WW II carrier pigeon skeleton found in chimney w/message

[The Bread Guy]

He had survived the perilous flight back from Nazi-occupied territory hundreds of miles away.

Exhausted, the British ‘spy’ pigeon swooped down on a chimney in Surrey for a rest.

And there, sadly, he fell off his perch. Perhaps overcome by fumes from the fire below, he died – with a vital coded message in a tiny capsule still strapped to his leg.

His remains lay undiscovered in the chimney for around 70 years until the home’s current owner David Martin recently decided to restore the fireplace.

‘The chimney was full of twigs and rubbish,’ he said yesterday. ‘We were stunned by how much came out. Then I started finding bits of a dead pigeon. We thought it might be a racing pigeon until we spotted the red capsule.’

The former probation officer and his wife Anne, both 74, unscrewed the capsule and found a hand-written message inside on a ‘cigarette paper thin’ piece of paper.

It has been sent to code breakers at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, the intelligence centre where work to crack the Nazi Enigma code shortened the war by years, and to their modern-day counterparts at GCHQ in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, who also are trying to decipher it ....

Daily Mail, 1 Nov 12

Here's the leg bone w/message container ....

.... and here's the message:

 

[Bzzliteyr]

It says "large double double with a boston cream, no sweetner."

 

[my72jeep]

It says "large double double with a boston cream, no sweetner."

Funny I translated it as send more hard tack, canned milk and spam,,,,,,,,,,

 

[the 48th regulator]

Oh no, not Speckled Jim!!!

dileas

tess

 

[jollyjacktar]

update on the message.

'Hit Jerry's panzers here'... code on dead wartime pigeon is cracked

    Wartime code-breaking analysts and experts from GCHQ had been left stumped by the 1944 message
    The despatch, sent by 27-year-old Sergeant William Stott, identified German troop and tank positions in Normandy

By Padraic Flanagan

PUBLISHED: 22:23 GMT, 15 December 2012 | UPDATED: 22:41 GMT, 15 December 2012

It was the Second World War code no one could crack – a message from 1944 found decades later attached to a dead carrier pigeon in a fireplace.
Wartime code-breaking analysts and experts from GCHQ were all left stumped.  But now a historian has come forward with the right codebook to finally reveal what it says.

The despatch, sent by 27-year-old Sergeant William Stott, identified German troop and panzer tank positions in Normandy and highlighted ‘Jerry’ headquarters and observation posts to target for attacks.  It read: ‘Hit Jerry’s right or reserve battery here.  'Troops, panzers, batteries, engineers, here.  'Counter measures against panzers not working.’

Expert Gord Young deciphered it by consulting a Royal Artillery codebook which had been kept by a relative who fought in the conflict.  Mr Young, who works at Lakefield Heritage Research in Ontario, Canada, says the message proves paratrooper Sgt Stott went behind enemy lines to help military planners direct the D-Day offensive.  Mr Young said: ‘We have been able to unravel most, but not all, of the so-called unbreakable code of
the pigeon remains.  'The message is indeed breakable.’

The message was originally discovered by retired probation officer David Martin, 74, when he was renovating his home in Bletchingley, Surrey.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2248818/Hit-Jerrys-panzers--code-dead-wartime-pigeon-cracked.html#ixzz2FArt2TvZ
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