Secret Pigeon Service

This was how resistance often emerged in occupied Europe. Not as the result of activity from London on the part of British spies or exiles, but as groups of friends spontaneously coming together because they hated the German occupation and were desperate to do something about it. People would hang out in cafés, conspiring, starting to collect what they knew might be useful information about the enemy they could see around them, but often with no way of transmitting it to Britain. Now, suddenly, Columba presented some people with an opportunity. Could it act as a link to the nascent resistance?

And so, after a year of occupation, Raskin received the phone call from Arseen Debaillie. The next day he was there in the corner shop, in front of him the pigeon and the two sheets of rice paper, along with a patriotic appeal from Britain for help. He never had any doubts about what to do. Raskin, Hector Joye and the Debaillies made their decision. They would answer the call. They agreed amongst themselves that they would split up over the coming days to maximize the amount of information they could collect.

Arseen, the youngest of the brothers at the age of 27, nevertheless looked the oldest with his broad chubby face and glasses. He was the chief enthusiast and spy amongst the three brothers, although the family would work together as a team, its members supporting each other. Arseen spent the next few days driving along the coast and through the neighbourhoods around Bruges taking notes. Gabriel, thirty years old and the most anxious of the three brothers, would maintain the cover of working the family’s growing business – supplying animal feed at Roeselare. But he also went with his brother on a car trip to the coast, ostensibly for business but also to see what information they could gather.

Michel, the gangly pigeon fancier, tended to stay at home. The pigeon had arrived just a fortnight before his thirty-second birthday. As a child he had suffered from rheumatic heart fever, a condition which had left his heart damaged and required him to see a doctor every few weeks. His comfort, like those in Britain who had supported Columba, were his pigeons. Sundays were the days he liked to spend with his birds, often racing them at Lille. He kept them in a large, sideboard-sized coop on the ground floor of the building.

Hiding the British bird carried risks. Immediately after occupying Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France, the Germans imposed controls on pigeon owners that were progressively tightened. In Belgium, the country’s Fédération des Colombophiles had to keep a register of every pigeon, and the Germans checked this regularly. Pigeon keeping would later be forbidden entirely in a number of districts in Belgium and northern France, matching closely the places where the Columba birds were dropped. Sometimes messages brought back by Columba pigeons revealed the pain this brought to those who loved their birds. One message reported a plea to British owners: ‘Rear a couple of young pigeons for me. I have to kill all mine.’ But Michel and the family were willing to take the risk. It was not too hard for him to hide one special bird that was different from the others.

Marie and Margaret, the two sisters, had their role. They would maintain the appearance that everything was normal at the shop, chatting away with customers while looking out for any signs of trouble. Raskin would go back to Brussels and gather material from there. He would also ask friends whom he trusted for any information they had.

Hector Joye had the time – and the cover – to travel. He had been a soldier in the First World War but while in the trenches he had been gassed by the Germans and was now invalided. During that war he had met Louise Legros, who worked for the Red Cross. Her well-to-do family had been opposed to their relationship, but one person who had encouraged them was Raskin. Theirs had been the first marriage he had conducted as a priest. Louise’s career had taken off and she had been appointed the director of a girls’ school in Bruges. The family lived in comfort in a house that was part of the grand, Gothic school complex. A family picture shows Raskin enjoying a lunch in comfortable surroundings with the Joye family all around – his visits were always the occasion for a party, events that the Joye children enjoyed.

Handsome, with swept-back fine dark hair, round glasses and a trim moustache, Joye was another tinkerer with similar hobbies to Raskin. He had once been a carpenter, had designed a heating system for some nuns and had built incubators for the eggs of the pheasants he kept. His finest invention, his son would remember, was a special Christmas tree mobile containing a mechanism that enabled the angels to fly around. As a former military engineer, he was fascinated by maps and fortifications. Like the others, he was a devout Catholic for whom serving God, king and country were as one. Because of his health, Joye had permission to travel up to the coast to get fresh air. With little to do (not least in comparison to his wife), Joye was enthusiastic at the opportunity to turn his hand to espionage.

