Britain and the dastardly war game of stop that pigeon
New book reveals how MI5 was called in to deal with German birds and find Nazi infiltrators in Allied roost
AT THE height of the Second World War, a crack MI5 unit was given the task of taking down the enemy in the skies over Britain.
Not the Luftwaffe – but the peregrine falcon.
The hawks were picking off homing pigeons returning from Europe with vital information. Some pigeon owners even feared the raptors were German trained and working for the Nazis. So the Falcon Destruction Unit was born.
The five-strong armed unit, led by a retired Irish colonel and champion shot, covered the south coast. The men would scour the clifftops for nests, and abseil to set spring traps. Birds not caught in traps were shot.
Details of the unit are contained in a book, Secret Pigeon Service by Gordon Corera, the BBC’S security correspondent. Appearing at the Hay Festival, Corera told the story of “the only MI5 team with a licence to kill”. He said: “There were wild hawks, peregrine fal- cons, on the British coast and they would kill some of the pigeons coming back from occupied Europe with messages. There was a question of what to do and so MI5 got in on the act.
“[They are] I think the only MI5 team with a licence to kill.”
The Falcon Destruction Unit drove around in an open touring car, an American Packard, attached to a caravan in which the men slept each night.
In his book, Corera writes that stories surfaced of “mysterious hawks spotted in Dorset, owned by suspicious characters who had links to Germany before the war”.
At the same time, there were fears that pigeons were being introduced by the Nazis to infiltrate Britain.
In 1941, homing pigeons were spotted over the Scilly Isles heading south toward the French coast, but were not from local Army or RAF lofts. In 1942, two birds were found on a British vessel off the coast of Ipswich, one carrying a message in German. And a bird with wings stamped ‘Wehrmacht’ came aboard a motor launch off Lowestoft, according to Corera.
The director-general of MI5 approved the creation of a falconry unit to dispose of enemy birds. The falcons were trained for five weeks at a base in Pembrokeshire.
Corera explained: “A team of MI5 officers actually spent a summer on the Scilly Isles, on the golf course, with hawks on their wrists, trying to catch German pigeons. One would stand at the highest point of the course, another across the island on the coast – hardly the worst job in summer – looking out for enemy pigeons, their falcons ready on their wrists to let slip. The Air Ministry supplied them with some pigeons to practise on.”
But “the sad truth is that the only pigeons they managed to kill were British ones, because hawks don’t have a friend-or-foe identification system”.
An MI5 report at the end of the war noted that the hawks did not bring down a single enemy bird, “probably because there never were any”.
‘Officers spent summer on the Scilly Isles with hawks on their wrists trying to catch German pigeons’