Homingpost is, by its own admission, a slow and unreliable post. We are not heroes. We do not pretend to be. But our craft owes everything to the pigeons of history who did, with sight and against fire, what we now attempt from a quiet parapet in Yorkshire. We honour them here. We name our birds after them. We owe them more than we can ever return.
Each morning before the dovecote is opened, Henrik reads aloud the following names. He does this softly, into the rafters, where our flock cannot see him but will hear him. The pigeons, in their own way, attend.
On the 4th of October 1918, the so-called “Lost Battalion”—some 554 men of the 77th Division—was pinned behind enemy lines in the Argonne and, by tragic miscommunication, being shelled by their own American artillery. Two pigeons were sent. Both were shot down. Cher Ami was the third. She took off through the smoke and was hit almost at once: shot through the breast, blinded in one eye, and with her right leg dangling by a tendon, the message capsule swinging beneath.
She flew on. Twenty-five miles in twenty-five minutes. The message arrived. The shelling stopped. One hundred and ninety-four men walked out of that ravine. Cher Ami was carried, by hand, back to a field surgeon. She lived another eight months. Her body resides at the Smithsonian.
On the 18th of October 1943, the British 56th Infantry Division captured the village of Calvi Vecchia ahead of schedule. Radios failed. The Allied air command, unaware, was already scrambling bombers to flatten the village. G.I. Joe was released with the message.
He flew twenty miles in twenty minutes. He arrived as the bombers were taxiing for takeoff. The mission was scrubbed. Approximately one thousand men of the division, and an unknown number of Italian villagers, lived to see the next morning because of him.
On the 23rd of February 1942, an RAF Beaufort bomber ditched into the North Sea after engine failure. The crew of four climbed into a life raft with their issued carrier pigeon, Winkie, and released her. She flew over a hundred and twenty miles back to her loft in Broughty Ferry, Scotland, arriving exhausted and coated in aviation oil.
Her owner reported her arrival. From the condition of the bird—the oil, the time elapsed—an RAF officer triangulated where the bomber must have come down. A search was launched within two hours. All four men were saved.
Released from Arnhem during the catastrophic September 1944 airborne operation, William of Orange covered the 250 miles back to England in 4 hours and 25 minutes, flying through anti-aircraft fire and a worsening weather front. His message carried intelligence credited with the safe withdrawal of more than 2,000 paratroopers.
On the 7th of June 1944, the day after the Normandy landings, Paddy carried the first coded communiqué of the invasion’s success back to England. He covered 230 miles in 4 hours and 50 minutes, the fastest such flight of the war, through weather and over an English Channel still thick with Luftwaffe patrols.
Mary served on dozens of missions throughout the war and was, by the time of her last flight, more scar than feather. She was attacked by German hawks deployed along the French coast. She survived shrapnel from a bombed loft. She was treated twenty-two separate times by her keeper, Charlie Brewer of Exeter. She always came home.
Commando completed ninety known operations into Nazi-occupied France, each one beginning with a parachute drop from a Lysander and ending with a long flight home through hostile sky. The intelligence he carried—troop movements, supply stations, the locations of downed airmen—is, in many cases, still classified.
On the 10th of October 1940, an RAF bomber was forced down in Holland. Royal Blue, aboard, was released. He was the first pigeon of the war to deliver a message from a downed aircraft on the European continent back to England—four hours and ten minutes from the wreckage to the home loft. The crew were located and recovered.
The Duke of Normandy was released by British paratroopers in the early hours of D-Day, at approximately 06:30, from a position behind the German coastal defences. Through dense fog and unrelenting rain, with the radio silence of the operation imposing the strictest secrecy, he carried back the first verifiable confirmation that the airborne landings had succeeded.
The Dieppe Raid of August 1942 was a costly and largely unsuccessful Allied assault on the French coast. As communications failed and casualties mounted, Beach Comber was released from the beachhead carrying the first news to reach England of what had occurred. He flew, alone and across fire, to deliver it.
It would be unconscionable for a satirical Yorkshire dispatch company to compare its services to the work of pigeons who flew through war for the sake of strangers.
We name our birds after them because we wish to be the kind of company that remembers. Because each morning, when our flock is released to the indifferent Yorkshire sky, we like to think they carry the smallest echo of those earlier wings. And because, if any of our birds were to do, by accident, what those birds did on purpose, we would want it to be in a name worth saying.
Coo softly. Hope loudly. Remember them.
If you would like to read more, we recommend the records of the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and the published histories of the National Pigeon Service.
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