The amateur spies needed to work fast. The pigeon could not be kept too long. But they were determined to make the most of their opportunity. The amount they collected was astonishing. They fanned out to discover what they could on their travels. Joye was the busiest. There was a particularly interesting chateau near Bruges occupied by German troops, he knew, and airports, and ammunition warehouses and factories producing material for the Wehrmacht. He would see what he could find. Arseen knew about the Bruges–Ghent railway line and a local aerodrome near their house, and could give details about the local population. Marie and Gabriel provided specific information about a nearby chateau. Raskin meanwhile seemed to have a stack of information ready to go. Some of this came from the network of contacts he had built up in Brussels, many of whom were women he knew through the church, and who were beginning, if haphazardly, to gather details of what they observed. Raskin tapped these friends for information. One letter to ‘my good Father’ from those days provides information about a German storage building in Brussels, and includes a drawing as well as details of munitions.

After days of frantic gathering, all the precious intelligence had to be squeezed into the two tiny sheets of rice paper the British had supplied with the pigeon. Raskin’s experience as a cartographer in the First World War and from China as a calligrapher meant he would be the one to write it all up. The Debaillies had just the place for him to work. Their corner shop was the public face of the business, where customers could come in and out. But the building was more of a mini-complex. There was an adjoining house where the family lived. And then, round the back of the shop, past a small, closed interior courtyard, was a structure used as a warehouse to store all the goods. At the beginning of the war, fearing German bombs, the family had built a windowless concrete room towards the back. Relatives would send their children out to Lichtervelde because it was thought less dangerous, and this room was their hiding place. The room had a bed in it where the children could sleep at times of danger, and a strong lock. It was what you might today call a safe room. It was perfect for spy-work.

A niece called Rosa, the daughter of another sister, was only eleven but was staying with the family. She was fond of Raskin. He wrote a rhyme, ‘Doosje van Roosje’ (little Rosa’s little box), on her sewing box and taught her to play the accordion the family had given him as a gift. She remembers Raskin was there more than normal during those days of July 1941. Something different was happening, she knew, but no one told her what it was. That would be too risky, in case she talked. She does remember one of her aunts – Marie, she thinks – heading into the safe room more often than she normally did.

At a table underneath a light in the safe room, Raskin pored over the drawings and details that came in, the spider at the centre of a web of espionage. The drafts of the maps and notes have miraculously survived, pages and pages of them, different types of notepaper and different handwriting reflecting the many hands that contributed to the work. Space was tight. Everything had to fit on two pages, and that meant decisions. Like a ruthless sub-editor at a newspaper, Raskin scribbled out lines with black pen where he thought the detail was superfluous. A line about the Germans taking too many potatoes from people is crossed out, as are general complaints about poverty and life being expensive. That was not hard intelligence, he knew. The next line of a draft, though, stayed in for the moment – how the Germans went from carriage to carriage on trains taking food from people, sometimes even slurping raw eggs. Also retained was a line about how people were taking the copper of phone cables between Bruges and Ghent. A line about how people longed for the English and would point out the blackshirts was scribbled out. Raskin was careful to stick to the exam question – answering the specific queries that the pigeon had carried to them and not inserting extraneous information.

The pigeon sat just round the corner at the ready. For Raskin, it may have represented something more than just a messenger. The pigeon – referred to by its proper name, the dove – has a powerful symbolic role in Christianity. When Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, ‘the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”’ This dove had come to Belgium from Britain; but perhaps, for Raskin, it had come spiritually as well as literally from above. Faith, duty and spying were all intertwined in the priest’s mind.

