Part 3
The Carrier-Pigeon Service of the American Army is a part of the Signal Corps, being composed of officers and men who are expert pigeon breeders and handlers, and who have the ability to impart their knowledge to others. The pigeon section, which was organized shortly after our entry into the war, consisted of two companies with a personnel of 24 officers and about 650 men. The birds used by the army are known to the fancier as “homers” and are really not carrier-pigeons at all, the latter being a large, ungainly show-bird that cannot fly a city block. But our allies persist in calling homers “carrier-pigeons,” and our military authorities have adopted the term. The homer has all the qualities required of a military messenger. He is a strong, well-built, racy-looking bird, possessed of indomitable courage. His most characteristic trait is, of course, his remarkable ability to find his home when released at great distances from it. This power, which has been developed by scientific breeding to an almost uncanny degree, is the asset which makes the bird of enormous value to the army. Though scientists have attempted to explain the homing instinct, they have arrived at different and frequently contradictory conclusions, it being enough to know that it is an instinct with which all birds are endowed to a greater or less degree, and which has been developed in the homer to a stage where it is limited only by the bird’s physical endurance. Nature has equipped the pigeon with numerous air-sacs adjoining the lungs, in which a reserve supply of warm air is carried and supplied to the lungs as needed during flight. Over the eye is a transparent lid, called a “blinder,” which protects the eye while in flight, and is at the same time transparent, thus providing a sort of natural goggle. Well-trained homers have frequently flown 1,000 and even 1,500 miles, while pigeon-fanciers think no more of a 500-mile flight than horsemen do of a mile trotted in 2:30. On clear days a homer pigeon will fly distances up to 300 miles at a speed close to a mile a minute, though longer distances are usually covered at a somewhat lower rate of speed, the birds instinctively taking advantage of the favoring air-currents and increasing or decreasing their altitude in order to obtain the benefit of them.
Long before the Great War it was discovered that pigeons would “home” to movable lofts as unerringly as to stationary ones, this being of great importance from the military point of view because it made it possible to move the cotes up to within a few miles of the firing-line. It also made it comparatively easy to supply the advanced posts with fresh pigeons. It was found that a week or ten days was usually sufficient to acquaint the birds with the new location of the loft and with the surrounding country, moves of twenty-five miles without the loss of any birds being not at all uncommon. Each of these mobile lofts was stocked with seventy-five young birds, six to eight weeks old, of the best pedigreed stock obtainable. Clasped about the leg of each bird was a seamless aluminum band bearing a serial number, the year of birth, and the letters “U. S. A.” These bands are put on soon after birth and cannot be removed except by destroying them. As the birds had never been outside a loft, it was a comparatively easy matter to settle them in their new homes. Their early training was devoted to the development of their flying strength and stamina and to the habit of quick “trapping,” by which is meant the entrance of the bird into the loft immediately upon reaching it, a pigeon that alights on the ground or roosts on the roof of the loft being considered most imperfectly trained. They soon learn to trap without hesitation, a flock of seventy-five birds entering a loft in from ten to twenty seconds after pitching on the roof. To overcome the habit of loafing, birds are fed in the loft after alighting with their favorite grain. After a month or two of this preliminary training the birds are “tossed,” to use the phraseology of the fancier, at increasing distances from the loft, so that by the time they are five or six months old they are flying from fifty to seventy-five miles with speed and certainty. They are then ready for service in the trenches. Not all, however, are assigned to the infantry. Every tank crew carries a complement of pigeons, men from the Pigeon Service are frequently attached to cavalry units, and birds have been used successfully from balloons and airplanes. The infantryman carries his pigeons in a light wicker hamper strapped to his back, each bird wearing a corselet made of crinoline stiffened with whalebone and with strings running to the sides of the basket, thus preventing it from being tossed about and injured.
