The U.K. considered training pigeons to deliver weapons of mass destruction but changed its mind, government files show.
City pigeons
It considered using the birds to deliver biological weapons after World War II but decided the birds had outlived their usefulness in battle.
Homing pigeons carried vital messages in wartime, and the Pigeon Policy Committee of the day discussed training them to undertake ever more daring tasks.
“We can now train pigeons to ‘home’ to any object on the ground when air-released in the vicinity… Bacteria might be delivered accurately to a target by this means,” head of the Air Ministry Pigeon Section Lea Rayner said in a 1945 report.
“With the latest developments of explosives and bacterial science I suggest that this possibility should be closely investigated and watched.
“A thousand pigeons, each with a two ounce explosive capsule, landed at intervals on a specific target might be a seriously inconvenient surprise.”
But other committee members did not share Rayner’s enthusiasm and in 1948 the armed services said they had no further interest in pigeons.
The secret services, however, thought anti-British forces would continue to communicate with each other via pigeons and asked a civilian pigeon fancier to keep 100 birds for MI5 to use to prepare countermeasures.
But they abandoned that scheme in 1950.
The U.K. used about 250,000 pigeons to carry messages in World War II and 32 of the birds received the Dickin Medal, the highest award of valour for animals.
The birds were also used for aerial surveillance. At the beginning of the 20th century Bavaria’s pigeon fleet flew over Europe with cameras attached to their bodies that took a series of timed shots.
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