Tag Archives: Book review

Arts, Books, Britain, History, Second World War

Book Review: ‘Secret Pigeon Service’

REVIEW

Intro: How our intrepid pigeons went to war to send back Nazi plans to Churchill – and why, despite top brass doubters, dropping them behind enemy lines wasn’t so bird-brained after all.

GORDON COREA tells a true story that is likely to make you gasp on every page. Once this book has been read you’ll never look at a pigeon disdainfully again. In fact, you might even feel the urge to go straight to Trafalgar Square to pay homage to the species. Some readers might find themselves muttering, again and again, the World War II expression: ‘It’s too fantastic.’

This is the story of the bravery and single-mindedness of both humans and pigeons. It throws light on all kind of facets of World War II, from the realities of life inside occupied Europe and the canny evils of the Nazi regime, to the well-meaning, but blundering, chaos of the British intelligence system, and the generosity and charm of the British pigeon-fancying fraternity.

The most astonishing thing of all, on which the story is based, is that homing pigeons (columba livia, to use their Latin name) can fly back to their home loft in any suburban location, from an unknown field in the middle of Belgium, in six-and-a-half hours. Exactly how they find their way is still a bit of a mystery to scientists.

But when reading this book, you’re constantly thinking about what it must be like to be a pigeon on its own in a gale above the churning North Sea, miles from both shores. It knows only that it must get home and has no idea that it’s carrying vital intelligence written on a tiny square of rice paper rolled up inside a cylinder attached to its ankle.

Pigeons had been used in warfare before – they were sent out in balloons during the Siege of Paris, and in World War I they flew 15 or 20 miles across the front lines.

But this cross-Channel scheme was of a whole new order. It needed an eccentric to dream up such a plan, and in this case the visionary eccentric was an alcoholic veteran spy called Rex Pearson, who was at a loose end after being sacked from his intelligence job in Switzerland.

He saw the potential of dropping pigeons in cages, with tiny parachutes, from planes flying 30,000 feet above gardens in occupied Belgium and Holland.

The cages would contain a questionnaire in Dutch, Flemish and French, a pencil, and a small bag of pigeon feed. MI6 were sceptical of the idea, seeing this as an ‘outmoded’ method of warfare. As Corera punningly quips: ‘Pigeons were low down the pecking order of intelligence requirements.’

 

BUT Pearson persisted, and the Army eventually gave permission for a small ‘Special Section (Carrier Pigeon)’ team to start Operation Columba from the bowels of the War Office, where the eccentrics in charge had a ‘Heil den Fuhrer!’ poster of Hitler on the wall, for reasons of dark humour it can only be assumed.

No Frederick Forsyth thriller could be as gripping as this real-life story. With his pigeon-like instinct for homing in on an individual human story, the author leads us to a small farmhouse deep inside occupied Belgium, and to the Debaillie family. In July 1941, they found one of the Columba’s parachuted pigeons in their back garden.

What should they do? If they were caught sending messages to Britain, their lives would be in danger.

Corera utilises ‘parable of the sower’ cadences to sum up what happened to dropped pigeons: some were lost in planes shot down; some were handed in to the police, some fell straight into enemy hands, some were eaten by hungry locals, and some were taken by hawks.

Every now and then, however, a pigeon came into the hands of true ‘patriots’ willing to take the risk of sending a message back to Britain. It’s painful to relate the stark statistic that out of 16,554 birds dropped between 1941 and 1944, only one in ten made it home.

But this one did. The message, on both sides of a four-inch-square piece of rice paper, is reproduced in the book. It was known as ‘Message 37’, sent by the Debaillie family’s small band of patriots who called themselves ‘Leopold Vindictive’.

SPS3

Carrier pigeons were trained by soldiers to send messages back home.

This message was a thing of such lovingly detailed beauty, revealing the exact positions of German military installations, that it was shown to Winston Churchill, who hailed it as symbolic of the spirit of resistance alive inside occupied Europe.

The man who created the message was a bearded priest called Father Joseph Raskin who, as the book progresses, becomes more and more of a saint – almost a Dietrich Bonhoeffer figure.

Corera (a fully trained investigative journalist) visited and interviewed the descendants of the Debaillie family, and we can see a photograph of them holding the pigeon just before they released it with its message attached.

They knew the pigeon arrived safely because, listening illegally to their radio set, they heard the BBC’s coded message: ‘Leopold Vindictive, the key fits the lock, and the bird is in the lion’s cage.’

