Puss hots up Cold War action
DECLASSIFIED files from the CIA reveal that animals were used to wage the Cold War against the Soviet Union with varying success.
In the 1960s the US intelligence agency spent half a million pounds on experiments such as fitting pigeons with cameras to take pictures over sensitive areas of Russia.
Dolphins were hopefully trained for harbour penetration and one of the most bizarre episodes was when a listening device was put inside a cat in Operation Acoustic Kitty - a purr-fect project that didn’t work.
Don’t laugh. A few years ago, Freya, the cat of then Chancellor George Osborne, was suspected of being bugged as it wandered round sensitive areas of government.
Animals have been used throughout history in warfare, as mascots and heroes.
Without horses there would have been no Charge of the Light Brigade. Donkeys have been used for transport, camels for carrying wounded and dogs for a variety of tasks. In ancient times, packs of war hounds were set loose; in the First World War they laid telephone lines and they have been used for guard duty, carrying messages and sniffing out bombs.
Syrians launched scorpion-filled clay pots at invading Romans and beehives were lobbed over the walls of besieged cities. War elephants were used, most famously by Hannibal, and the US military tried fitting bats
A listening device was put inside a cat in Operation Acoustic Kitten - a purr-fect project that didn’t
work
with incendiary devices. The idea was to drop them over Japan so they would set fire to wooden houses. The scheme actually resulted in the bats setting alight a US hangar and a general’s car before it was abandoned.
Pigeons have been messengers for thousands of years, often through war zones.
Almost a quarter of a million birds served with the military and home defences during the Second World War. Code breakers at Bletchley Park used them and they were dropped by parachute in containers to Resistance fighters.
The Dickin Medal — known as the animal VC — was instituted by the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals in 1943 and, in the next six years, was awarded for outstanding service to 32 pigeons, 18 dogs, three horses and a ship’s cat.
Huddersfield has its own animal claim to war fame.
A squirrel called Fortnum was rescued from France by a flight lieutenant in the RAF as the Germans invaded in the Second World War. He returned with the officer on the flight deck of his bomber on missions over Berlin. When Fortnum retired from active service, he went to live in a country house at Almondbury.
A pigeon trained by Flight Sergeant Douglas Kendall, former president of Longwood Homing Society, and son of Alfred Kendall, licensee of the Angel Hotel at Paddock Head, saved the fourman crew of a downed RAF aircraft in the Middle East. All the planes carried homing pigeons.
An SOS was sent when the engines failed returning from a reconnaissance mission and it ditched in the sea. Rescue planes searched the area for fourand-a-half hours without success. Then the pigeon flew into its loft with the message the crew were in a life raft and gave the co-ordinates and the men were rescued.