Читать книгу Secret Pigeon Service: Operation Columba, Resistance and the Struggle to Liberate Europe - Gordon Corera, Gordon Corera - Страница 12

In the bowels of the War Office, two men waited anxiously for the first signs that Columba would work. Everyone has heard of MI5 and MI6, the domestic and foreign intelligence services that survive to this day. Some may even have heard of MI9 – the wartime department that helped Allied servicemen escape from behind enemy lines. But few will have heard of MI14 – let alone its subsection MI14(d) and its ‘Special Continental Pigeon Service’. Perhaps that subsection’s lack of fame is understandable, given that in 1941 it comprised a crack team of just two. But the little-known MI14 department to which those men belonged had arguably one of the most important tasks of the war. Its mission was the first priority of intelligence – to know your enemy.

As war began in 1939, the entire staff devoted to evaluating information about the Nazi war effort and its day-to-day battle strategy amounted to a grand total of five officers across MI14. The initial estimates of German military strength were way off the mark – Britain thought the Germans had 1,400 medium tanks, for example, when there were only 300. That kind of knowledge had serious repercussions when it came to understanding the fight that lay ahead, and whether and how it might be won.

Initially operational intelligence on the enemy sat within the department known as MI3, which was broken down into different departments. MI3b looked at Italy, while MI3c looked after the Soviet Union and was staffed by two Russian-speaking former brewers who despised the USSR more than they did the Germans, and who were consistently wrong on every issue. Intelligence on Germany became so important that it merited its own separate team, and so it was hived off to become MI14. Initially the small team consisted of a rich array of old-timers from the First World War who were not quite up to it, alongside a new batch of often eccentric but more talented younger men.

MI14 was itself broken up into smaller units populated by an array of oddballs and professors who had come into the military from civilian, often academic, life. One section investigated German strategy and intentions. Another, led by a former England cricket captain, looked at German anti-aircraft positions. A professor who had studied the Roman army’s order of battle two thousand years ago now did the same for the Wehrmacht, the German army. As seems customary in British intelligence, MI14 even had its own Soviet mole in Leo Long. He had been recruited at Cambridge and was, unbeknownst to his colleagues, passing on their secrets to Moscow via Anthony Blunt. The teams worked all hours dealing with a constant stream of queries and requests from different parts of the armed services. Which were the best targets to attack in Germany by air? Where was this or that Panzer division? How was the Germany army reacting to British propaganda?

The specific task of MI14(d) was to understand the German occupation of Western Europe, including the deployment of its forces and the work of its secret services. And it was in this team that Columba found its home.

Brian Melland was the man in MI14(d) who oversaw Columba for much of its life. Melland was described by a colleague as a ‘theatrical character’. He was a convivial figure, a brilliant comic and mimic round the dinner table, but could quickly go from fooling around to focusing on the most serious matters with a fiery moral indignation. The theatrical description, moreover, was literally rather than just figuratively true. He had been born in 1904 in Paris, where his father had fallen in love with a French pianist. After studying French and German at Cambridge, he had begun a rather conventional career with Shell Oil. But after five years he realized he was bored and gave it up for his first love, acting. He spent eight years before the war treading the boards as a professional actor in repertory theatre in Manchester. He was married in 1938 and his son was born just as the war was beginning. Melland had hoped to join the Navy, but when that did not work out he walked across the road to the War Office; thanks to his language skills, they put him straight into Military Intelligence. With his dark hair parted on the side he was handsome but also smart and diligent. He would become the leading British expert on the German military and the go-to man on German documents. This meant he became involved in interrogating captured Germans. In the summer of 1941, just as Columba was starting up, a secretary came in to his office. In her strong cockney accent, she said there was a ‘Mr S’ who Melland needed to go and see urgently. It turned out she meant Rudolf Hess – the Deputy Führer, who had just landed in Britain.