If only the whole book were a catalogue of mini-successes like that one. But thanks to a mixture of human error, spies who lost heart, and the refusal of rival sections of the British intelligence service to speak to one another, the story all too soon turns into one of missed opportunities and failed missions.

Raskin was desperate to repeat this message-sending, but he waited in vain for more pigeons.

Some did land, but they were too far away to be found.

Raskin’s desperation was so acute that he took many risks, joining up with other Belgian spy networks so that when the Germans arrested one spy they were easily able to ‘roll up’ the whole network – including Raskin.

The scene where this happens makes almost unbearable reading. Nevertheless, Operation Columba grew in stature as the war went on, and MI6 grudgingly admitted how useful homing pigeons could be. Hundreds of Allied lives were saved by pigeon-borne intelligence.

British pigeon-fanciers from Ipswich to Plymouth who gave up their pigeons for war use were heroes, but the pigeons were the greatest heroes of all.

Take 11-month-old Billy, for instance, who, when his bomber crew crash-landed in France in 1942, delivered his message the next day in a state of collapse. He had flown through a gale-driven snowstorm back to the RAF station in Lincolnshire.

As well as human double-agents, there were pigeon double-agents. Germans put their pigeons into Columba cages so that message intended for London found their way to a German loft, thus exposing ‘traitors’.

Patriots became terrified of ‘Gestapo pigeons’ posing as British birds. Germans, in turn, became terrified of British ‘phoney pigeons’ disguised as German pigeons, with German rings on them.

These would be sent to Britain with a German agent and then fly home to their British loft, bearing useful intelligence.

And wait for the American pigeons, who started arriving in ships in 1942. Handsome well-fed American pigeons started cross-breeding with scrawnier British pigeons, just as handsome GIs did with British girls.

The Americans developed the useful ‘pigeon bra’, which made it easier for soldiers parachuted into foreign fields to carry birds on their person.

For an agent parachuting into occupied Europe, it was a great comfort to release your pigeon and watch it fly off homewards with a message that you’d landed safely.

Corera’s gripping book is an intoxicating mixture of comedy and high seriousness.

A warning: it contains a moment of horrific Nazi violence, or, as they would call it, ‘justice’, that you won’t forget.

– Secret Pigeon Service by Gordon Corera is published by William Collins for £20

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Books, Britain, Government, History, Military, Russia

Book Review: The Red Atlas

The Red Atlas

The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World

Intro: As the Head of The British Army predicts that Russia may start a war, a new book reveals they’ve had detailed maps of our secret military complexes for decades

FOLLOWING the events such as the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917, and the execution of the Tsar and the imperial family, the Russian Revolution ushered in a world of horror and mass death.

It was Stalin, the then General Secretary of the Communist Party, who personally signed-off the lists of execution quotas. He had avidly read and annotated torture reports and was responsible for sanctioning what was to befall. In 1937 and 1938 alone, more than 681,000 people received a bullet in the back of the neck.

Terror was used by the KGB and its forerunner, the NKVD (the secret police), to ensure obedience and to suppress discussion and dissent. As capitalism was overthrown, businesses were nationalised, private property was confiscated, and the mass media was controlled.

Government regulations and bureaucracy intensified, the dictatorship of the proletariat was imposed, and Stalin’s purges eliminated political rivals, scholars, artists, and anyone else who was of mild intelligence. In the Ukraine, food, grain and livestock were requisitioned and some 4 million people were deliberately starved – implemented through an organised famine, or genocide, to punish “anti-party elements and saboteurs”.

Had NATO not kept them the other side of the Iron Curtain, it was Stalin and his successors’ resolute ambition and intention to have brought their Marxist ideology to London.

 

PART of the enormous and secret infrastructure of the Cold War involved the Soviets creating amazingly detailed maps – useful for invading armies and occupiers – which were designed and intended to support civil administrators when the “entire world is communist”.

On the evidence of their maps of Britain they imagined they could one day possess, the authors write that the “Russians didn’t miss much”.

Using high-altitude aircraft, satellite imagery and missiles bearing reconnaissance cameras, the Russians plotted every inch of our islands, continually revising and redrawing the maps “to keep up with the transformation landscapes”.

The Russians also deployed people on the ground, quietly walking down the streets, looking. This was enacted through Le Carre-esque like double-agents who relayed back to Moscow details of factories, including their production outputs and ownership. The size and shape of buildings were of great interest. Every high-rise and low-rise in Southampton, for example, was known by the enemy.

