Encrypted WWII Carrier Pigeon Message Found in 1982

Peter Austin explored the history of British military pigeons and the encrypted messages they carried during World War II, explaining how the birds were trained to return home.

Military pigeon handlers kept the birds in a coop for several weeks until they accepted that location as their new home. …The birds were then sent to the front lines or other critical locations, and when the need arose, a message could be attached to an individual pigeon’s leg, and the pigeon would be released. All being well, it would instinctively fly straight back to its coop

By examining the mysterious 1982 discovery of a message-carrying pigeon’s skeletal remains in a chimney in Surrey, England, Austin looked into how wartime communication relied on these clever avian messengers.

In 1982, a Mr. David Martin of [Bletchingley], Surrey, had discovered the skeletal remains of a bird in his chimney whilst renovating his house. Not an unusual thing to find up a flue that hasn’t been cleared out for a while, I’ll grant you, except for one thing. Attached to the bird’s leg was a small canister containing a note onto which was written a coded message. These were the remains of a World War II carrier pigeon that had sadly never made it home.

A subsequent investigation identified two pigeon numbers on the message, indicating that two copies had been sent. Unfortunately, the message still cannot be decoded without the original cryptographic material, according to GCHQ, the successor to the Government Code and Cypher School, which was based at Bletchley Park during World War II.

Now despite the encryption, a few details were actually fairly clear from the outset. And these two lines at the bottom of the sheet tell us that two copies of the message had been sent out via a pair of different pigeons, presumably to double its chances of arriving. It’s thought that our chimney bird was the one known as NURP40TW194, meaning it was bred by the National Union of Racing Pigeons, hatched in 1940.