The second member of MI14(d)’s double act was L. H. F. ‘Sandy’ Sanderson. He had joined MI14 in January 1940 after being told he was too old to return to the Highland Division, with whom he had served in the First World War. However, the fact that he spoke excellent German would be put to good use. Lean and moustachioed, Sanderson had served as a business executive between the wars. ‘He looked like a friendly, alert terrier,’ recalled Noel Annan, who had been recruited into MI14 as a 24-year-old on New Year’s Day 1941. It can be surprising to realize the inexperience of the quickly expanding British intelligence world in the early years of war. But in some cases, it drew in people who brought their own skills and experience. That was true of Melland and Sanderson.

The MI14 team, whose initial five officers would grow to more than fifty, lived what Sanderson called a ‘troglodyte existence’ in the bowels of the War Office. This created something of a bunker mentality, especially as their job was to immerse themselves in their enemy’s thinking. They sometimes feared that their combination of dedication and humour might lead to confusion and even suspicion among those not part of the team. ‘We had in this large basement a great picture on the wall of Hitler with the inscription “Heil dem Führer”,’ Sanderson later recalled. ‘We often spoke German among ourselves for fun or practice and I wondered what a British passer-by in Whitehall would have thought, had he witnessed the scene.’

Amidst the humour and camaraderie, MI14’s work could not have been more serious. In six weeks of May and June 1940, France, Belgium and the Netherlands had all collapsed. There was now one crucial question to which everyone from Churchill down to the man on the street wanted the answer. Was Britain next? Were the Germans about to invade? This became the overriding mission for MI14 in its early days. Few tasks could have been more important. The fear was that the Germans would simply follow through and head over the Channel. At the end of May 1940, an urgent telegram went to coastal stations saying all defences had to be manned through the night since an invasion was considered imminent.

From June 1940, Sanderson was made responsible for all Army intelligence relating to the invasion of the UK. He was the only officer on the ‘Invasion Warning Committee’ who worked full time looking for ‘indicators’ – warning signs that meant the worst was about to begin. The committee met every day at noon at the Admiralty and at one o’clock would issue a single sheet of paper that summarized all the intelligence which had come in over the last twenty-four hours. It aimed to answer three simple questions: where, when and how would an invasion take place? That piece of paper would go up to the Chiefs of Staff and to the Prime Minister himself. The team would hold their breath for any outbursts from Churchill. Normally, by 3 p.m. they knew they could breathe out if nothing had been heard.

In June 1940, Churchill had prepared the public for the possibility that German troops might arrive over the Channel. ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds,’ he had promised a nervous but resolute nation. The message is now remembered as one of defiance, but it was also designed to prepare the public for what many then thought inevitable. Posters were put up for public consumption entitled ‘If the Invader comes – what to do and how to do it’. The advice was simply to stay put.

The last invasion of the country had been in 1066, and Sanderson felt the public had no idea what total war would be like as ravaging armies moved across the British countryside. ‘Confusion and bewilderment might have led to disaster,’ he believed. ‘We felt that if we held out for a week we should do well.’ For all Churchill’s talk, the secret British assessment was that if the Germans did manage to gain a foothold in Britain, there would be no chance of driving them back into the sea. The country would be lost. The Army was short of equipment and the Home Guard was not far off their depiction in Dad’s Army, relying on pitchforks and golf clubs as weapons. Sanderson compiled a top secret handbook to help defending British forces know what to expect (although it did not remain so very secret, since someone managed to leave a copy in a public lavatory in Dublin and an Irishman handed it to the German embassy). The Army prepared an emergency pigeon service which would provide communications for defensive lines if all other links between HQ and forward units were cut.

There were also farcical attempts to undermine German morale. English phrase books were dropped by air upon German troops in France containing what seem comical phrases such as ‘We are sea-sick – where is the basin?’, ‘See how briskly our Captain burns!’ and ‘Why is the Führer not coming with us?’ But there was little hiding the fact that the situation was desperate. If the Germans seized the moment, it might all be over.