The utilities, industries and transport systems were fully documented and recorded – the width of roads, the height and dimension of bridges, their load capacity and construction materials used. Local terrain was scrutinised – forests, the types of trees, height, girth and spacing. Railway signals, timetables, and even disused tracks were drawn, in case they could be reinstated.

The Russians were also very keen on marine areas and navigable rivers. They marked spot depths, dredged canals and tidal ranges. The water speed and flow at estuaries fascinated them: the Mersey at Liverpool, the Forth at Edinburgh, and the Medway at Rochester and Chatham. In 1919, all mapping activities were put under state supervision by Lenin.

It was Stalin, however, who created the Military Topographic Directorate of the General Staff of the Soviet Army. It was a massive secret enterprise involving thousands of people. Up to 2 million maps were made of the West, which were kept under armed guard in a series of 25 humidity-controlled vaults.

Even within the Soviet hierarchy, military officers who were required to use maps for training and exercises had no idea of the extent and scope of Stalin’s project. Every map and chart had to be returned to the depot after use.

It is no quip to suggest that the Russians knew more about Britain than the average British citizen. On our own Ordnance Survey maps, for instance, there are frequent blanks, known as security deletions. Sensitive information is excluded from public view.

With the help of their spies and saboteurs, however, the Kremlin knew all about our secret military installations and complexes. In their Red Atlas they drew every hut and barrack at the Royal Naval dockyard at Pembroke, an RAF flying boat base.

They knew the berth length and channel depth at Chatham, where submarines were built and maintained. They could have found their way blindfolded around the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Burghfield, near Reading, where nuclear warheads are constructed. Even Google Maps omitted this place until recently.

John Davies and Alexander J. Kent grow melancholic and pensive as they recount the story of the Soviet cartographic enterprise. That story has never been told until now. The maps themselves, which began to be leaked to the West after the pulling down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, have rarely been publicly displayed.

The craftsmanship involved is tremendously skilled. We are told that the “sheer beauty of the maps makes them mesmerising… the use of colours, lines and geometric shapes lends them an Art Deco feel.”

The Soviets transliterated many towns and cities for Warsaw Pact commanders. Rochester became Roczyste, Chatham labelled as Czetem, Herne Bay denoted as Hen-Bei, Margate became Magyt and Maidstone converted to Mejdsten.

Like William the Conqueror, it can be guessed where the Red Army planned to arrive on our shore. Sussex and Kent were in the firing line. The Soviets were also very interested in Cambridge: “The lodging houses and their lecture halls are reminiscent of monasteries or ancient castles . . . there is rain on 12-14 days each month.”

The university is where all the spies were educated: Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt. Perhaps Moscow assumed their battalions would get a big welcome when they turned up there in force.

– The Red Atlas by John Davies and Alexander J. Kent is published by the University of Chicago Press for £26.50

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Arts, Books, History

Book Review: The London Cage

REVIEW

Synopsis: In a Kensington basement after the war, a British colonel drew a confession from the brutal Nazi who massacred 100 of our surrendered troops. So, were we guilty of torture too?

THE FORMER member of the Gestapo was arrogant and defiant as he faced his interrogators. No, he snarled, refusing to discuss his part in the murder of two of the British airmen who had tunnelled their way out of Stalag Luft III in the Great Escape in 1945.

Fifty of the captured escapers had been summarily shot on the orders of Hitler, and, with the war over, British investigators were rounding up those suspected of the killings.

One of them, Erich Zacharias, was brought to the so-called London Cage, a clandestine interrogation centre run by the Secret Service behind closed doors in an exclusive, leafy private road in Kensington, London. Elegant rooms had been turned into cells and dormitories. The basement billiard room housed the interview rooms.

There, the man in charge, the redoubtable and fearsome Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Scotland, staged a special scenario to loosen his captive’s tongue.

“The blinds were drawn, the lights were on. Zacharias was brought in with handcuffs and made to kneel in front of a table. Four of us faced him.”

This was a deliberate re-enactment of the scene when Zacharias tortured the two escaped airmen in his charge before killing them – as Scotland knew from other witnesses.

“A statement was read out giving the facts about his part in the murder. I put my hand on his shoulder and said: ‘What is the truth?’” Shocked, unnerved and intimidated, Zacharias broke down immediately and blurted out his admission of guilt to the shooting.

For Scotland, it was job done – in just five minutes. He recorded: “It is true we tried a little showmanship with Zacharias but this was a matter of psychology, not force.”

