Blog post: swansont: Secret Agent Bird

The remains of a World War Two carrier pigeon which was lost in action 70 years ago while delivering a top secret message over enemy lines has been found in a chimney in Bletchingley, Surrey.

 

The skeleton of the bird has a small red cylinder attached to its foot which contains a mysterious cigarette paper sized coded message. The message is deemed so sensitive, that Codebreakers at GCHQ in Cheltenham are now frantically trying to decipher it.

 

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Historians believe the bird was almost certainly dispatched from Nazi-occupied France on June 6 1944, during the D-Day Invasions. Because of Churchill’s radio blackout, homing pigeons were taken on the D-Day invasion and released by Allied Forces to inform military Generals back on English shores how the operation was going.

 

Unlike other carrier pigeon messages, however, Mr Martin’s is written entirely in code.