On 16 July 1940, Hitler issued Directive No. 16, ordering his armed forces to prepare plans for Operation Sealion – the invasion. The German navy had been considering the challenge for close to a year. They reckoned if they could get an initial ten divisions, or about 110,000, men over a bridgehead they could drive west of London to cut the capital off, forcing its surrender. German spies reported back to the High Command details of coastal defences between Dover and Brighton. The Germans also planned their own deception operation – as the British would later manage – in which they would feed false radio traffic and intelligence to make it look as if a landing was about to take place in the north-east of England to send defending forces the wrong way. The German D-Day was initially planned for September 1940.

The job of Sanderson and the MI14 team was to provide warning. They had said an attack on the Low Countries was probable. But they had never spotted any signs that it was actually beginning. Britain had been completely blind to the attack on Norway as well. The fear that there would be no warning when it was Britain’s turn haunted the team at the War Office. They were convinced Germany had completed all the necessary arrangements.

The British had no spy inside Berlin who could tell them when the order was given, so Sanderson’s job was to scour whatever scraps of intelligence he could get his hands on to find any so-called indicators. For instance, the Germans would need barges and other vessels to carry troops across the Channel, and so any sign of increased activity at ports in Belgium and France might be a giveaway (there were plans to bomb the ports if sufficient warning was received). Every moment mattered and might make the difference between the country’s survival and its capitulation.

The sources Sanderson and MI14 could turn to for insights into German plans were scant. The intelligence picture was parlous. The pickings were so slim that at one point MI14 were instructed to see if an astrologer and water diviner, ‘Smokey Joe’ from Yorkshire, might be able to help. The Enigma decrypts from Bletchley Park would eventually transform understanding of Germany’s actions, but at the start of the war that effort was only just beginning and was yet to bear much fruit. In the dark early days there were only two real sources.

The first was age-old – human intelligence, courtesy of MI6. But their networks were an absolute mess at the start of the war. In November 1939, two MI6 officers had fallen into a Nazi trap and been captured at Venlo on the Dutch border. They were interrogated, with the result that much of the secret service’s work in Western Europe was compromised. The Nazi thrust through Belgium, the Netherlands and then France had compounded the disaster for MI6. No one had expected that those countries would collapse so quickly and so no one had prepared for the gathering of intelligence through underground networks under occupation. Almost all of MI6’s existing networks had been rolled up and it had to start virtually from scratch. Dansey and MI6 were all too aware of the pressure they were under to deliver – especially since they now had competition from the newly formed Special Operations Executive (SOE), which was making a lot of noise carrying out orders to ‘set Europe ablaze’.

The reputation of MI6 – fuelled by thriller writers even then – might have been fearsome, but the reality did not always match up. Brain power was often lacking, as the emphasis was on a kind of schoolboy cunning. Hundreds of reports from MI6 regularly passed through Sanderson’s tray in a single week, but many were likely to be rubbish. Some of the reporting Sanderson saw from MI6 was ‘quite ludicrous’, he thought. One report in 1940 suggested German troops in Norway were training to swim ashore wearing green watertight suits and had been heard practising on Scottish bagpipes. There was absolutely no reliable source in France reporting anything to MI6 until late November 1940.

Belgium, with its busy ports, was always likely to be a key staging post for an invasion of Britain. But MI14 was unconvinced by the reports that came in during the early months of the war. ‘Unfortunately, neither the agent in Belgium nor the agent in France inspire full confidence,’ the team noted of MI6’s offerings. ‘The agent in Belgium may be described as enthusiastic, as well as painstaking; his frequent reports are alarmist in tone (some of his prophecies have already been disproved), and he has provided very few identifications.’ Along with the French agent, the two ‘can only be classed as among the least reliable of our whole body of sources’.