Material was still coming in as he wrote. The Germans were strengthening their positions on the coast, fearing an English attack. A new division had been installed and there was extensive activity from planes as well as lorries bringing in fuel. Advice was offered as well – if the British were planning to invade then they should avoid delay in moving through the country or the Germans would take all the able-bodied men to Germany. No one had any idea that it would take three long years for the British to arrive.

Finally, he was ready. Raskin took his pen and began the final draft, working through the night of 11 July. He sat at the desk with a magnifying glass to ensure he could cram in as much detail as possible on the tiny sheets of paper. The quill of his pen was precise. Every space would be put to use. A last-minute item of intelligence came in on the morning of 12 July at five minutes to eight. Joye had come through Bruges railway station and had seen a ground air defence post moved. That detail was added in the corner.

Raskin finished with a flourish and a special touch. ‘Our seal!’ he wrote in the bottom corner, adding a symbol which he intended to be a unique identifier of the group and its future messages. It was a circle with a curly L sitting in a V, one side of the V becoming either a cross or a sword, depending on how you interpreted it. Their name was Leopold Vindictive.

There was no more space. The message was ready to fly. The two pieces of rice paper were carefully folded up and placed inside the green cylinder that had come with the pigeon. The cylinder was slotted into the ring around the pigeon’s feet and twisted to secure it.

The group then did something extraordinary, an act contrary to every rule of spycraft. They picked up their family camera and took pictures of the pigeon, and of the message being pushed into the green cylinder. But then, even more extraordinarily, the three brothers and two sisters stood for a family portrait in the inner courtyard. Marie and Margaret are in their aprons, Michel and Gabriel in working shirts with braces. Arseen looks somewhat smarter. At first sight, it could be any other family picture, but look more closely and you can see that Marie, the elder sister, is holding a resistance newspaper, Margaret is holding what looks like a white sheet – the parachute. Arseen holds a pencil, Gabriel the British intelligence questionnaire, and Michel proudly clutches the pigeon. And in front of them, propped against a table with a white tablecloth, is a chalkboard – probably the board that they would normally use to display the latest fruit and vegetable prices for shoppers. But this time, on the board are written the dates of the bird’s arrival and departure, its ring number and the phrase ‘Via Engeland’ to mark its destination. And at the top are three capital V’s – the symbol of Victory, which earlier that year the BBC had called on people to daub on walls as a symbol of defiance.

Taking the photos was a mad, risky and amateurish thing to do, and yet it spoke of something that is impossible to criticize – a deep pride in their work of resistance. Raskin is not in the picture, most likely because he was on the other side of the camera taking it.

There was one final picture to be taken. Michel climbed up onto the roof, where there was an oat-attic. This was the place from which he normally released his pigeons, and so it may have looked less suspicious than it sounds to anyone watching him. Up there he opened his cupped hands and released the bird; a picture captures the precise moment. At 8.15 a.m. the bird rose high into the sky and circled for a few moments to get its bearings. Then it made for the Channel and for England. In seven hours’ time it would have escaped Nazi-occupied Europe and be home in suburban Ipswich.

CHAPTER FOUR

Arrival

It took thirty-six hours from Michel’s release of the pigeon on the roof in Lichtervelde for Raskin’s elegant message to reach the hands of British intelligence. The pigeon, which had left Britain on 5 July and was released from Belgium at 8.15 a.m. on 12 July, flew over the English Channel and was back at its loft in suburban Ipswich – about ten miles from the coast – by 3.30 that afternoon. All it knew was that it was home.

Loft owners had been ordered to keep a sharp eye out for the return of a bird, even though they were told nothing of its mission. As soon as a pigeon arrived, they were to take off the Bakelite cylinder, which was about the size of a pen top, attached to its legs. Well-to-do owners might have their own phone and be able to call the special number. But otherwise a child might be sent on a bike with the cylinder to the local pigeon supply officer, who would call in the delivery. Then they would wait. In some cases the roar of a motorcycle dispatch rider could be heard outside in just twenty minutes. The cylinder would be handed over and rushed to London. The orders were strict – cylinders were never to be opened by anyone until they arrived at the War Office. This was partly because the contents were secret, but more so because they were often written in pencil and folded up so tight that they had to be carefully extracted without being ripped or smudged. If that happened, someone would have risked his or her life for nothing.