As long as the ordinary means of communication are working satisfactorily, birds are not used. But when a barrage is laid down and the telephone-wires are destroyed, resort is had to the pigeons. When an advance-party has pushed far ahead of the main force it, too, relies on this method of liaison. In short, when every other method of liaison has failed or is unavailable, important messages are intrusted to the birds. The messages are written on fine tissue-paper, folded into a small wad, and inserted in the aluminum holder which is attached to the leg of each pigeon. The bird is then released, and in spite of the terrific din and confusion of battle, in spite of the enemy shotgun squads, composed of expert shots, whose duty it is to pick off carrier-pigeons, it wings its way through shell and gas barrages to its loft in the rear of the lines. I might mention in passing that though birds are frequently killed while in their baskets by exploding shells, and others die from long confinement without food or care in the trenches, those that survive become accustomed to the roar of cannon and never suffer from shell-shock. On reaching his loft the bird hurries into it through an opening which permits of entry but not of exit, the dropping back of the little door ringing a bell which announces the arrival of a message from the front, whereupon eager hands strip the cylinder from the leg of the bird, the message which it contains being relayed to headquarters by telephone or despatch-rider.
The pigeons were not always fortunate enough, however, to pass through the battle area unscathed, many birds having succeeded in reaching their lofts with their messages only to succumb to their wounds. During the offensive in the Argonne an American pigeon reached its loft with the leg to which the message was attached severed and dangling by the ligaments, the missile that severed the leg having also passed through the breast-bone. In spite of these injuries and the great loss of blood the heroic bird flew twenty-five miles with a message of vital importance. I am glad to say that the pigeon recovered and was recommended in due form for the D. S. C. An English bird was struck by a piece of shrapnel while homeward bound with a message. Both of its legs were broken and the aluminum message-holder was embedded in the flesh by the force of the bullet. But its spirit never faltered. It struggled on and on, blood dripping from it in an ever-increasing stream, to fall dead at the feet of the loft attendants. Another bird was released from a seaplane which had fallen and was being shelled by a German destroyer. It rose quickly and circled once to get its bearings. Shots resounded from the deck of the destroyer, the bird stopped short in its flight, and a flurry of falling feathers told their tale, but, after a short fall, it recovered and valiantly struggled on. Within thirty minutes after its release three British destroyers, white waves curling from their prows and clouds of smoke belching from their funnels, came racing toward the scene, whereupon the German turned and fled and the aviators were saved. With wings and body terribly lacerated the plucky bird had flown thirteen miles to a naval air-station and given the alarm. Here is another incident in which a feathered messenger played a hero’s rôle. A detachment of French infantry was ordered to hold a certain strategic position at all costs, thereby affording their main body time to retire to another position. The Germans, realizing that the stubborn little band of Frenchmen was balking them of their prey, launched attack after attack, until, borne down by sheer weight of numbers, the defenders were literally engulfed by the wave of men in gray. Just as all that remained of the detachment were making their last stand, a blood-stained pigeon fell exhausted in a French loft behind the lines. The message which it bore read:
“The Boche are upon us. We are lost, but we have done good work. Have the artillery open on our position.”
Little has been said about the work of pigeons in this country. Over a hundred lofts were established at the various camps and cantonments, the thousands of birds which they housed proving of no inconsiderable value in the training of the troops for fighting overseas. Everywhere that they were used the birds showed a dependability which won for them the enthusiastic admiration of all who were familiar with their work. Indomitable courage, a gameness which ends only with death, and a burning love of home are among the qualities most cherished by Americans, and nothing possesses them to a greater degree than the army carrier-pigeon.
Though the Belgians made extensive use of dogs for hauling machine-guns, and though the French used them to a certain extent for liaison work and the British for locating the wounded, they were not utilized by the American forces overseas. A considerable number of dogs, most of them police-dogs and Airedales, were trained at the various camps and cantonments in this country, however, and had the war continued they would undoubtedly have proved of real service in certain forms of work in France. The attitude of the American soldier toward the subject of dogs is best expressed by a story which I heard in France. An American officer, lost at night in No Man’s Land, sought refuge in a shell-hole. He found, however, that it already had an occupant, an American doughboy—from his accent evidently a product of the Bowery—who, it appeared, was lost like himself. In the periodic bursts of light afforded by the star-shells the officer noticed that the man had strapped to his back what appeared to be a large basket.
“What have you in there?” he inquired curiously.
“Boids, cap’n, boids,” the soldier answered in a hoarse whisper, adding disgustedly: “An’ that ain’t the woist of it, cap’n. I hear they’s goin’ to give us dawgs!”
