Mar

12

The Rest Is History podcast episode

‘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 First World War.

The book:
Operation Columba–The Secret Pigeon Service: The Untold Story of World War II Resistance in Europe

Between 1941 and 1944, British intelligence dropped sixteen thousand homing pigeons in an arc across Nazi-occupied Europe, from Bordeaux, France to Copenhagen, Denmark, as part of a spy operation code-named Columba. Returning to MI14, the secret government branch in charge of the "Special Pigeon Service," the birds carried messages that offered a glimpse of life under the Germans in rural France, Holland, and Belgium. Written on tiny pieces of rice paper tucked into canisters and tied to the birds’ legs, these messages were sometimes comic, often tragic, and occasionally invaluable—reporting details of German troop movements and fortifications, new Nazi weapons, radar systems, and even the deployment of the feared V-1 and V-2 rockets used to terrorize London.

Gyve Bones adds:

Recently watched a dramatization of this story of WWI in the Ardennes Forest, about the Lost Battalion of US Army that carried out their offensive orders too well, penetrating too far without the units supposedly on their flanks, and became isolated and surrounded by Germans, and their only means of communication with HQ was carrier pigeons, carried in cage backpack by the communications guy. It was a sort of inverse Battle of the Bulge, where the allied offensive bulged in and got cut off, but analogous to the situation of the 101st isolated and surrounded in Bastogne.

Excellent made for TV movie:
The Lost Battalion (2001)


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