In his 1928 volume, Pigeons in the Great War, Osman described the carrier pigeon service as “practically infallible” and gave an unsubstantiated delivery success rate of 95-99%. Image available in the public domain via the Dutch Nationaal Archief and Wikimedia. British Army staff bandaging the leg of a carrier pigeon which returned wounded with a message. Osman had a long-standing interest in racing pigeons: in 1898, he abandoned his career as a lawyer’s clerk and established and became first editor of the Racing Pigeon, a weekly magazine still in publication today. Shortly afterwards, the Carrier-Pigeon Service was officially founded under the control of the Intelligence Corps and under the directorship of Captain (later Lieutenant Colonel) Alfred H. In September 1914, the French Army gave 15 pigeons to the British Intelligence Service and by May 1915 a carrier pigeon service was improvised by the Second Corps during the Second Battle of Ypres. However, the British Army did not have a carrier pigeon service, unlike their counterparts in the French and German Armies. By the outbreak of First World War in August 1914, the military use of carrier pigeons was well established. They went on to prove their worth during the four-month siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-1871 when, it is said, 400 birds delivered nearly 115,000 government messages and about a million private messages.Ĭarrier pigeons were well regarded by the British military with a strong and illustrious tradition: carrier-pigeons were used to deliver the news of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo in 1815. Despite the development of optical telegraph signalling systems in France in the late eighteenth century, carrier pigeons remained popular in France. The name of the tower originates from French engineer Claude Chappe, and his brothers, who in 1792 designed the first optical telegraph.Ĭarrier pigeons were also used over three thousand years ago by the Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and others. Science Museum object 1933-648/1 Model of a ‘Chappe’ type semaphore signalling tower, 1933.
The use of pigeons as method of military communications dates back over 3,000 years with the earliest recorded use of pigeons in warfare dating back to c.1150 BCE when the Sultan of Baghdad strapped capsules filled with papyrus sheets to the leg or back feathers of pigeons and used them as messengers. On the frontline, they were mostly used for espionage and for emergency messages, from soldiers and tanks in no-man’s land and when an attack was about to take place. In the First World War, carrier pigeons were used to send short messages on land, in air, and at sea. Here, different methods of signalling were used to communicate and one of the most ancient systems of communication used were carrier pigeons, also known as messenger pigeons. One of the historic episodes explored in Top Secret: From Ciphers to Cyber Security is the life and death importance of secure communications in the trenches of the First World War. Dr Elizabeth Bruton explores more about how in the First World War, carrier pigeons were used to send short messages on land, in air, and at sea.
0 kommentar(er)
