Undercover pigeon carrying WW2 secrets found

Fun post, a lot better sport than finding an unexploded 250 kilo bomb leftover from WWII in ones chimney.

Another famous wartime homing pigeon..

Cher Ami

Cher Ami (French for "dear friend", in the masculine) was a registered Black Check Cock homing pigeon which had been donated by the pigeon fanciers of Britain for use by the U.S. Army Signal Corps in France during World War I and had been trained by American pigeoneers. It helped save the Lost Battalion of the 77th Division in the battle of the Argonne, October 1918....

...As Cher Ami tried to fly back home, the Germans saw him rising out of the brush and opened fire. For several moments, Cher Ami flew with bullets zipping through the air all around him.

Cher Ami was eventually shot down but miraculously managed to take flight again. He arrived back at his loft at division headquarters 25 miles to the rear in just 65 minutes, helping to save the lives of the 194 survivors. In this last mission, Cher Ami delivered the message despite having been shot through the breast, blinded in one eye, covered in blood and with a leg hanging only by a tendon.

Cher Ami became the hero of the 77th Infantry Division. Army medics worked long and hard to save his life. They were unable to save his leg, so they carved a small wooden one for him.

When he recovered enough to travel, the little one-legged hero was put on a boat to the United States, with General John J. Pershing personally seeing Cher Ami off as he departed France.

Maybe an OSS agent discovered a crazy Nazi secret,he tried to send a message but it didnt work? Very possible. Of course there could be many other reasons.

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

Why do you think it is one of the top-flagged posts currently? What else could explain it? Before this there was the one about supposed bigfoot/yeti hair being analyzed.

That's the problem here at ATS, there is some much noise made my the nut heads that it is hard to find the genuinely interesting stories.

reply to post by MrInquisitive


Perhaps, in amongst the doom and gloom and the rape of society by big business and the Governments there are these lighter pieces that help the average ATSer to relieve a little stress and consider small things.

We all need a break and this is why these threads get S&Fed.

Pretty hard to give S&F when someone is pointing out that you are about to be roasted alive by bankers and politicians wielding death rays..

P

the nazis have a base at south pole
leaving earth to the moon !
we are all doomed

thats the message by the way , was up all night cracking it !

Ya know... as intriguing as this is, and it is a cool story (even if journalists skew facts to make a 'breaking news' report...) I have to wonder:
Surely they have cracked the code. Think about it, they are an intelligence agency, Hitler and his posse were vanquished, so we have a lot of their intelligence doc's as well... we didn't just throw that all away did we: "No, Jones, burn the blighter; burn the code books! The Great War is won!"
Me no think so... I think they know what it says.
Whether the information is sensitive once cracked is up in the air I suppose.
So, two things:
They couldn't care to let us know,
or, they feel we'll never find out. (It was found by the owner in 1982)

Why wouldn't they know what it says?

That pigeon isn't dead, it's simply pining for the Fjjords .........

reply to post by paulmac


PINNING FOR THE FJORDS!! what talk is that!

reply to post by paulmac


LOL!! Now I'm gonna have to dig through the garage looking for my Monty Python collection....

Originally posted by paulmac
That pigeon isn't dead, it's simply pining for the Fjjords .........

Pining for the fjords? my good man that there pigeon is gorn,it is pushing up the daisies,it has ceased to be, it is an ex pigeon.

Originally posted by Aloysius the Gaul

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??

That's true,but maybe the code was intercepted from an enigma coded transcription by the British agent(assuming that it was a British agent) and sent in its encrypted form?Could also have come from a German double agent who had access to enigma transcriptions.

I'm not understanding why The New York Times' article is the only one I can find referencing 1982 as the year the pigeon carcass was discovered. Everything else I find suggests it was recent. What am I missing here? The NYT article even goes into details that I can't find elsewhere, e.g.

The bird’s skeleton was discovered in 1982 at the 17th-century Surrey home of David Martin as he sought to renovate a chimney. Amid a cascade of pigeon bones, “down came the leg with the red capsule on,” he said in one of many interviews he has given in recent days.

[...]

