Two days after the initial drop in April, the phone rang at the War Office. On 10 April the first bird had made its way home to Kent. Columba message number one was phoned back to Melland and Sanderson at the War Office at 10.30 a.m.
The message was from a small village called Le Briel in the commune of Herzeele in northern France, not far from the Belgian border. It might have been short but it contained real information. ‘Pigeon found Wednesday 9th at 8am’, it began. ‘The German troop movements are always at night. There are 50 Germans in every Commune. There is a large munitions dump at Herzeele 200 metres from the Railway station. Yesterday, a convoy of Horse Artillery passed towards Dunkirk via Bambesque and another to Hasebrouck. The Bosches do not mention an invasion of England. Their morale is not too good. The RAF have never bombed these parts. They should come to bomb the brick works as the proprietor is a …’ The next word is written up as ‘illegible’ by the translator, but one wonders if that was actually to avoid the blushes caused by a cruder word the Frenchman might have used about a collaborator.
And then the message ended with one of those phrases that spoke of something in the spirit during those dark days in France. ‘I await your return, I am and remain a Frenchman.’ It was signed ‘ABCD34’. This was precisely the type of intelligence the team had been after. It was a good start, a relief for the team who had backed Columba.
That same day at 3 p.m. came message number two, this time unsigned, from Flanders. ‘There are only a few troops here and no petrol dumps, but yesterday some artillery arrived and the men say they are going to Yugoslavia where other troops and wagons are also moving.’ Columba was working, although it took another nine days for the next message to arrive.
The next drop took place on 6 May and was less successful. One message simply brought greetings from West Flanders. Below was the slightly forlorn comment: ‘Through a mishap this bird lost the questionnaire en route as did a number of others which have returned empty.’ Another from the same batch mentioned some aerodromes but, as would often be the case, provided too little detail to locate them.
Resistance is often portrayed as a stark choice. A choice between a life of danger on the run or one of collaboration. But in reality, it was a much broader spectrum. People could and did resist in small ways and large. That was evident from those who chose to take the risk to send a message back via Columba. Some of those early messages were short – ‘No troops here’ was all one said, without even saying even roughly where ‘here’ was. Others wrote just a few lines with a plea for help, while making clear the individual understood the risks involved. ‘Although this may cost me my head if one of the damned Boches saw me take the bird to my house, I will release the pigeon again with information for you,’ they wrote.
Most pigeons were found early in the morning by farmers tending their land. The messages sometimes showed daily rural life continuing as if war had barely intruded. ‘I found this pigeon on the 6th early in the morning while I was cutting clover for the animals and I have looked after it well and given it food and drink and am now anxious to know if the little animal reaches its loft … Hoping that I have possibly rendered you some service.’ Often the finders were illiterate or unsure of what to do and would confide in a local priest, schoolmaster or someone else whom they trusted. That was often when the best intelligence came.
In some cases the pigeons found their way to people already trying to organize some kind of resistance. In July 1941, a writer said he was part of a group of eleven patriots in a position to give important information. A parachutist who had recently been dropped above Carpiquet in Caen was safe and sound but the person who had sheltered him had been denounced and was going to be shot. ‘From now onwards we will take direct action against such person in striking down anyone who betrays,’ they wrote. Columba was revealing that there were many in Europe who wanted to do something – some were willing to send a short message back, while others were already looking for ways to do more. There was potential there to be tapped.
Food was one recurring theme. The Germans took around 70 per cent of pre-war food production and the results were severe. Messages spoke of hunger and starvation. One writer in May said the pork butchers had all been closed because all the pigs had been sent to Germany and there was precious little other meat. ‘If it lasts much longer we must starve,’ one Belgian wrote, ‘try to free us as quickly as possible.’ In Brussels a writer said that the rations for the previous month had been 5 kilos of potatoes plus 225 grams of bread per day: ‘too much to starve but not enough to live.’ Potatoes were being requisitioned to be sent to Germany, they wrote, so people would dig them up and eat them before they were ripe. There were complaints of some French peasants profiteering and selling on butter and eggs to the Germans at high prices. Also evident were signs of small acts of resistance. One writer in Flanders recorded that a local farmer had hung a dead hen outside with a written note on it saying he would rather his hens were dead than lay eggs for the Germans. (The same author ended his message with the phrase ‘I do hope this is not a German pigeon’.)
A few weeks after Columba began, a message recorded that everyone had heard the ‘startling news about Hess’ – the Deputy Führer who had landed in England on some kind of bizarre mission in May and was now in custody. The Columba message noted it had made a ‘big impression on the Boches’. Another said that the German soldiers tried to listen to the English wireless to hear what had happened and did not believe the claims on German radio about the Deputy Führer’s mental illness. The morale of the Germans was not always good. One message that summer reported that sixteen pilots near Passchendaele being trained at an aerodrome were imprisoned for not flying, while one had actually taken off with his aeroplane and fled. Another writer talked of his conversations with the German soldiers. ‘When we talk to a soldier he dares to give his view they are all tired [of the situation] – but then he keeps looking round to see if another soldier is not approaching for they have no confidence in each other.’
One pigeon from Folkestone was found by a fellow pigeon lover in northern France. The English pigeon ‘could hardly have come into better hands’, he wrote in a detailed message tinged with sadness. He provided a long note full of details of life and of whatever movements he had seen, including the location of German telephone exchanges. He suggested that the Germans were convinced the British would not dare try a landing and could easily be defeated if the British did come. He did not want compensation for his efforts. He was just serving his country. But there was another reason. ‘This is a means for me to avenge myself for my son, whom they have killed.’ His son could not be replaced, but he did say that after the war he would like to replace all his own pigeons, which had also been killed.
Each pigeon was an act of resistance, however small – the risk of a life for the chance of contact with distant Britain. A bond was being created between the sender of a message in a small rural village and the official reading it in London’s War Office. But could Columba provide real, hard intelligence, more than just scraps and colour? The first sign that it might arrived in June.
Top of the list of questions to which Melland and Sanderson wanted answers was whether the finder of a pigeon knew anything of possible plans for the invasion of England. The seventh Columba message pointed to just that. ‘The attack on England will occur very soon, unforeseen and terrible,’ it warned in spring 1941, saying ships were being prepared in the Grand Canal in Belgium and four new aerodromes would be completed in the next few days. Docks which had been bombed were being repaired. Sanderson would find pigeons among the best sources for invasion intelligence, sometimes noting when they corroborated other sources or failed to back up reports from MI6 agents whom he was not sure about. ‘Valuable reports continue to arrive by pigeon,’ the official indicator’s document noted, adding that the