Gordon Corera, a BBC correspondent, happened upon a trove
of World War II-era files that detailed a relatively unknown pigeon
service that relied on the homing ability of the birds to carry messages
from occupied Europe back to Britain. Operation Columba is the result of his find, and subsequent research.
Essentially,
the British security (espionage) services, devised a plan to drop
pigeons into Europe and then request those who found the birds to
complete surveys about the German occupation, clarity of BBC reception,
and a host of other factors and then release the pigeons for the return
to Britain.If only it were that easy. The bird might not survive the
initial drop, or might be turned into the Germans, or might be devoured
by the starving populace, or might become a hawk's dinner on the return
flight to Britain. And even if it made it, the intelligence might be
worthless, or might have fallen out along the way, or, or, or. Yet, one
of these messages returned such a trove of intelligence as to be shown
to Churchill himself.
I found the most troublesome
aspect of the history to be the hope that it inspired in the Belgians,
particular those whose christened themselves the Leopold Vindictive,
which simply could not be realized. As Corera explains, it wasn't as
simple as being able to deliver a pigeon on command (see the reasons
above!), but the Belgians could not know that and some risked - and lost
- everything in a desperate bid to contact London. Whether the British
had considered such possibilities is unknown and unknowable, but I
couldn't help but feel that to a certain extent the British were "using"
those in occupied Europe, even if their intentions were noble.
Operation Columba: The Secret Pigeon Service is not at all a bad book. It simply suffers from being of the exact same genre as The Winter Fortress and, in comparison, pales a bit. The action wasn't quite as fast, and the intrigue wasn't quite as high.
Three stars.
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