War pigeon

[2] Another, named Cher Ami, lost his foot and one eye, but his message got through, saving a large group of surrounded American infantrymen.

Before the advent of radio, carrier pigeons were frequently used on the battlefield as a means for a mobile force to communicate with a stationary headquarters.

One of their homing pigeons, a Blue Check cock[a] named Cher Ami, was awarded the French "Croix de Guerre with Palm” for heroic service delivering 12 important messages during the Battle of Verdun.

The crucial message, found in the capsule hanging from a ligament of his shattered leg, saved 194 US soldiers of the 77th Infantry Division's “Lost Battalion" in the Battle of the Argonne, in October 1918.

[7][8] When Cher Ami died, he was mounted and is part of the permanent exhibit at the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution.

Pigeons were carried in airplanes to rapidly return messages to these stations, and 829 birds flew in 10,995 wartime aircraft patrols.

[11] During World War II, the United Kingdom used about 250,000 homing pigeons for many purposes, including communicating with those behind enemy lines such as Belgian spy Jozef Raskin.

The head of the section, Lea Rayner, reported in 1945 that pigeons could be trained to deliver small explosives or bioweapons to precise targets.

[18] In 2016, a Jordanian border official said at a news conference that Islamic State militants were using homing pigeons to deliver messages to operatives outside its "so called caliphate".

A grand ceremony was held in Buckingham Palace to commemorate a platoon of pigeons that braved the battlefields of Normandy to deliver vital plans to Allied forces on the fringes of Germany.

[25] Three of the actual birds that received the medals are on show in the London Military Museum[clarification needed] so that well-wishers can pay their respects.