Certainly no direct physical violence was used to extract the confession, but did his actions still amount to putting undue pressure on the suspect? Did Scotland contravene the standards of behaviour towards prisoners laid down by the Geneva Convention?

These sorts of moral questions have always hung over what went on in the mysterious London Cage, and they are raised again by historian Helen Fry in this impressively forensic study, which not only throws light on an intriguing (and murky) backwater of World War II but also on an unresolved ethical dilemma still with us today.

The Cage – housed behind the ornate facades of numbers 6,7 and 8 Kensington Palace Gardens and backing onto the Palace grounds – was not a cosy place to find yourself in, and was never meant to be.

It was intended for the extraction of vital intelligence, initially information from German PoWs and then, after the war, evidence to convict those suspected of war crimes.

Scotland, as tough and motivated as any Nazi but outstandingly clever and psychologically perceptive, ran it with a rod of iron. He claimed an intimate knowledge of the mindset of Germans, and that they responded only to a figure of authority.

So he barked and bawled, demanding submission and cooperation from the thousands of inmates who passed through it. His penetrating gaze alone could make strong men quail. Those who chose to take him on were humiliated.

In his memoirs – which went unpublished because MI5 banned them under the Official Secrets Act – he maintained that “it was necessary to discipline tough, arrogant and impudent prisoners and we had our methods for these types”. But he insisted that “no physical force was used, no cold-water treatment, no third degrees”.

Fry comes to a different conclusion. “Few can deny he went too far,” she concludes as she examines evidence of prisoners being deprived of sleep, doused with cold water and made to carry out humiliating chores, such as scraping a toilet with a razor or toothbrush. Some were exercised to exhaustion on the parade ground, others kept in solitary confinement for extended periods.

The most uncooperative found themselves in Room 22 in the basement, which was dark, damp and kitted out like a dungeon. Prisoners were forced to stand naked for hours, sometimes chained, or kept for prolonged periods in a cold bath.

There was talk of electric shock treatment and the use of tongue-loosening ‘truth’ drugs. Four Cage prisoners committed suicide.

Scotland, however, always maintained that he only ever used “moderate” physical force – such as boxing an inmate’s ears – as a disciplinary measure, not as a way of extracting out information. Allegations of serious misconduct generally came from those whose necks were literally on the line, such as Zacharias.

When he went to trial in 1947, his German defence lawyer accused the British of obtaining his confession by force, and Scotland spent three days in the witness box denying that he had struck Zacharias or used electrical devices on him. The court believed him, accepted Zacharias’s confession as genuine and sentenced him to hang.

In explanations of his actions, Scotland wrote: “You don’t allow tough Gestapo criminals to imagine they have arrived at a kindergarten or for a rest cure. But there were ways of putting a cocky prisoner in his place without beating him up.

Another who alleged misconduct was SS officer Fritz Knochlein, responsible for the massacre of nearly 100 British soldiers who had surrendered en route to Dunkirk in 1940.

 

SCOTLAND admitted he was tempted, describing him as “the worst German we ever had in the Cage. I could hardly look at him without wanting to hit him.

“He aroused the worst side of my nature. His evilness, lying and brutal nature and the thought of the brave men he had caused to be slaughtered, made me long to give him a taste of the SS medicine.” But he was adamant that he had not done so.

In court, Knocklein alleged that he’d been whipped, kicked, beaten and tortured, but the judges who heard his war crimes trial decided that, even if true, the allegations were irrelevant to the charges against him. He, too, hanged.

For Scotland, the verdict did not amount to a vindication. Rumours and innuendo clouded his reputation, and still do.

Seventy years on, it’s easy to be shocked by the excesses that undoubtedly went on at the Cage. The liberal conscience is offended, as if Scotland were equivalent in evil to the atrocities of the Nazis.

Fry is aware of this, urging us to keep the backdrop of the Cage in proper focus. They had to deal with some of the toughest prisoners ever held by the British, perpetrators of the vilest acts of inhumanity, genocide and cruelty on an unprecedented scale.

But how rough is rough? There’s the rub. The line crossed at the Cage was a thin and uncertain one, with which we still struggle.

We were at war then, and are in a war now, against terror. To what lengths should those charged with our protection be allowed to go, compiling information to secure our safety?

That was Colonel Scotland’s dilemma, and it’s the same not only for the security forces of the 21st century but for every citizen, too. I only wish there were an easy answer

– The London Cage by Helen Fry is published by Yale for £18.99

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