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Introduction

Like the farmer in the field, I stumbled across the oddities of Operation Columba by chance one morning. I was covering a quirky news story about a dead pigeon’s leg found in a chimney in Surrey. Attached to the bony leg was a message which had stumped GCHQ’s top code-breakers. They had been unable to decipher what the seemingly random series of letters meant. No one was even sure who the pigeon had been sent by, and everyone seemed quite surprised to find that pigeons had been used in the Second World War.

Perhaps there was some clue in the National Archives in Kew which could unlock this pigeon’s secrets? I spent a morning pulling up any and every file that looked as if it might relate to pigeon messages in the Second World War. There were more than I thought, and it was a bewildering induction into a world I had never even known existed. But amidst the interminable accounts of which department should pay for pigeon feed, or what rank of personnel were required for a particular RAF loft, one file that landed on my desk immediately stood out.

Apart from the dates, the front cover bore only two words. One was ‘Secret’; the other, in elegant handwriting, was ‘Columba’. At the top was a photo of a pigeon someone had cut out. Just below the pigeon was a cartoon – also cut out, this time from a newspaper – of Hitler lying prostrate on the floor. This gave the impression that the pigeon had done on the Führer what pigeons do, leading him to fall over. At the bottom of the cover was another cartoon, this one of an RAF plane flown by Winston Churchill with a familiar cigar in his mouth and his fingers held up in his ‘V for Victory’ sign. The file clearly contained details of a secret operation. But it looked utterly unlike any I had seen before. What kind of people would, in the midst of war, encase the contents of their clandestine work in such colourful – even playful – packaging?

Loosening the ribbon that bound the file, I uncovered riches inside. The file had nothing to do with the secret message found in the chimney. But it was far more interesting. The riches came in the form of tiny pink slips of paper. These were messages from ordinary people living under Nazi rule in occupied Europe that had been brought back by pigeon. They were filled with the day-to-day realities of wartime and offered a remarkable insight into the small frustrations and dark tragedies of life under occupation. And then I came across message number thirty-seven. It was unlike everything else. All the other messages had been written up into formal notes, but in this case a copy of the original message had been included in the archive, clearly because it was something special. It looked more like a work of art than an official document. There was tiny, beautiful inky writing, too small to read with the naked eye and densely packed into an unimaginably small space. A swirling symbol as a signature. And maps, detailed colourful maps. Most of the other messages produced intelligence reports that were half a page or perhaps a page long. Message 37 – rolled up tightly into the size of a postage stamp so it could fit into a cylinder attached to a pigeon’s leg – produced an astonishing twelve pages of raw intelligence. And it had clearly had a profound impact on the team running Columba. The intelligence must have left an impression on everyone who saw it – and many did as it was passed around the highest levels of government, many referring to it in almost reverential terms.

But there was a mystery. Who had written it? And what had happened to them? The files had no answer. There was only a codename – Leopold Vindictive – on the message. Other documents contained confusing references to attempts to contact the writer after the message had been received. In none of them could I find a name. Nor was there any reference to the author in the history books I consulted. I knew I had to find out. The quest became something of an obsession. Who or what was Leopold Vindictive? And what was his – or her – fate?

Three years after first opening that file, I found my answer in Belgium. The answers lay partly with the families of those who had been members of Leopold Vindictive and who had preserved their story. In one house in a small town, a family opened up a metal keepsake box. Inside was a treasure trove of photos, maps and – most startlingly – the raw intelligence that had been collected to send back to Britain. Some of it had formed the basis for my message 37, but even more surprisingly, there was much more that had never made it over the Channel. Alongside those artefacts, I found a human story more dramatic and more powerful than I imagined. It is a story which has not been told before and which has had to be pieced together from personal accounts and archives in Britain and Belgium. It is the story that forms the centrepiece of this book, around which the wider story of the operation called Columba is told.

The pigeon is not the most obvious subject for someone interested in intelligence to write about. It is fair to say that the birds had not exactly stirred my interest before. Pigeons have a bad name. Quite literally, since if we preferred to call them by their proper name – doves, or to be more precise rock doves (or, most formally, Columba livia) – they might be seen in a less negative light. Our perception of the pigeon is coloured by the times as children we have chased them or as adults have evaded their droppings. But our experience of ‘feral’ pigeons has obscured from us the truth that some pigeons are a form of superhero. Imagine being blindfolded and then taken hundreds of miles from home – perhaps even to another country across the sea. And then suddenly having the blindfold removed and, despite not having the slightest idea where you are, racing home at top speed. Even if home is six hundred miles away. That is not normal. Just like the super-powers of comic-book heroes, the homing instinct of pigeons is something that scientists cannot explain. They have tried over the years, with theories about magnetic fields and the sun, but no one has satisfactorily managed it.

It is a strangely comfy super-power though. The pigeon is not on a mission to save the world. It just wants to go home. From the age of six weeks, pigeons can be taught to ‘home’ to the loft from which they make their first flight, because they understand that is where they will find food, water and company. Pigeons can be picky in their journey – they do not like to fly at night or to cross water, often flying along the coast to find the shortest point at which to cross a body like the English Channel. But they are ultimately single-minded in simply wanting to get back to where they belong. Amidst the horrors of wartime, this longing has a particular resonance.