A second source of intelligence for MI14 was new. Aerial reconnaissance was just emerging. From photographs taken at a height of 30,000 feet, Sanderson recalled, an interpreter in one case was able not only to see a football stadium on the ground but also provide a useful match commentary, reporting that during the interval of nine seconds between three photos, the team at the end closest to a gasworks was being severely pressed by the other side as the opposition moved the ball a good twenty-five yards forward. MI14’s specialist would use photos to count the number of barges at Channel ports and look for changes. But there were limits to what could be seen from the skies. Interpretation by analysts was often tricky and filled with ambiguity. Bad weather sometimes meant there were many days when no flights could be made. The irregular timing of reconnaissance missions also made it hard sometimes to know from the pictures obtained what was changing and why. Movements on land were harder to spot than those of ships, since they often took place at night. There was also the risk of reconnaissance planes being shot down.

Air reconnaissance and ‘special methods’ – a code for intercepts – might provide indications, but agents were the best means of reporting German intentions and identifying what the signs meant. There were at least fourteen ports that the Germans might use. Since August 1940, MI14 had been pressing MI6 forcibly to try and have agents placed in these ports with some means of communication, but so far it had failed to deliver. There were people in occupied Europe willing to help, and Dansey and MI6 were trying to drop or land agents into Europe to contact them, but the going was slow.

The biggest problem with human intelligence sources (other than the reliability of the source itself) was the delay before the information arrived in London. Getting agents in and out at the start of the war was difficult and dangerous. Radios were in their infancy and so intelligence often had to be smuggled out by hand, passing from courier to courier. This meant it could take months, and by the time it arrived an item of intelligence which might have once been valuable could be out of date. One MI6 officer complained that although he was receiving lots of reports from Belgium, the information ‘has been so old that they have become valueless’. The average time it took in the middle of the war for an agent’s report to reach MI6 was nearly a third of a year. This was frustrating to analysts in London hungry for intelligence to help inform their decisions and improve their understanding of the enemy’s capabilities.

In the summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe had begun its campaign to destroy Britain’s defences – first targeting the RAF itself and then, in what became known as the Blitz, the capital city and other targets. In Plymouth, Bert Woodman watched as incendiaries rained down on the city, anti-aircraft guns roared in response and tracers lit up the sky. As local pigeon supply officer and also an ARP warden, he found his pigeons in high demand, as police needed them in order to communicate when the telephone lines went down. The damage was fearful. ‘The bomber will always get through,’ pre-war Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had warned, and for a while it was feared he might be right. As war approached, desperate ideas had been thrown around to stop raids at night, when it was much harder to spot incoming bombers, one serious idea being to floodlight the whole of southern England. Technical intelligence on Germany’s weapons – especially in the air – was vital.

MI6 as a whole was sceptical about pigeons as a method of gathering intelligence, but one person who worked at its headquarters would become Columba’s greatest champion as he struggled to combat Germany’s aerial power. He was not a spy but a scientist. When war began, Reginald Jones – usually known as R. V. Jones – was one of those impatient new men who would rise fast because he understood how much warfare had changed. Jones, from a middle-class background in South London, had by the age of seventeen built a radio set that could pick up transmissions from Australia. He was ambitious and difficult to work with, but he knew what he was doing.

As fears of invasion gripped the country, Jones was sent from the Air Ministry to MI6 as a scientific adviser in its Air Branch. His mission was to detect as early as possible any new German weapon that might change the course of the war. Panic had gripped the intelligence community when Hitler made a speech claiming he had a secret weapon against which no defence could stand. Jones was ordered to find out what this mysterious weapon might be. MI6 files were crammed with wild rumours of ‘death rays’. One inventor had been paid by MI6 to see if he could live up to his promise of developing such a ray, but his invention proved only useful for preserving fruit. Eventually, Jones asked for a new translation of Hitler’s speech that had started all the fuss. He discovered that the context of the word for weapon (Waffe) had been mistranslated; what Hitler was referring to was his ‘Luftwaffe’ or air force, against which no one could prevail. His inquiries though had taught him two lessons. First, the spies barely understood science. And second, the Germans knew the war in the air would be pivotal and were far ahead in utilizing the latest technology.