On the morning of 13 July, the message arrived in London at Room 25 of the War Office. Sanderson and Melland were both on duty that day and early in the war they opened the messages themselves. ‘I well remember the fascination of opening these little tubes and unwinding the thin slips of paper which they contained,’ Melland later said. When the pigeon service first began, it was feared that the tiny cylinders might be booby-trapped. And so Melland and Sanderson would open them with a sheet of protective glass in front of their faces in order to guard against any ‘tricks’. Fortunately, they never had a cylinder explode in their face (although Bert Woodman in Plymouth said he heard that at least one cylinder had been found with explosives). Once a cylinder was open, they would translate the message into English, enter its details in a log book and then distribute the information round other departments.

Both men would always remember that day in July. There was nothing to suggest that message number 37 would be anything different from the other thirty-six they had opened in the previous three months. Melland pulled the first thin sheet of paper, nine inches square, out of the canister. The writing on it was tiny. But the closer he looked, the more astonished he was. Decades later, when Sanderson reflected on the intelligence that he had seen, he would remember this as the ‘most exciting and romantic’ of all the reports that passed through his hands.

Melland and Sanderson realized instantly that this was something different, something special. The writing spread across the two pages was small but perfectly formed, the accompanying maps expertly drawn. It felt as if every single millimetre of the two sheets had been used to cram in as many words as possible.

The author of the message had helpfully recommended placing the sheets against a dark paper and using a magnifying glass after cutting it up and reassembling it so that it was all in the right order. As the team set about typing out a report, they found that the transcription came to 5,000 words and took up twelve pages. And what was in those pages was gold dust.

‘This message is from Leopold Vindictive 200’, it began in English, although the bulk was in French. It was the specificity that was so remarkable, comprising precisely the type of intelligence the team had dreamed of when they started Columba. The text referred to maps and specific symbols employed to indicate hidden German emplacements and munitions depots. An old submarine base was now being used to repair boats and was carefully concealed by shrubs and buildings. Bombs would need to fall over an area of 200 by 300 metres to destroy it, Leopold Vindictive noted. The writers had explained when to attack to avoid civilian casualties. The Shell depot near Neder-over-Heembeek should be bombed ‘without delay’ – a map indicated exactly where the key parts of the oil facility lay. Another important fuel dump was protected by concrete and so would need larger bombs. ‘At any price spare the town of Bruges,’ they had written with a care for the architectural beauty of the city.

There were also precise battle damage assessments of recent British raids in Brussels. ‘Our congratulations to the airmen who carried out the bombardment in the Rue de Birmingham on Thursday 26th June and the Rue de l’Intendant on Thursday 10th July. They were marvellous hits which filled the whole city with admiration.’ The first bomb had wiped out a building where parachutes were made while hardly damaging neighbouring houses. Nine Germans were killed, while fifteen civilians had been only slightly wounded. The second had taken out a crucial German factory. More targets were suggested – a palace inhabited by hundreds of Germans, the location of an officers’ club, another building ‘swarming’ with Germans day and night, a garage which only worked on German vehicles, other barracks. The location of a wireless jammer opposite a hotel was also given. Brussels aerodrome should be targeted, but the writers warned that most of the structures around it were actually dummies. Nearly a dozen other factories in the region were also named as playing a role in the German war effort.

In the case of one telephone exchange, the team revealed it was guarded night and day with a machine-gun post in fear of a British attack by parachutists. The Germans were supposed to call the local Civil Guard for help in the event of an attack, but Leopold Vindictive revealed that the guards were in fact quite hostile, suggesting they might take their time to arrive. ‘I have this from a man on the spot,’ they wrote.

