pidgee me

2026-08-16

Thirty two pigeons have been decorated for bravery

There is a medal for animals. It was instituted in 1943 by Maria Dickin, who founded the PDSA, and it is described by the charity that awards it as the highest honour any animal can receive while serving in military conflict. People call it the animals' Victoria Cross.

It has been awarded seventy five times. Dogs have won thirty eight of them. Pigeons have won thirty two.

That ratio is the interesting part. Set aside four horses and one cat, and the entire history of decorated animal bravery is a contest between dogs and pigeons, and the pigeons are not far behind.

What they actually did

GI Joe flew twenty miles in twenty minutes to stop an air raid on a village that had already been taken. The bombers were minutes from taking off. The message arrived in time and something like a hundred Allied soldiers were not killed by their own side.

Twenty miles in twenty minutes is sixty miles an hour, in case you want to sit with that for a moment. It is not even the fastest a pigeon has been recorded flying. It was simply fast enough.

Gustav was the first bird back from the Normandy beachhead on the sixth of June 1944, carrying the first news of the landings. Radio silence was in force. The invasion of Europe was reported, initially, by a pigeon.

Duke of Normandy was the first bird to arrive with a message from the paratroopers who had dropped behind enemy lines, which is a sentence worth reading twice.

Princess flew about five hundred miles, most of it over open sea, from Crete to RAF Alexandria carrying intelligence. Over water there is nothing to navigate by and nowhere to land.

Two hundred thousand of them

More than two hundred thousand homing pigeons were given to British and American forces during the Second World War. Most were donated by ordinary fanciers who kept lofts in back gardens and handed over their best birds.

The birds were carried in baskets, dropped by parachute in crates, and taken into occupied territory by agents. Getting a message out was often the whole problem, and a bird in a basket was the answer nobody could jam or intercept.

The Germans understood this perfectly, which is why they kept hawks on the English Channel coast for the express purpose of killing pigeons in transit. A bird crossing the Channel had to get past a bird trained to stop it.

Why a pigeon

A homing pigeon does one thing extraordinarily well: it goes home. Not to a grid reference, not to a destination you choose, but to the loft it was raised in. That is the whole trick and it is also the whole limitation.

It means a pigeon can only ever carry a message in one direction, from wherever you take it back to where it came from. Every one of those wartime flights was a bird going home, with something strapped to its leg, whether anybody was shooting at it or not.

The bit that stays with you

The medals were not awarded for winning anything. They were awarded for finishing a journey. The bird did not know what was in the capsule, or that a village was about to be bombed, or that a continent was waiting on the news it was carrying.

It just went home, because that is what it does, and it happened to matter enormously.

Send a message by pigeon