Operation Columba—The Secret Pigeon Service

“No Frederick Forsyth thriller could be as gripping as this real-life story” of British intelligence, brave WWII resisters, and 16,000 homing pigeons ( Daily Mail ). Between 1941 and 1944, Britain dropped sixteen thousand homing pigeons in an arc across Nazi-occupied Europe, from Bordeaux, France to Copenhagen, Denmark, as part of a spy operation code-named Columba. Returning to MI14, the secret government branch in charge of the “Special Pigeon Service,” the birds carried messages that offered