Secret Pigeon Service

The second member of MI14(d)’s double act was L. H. F. ‘Sandy’ Sanderson. He had joined MI14 in January 1940 after being told he was too old to return to the Highland Division, with whom he had served in the First World War. However, the fact that he spoke excellent German would be put to good use. Lean and moustachioed, Sanderson had served as a business executive between the wars. ‘He looked like a friendly, alert terrier,’ recalled Noel Annan, who had been recruited into MI14 as a 24-year-old on New Year’s Day 1941. It can be surprising to realize the inexperience of the quickly expanding British intelligence world in the early years of war. But in some cases, it drew in people who brought their own skills and experience. That was true of Melland and Sanderson.

The MI14 team, whose initial five officers would grow to more than fifty, lived what Sanderson called a ‘troglodyte existence’ in the bowels of the War Office. This created something of a bunker mentality, especially as their job was to immerse themselves in their enemy’s thinking. They sometimes feared that their combination of dedication and humour might lead to confusion and even suspicion among those not part of the team. ‘We had in this large basement a great picture on the wall of Hitler with the inscription “Heil dem Führer”,’ Sanderson later recalled. ‘We often spoke German among ourselves for fun or practice and I wondered what a British passer-by in Whitehall would have thought, had he witnessed the scene.’

Amidst the humour and camaraderie, MI14’s work could not have been more serious. In six weeks of May and June 1940, France, Belgium and the Netherlands had all collapsed. There was now one crucial question to which everyone from Churchill down to the man on the street wanted the answer. Was Britain next? Were the Germans about to invade? This became the overriding mission for MI14 in its early days. Few tasks could have been more important. The fear was that the Germans would simply follow through and head over the Channel. At the end of May 1940, an urgent telegram went to coastal stations saying all defences had to be manned through the night since an invasion was considered imminent.

From June 1940, Sanderson was made responsible for all Army intelligence relating to the invasion of the UK. He was the only officer on the ‘Invasion Warning Committee’ who worked full time looking for ‘indicators’ – warning signs that meant the worst was about to begin. The committee met every day at noon at the Admiralty and at one o’clock would issue a single sheet of paper that summarized all the intelligence which had come in over the last twenty-four hours. It aimed to answer three simple questions: where, when and how would an invasion take place? That piece of paper would go up to the Chiefs of Staff and to the Prime Minister himself. The team would hold their breath for any outbursts from Churchill. Normally, by 3 p.m. they knew they could breathe out if nothing had been heard.

In June 1940, Churchill had prepared the public for the possibility that German troops might arrive over the Channel. ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds,’ he had promised a nervous but resolute nation. The message is now remembered as one of defiance, but it was also designed to prepare the public for what many then thought inevitable. Posters were put up for public consumption entitled ‘If the Invader comes – what to do and how to do it’. The advice was simply to stay put.

The last invasion of the country had been in 1066, and Sanderson felt the public had no idea what total war would be like as ravaging armies moved across the British countryside. ‘Confusion and bewilderment might have led to disaster,’ he believed. ‘We felt that if we held out for a week we should do well.’ For all Churchill’s talk, the secret British assessment was that if the Germans did manage to gain a foothold in Britain, there would be no chance of driving them back into the sea. The country would be lost. The Army was short of equipment and the Home Guard was not far off their depiction in Dad’s Army, relying on pitchforks and golf clubs as weapons. Sanderson compiled a top secret handbook to help defending British forces know what to expect (although it did not remain so very secret, since someone managed to leave a copy in a public lavatory in Dublin and an Irishman handed it to the German embassy). The Army prepared an emergency pigeon service which would provide communications for defensive lines if all other links between HQ and forward units were cut.

There were also farcical attempts to undermine German morale. English phrase books were dropped by air upon German troops in France containing what seem comical phrases such as ‘We are sea-sick – where is the basin?’, ‘See how briskly our Captain burns!’ and ‘Why is the Führer not coming with us?’ But there was little hiding the fact that the situation was desperate. If the Germans seized the moment, it might all be over.

