Homing Pigeons Carry Message of Losses

Heroes Remember

Homing Pigeons Carry Message of Losses

Transcript

They put down what they thought of the whole expedition, and we let the pigeon go. Now when you let the pigeon go you turn it upside down, feet up in the air, and you hold it, you hold it in two hands like that and you just clutch it there just so the neck is sticking out, and then you flip it up. Now when you do that, the pigeon turns over to the side, and then finally it picks up it’s elevation and then it starts to flap its wings. It goes around once, maybe twice around the ship and then it’s gone. It’s heading for home. For that loft near England, near London. First one was shot down. The Germans shot a shell, and he exploded right over the top of the ship. And we saw the pigeon go down, the boys were watching with binoculars, and they saw the pigeon go down. Well, we still have about twenty pigeons left. Another pigeon. So, I went down and brought another pigeon and that one made it. And, you know, that pigeon, it’s eighty miles from Dieppe to Portsmouth. There was no coffee breaks and there was no stop on the road, because it was just seawater. And so, they just kept on flapping their wings and just flapping their wings and heading off for home. And at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, that pigeon got into the loft, and so, the people that were looking after the loft brought the pigeon out, got the message. And then, from there it went by telegraph to London. It was called off and the expedition was a failure. More would be explained: why and how and so forth. They had remarks made as to what went wrong. Now, the captain had explained that for, in early parts to high ranking officers, you have, when you have a raid of that nature, where you have a limited amount of support. You’re short of this, you’re short of that and short of that but everything must work. Every, so what happened at Dieppe was this. The people that were to go ahead and blow up the embankments and let the, the explosive people in to knock out the big guns were not able to make it. Their, their torpedoed ship was knocked out. So, they were left there stranded with no equipment to use their explosive. So, now alright, the tanks. Well the tanks were supposed to be able to go in and they had to have explosives to get the tanks in. Tanks couldn’t make it. The explosive, there was no explosives. And so, it was impossible to get through. And so, the chain reaction worked down, down, down, down until everything was a failure. And so, then in the telegram that the pigeon carried it says, “In the future, we must rely on more firepower. Have more material for defence and for attacks and so forth.” And so that’s all described in there. So, anyhow the pigeon made it. Then, at 11 o’clock in the morn.. at night our ship pulled into Portsmouth. The ambulances were there. Some, they said, “Don’t unload the dead now, but the living we’ll try to get them off first.” So they got the living off and of course ourselves that had not been hit and were in, still in good condition, we got off. And when I got off, down the gang plank, there was a table at the far end. There was a couple naval officers there. “Now before you go for coffee,” because we hadn’t eaten for two days, “before you go for your coffee and sandwiches and lunch we want to know from you anything that you can tell us about casualties. Did you see anybody that you knew that were killed and died?” “Yes.” And then, you’d go and give them the list of people that you saw dead and so on and so forth. Right. And so, then with that in mind, they had an idea of how many people were missing. One regiment, the French Canadian Regiment, they went in with six hundred men, they came back with twenty-seven. Pretty poor Pretty poor average. But that’s the way the, that’s they way the Dieppe Raid went.

Description

Mr. Grand describes his crippled vessel’s journey back to England. He recalls that it was decided to send a message to England, reporting the outcome of the attempted landing, by an on board homing pigeon.

John Grand

Mr. Grand was born in 1909 in, as he described it, “a small hamlet in the wilderness of southern Manitoba.” His father homesteaded in Manitoba and then Saskatchewan. John Grand described his growing up during the Depression as poor and tough.

Mr. Grand was very interested in electronics as a teenager and held an amateur radio licence. He tried to join the Signal Corps in the 1930's, but was rejected for being “too flat-chested”. He remembers being so poor that he often joined the soup line to get something to eat. His first job was on the assembly line at Canadian Marconi for eleven cents an hour.

He joined the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals when war was declared in 1939. He was first assigned as a radio operator, but when his superiors saw his mechanical skills he was quickly re-assigned as a radio technician. His overseas service included landing at Dieppe, participating in the Normandy Campaign and in the liberation of Holland.

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