But at first, said Mr. Martin, now 74, and a retired probation officer, no one seemed interested in what might well be a gripping yarn of feathered valor. At the time, the Falklands War was under way. The code-breakers were too busy to worry about pigeon bones. “It wasn’t a story then,” he said in a telephone interview on Thursday. Only the community of people who love pigeons — including some who race the birds and are schooled in their wartime history — took an interest and began a campaign over many years to get officials to pay attention. Two years ago, Mr. Martin and his wife, Ann, finally found a taker for a copy of the message: Bletchley Park, which is now a museum. Over time, curators there became convinced of the message’s uniqueness — other pigeon files used little or no code. And so the original, a tiny message scribbled on a standard military form, was sent on to GCHQ to take a look. By Thursday, the bird’s destiny was the subject of a bona fide news media happening. As Mr. Martin spoke on the telephone to one reporter, a photographer from another news media outlet was transmitting images from his yard. At Bletchley Park, Mr. Hill could not come to the phone immediately because he was giving a television interview.

Source

Seriously, what am I missing? I admit to being severely sleep-deprived with a preference for DuckDuckGo over Google but I checked ABC, The Daily Mail, The Huffington Post (which even quotes "was cleaning out his chimney recently"), The Telegraph, The Independent and even the New York Times-linked Bletchley Park article and not one mentions that it was a long-ago discovery. Does the NYT have an exclusive or are they just reeeally creative?

Originally posted by nake13

Originally posted by paulmac
That pigeon isn't dead, it's simply pining for the Fjjords .........

Pining for the fjords? my good man that there pigeon is gorn,it is pushing up the daisies,it has ceased to be, it is an ex pigeon.

No no he's not dead 'e's uh,............. Resting !

Sounds like it could be the Navajo code talkers

KNOWN AS NAVAJO CODE TALKERS, they were young Navajo men who transmitted secret communications on the battlefields of WWII. At a time when America's best cryptographers were falling short, these modest sheepherders and farmers were able to fashion the most ingenious and successful code in military history. They drew upon their proud warrior tradition to brave the dense jungles of Guadalcanal and the exposed beachheads of Iwo Jima. Serving with distinction in every major engagement of the Pacific theater from 1942-1945, their unbreakable code played a pivotal role in saving countless lives and hastening the war's end.

IT IS THE ONLY UNBROKEN CODE in modern military history. It baffled the Japanese forces of WWII. It was even indecipherable to a Navajo soldier taken prisoner and tortured on Bataan. In fact, during test evaluations, Marine cryptologists said they couldn't even transcribe the language, much less decode it.

www.navajocodetalkers.org...

Did IQ's just drop sharply while I was away? (Internet points for the person who knows where that comes from)

Code was used throughout the second world war, and it's not as simple as just looking in a book. There were differing levels of secrecy, with some cyphers restricted. Even now there will be some cyphers that are not common knowledge.

Deciphering this would have taken a key, and a key is not something you can just "work out" through looking at it.

No one here is going to be able to crack that code.

Don't you think it would have been a little stupid to use a code that could be deciphered by a layman? This was intended to remain secret from Nazis and their sympathizers, does anyone here really think that they are more intelligent than an entire WW2 code-breaking department?

I also think the reporting on this is a little pathetic. This is not urgent, obviously. No one is "frantic" about it - unless they have existing intel that Hitler built a time machine and jumped ahead to Dec 1st 2012 when he was about to be captured.

It's a fascinating story, because it connects us to what happened, and it reminds us of what people achieved back then to defeat the Nazis. This was back in a time when the British people were genuinely clever, imaginative and resourceful.

It will be interesting to see what it says, and whether that information would change our view. For all we know it could be stating that Hitler is about to surrender, or that they plan to invade the UK, or that they've developed a weapon that we then never witnessed... there are countless possibilities. Of course, it could also say "please send more toilet paper"

reply to post by detachedindividual


well wouldnt the code be published somewhere.....by now.

the birds only return home.....so this is a message returning from the front lines....
they were carried by airmen....so this could be coordinates for a target..or news about a target

but i do think that we can break it....someone somewhere would of discussed it...(online/published).we can then pick up the residual elements...then use our communal ATS brain...to come up with some ideas

also...the pigeon handlers THEMSELVES are still alive
www.454-459squadrons.org.au...

This morning it was in the news here in the Netherlands, I was also very fascinated about this story. There should be a possibility to decrypt/decode the message on the paper but I haven't found a better/sharper picture that shows all the characters on the small paper. So if someone is able to get a better picture then our options to decode it will rise.

by the way, I also found this document but I'm not sure if this is going to help to decode the message. I can't use it, maybe someone else can?

I cant but not think there is some recruiting going on with this message.

Shortage of cryptoanalysists?

reply to post by GPegel

See yubiadens post on page 2.
It contains a text list of the 5 letter groups.