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Though Americans have always been the greatest photographers in the world, the Yankee abroad being readily distinguishable by his ever-ready kodak, it is a rather surprising fact that it needed the World War to convince the American military authorities of the vital importance to the army of the camera. Upon our entry into the war, however, the War Department, following the example of the European armies, established a photographic section, with a personnel of forty-odd officers and nearly 800 men, as a part of the Signal Corps. The duty of this section was to take pictures, both still and motion, of every phase of America’s participation in the war, both on the fighting front in Europe and in the training-camps at home; for the information of the intelligence officers of the A. E. F., for the guidance of the artillery, for purposes of instruction in the schools and cantonments, for propaganda use at home and in foreign countries, and for illustrating the official history of the great conflict.
The photographic section was divided into two branches, land and air, the latter being, perhaps, from a military standpoint, the more important of the two for the reason that airplanes were used primarily for reconnaissance work and were, when equipped with cameras, literally the eyes of the army. The airplane being the eye of the army, the camera may be said to have been the pupil of the eye. In order to provide the large and highly trained personnel required for this service, there was established at Rochester, New York, a School of Aerial Photography—the largest in the world—where candidates received, in addition to a thorough military training, a course of instruction in everything relating to modern photography, from the manufacture of plates and films through the selection and use of lenses, shutters, and light-filters, to the printing of the picture itself. In addition to becoming familiar with these details of commercial photography, they were instructed in all the special phases of military photography, such as map-plotting, mosaics, enlargements, and the study of topography from a negative made many thousands of feet in the air. As in that chapter dealing with the Air Service I have described in considerable detail the methods and instruments used in aerial photography, it is enough to say here that the aerial branch of our Photographic Service attained such a degree of efficiency that, in the closing months of the war, it became virtually impossible for the Germans to dig a dozen yards of new trench, to transfer a platoon, to change the position of a machine-gun, without being detected by the all-seeing eyes of our cameras.
The mother school for land photography was located at Columbia University, in New York, where the students received the same thorough training which was given to the aerial operators at Rochester, with instruction in motion-picture photography added. The students at this school were the pick of the newspaper photographers and motion-picture operators of America. Among them were men who had “snapped” presidents and potentates, celebrities and notorieties, prize-fighters, reformers, murderers, prelates, politicians and statesmen, leaders of society, Society and near-society; who had “filmed” presidential inaugurations, Newport weddings, railway disasters, yacht-races, South Sea cannibals, Mexican revolutions, and Heaven knows what besides. Their courage and resourcefulness were precisely the qualities which were required of army photographers, for there was nowhere that they would not go, nothing that they would not do, and the more danger there was in their work the more it appealed to them. When a new type of gun was being fired for the first time and the gun crew took refuge in the bomb-proofs as a precaution against accident, the army movie-men moved their machines up close in the hope that if the gun exploded they would get a picture of the explosion. One of the Signal Corps operators, Captain Edward N. Cooper, with his assistant, Sergeant Adrian Duff, while attached to the Twenty-Sixth Division, crawled out into No Man’s Land just before an attack was scheduled to take place, and, though exposed to both German and American fire, set up their machine in order that the people at home, seated comfortably in motion-picture theatres, might actually see the boys going “over the top.” On another occasion this same young officer became separated from the troops to which he was attached and found himself under the fire of a German machine-gun, but in spite of the hail of bullets he stuck to his work, made his pictures, and returned to the American lines herding in front of him a group of Germans whom he had captured single-handed at the point of an empty revolver. A camera-man whom the French Government detailed to accompany me along the Western Front in 1916 was seriously wounded by a German shell just as we were leaving Verdun. His assistant helped me to give first aid to his chief and then, though the road was being heavily bombarded, coolly set up his machine and turned the crank while the wounded man was being lifted into an ambulance. It is a striking commentary on the scepticism of American audiences that, when I showed that picture in the United States, fully half of the people who saw it insisted that it had been faked. Another officer of the photographic section who, before our entry into the war, as the representative of a Chicago newspaper had accompanied the German Armies during the invasion of Poland, was present at the capture of Warsaw. When the Kaiser reviewed the troops after his triumphal entry into the captured city, the American pushed his way through the cordon of soldiers and police agents which surrounded the imperial motor-car, set up his machine within six feet of the astonished Emperor, and proceeded to take a “close-up” of the All Highest, who was so amused by the effrontery of the performance that he insisted on shaking the photographer’s hand!
