Code breakers at the British GCHQ headquarters are busy trying to break the code. They can navigate home from remote and strange locations by detecting the Earth’s magnetic fields, making them almost perfectly built for delivering messages on the battlefield. Hi-Very interested in your story about pigeons. Due to their obvious necessity for wartime communication, approximately 56,000 carrier …

Spies in the sky: 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 Homing pigeons were the least likely form of communication to be intercepted. In 532 BC a Greek poet referred to the pigeon as a message carrier in a poem entitled ‘Ode to a Carrier Pigeon’ and later, between 63 BC - AD 21, the Greek geographer Strabo noted that pigeons were trained to fly between certain points along the Mediterranean coastline to carry messages of the arrival of fish shoals for waiting fishermen. A pigeon has been found in a chimney with a top secret code message still strapped to it's leg 70 years or so after the war ended. Such was the importance of pigeons that over 100,000 were used in the war with an astonishing success rate of 95% getting through to their destination with their message. They were also the most secure and reliable.

Oftentimes, these carrier pigeons, also called homing pigeons, were the only form of communication during World War II. Pigeons themselves are capable of incredible physical feats. Message 1 - pigeons Posted on: 10 January 2005 by Robert Ryan. More than 95% of the messages they carried were successfully delivered.

Pigeons played a vital part in World War One as they proved to be an extremely reliable way of sending messages. They can launch themselves to 60 miles per hour from a standstill in just two seconds and are capable of flying hundreds of miles in a matter of hours.