On 16 July 1940, Hitler issued Directive No. 16, ordering his armed forces to prepare plans for Operation Sealion – the invasion. The German navy had been considering the challenge for close to a year. They reckoned if they could get an initial ten divisions, or about 110,000, men over a bridgehead they could drive west of London to cut the capital off, forcing its surrender. German spies reported back to the High Command details of coastal defences between Dover and Brighton. The Germans also planned their own deception operation – as the British would later manage – in which they would feed false radio traffic and intelligence to make it look as if a landing was about to take place in the north-east of England to send defending forces the wrong way. The German D-Day was initially planned for September 1940.

The job of Sanderson and the MI14 team was to provide warning. They had said an attack on the Low Countries was probable. But they had never spotted any signs that it was actually beginning. Britain had been completely blind to the attack on Norway as well. The fear that there would be no warning when it was Britain’s turn haunted the team at the War Office. They were convinced Germany had completed all the necessary arrangements.

The British had no spy inside Berlin who could tell them when the order was given, so Sanderson’s job was to scour whatever scraps of intelligence he could get his hands on to find any so-called indicators. For instance, the Germans would need barges and other vessels to carry troops across the Channel, and so any sign of increased activity at ports in Belgium and France might be a giveaway (there were plans to bomb the ports if sufficient warning was received). Every moment mattered and might make the difference between the country’s survival and its capitulation.

The sources Sanderson and MI14 could turn to for insights into German plans were scant. The intelligence picture was parlous. The pickings were so slim that at one point MI14 were instructed to see if an astrologer and water diviner, ‘Smokey Joe’ from Yorkshire, might be able to help. The Enigma decrypts from Bletchley Park would eventually transform understanding of Germany’s actions, but at the start of the war that effort was only just beginning and was yet to bear much fruit. In the dark early days there were only two real sources.

The first was age-old – human intelligence, courtesy of MI6. But their networks were an absolute mess at the start of the war. In November 1939, two MI6 officers had fallen into a Nazi trap and been captured at Venlo on the Dutch border. They were interrogated, with the result that much of the secret service’s work in Western Europe was compromised. The Nazi thrust through Belgium, the Netherlands and then France had compounded the disaster for MI6. No one had expected that those countries would collapse so quickly and so no one had prepared for the gathering of intelligence through underground networks under occupation. Almost all of MI6’s existing networks had been rolled up and it had to start virtually from scratch. Dansey and MI6 were all too aware of the pressure they were under to deliver – especially since they now had competition from the newly formed Special Operations Executive (SOE), which was making a lot of noise carrying out orders to ‘set Europe ablaze’.

The reputation of MI6 – fuelled by thriller writers even then – might have been fearsome, but the reality did not always match up. Brain power was often lacking, as the emphasis was on a kind of schoolboy cunning. Hundreds of reports from MI6 regularly passed through Sanderson’s tray in a single week, but many were likely to be rubbish. Some of the reporting Sanderson saw from MI6 was ‘quite ludicrous’, he thought. One report in 1940 suggested German troops in Norway were training to swim ashore wearing green watertight suits and had been heard practising on Scottish bagpipes. There was absolutely no reliable source in France reporting anything to MI6 until late November 1940.

Belgium, with its busy ports, was always likely to be a key staging post for an invasion of Britain. But MI14 was unconvinced by the reports that came in during the early months of the war. ‘Unfortunately, neither the agent in Belgium nor the agent in France inspire full confidence,’ the team noted of MI6’s offerings. ‘The agent in Belgium may be described as enthusiastic, as well as painstaking; his frequent reports are alarmist in tone (some of his prophecies have already been disproved), and he has provided very few identifications.’ Along with the French agent, the two ‘can only be classed as among the least reliable of our whole body of sources’.