[Illustration: MOTION-PICTURE OPERATORS OF THE PHOTOGRAPHIC SECTION OF THE SIGNAL CORPS GOING INTO ACTION ON A TANK
There was nowhere they would not go, nothing that they would not do, and the more danger there was in their work the more it appealed to them.
_Photograph by Signal Corps, U. S. A._]
[Illustration: AN OFFICER OF THE SIGNAL CORPS OPERATING A TELEPHONE AT THE FRONT.
This instrument was so compact that it could be carried as part of the equipment of a soldier and quickly put into operation.
_Photograph by Signal Corps, U. S. A._]
Motion-pictures were used in the training of troops far more generally than the public realized. A series of pictures taken at the Military Academy at West Point and exhibited at every camp and cantonment in the United States did more in a few hours to acquaint the troops with military etiquette and the evolutions of the squad, the platoon, and the company than any number of drills and lectures could have done. “Animated drawings,” as they are called—like those of Mutt and Jeff and the Katzenjammer Kids—were made under the direction of the Signal Corps for the purpose of familiarizing the men with the mechanism of the service rifle, the automatic pistol, and the various types of machine-guns. By running these pictures slowly, every stage of the operation of loading and firing was made clear, from the insertion of the cartridge into the clip or belt to the bullet leaving the muzzle. But the greatest value of the motion-picture, when all is said and done, was in keeping up the morale of the American people by combating the insidious and undeniably clever propaganda which was carried on in this country by the Germans. Enemy agents spread reports that the drafted troops were being ill-treated in the camps, that they lived in wretched quarters, were poorly fed, and suffered from lack of proper clothing. To answer these charges a score of movie-men were despatched to the various camps, the pictures which they took and which were exhibited throughout the country showing the clean and comfortable barracks, the men seated at their bountiful and appetizing meals in the mess-halls, the football and baseball games, the camp theatres, and the other features of cantonment life, thus providing a convincing refutation of the German insinuations. Parents who had heard the widely circulated tales of the unsanitary and immoral conditions to which their boys were exposed in France could go to their local motion-picture houses and see for themselves the clean dormitories, the Y. M. C. A. and Knights of Columbus huts, the social gatherings, the splendidly equipped hospitals, incidents of life in the back areas and in the trenches, and not infrequently the faces of their loved ones themselves, sun-bronzed and happy, wearing “the smile that won’t come off.” If the photographic section of the army had accomplished nothing else, its existence would have been justified a thousand times over by the service which it performed in fighting the propaganda of the Hun and in bringing cheer and comfort to the parents, wives, and sweethearts whom the boys had left behind them.
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As a result of the researches and experiments which it carried on during the war, the Signal Corps has, in addition to its countless other achievements, produced several devices which are of such an astounding nature as to strain almost to the breaking-point the credulity of the layman. I am not permitting myself to indulge in the slightest exaggeration when I assert that these devices place in the hands of the United States weapons which would render this country wellnigh invulnerable in the event of our ever becoming involved in another war. But—and herein lies their greatest significance and interest—they are, beyond all question, the most important inventions, so far as their effect on the peaceful interests of the nation are concerned, which have been produced since Morse invented the telegraph, Bell perfected the telephone, and Marconi amazed us with the wireless. Imagine the value of a device which permits of a conversation being carried on between a person on the ground and an aviator in the clouds as easily as though they were seated opposite each other at a dinner-table! Such is the radiotelephone, which I have described in detail in the chapter on the Air Service but which was suggested and brought to a state of perfection by officers of the Signal Corps. Conceive, if you can, of another device which permits of nineteen separate and distinct telephone and telegraph messages being transmitted simultaneously over a single copper wire! Picture the advance in world-communication made possible by the discovery, made by General Squier, the Chief Signal Officer of the Army, that growing trees can be used as natural antennæ for both sending and receiving radio messages! And, as a climax to this amazing list of achievements, let your imagination attempt to grasp the military and commercial significance of a device for the sending over telegraph wires or cables of cipher messages which, though they can defy any system of deciphering known to science, appear in plain language at the other end! You may think, perhaps, that I am overenthusiastic; that I have used too many adjectives and exclamation-marks. But suppose that I tell you something about these inventions. Then, unless I am greatly mistaken, you will be guilty of adjectives and exclamations yourself.