Over the course of human history, this super-power has been recognized by people who have learnt to employ it for communication by releasing pigeons to send messages home. Noah released a dove from the Ark to bring back reports of whether the flood waters had receded. In Ancient Greece, the names of winners in the original Olympic Games were sent to distant towns by pigeon. Julius Caesar used birds during the conquest of Gaul (the Romans had, at various times, a fad for breeding pigeons, but that seems largely to have been in order to eat them). The Sultan of Baghdad used a pigeon post around 1150. In the nineteenth century, Julius Reuter began a news service using pigeons to send messages between Brussels and Germany. In Paris, pigeons were the only form of contact with the outside world during its siege in 1870. A manned hot-air balloon flew out of the city under fire carrying pigeons. Friends and family (including those in Britain) could post their letters to the city of Tours, where they would be photographed and then reduced to the point where one of the pigeons could be loaded with a film containing 2,500 messages before it flew home to Paris. A magic lantern would project the messages onto a screen so they could be copied out and sent to the recipients.

The modern sport of pigeon racing began at the start of the nineteenth century in Belgium. Clubs were formed as pigeons were carefully selected and bred to improve their abilities. The breeding extended their range from 40 miles to 200 miles and then upwards to 600 miles or more. The peak popularity of the sport came in the years before and after the Second World War; at least a quarter of a million Belgians were involved, and one in nine families had a pigeon. Lofts were present in almost every small town and village in northern France and the Low Countries, across much of Britain and in the United States.

Breeding pigeons to improve their ability (or their looks) was honed to a fine art by pigeon fanciers, or – to give them their proper name – the fancy. Pigeon keeping has come to be seen as a working-class preserve, the ‘poor man’s racehorse’, a sport offering the chance to train an animal, enjoy a social life around meetings and even perhaps win a bit of money on the side. Historically, it was also a sport for the well-off, which is why so many country houses had dovecotes and pigeon lofts. The Queen still has her own pigeon loft at her estate in Sandringham, the first pigeons a gift from the Belgian king. At the start of the Second World War, these pigeon owners – rich and poor alike – were called on to play their part in a remarkable and little-known volunteer effort. Total war demanded sacrifice, and pigeons and their owners played their part.

Pigeons did not win the war. People did. And this story is not so much about the birds as about the people who sent and received the pigeons of Columba. Yet, in a war that began with Blitzkrieg and ended with the atomic bomb, pigeons had a unique place when it came to intelligence gathering. Intelligence involves understanding your enemy – the disposition and composition of their forces, the lie of the land and the mood of the people. There are many ways of finding this out, the oldest being to use human spies who can see what is happening. But in this war there was a crucial challenge. How did your agents get the information back from behind enemy lines? Long before modern communications technology, the near-miraculous ability of trained pigeons to return to their home loft offered an unusual but highly effective way of receiving news and communicating.

Columba ran from April 1941 until September 1944. A total of 16,554 pigeons would be dropped in an arc from Copenhagen in Denmark to Bordeaux in the South of France. Casualties were heavy. Some were lost on planes shot down before they had a chance to be released. Some lay unfound in a field. Others fell into enemy hands. Some were eaten by hungry locals. Others were released but never made it back. The pigeons had to race through storms and battle against their nemesis – the hawk – to come home with their precious cargo. They returned with their messages to a quirky and quarrelsome band of British spymasters-cum-pigeon fanciers who did their best to prove the worth of their special operation against bureaucratic hindrances, institutional scepticism and bitter personal rivalries. The story of Columba – and particularly that of its most important message – does not always shine a particularly happy light on the inner workings of British intelligence, revealing divisions often overlooked in rose-tinted accounts of the war. The harsh reality is that brave men and women in the field were sometimes let down by London.

The messages Columba’s pigeons carried, though, would prove their worth. Messages like number 37 provided vital intelligence on Nazi plans to invade England during its darkest hour. Others would bring news of the latest German weapons and would pave the way for D-Day and victory in May 1945. Still other messages were more personal, like the letter from a crashed RAF airman to his mother.

Who were the people who provided this rich seam of intelligence? Some were trained agents. But most were simply local villagers who made a choice to undertake their own small act of resistance. As a result, their messages – sometimes tragic, sometimes comic – provide a unique and untapped insight into the realities of daily life under Nazi occupation, from the struggles over food to the attitude towards collaborators, and even the often terrible impact of Allied bombing on those living under occupation. They offer the authentic voice of the villagers of rural France, Belgium and the Netherlands and their calls to Britain for help.

The pigeon was simply doing what it did by its nature. It knew nothing of the war that raged around it. But for those involved in Columba, the values of sacrifice, duty and a love of home all came to be embodied in the humble pigeon’s flight. The living creatures offered a unique bond. For the British commando dropped with a pigeon behind enemy lines and in fear of his life, the sight of the bird flying off to a suburban garden with a message that he was safe offered a connection to home from a dangerous foreign field. And for a Frenchman or woman or a Belgian living under occupation, there was the knowledge that the pigeon that they released up into the sky was racing back to its home, bearing their message, to a land still free. This was the secret of Columba.