There were also assorted items of intelligence about daily life. Dropping propaganda leaflets was fine, but little packets of chocolate should be dropped with them to show there was no lack of food in England, they recommended. The impact of British bombers and the recent German attack on Russia had worried many of the local ‘black-shirt nationalists’ who supported the Nazis, and many had begun deserting. The blackshirts trained every Sunday morning between ten and twelve at one set of barracks. Bombing them, it was suggested, would discourage any more would-be recruits, and there was no anti-aircraft gun for several kilometres around the site. The Germans had been trying to recruit locals to fight the Russians, claiming it was a crusade of Christianity; leaflets should be dropped to say that those who joined would be held accountable.

Sanderson in particular found message 37 invaluable. The most significant section of the message answered the question that haunted his waking hours – what were the invasion plans? Belgium was seen as a launching point, with barges potentially heading out from Ostend, Antwerp and other ports. Britain had its own plan to carry out a sabotage mission (codenamed Claribel) to sink barges, damage rail lines and cut power and communications once the first signs of invasion were spotted, although the department tasked with carrying this out had to acknowledge in the spring of 1941 that it had no contact with or knowledge of any Belgian resistance organization and its attempts to send in a radio operator to make contact had failed.

Leopold Vindictive had real information. A map showed the chateau of Tillegem near Bruges and revealed that it was the central communications installation for German High Command in the whole sector. The picturesque medieval chateau, surrounded by a moat, had been undergoing work for four months and Leopold Vindictive were sure it was to be used by an admiral as a base for the invasion of England. It was nearly – but not quite – ready, they reported. One hundred and fifty special technical staff used the latest radio apparatus from Siemens. Nobody (the word was underlined by the writer) was admitted to the chateau except for the chiefs and the specialists. Anybody approaching would be shot without challenge.

The site’s true purpose and importance had been unknown to anyone in Britain. If an invasion appeared imminent, it could now be targeted by bombers or even by commandos; equally, it would need to be dealt with if Britain wanted to launch its own attack on the Belgian coast. With that in mind, Leopold Vindictive described how the crucial junction for the communication cables was outside the building in concrete shelters nine metres underground, protected with reinforced steel bars. An 11,000-volt current was provided by a cable lying along the road. Further specific details were supplied of the cables and of the antennae, which sat fifty metres back. In order to identify this from the air, the writer explained, a photograph could be taken between eight and ten in the morning from a particular direction he marked on the map. This would make the complex easier to spot. Usefully, it was pointed out which anti-aircraft positions had not yet had their guns installed. In all, fifty separate locations used by the Nazis were detailed; in some cases the paper gave more than a dozen items of note about an individual position.

The professionalism of whoever sent the message was obvious. It asked for a response that would indicate, by referring to letters ascribed to different sections, what in the enclosed information was unknown to the British, and in which areas more information was still wanted. The information, the author promised, was ‘thoroughly reliable’.

But who could have produced such treasures? And could they really be trusted? There was no name other than the codename, and nothing else was known except that the team consisted of a staff of three principals and several secondary agents. But to establish his bona fides, the author did offer an unusual means of verification. ‘Identify me as follows – I am the bearded military chaplain who shook hands with Admiral Keyes on the morning of May 27th 1940 at 7.30 a.m. Ask the Admiral please where he was exactly at that moment with my most respectful greetings.’

Admiral Roger Keyes was quickly approached by Military Intelligence. He would have remembered the meeting with the chaplain well. It was a day he would never forget. Keyes was close to King Leopold of Belgium, a friendship forged in the First World War when the sailor had led the Dover Patrol and the Belgian royal family frequently crossed the Channel. Leopold, then a boy, had attended Eton during term time, occasionally lunching with Britain’s royal family, but returning to serve on the front line during vacations. His father had stayed in Belgium as king during the war, a decision popular in the country.