Secret Pigeon Service : Operation Columba, Resistance and the Struggle to Liberate Occupied Europe

Resumen del libro

Secret Pigeon Service is an original piece of investigation, bringing a brand new meaning to air force'. Corera uses declassified files with original reporting from across Europe and pays homage to the families of those who risked their lives to send back messages, melding the human stories with the wider story of the war. Everyone has heard of MI5 and MI6.

Some may even have heard of MI9 which helped downed airmen escape in World War II. But few will know of MI14(d) - the Special Pigeon Service'. From 1941 though 1944, sixteen thousand pigeons were dropped in an arc from Bordeaux in Southern France to Copenhagen in Denmark as part of Columba' - a secret British operation to bring back intelligence from those living under Nazi occupation.

In a war that began with Blitzkrieg and ended with the atom bomb, pigeons had a unique place in intelligence. Long before Twitter, social media and modern communications technology, the near-miraculous ability of trained pigeons to return to their home loft even if dropped in a strange place hundreds of miles away offered an unrivalled means of receiving news and communicating in secret in near-real time. In a previously unheard account, which follows the Belgian intelligence cell named Leopold Vindictive', led by a priest named Jozef Raskin, Gordon Corera uncovers the secrets of this most special aerial secret unit.

Columba tells the compelling story of how a priest, a flock, and 3mm tubes containing war intel conspired together and became a significant force in the world of intelligence during the Second World War.