There were sympathetic people on the other side who wanted to help. The challenge was finding them and then getting their intelligence back. In the First World War small hydrogen balloons had been sent out downwind from the British side of the front lines to any district where it was thought German forces were concentrated. Normally seven balloons were released in a night, each holding four carrier pigeons in their own basket with a parachute. At first, the baskets were attached to a cross-shaped device with an alarm clock in the middle. When it reached the right hour and rang it would release the parachutes. Later, a slow-burning fuse was employed.

Attached to the pigeons was an envelope containing a patriotic appeal and a questionnaire asking whether the Germans were present, and in what numbers. This could be filled in by locals and then clipped back onto the pigeon’s leg. By breakfast time, a quarter of the pigeons released at night had normally returned, half with messages. It bothered the Germans enormously. The chief of the German Intelligence Service had griped about their use and fourteen days’ leave were promised to any German soldier who shot a pigeon down. At least eleven were shot and found to be carrying important military information.

Pearson had been in charge of all balloon operations in France by the end of the First World War. Now he wanted to do it again. And better.

What Pearson had in mind this time round was much more ambitious. In the previous war, the pigeons had typically flown only fifteen or twenty miles across the front lines. Balloons dependent on the wind might be fine for delivering pigeons over enemy lines that you were sometimes close enough to observe. But in this new war, the challenge was much greater. Pearson wanted to see if pigeons could make it all the way from occupied Europe, over the Channel or North Sea and back home to England. The challenge of getting the pigeons to the target zone in the first place could be solved by dropping them from planes rather than balloons. The chances of their return home would depend entirely on the skill of the birds.

Pearson pressed his case, against considerable resistance. His old service MI6 (officially designated the Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS), which recruited agents to provide information abroad, was dismissive. It thought so little of the prospects that it said it wanted absolutely nothing to do with the idea and refused to co-operate. But Military Intelligence – based at the War Office and reporting to the Army, separate from MI6, which reported to the Foreign Office – eventually relented. It was a long shot but Columba, as the service was christened, offered the tantalizing chance to establish contact with untapped sources which Britain could reach by no other means. Pearson was appointed officer in charge of the Special Continental Section of the Army Pigeon Service, and soon a grandly titled ‘Special Section (Carrier Pigeon)’ team was set up in the Royal Corps of Signals. He would organize the logistics. Any messages that arrived back were to be sent on to a Military Intelligence team at the War Office. This meant Columba was rooted in the Army and not in the RAF – a source of abiding tension.

The first experimental pigeon drops took place at the end of 1940. Pigeon owners were told as little as possible about why their birds were needed. Early trials focused on how to transport the pigeons, and whether ‘head down’ or ‘tail down’ was better to avoid tail feathers being frayed. By January, a new container made their journey somewhat more comfortable as six birds were dropped from a Lysander plane at 130 feet. The parachute opened perfectly and the landing was gentle, but the container rolled over two or three times after reaching the ground. The pigeons did not appear ‘unduly frightened’, it was noted. They were given two minutes to recover before being liberated. Visibility was poor, so the birds circled for nine minutes or so trying to get their bearings before heading off to Aldershot. They covered ten miles in about fifteen minutes.

By April 1941, Columba was ready. Each container would be attached to a three-and-a-half-foot parachute. On the outside of the container was an envelope with a questionnaire, some rice paper for the return message and – thoughtfully – a pencil, as well as a bag containing ½ lb of pigeon food. Instructions explained that the parachute must be disposed of, and that the pigeon should be fed an eggcupful of corn a day and allowed to stretch its wings a little.

The questionnaire would be in French or Dutch, depending on the drop site. It included a run-down of the information Britain sought, compiled by the organizations that were customers of Columba’s information – Military Intelligence, the Air Ministry, the Admiralty and the BBC. Top priority was anything on a planned invasion of England, followed by details of any troops in the area, enemy morale, significant addresses the Germans were using, the location of aerodromes, the effect of any recent bombs dropped by the Allies, and finally – in an example of early audience research – the extent to which people could hear BBC radio clearly and their views of the service it provided. It ended with the words: ‘Thank you. Take courage. We will not forget you.’

Instructions showed how to correctly clip the small green cylinder onto the pigeon’s leg again once the questionnaire had been filled in. Also enclosed was a copy of the latest edition of either a French, Belgian or Dutch resistance newspaper printed in London (or in some cases the Daily Mail). The idea was that this would provide assurance to the recipient that the bird had come from England and would return there when released.

No one was quite sure it would work. One official reckoned there were four options for a pigeon. It might not be found and simply die. It might be picked up by a local, as hoped, and a message sent back. Or it could be picked up by the Germans and dispatched back with a fake message. There was a final option – ‘they may be picked up by a hungry patriot and find themselves in a pigeon pie.’ The scepticism was shared by the RAF pilots who were asked to drop the birds. Perhaps reflecting their own sense of humour, they were convinced that any questionnaires that did come back would be filled with obscene messages from the Germans. But most, they thought, would not even get that far. ‘In our jaundiced opinion most of them ended up on the dining table!’ a pilot reckoned. That may have been true for many of the birds. But not all.

On the night of 8 April, an RAF Whitley took off from Newmarket making for Belgium on Columba’s first run. The plane was attacked by anti-aircraft fire near Zeebrugge but the Germans on the ground were wide of the mark. The rear gunner on the RAF flight even managed to take out one of the searchlights. The plane headed for the Franco-Belgian border and the dispatcher was told to ‘commence operations’. The pigeons in their containers were pushed out.

At Columba’s HQ in the War Office, they sat and waited.