Jones found the old hands at Bomber Command complacently arguing that the use of their standard flying instruments along with a quick glance at the sky was enough to find targets. Jones did not make himself popular when he asked why, if this was the case, so many British bombers flew into hills during practice flights. And when German bombers began their onslaught, they seemed uncannily accurate – at least compared to the British – in finding their targets. What followed became known as ‘the Battle of the Beams’. Through a series of clues and intelligence leads, Jones was able to work out that the Germans had discovered a successful way of guiding their bombers by means of radio beams, which the planes were able to follow. Aged just twenty-eight, Jones found himself briefing Churchill in the Cabinet Room, rebutting hostile questioning from those round the table who doubted his ideas (including his former tutor, who was the Prime Minister’s scientific adviser). But he won the argument, and Britain began developing counter-measures by broadcasting their own beams to confuse the Germans’ navigation. At the same time, the development of radar helped the RAF scramble to meet the German threat as the Luftwaffe began their campaign against Britain. It was the start of a scientific cat-and-mouse game that would last throughout the war.

Jones’s forte was solving intelligence puzzles. In his hand would be a jigsaw piece that looked curious – say, a report of some kind of unusual German activity. First he had to find other pieces that might fit alongside it. Jones described an intelligence analyst as like a human with various senses – eyes in the sky in the form of aerial reconnaissance, ears listening at Bletchley, hands that could reach out from the Secret Service. When the ears heard an unusual noise, then the eyes would turn towards the sound to find out more. Jones was hungry for every snippet of intelligence that might help him understand German technology but, as with MI14, the sources were scant. Pigeons would play their part.

The RAF’s victory in the Battle of Britain meant the summer of 1940 passed without invasion. The Luftwaffe had proved a fearsome weapon but not, as Hitler had claimed, one against which it was impossible to prevail. The German navy had insisted that air superiority was a vital prerequisite for invasion. Nor had there been enough time to prepare the right type of craft to transport the Wehrmacht over the Channel. But the leadership of MI14 remained convinced that invasion was likely in 1941.

Their job of detecting preparations was complicated by a German decision to keep up the constant menace of the possibility of invasion, so as to maintain pressure on Britain. This meant Germany was ensuring that activity was visible and that fake intelligence was passed to Britain through military attachés and other channels. As the spring of 1941 began, the fear that German landing craft would soon be arriving on the British coast was still real. Sources reported details of preparations such as the training of parachutists, and even the intensive manufacture of gas. By May 1941, MI14 were still seeing reports of a possible invasion, with June to August appearing to be the most likely time. Reports from Belgium talked of the training of troops wearing British uniforms and the possible construction of barges.

The reality was that Germany had backed away – but no one in London knew that for sure, partly because the intelligence picture remained so poor. Details of the German military in Belgium and the Netherlands remained ‘very unsatisfactory’, the Director of Military Intelligence told MI6 in February. ‘We have no confirmed evidence of the number of divisions located at any time in these countries … With invasion more than likely at any time after a month from now this is a most serious situation.’

From the spring of 1941, there was a new source for the analysts in London – Columba. For Brian Melland and Sandy Sanderson at MI14, Columba was not a source whose reports were passed on to them like the human intelligence of MI6. It was their own source. Rex Pearson looked after the logistics, but Melland and Sanderson were given the job of overseeing the operation. They were the ones who decided what questions would be asked in the questionnaire; in what areas the pigeons would be dropped; and who evaluated the material when it came back. They were able to handle the resulting intelligence direct. And – most remarkably – it was intelligence so fresh you could almost smell it. It would be in their hands within hours or days of someone observing something.

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 troops did not hold out much enthusiasm for the possibility but that large-scale exercises still seemed to be taking place. In May and June 1941 sources were still suggesting that an invasion was possible, and that exercises were occurring and logistics like barges being put in place.

A pigeon from Cambridge fell in Huines near the Channel coast on 14 June 1941 and was liberated from Pontorson on the 17th. It had an unusual journey back. It was found in Penzance on 20 June. A military officer opened the message and ‘with great zeal’ translated it himself. It took a further three days for it to be transmitted by a wireless officer to the War Office, leading to an angry letter explaining that in future any pigeon container found with a coloured disc was to be sent immediately by dispatch rider.