A second source of intelligence for MI14 was new. Aerial reconnaissance was just emerging. From photographs taken at a height of 30,000 feet, Sanderson recalled, an interpreter in one case was able not only to see a football stadium on the ground but also provide a useful match commentary, reporting that during the interval of nine seconds between three photos, the team at the end closest to a gasworks was being severely pressed by the other side as the opposition moved the ball a good twenty-five yards forward. MI14’s specialist would use photos to count the number of barges at Channel ports and look for changes. But there were limits to what could be seen from the skies. Interpretation by analysts was often tricky and filled with ambiguity. Bad weather sometimes meant there were many days when no flights could be made. The irregular timing of reconnaissance missions also made it hard sometimes to know from the pictures obtained what was changing and why. Movements on land were harder to spot than those of ships, since they often took place at night. There was also the risk of reconnaissance planes being shot down.

Air reconnaissance and ‘special methods’ – a code for intercepts – might provide indications, but agents were the best means of reporting German intentions and identifying what the signs meant. There were at least fourteen ports that the Germans might use. Since August 1940, MI14 had been pressing MI6 forcibly to try and have agents placed in these ports with some means of communication, but so far it had failed to deliver. There were people in occupied Europe willing to help, and Dansey and MI6 were trying to drop or land agents into Europe to contact them, but the going was slow.

The biggest problem with human intelligence sources (other than the reliability of the source itself) was the delay before the information arrived in London. Getting agents in and out at the start of the war was difficult and dangerous. Radios were in their infancy and so intelligence often had to be smuggled out by hand, passing from courier to courier. This meant it could take months, and by the time it arrived an item of intelligence which might have once been valuable could be out of date. One MI6 officer complained that although he was receiving lots of reports from Belgium, the information ‘has been so old that they have become valueless’. The average time it took in the middle of the war for an agent’s report to reach MI6 was nearly a third of a year. This was frustrating to analysts in London hungry for intelligence to help inform their decisions and improve their understanding of the enemy’s capabilities.

In the summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe had begun its campaign to destroy Britain’s defences – first targeting the RAF itself and then, in what became known as the Blitz, the capital city and other targets. In Plymouth, Bert Woodman watched as incendiaries rained down on the city, anti-aircraft guns roared in response and tracers lit up the sky. As local pigeon supply officer and also an ARP warden, he found his pigeons in high demand, as police needed them in order to communicate when the telephone lines went down. The damage was fearful. ‘The bomber will always get through,’ pre-war Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had warned, and for a while it was feared he might be right. As war approached, desperate ideas had been thrown around to stop raids at night, when it was much harder to spot incoming bombers, one serious idea being to floodlight the whole of southern England. Technical intelligence on Germany’s weapons – especially in the air – was vital.

MI6 as a whole was sceptical about pigeons as a method of gathering intelligence, but one person who worked at its headquarters would become Columba’s greatest champion as he struggled to combat Germany’s aerial power. He was not a spy but a scientist. When war began, Reginald Jones – usually known as R. V. Jones – was one of those impatient new men who would rise fast because he understood how much warfare had changed. Jones, from a middle-class background in South London, had by the age of seventeen built a radio set that could pick up transmissions from Australia. He was ambitious and difficult to work with, but he knew what he was doing.

As fears of invasion gripped the country, Jones was sent from the Air Ministry to MI6 as a scientific adviser in its Air Branch. His mission was to detect as early as possible any new German weapon that might change the course of the war. Panic had gripped the intelligence community when Hitler made a speech claiming he had a secret weapon against which no defence could stand. Jones was ordered to find out what this mysterious weapon might be. MI6 files were crammed with wild rumours of ‘death rays’. One inventor had been paid by MI6 to see if he could live up to his promise of developing such a ray, but his invention proved only useful for preserving fruit. Eventually, Jones asked for a new translation of Hitler’s speech that had started all the fuss. He discovered that the context of the word for weapon (Waffe) had been mistranslated; what Hitler was referring to was his ‘Luftwaffe’ or air force, against which no one could prevail. His inquiries though had taught him two lessons. First, the spies barely understood science. And second, the Germans knew the war in the air would be pivotal and were far ahead in utilizing the latest technology.

