War Pigeons: Cher Ami, the Siege of Paris and Maidenform's Pigeon Vests

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Military homing pigeons are bred rock doves, and the racing homer created by 19th century Belgian and English breeders crossed the stamina of the French cumulet with the homing instinct of the English carrier, producing birds that average 60 miles per hour over flights of up to 1,100 miles. Armies used them by carrying birds away from fixed lofts and releasing them to fly home. The transcript traces them from a Sultan of Baghdad's network around 1150 BCE, Cyrus of Persia and Julius Caesar to the news of Waterloo in 1815. During the 1870 to 1871 Siege of Paris, pigeons were floated out by balloon and flew back with microfilmed dispatches: about 400 birds carried 115,000 government messages and nearly a million private ones, while the Prussians sent hawks and falcons after them.

In World War I, with telegraph lines cut by shellfire, the French advanced at the Marne with 72 mobile lofts and birds flew in gas-proof boxes with a 95 percent success rate. In October 1918 Cher Ami carried the coordinates of the 77th Division's Lost Battalion over 25 miles after being shot, saving 194 men and earning the Croix de Guerre. In World War II the United States trained 54,000 pigeons and Britain used 250,000 to stay in contact with agents, because a bird gives off no signal to intercept. MI5 kept 100 birds on standby until 1950, the Swiss Army kept its pigeon section until 1996, and Indian police detained suspected spy pigeons from Pakistan in 2010, 2015 and 2020.

• In 1944 Maidenform made 28,500 corset-laced vests so paratroopers could jump with pigeons strapped to their chests, for no more than six hours.
• A single private dealer bought all 27,064 surplus pigeon vests after the war.
• Pigeons trained on the USS Langley in 1922 abandoned the moving carrier and roosted on cranes at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard.
• The US 285th Signal Pigeon Company clipped the wings of 15,000 captured German birds.
• Thirty-two pigeons have received the Dickin Medal, including GI Joe and Paddy, who carried D-Day intelligence across the Channel.