The annoyance arose because that message from Pontorson – Columba message 19 – was one of the first to show what the operation might be capable of achieving, especially when it came to the challenge of warning of possible invasion. It contained rich detail of troop movements out of Brittany and the use of nine motor barges near Mont St Michel for embarkation practice. It pointed to an airfield at Caen where the planes were housed in specially camouflaged hangars. Details of anti-aircraft positions were given, and the writer offered specific suggestions of where to bomb. They also warned of fifth columns in England, having heard a drunken officer say that they were dropping parachutists in English uniform who spoke the language. There was even a special instruction centre in Brest to train them. He also wrote that a letter the previous day from a German officer to a female collaborator had indicated that an invasion was to come about next week. This was precisely the kind of information Sanderson was looking for.

The author was highly motivated. ‘The population here is 95% with you and hopes for deliverance. They vomit Darlan [the French admiral who collaborated in the Vichy regime] and his clique of traitors; we are ashamed to be represented in the eyes of the world by such a band of bastards. There are some “swine” here too, as everywhere but I’ve got them listed.’ The author went on to name the specific hotel keepers at Mont St Michel who ‘fight each other as to who shall make the most fuss of the Boches’. This scandal should be broadcast, he suggested, on the BBC, which he said he could hear very well. On Sunday, 15 June, he reported, there had been violent riots in Rennes when the people tried to commemorate those who died in the fall of France. The Germans and the police drove back the crowd to the Place du Palais where the Marseillaise was sung ‘with great fervour’ and accompanied by cries of ‘death to Ripert’ – the prefect nominated by the Vichy government to the area. Reprisals had come thick and fast afterwards, but the plan was to repeat the demonstrations on the night of the 17th – the very night the individual was writing the message. He ended with ‘Vive La France, Vive L’Angleterre and Vive de Gaulle’. The writer, who signed himself Arvor 114, asked for more pigeons and gave a specific location in a marsh near a railway line.

The Columba team analysed the message carefully. It was unusually detailed. How, when travel restrictions were in place, could someone living in Pontorson be in a position to report on events as distant as Caen in one direction and Beaumont-Hague in the other? Could it be a plant? They went through the details paragraph by paragraph. The troop movements, they judged, matched those of message number 18 and the train movements also seemed about right. The claim of poor morale in the area was supported by an MI6 source. Other information was considered fairly likely to be true or ‘sensible’. They carefully examined the request to name certain collaborators on air. Could this be an attempt to implicate genuine members of the resistance? ‘On the whole, we think not,’ was the verdict.

One or two points were considered unlikely to be true, but the writer’s wide-ranging knowledge could be explained by travel entailed in his job or by information being passed on from others. That would be similar to the way MI6 sources often reported, and ‘the information he has supplied us is certainly well up to their standard,’ the Columba team noted. The decision was made to consider the message valid and drop more pigeons in the marsh where they had been requested.

On 2 July 1941, the results from Columba’s initial foray were written up. Over three months, 221 birds had been released over Flanders, Normandy and Brittany. Forty-six returned, 19 with messages, 17 of which contained information. And this information had already shown its value. The six messages from Normandy and Brittany helped identify two German infantry regiments and also the movement of troops away from Cherbourg and Brittany. This was especially interesting since there had been few such indications from MI6 sources. What was particularly special about Columba was that intelligence would be in the hands of those hungry for information within hours of a message being written. This was unique among sources of intelligence, and the freshness of the information was something London would frequently marvel at. ‘I think this form of intelligence is most valuable and has great possibility and should be encouraged,’ the Deputy Director of Military Intelligence wrote. It was noted that it was an economical operation. The RAF planes were going across the Channel anyway and the main contribution was that of the pigeon owners themselves, who gave of their time and their birds freely. Columba was up and running. And within days of that first summary of its efforts, its most important message would arrive.