Jones found the old hands at Bomber Command complacently arguing that the use of their standard flying instruments along with a quick glance at the sky was enough to find targets. Jones did not make himself popular when he asked why, if this was the case, so many British bombers flew into hills during practice flights. And when German bombers began their onslaught, they seemed uncannily accurate – at least compared to the British – in finding their targets. What followed became known as ‘the Battle of the Beams’. Through a series of clues and intelligence leads, Jones was able to work out that the Germans had discovered a successful way of guiding their bombers by means of radio beams, which the planes were able to follow. Aged just twenty-eight, Jones found himself briefing Churchill in the Cabinet Room, rebutting hostile questioning from those round the table who doubted his ideas (including his former tutor, who was the Prime Minister’s scientific adviser). But he won the argument, and Britain began developing counter-measures by broadcasting their own beams to confuse the Germans’ navigation. At the same time, the development of radar helped the RAF scramble to meet the German threat as the Luftwaffe began their campaign against Britain. It was the start of a scientific cat-and-mouse game that would last throughout the war.

Jones’s forte was solving intelligence puzzles. In his hand would be a jigsaw piece that looked curious – say, a report of some kind of unusual German activity. First he had to find other pieces that might fit alongside it. Jones described an intelligence analyst as like a human with various senses – eyes in the sky in the form of aerial reconnaissance, ears listening at Bletchley, hands that could reach out from the Secret Service. When the ears heard an unusual noise, then the eyes would turn towards the sound to find out more. Jones was hungry for every snippet of intelligence that might help him understand German technology but, as with MI14, the sources were scant. Pigeons would play their part.

The RAF’s victory in the Battle of Britain meant the summer of 1940 passed without invasion. The Luftwaffe had proved a fearsome weapon but not, as Hitler had claimed, one against which it was impossible to prevail. The German navy had insisted that air superiority was a vital prerequisite for invasion. Nor had there been enough time to prepare the right type of craft to transport the Wehrmacht over the Channel. But the leadership of MI14 remained convinced that invasion was likely in 1941.

Their job of detecting preparations was complicated by a German decision to keep up the constant menace of the possibility of invasion, so as to maintain pressure on Britain. This meant Germany was ensuring that activity was visible and that fake intelligence was passed to Britain through military attachés and other channels. As the spring of 1941 began, the fear that German landing craft would soon be arriving on the British coast was still real. Sources reported details of preparations such as the training of parachutists, and even the intensive manufacture of gas. By May 1941, MI14 were still seeing reports of a possible invasion, with June to August appearing to be the most likely time. Reports from Belgium talked of the training of troops wearing British uniforms and the possible construction of barges.

The reality was that Germany had backed away – but no one in London knew that for sure, partly because the intelligence picture remained so poor. Details of the German military in Belgium and the Netherlands remained ‘very unsatisfactory’, the Director of Military Intelligence told MI6 in February. ‘We have no confirmed evidence of the number of divisions located at any time in these countries … With invasion more than likely at any time after a month from now this is a most serious situation.’

From the spring of 1941, there was a new source for the analysts in London – Columba. For Brian Melland and Sandy Sanderson at MI14, Columba was not a source whose reports were passed on to them like the human intelligence of MI6. It was their own source. Rex Pearson looked after the logistics, but Melland and Sanderson were given the job of overseeing the operation. They were the ones who decided what questions would be asked in the questionnaire; in what areas the pigeons would be dropped; and who evaluated the material when it came back. They were able to handle the resulting intelligence direct. And – most remarkably – it was intelligence so fresh you could almost smell it. It would be in their hands within hours or days of someone observing something.

Two days after the initial drop in April, the phone rang at the War Office. On 10 April the first bird had made its way home to Kent. Columba message number one was phoned back to Melland and Sanderson at the War Office at 10.30 a.m.

