I was looking again at this book ‘Rescue’ by Graeme Cook, 1978, deciding whether to keep or not.                                                                                                                                                                                

Chapter 4 has this account from February 1942 of a Beaufighter aircraft searching the Skagerrak when suddenly one

engine exploded and the plane out of control crashed into the sea. The radioman to his credit in the 30 seconds he

had from explosion to crash was able to send a distress and lock the key – but unfortunately this seems not to have

been heard. The plane did carry two homing pigeons, each in its own wicker basket. A crewman exiting the crashed

plane managed to extricate one basket. A note was written and attached to the pigeons leg message cartridge and this

pigeon released. This pigeon was never seen again. However unbeknownst to the aircrew, the second pigeon had not

gone down with the ship, but had somehow escaped. It arrived back at its home Broughty Ferry exhausted and covered

in oil. It had rested at night on an oil tanker. Tracking shipping travel in that area a likely area of the aircrash was reckoned

and a successful rescue followed.
I had never read anything about homing pigeons being carried on any aircraft. I would like to know a little more about this

and perhaps someone here can add with this subject. I read some on Wiki about pigeon use in the ‘Market Garden’

operation and so forth but i don’t want to recapitulate those stories. I am asking about this aviation employment of

homing pigeons. Was this a one-off experiment, and when ended?

Chapter 5 has the tale of Felix Kersten, physical therapist to Heinrich Himmler. The seeming exaggerated influence of this

man, no doubt a hero to the extent he could affect history, and the totally fabricated conversations make me regard with some suspicion the other accounts in this book.

-Hue Miller,  K7HUE

Newport, Oregon, USA