The Doves of War

By a wide margin, my best “read” last month was a children’s book of a mere thirty-two pages; it arrived as a present from a friend. I unwrapped it with a touch of suspicion—a mild wariness. True, I’m not as sharp as I once was. (That umbrella left behind in the restaurant; that famous person whose name somehow won’t come forward on the tongue.) But—a children’s book. H’mm. A gentle hint?

Reassurance came within the first couple of pages; absorption and delight followed all the way to the end. I was reading the true story of what was surely the most unusual Australian army unit on our Order of Battle in the Second World War. Only a small minority of those on its strength were humans; the multitude of heroes who swelled the ranks were birds. This was the Carrier Pigeon Service of the Australian Corps of Signals.

I had no notion of the extent of the role of pigeon message-carriers in the campaigns against the Japanese aggressors of 1941–45. Somehow, memory had written off pigeons as part of the scene in the “no man’s land” of the First World War; surely now they had been superseded by radio? This dismissal was not merely an error; it was an impiety: who of us may brush aside the little messenger appointed by God to bring the glad tidings to Noah in his Ark?

Gavin Long’s many-volumed Official History of Australia in the War of 1939–45 gives no general account of the Carrier Pigeon Service, beyond saying (in Volume VI): “Later in the war, pigeons were used to good effect”. Incidents of pigeon participation are briefly mentioned from time to time—on Bougainville, in the Sepik and Ramu River fighting on New Guinea’s main island, on Borneo and—at sea—in the Huon Gulf. They were used also in the Kokoda campaign. In July 1945 there was a rare occasion reported of birds blotting their copybooks. (After all, what else could a pigeon do?) One pair decided that flying conditions were too foul for take-off, so they simply flew into a nearby high tree, and couldn’t be dislodged. The disappointed officer who had despatched them noted crossly: “I wish I’d eaten them yesterday, while they were kicking up such a noise!”

Fanciers have made “homing” or “racing” pigeons their hobby for centuries. Those birds can fly at speeds approaching 150 kilometres per hour, travel all day without rest or refreshment, surmount fog, thunderstorm and high winds. Their extraordinary powers of navigation—locating “home” hundreds of kilometres away—derive from magnetic particles in the substance of their upper beak.

In the Pacific, from 1942 onwards, over 13,000 of these “civilian” birds were recruited into the Australian Corps of Signals, and there taught to fly with lightweight message “capsules” attached to one leg. They then became fully-fledged (so to speak) carrier pigeons; each bore on a leg-band his own regimental number, just like a soldier’s “dog tags”.

The story of their devoted service to our troops in action is told by Vashti Farrer and Mary Small, and their brilliant illustrator Elizabeth Alger, in Feathered Soldiers. They use simple (but never condescending) language; the little book is packed with facts which I found fresh and fascinating; the attractively set-out glossary will probably add more useful words to a child’s vocabulary than a whole year would in some of today’s primary schools. But although we readers learn something new on every page, we never get that chill misgiving that we are being “educated”.

The illustrations—not a page without one—are all drawings in full colour. They are clear, explanatory and engaging, with a pervading tone of quiet good humour.

The pigeons were often called in to handle emergencies, when radio had failed, or unforeseen circumstances had arisen; troops may have been cut off, or incurred heavy casualties; a ship at sea may have fallen into difficulties. All this made high demands on ingenuity, and required a talent for improvisation. It also made the work extremely dangerous. The birds faced all the hazards of extreme weather (including disorientation by electrical storms); attacks by hawks and other predators; being shot down by Japanese marksmen. One bird travelled thirty kilometres and delivered his message with a bullet still lodged in his body.

A pigeon despatched from a disabled vessel in danger of sinking covered the sixty-four kilometres to our coastal base at Madang in fifty minutes, against driving rain all the way. By this means the ship was saved, and the lives of every man on board. In his soldierly career, that bird had already flown twenty-three missions, totalling 1600 kilometres.

For some purposes, pigeons offered substantial advantages over radio.

For example, every wireless signal we sent attracted the possibility of being monitored by the enemy. Even if the actual words and meaning of the message remained secure through encodement, the existence and location of our transmitting radio was betrayed. This could be—indeed sometimes was—fatal for our long-range “behind-the-lines” intelligence patrols; pigeons left no such revealing electronic loose ends. Reinforcements of fresh pigeons were dropped by parachute to “cloak-and-dagger” groups, preserving and prolonging the stealth and silence they needed for their operations.

The need for all radio signals to be converted to code before going to air created agonising delays to messages of desperate urgency; there was corresponding delay for decoding at the receiving end. A pigeon message was considered safe to send “in clear”, to be popped straight into its capsule hot from the sender’s pencil, and the bird (or birds) sent flying. (By way of insurance, it was common practice to send two birds on each mission, one carrying a duplicate.)

Using pigeons instead of human messengers had a further grim advantage. One old soldier with whom in recent days I discussed this admirable book put it this way: “I rather used to envy those little feathered buggers. If they fell into Japanese hands the worst that could happen to them was that they’d be eaten. But they wouldn’t be tortured to loosen their tongues.”

There was in those days no means of transmitting maps or diagrams from field to base by radio. But a pigeon made no difficulty whatever of an actual drawing being slipped into his leg capsule.

The extremely acute eyesight of pigeons was harnessed to skilled tasks. Birds trained to recognise the vivid orange colour of life-jackets accompanied the crews of rescue aircraft searching for surviving mariners from sunken ships, or aircraft crew shot down into the sea. Long before they entered human vision, the floating orange specks far below were spotted by the pigeon, who would then peck on a key which lit an alarm light. Then the searching aircraft would fly lower, and concentrate its area of search. Considerable numbers of servicemen survived into peacetime because they had, in one way or another, been rescued by pigeons. (I’ve just decided that “bird-brain” is a term of disparagement to be expunged from my vocabulary without delay.)

At least two Australian carrier pigeons were awarded the Dickin Medal—Britain’s “animal VC”.

In sad parallel with the fate of our gallant First World War horses in the Middle East, none of the Pacific pigeons returned home to Australia; the risk was too high of introducing exotic diseases, and all of them were put down. Until recently, the surviving men marched in Sydney on Anzac Day. They were preceded by their own banner which proclaimed their unit’s participation in “all operations in South West Pacific: also with American Forces”. Now, Boy Scouts proudly carry the banner on behalf of the veterans who can no longer march themselves.

To my mind, Feathered Soldiers is such a splendid book for children that any parent, grandparent, godparent, aunt or uncle is falling down on the job unless copies appear liberally among birthday presents and Christmas stockings. But I went on to wonder whether the book might join the select company of those that transcend the gradations of age; whether, for example, it fits the dedication of C.J. Dennis’s A Book for Kids (1921): “To all good children over four and under four-and-eighty”.

In a recent article, the writer Carmel Bird tells of her use of the classic series of Little Golden Books for teaching English (including grammar), not only to her Year 7 classes, but to university students doing “creative writing”. This did not wholly surprise me. At least one Little Golden Book (Mister Dog by Garth Williams) is still honoured and consulted in my family, although it was first read to the children at bedtime. How few books have the power to speak equally to the very young and the very old.