The message was from a small village called Le Briel in the commune of Herzeele in northern France, not far from the Belgian border. It might have been short but it contained real information. ‘Pigeon found Wednesday 9th at 8am’, it began. ‘The German troop movements are always at night. There are 50 Germans in every Commune. There is a large munitions dump at Herzeele 200 metres from the Railway station. Yesterday, a convoy of Horse Artillery passed towards Dunkirk via Bambesque and another to Hasebrouck. The Bosches do not mention an invasion of England. Their morale is not too good. The RAF have never bombed these parts. They should come to bomb the brick works as the proprietor is a …’ The next word is written up as ‘illegible’ by the translator, but one wonders if that was actually to avoid the blushes caused by a cruder word the Frenchman might have used about a collaborator.

And then the message ended with one of those phrases that spoke of something in the spirit during those dark days in France. ‘I await your return, I am and remain a Frenchman.’ It was signed ‘ABCD34’. This was precisely the type of intelligence the team had been after. It was a good start, a relief for the team who had backed Columba.

That same day at 3 p.m. came message number two, this time unsigned, from Flanders. ‘There are only a few troops here and no petrol dumps, but yesterday some artillery arrived and the men say they are going to Yugoslavia where other troops and wagons are also moving.’ Columba was working, although it took another nine days for the next message to arrive.

The next drop took place on 6 May and was less successful. One message simply brought greetings from West Flanders. Below was the slightly forlorn comment: ‘Through a mishap this bird lost the questionnaire en route as did a number of others which have returned empty.’ Another from the same batch mentioned some aerodromes but, as would often be the case, provided too little detail to locate them.

Resistance is often portrayed as a stark choice. A choice between a life of danger on the run or one of collaboration. But in reality, it was a much broader spectrum. People could and did resist in small ways and large. That was evident from those who chose to take the risk to send a message back via Columba. Some of those early messages were short – ‘No troops here’ was all one said, without even saying even roughly where ‘here’ was. Others wrote just a few lines with a plea for help, while making clear the individual understood the risks involved. ‘Although this may cost me my head if one of the damned Boches saw me take the bird to my house, I will release the pigeon again with information for you,’ they wrote.

Most pigeons were found early in the morning by farmers tending their land. The messages sometimes showed daily rural life continuing as if war had barely intruded. ‘I found this pigeon on the 6th early in the morning while I was cutting clover for the animals and I have looked after it well and given it food and drink and am now anxious to know if the little animal reaches its loft … Hoping that I have possibly rendered you some service.’ Often the finders were illiterate or unsure of what to do and would confide in a local priest, schoolmaster or someone else whom they trusted. That was often when the best intelligence came.

In some cases the pigeons found their way to people already trying to organize some kind of resistance. In July 1941, a writer said he was part of a group of eleven patriots in a position to give important information. A parachutist who had recently been dropped above Carpiquet in Caen was safe and sound but the person who had sheltered him had been denounced and was going to be shot. ‘From now onwards we will take direct action against such person in striking down anyone who betrays,’ they wrote. Columba was revealing that there were many in Europe who wanted to do something – some were willing to send a short message back, while others were already looking for ways to do more. There was potential there to be tapped.

Food was one recurring theme. The Germans took around 70 per cent of pre-war food production and the results were severe. Messages spoke of hunger and starvation. One writer in May said the pork butchers had all been closed because all the pigs had been sent to Germany and there was precious little other meat. ‘If it lasts much longer we must starve,’ one Belgian wrote, ‘try to free us as quickly as possible.’ In Brussels a writer said that the rations for the previous month had been 5 kilos of potatoes plus 225 grams of bread per day: ‘too much to starve but not enough to live.’ Potatoes were being requisitioned to be sent to Germany, they wrote, so people would dig them up and eat them before they were ripe. There were complaints of some French peasants profiteering and selling on butter and eggs to the Germans at high prices. Also evident were signs of small acts of resistance. One writer in Flanders recorded that a local farmer had hung a dead hen outside with a written note on it saying he would rather his hens were dead than lay eggs for the Germans. (The same author ended his message with the phrase ‘I do hope this is not a German pigeon’.)