Undercover pigeon carrying WW2 secrets found

reply to post by thePharaoh


Since birds "hold funerals for their dead." Maybe it's a eulogy?

Originally posted by yubiaden
It reads as follows:

HITLE RHASO NLYGO TONEB
ALLGO RINGH ASTWO BUTVE
RYSMA LLHIM MLERI SSOME
WHATS IMLAR. BUTPO ORGOE
BBELS HASNO BALLS ATALL.






I kid.

The letter frequencies sure do not look like singular substitution. I've given up, but sure hope to find out what it says!

I love it. At first I just glanced at this and just kind of passed it by. Then my brain said, "Hey-wait a second..." and I had to do a double-take. Very funny, gave you a star.

This is a good story, great find, OP.
It sounds like the man in question is nervous about the code being broken. Was he a double agent???

Maybe figuring out who's signature is signed at the bottom might be useful in determining the level of secrecy encoded in the note. If its a high ranking officer or an officer assigned to a specific area of warfare it might help in tracking down where the pigeon was from and where he was going. Just a thought.

Right a eulogy, the first and last 5 letter series are AOAKN maybe that's the French word adieu "to God".
See if that pattern solves anywhere else.

Originally posted by nake13

Working on it at the moment!,however,if the alpha numeric groupings are dependant upon the corresponding enigma machine settings from the day of transmission,may take a while.as it would should the groupings be generated from an agents one time pad.

I don't think the Brits used Enigma to encode their own messages did they??

"Hilter wears a toupee"

reply to post by Aloysius the Gaul


No, but we do have the american / ally counterpart - the SIGABA.

Saw a better pic of the message at another source.

Looks like two bands are listed on the message. And there is a field showing 'number of copies sent' is 2.

So two birds and 2 copies of the message, I would suspect. The bird found seems to be 37 DK 76 because the '6' looks to be visible on the band.

NURP 37 DK 76

NURP 40 TW 194

Hopefully they got the other message copy in a timely manner during war time.

Small update.. new article, little new information.

Wait... this was found when?

The bird’s skeleton was discovered in 1982 at the 17th-century Surrey home of David Martin as he sought to renovate a chimney.

A Bird Skeleton, a Code and, Maybe, a Top Secret

Originally posted by ignorant_ape
either i am missing something - or this is the most over-hyped twaddle since "x factor "

They just cracked the code!
Heard the news on the radio at my Ham radio club

It basically says:
"Hitler was just joking" or something like that, experts think.

That last article seems to claim the bird the 40 TW 194 bird but the band shown, to me, looks like the other bird.

Originally posted by FraternitasSaturni
reply to post by Aloysius the Gaul

 

No, but we do have the american / ally counterpart - the SIGABA.

so they did - just reading about it all now. the British had Typex based on Enigma, but apparently the US never allowed anyone else to even see SIGABA in use

It seems silly to give a bird a medal for failing to deliver its message. It was stuck in a chimney! What, it stopped for a cup of tea and some crumpet.

Giving this failure a medal would be to disrespect all the other pigeons that did their duty without stopping to smell the soot! The rest of the war time pigeons will be chirping in their graves!

ROFL!

P

what the hell does a bird do with a medal anyway??

use it to pick up chicks??

(:

Little bird just had a bad case of Saint Nick's, obviously at the wrong time. Zee Germans... fly away! Wait, what? Must deliver package... oooh, I smell milk and cookies. Zee package! Hrrm.

Fast forward to many years later, some dude finds some bones in his chimney - with an important message.
Come on now, what's not more intriguing than that?



Anyway, to the point.
Said message didn't come from an Enigma, as that machine was used primarily by the Germans in WWII. At that time, any Enigma machines captured by the allied forces would be quickly removed from the area and used for study, so it's doubtful one would be used for encoding/decoding purposes in the field.

That said,
Going by that idea and assuming that this message did indeed come from an allied source, which by all intents it appears to be... then this cipher is either one of the two possibilities:

1. Machine made (mechanically)
2. Human made (brains and hands, paper and pencil)

My bets are on this cipher originating from an M-209. Yep that's what I'm going with, though no emulator available for my OS. (mac)

reply to post by thePharaoh


It looks like it could be a one-time pad code as an agent using carrier pigeons would not likely have an enigma like machine in the field. If this is the case, without the source key, it won't be broken.

Originally posted by MDDoxs

During World War II, the United Kingdom used about 250,000 homing pigeons. The Dickin Medal, the highest possible decoration for valor given to animals, was awarded to 32 pigeons, including the United States Army Pigeon Service's G.I. Joe and the Irish pigeon Paddy.

How heroic - just look at his visage, what pride, and bravery, seemingly aware of his great responsibility!

Looks like Obama right after he first became president of the United States, as if posing for a bust in his eternal memory, except in this case it's entirely authentic.

According to a friend of mine, who was there(WWII)...
It's a message from the French resistance to English intelligence, requesting a forged copy of the Fallen Madonna with Big Boobies by Van Klomp.
Signed Nighthawk!

Originally posted by khimbar

Originally posted by butcherguy
reply to post by thePharaoh

 

Now codebreakers at GCHQ in Cheltenham are frantically trying to decipher the code to find out what the message that cost the pigeon it's life had to say

I wonder why they are 'frantic'?

It's not like this info will change the outcome of WWII, unless of course it pertains to plans for a time machine!

'Can confirm Hitler had child STOP. Called Angela Dorothea STOP'

Unless it says that!

I think you are a few years late for that...

Angela Dorothea Merkel (pronounced [aŋˈɡeːla doʁoˈteːa ˈmɛʁkl̩] ( listen);[1] née Kasner;born 17 July 1954) is the Chancellor of Germany and party leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).[2] Merkel is the first woman to have become Chancellor of Germany.