20 Times Animals Became History’s Most Unlikely Messengers

In 1918, during World War I, Major Charles Whittlesey and his 194 men were surrounded by German troops in France’s Argonne Forest, while being bombarded by their own army’s artillery. When two of the pigeons sent out to call for reinforcements were shot down, another pigeon, Cher Ami of the US Army Signal Corps, long described as female though later found to be male, was released. Despite being shot through the chest, blinded in one eye, and having a leg almost completely sliced off, the pigeon reached its destination. The shelling ceased, and the 194 men were rescued.

At the bottom of the Grand Canyon, which has no road and requires hiking an 8-mile trail to reach, lies the town of Supai, Arizona. Here, on the Havasupai reservation, letters, food, and medicine are brought down daily by pack mules. This has been going on since the 1930s, when the US Postal Service made a deal with local wranglers to lead the animals down the trail. Today, Supai remains the last official mule-mail route still operating in the nation.

In World War II, British forces seized the Italian village of Calvi Vecchia early, yet Allied bombers were already preparing to take off to bomb the village, and radio contact had been lost. G.I. Joe, a US Army Signal Corps pigeon that served with Britain’s 56th Infantry Division, flew 20 miles in 20 minutes, arriving just as the bombers were lining up for takeoff. The mission was aborted, saving an estimated 1,000 British soldiers and Italian civilians. He was subsequently awarded the Dickin Medal, the highest award given to animals in Britain for their wartime service.

In 1942, an RAF bomber ditched in the icy waters of the North Sea off Norway, with no chance to use the plane’s radio to send its location. Winkie, a homing pigeon aboard the bomber, was released and made her way back to Scotland, with engine oil smeared over her. She did not carry a message, but the RAF was able to determine where the plane had gone down based on when she arrived and how fast the wind was blowing. The four men on the plane were rescued, and Winkie became the first pigeon to be awarded the Dickin Medal.

When Roman general Decimus Brutus found himself trapped in the city of Mutina, modern-day Italy, by the forces of Mark Antony during Rome’s civil wars of 43 BC, he used pigeons to get messages past the siege lines. He fastened written messages to carrier pigeons, then let them fly towards a relief army under the future Emperor Augustus, which lay on the other side of the blockade. The pigeon signals let the relief army time the attack that broke the siege.

In the spring of 1918, a British Sherwood Foresters battalion, encircled by German forces during World War I, lost contact with headquarters when their telephones were blown up by shells. A handler then sent Jack, an Airedale Terrier messenger dog, running with a request for reinforcements tucked in his collar pouch. He ran half a mile under intense bombardment before sustaining serious injuries, crawling the rest of the distance before finally reaching his destination. Headquarters sent reinforcements, rescuing the battalion, after Jack delivered the dispatch cylinder and collapsed from his wounds.

Australian postal officials brought in single-humped camels to carry the mail through the Australian Outback of South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory from the 1860s to the 1930s. The camels were used because the desert heat and absence of water would kill horses. The camel trains were run by handlers, who came from parts of what is now Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan, but who were collectively and erroneously referred to as “Afghans” by colonial Australians. The camels could go days without water and were eventually replaced by motor trucks in the 1930s.

On June 6, 1944, Reuters correspondent Montague Taylor, stationed on a Royal Navy ship off the coast of Normandy, sent a message stating that the D-Day landings were successful under a very tight wartime radio blackout. Gustav, a homing pigeon, then carried that message on the 150-mile flight across the English Channel against gale-force winds, taking just over five hours to reach his loft in Kent. The bird’s arrival was the first public news that the British people would hear of the invasion. For the feat, Gustav received the Dickin Medal.

The telegraph wasn’t even invented yet, but thousands of years ago, empires around the world set up similar relay systems to carry mail at top speed. From Persia’s Chapar Khaneh to the Mongols’ Yam system centuries later, couriers exchanged exhausted horses for new ones at each station along the way. America’s Pony Express came next, reducing delivery times between Missouri and California to just 10 days. The Pony Express, however, only lasted about 18 months before the telegraph made it obsolete.

From 1940 to 1945, Mary of Exeter, a pigeon born and bred by a bootmaker named Cecil Brewer, carried secret messages back and forth across Nazi-occupied France on behalf of Britain’s National Pigeon Service. Germany trained hawks to intercept Allied messenger birds, but she survived those attacks and more, including shrapnel wounds that required 22 stitches and the bombing of her home loft in Exeter. She continued working until the end of the war and earned the Dickin Medal in 1945.

From 1943 to 1945, during the Bougainville and Guam island campaigns, the US Marine Corps’ 1st War Dog Platoon used trained Doberman Pinschers called “Devil Dogs.” Humidity and salty air in the tropical jungles could short-circuit radio transmitters, and thick forests blocked visual signals. Between front-line beachheads and the main base, the Dobermans ran reports back and forth, wearing them in metal canisters around their necks along sniper-raked jungle paths. They stood watch as sentries between runs.

From 1846 to 1904, India’s postal service operated a “Bullock Mail” on key northern routes, the main route being 380 miles long between Allahabad and Delhi. Teams of paired bullocks pulling large, box-like mail carts hauled mail day and night, in relays, along unpaved roads that were frequently rutted and sometimes muddy. Much slower than any horse-based courier service, it transported more substantial quantities of mailbags, papers and packages. The service continued until India’s ever-expanding railways eventually rendered it obsolete in 1904.

From the late 19th century through the first few decades of the 20th century, rural postmen in Belgium, the Netherlands, and France used powerful draft dogs, like Belgian Mastiffs, pulling a little two-wheeled wooden cart packed with mail, packages, and newspapers on village routes. This method was known as the poor man’s horse because it was a relatively inexpensive way to get around on a light route, one that did not warrant a horse. The practice was abandoned with new animal protection laws and the introduction of motorized vehicles in the 1930s.

In Alaska and Arctic Russia between the 1890s and 1920s, reindeer, introduced to Alaska by missionary Sheldon Jackson, were trained and used by postal services to haul mail through the tundra where no trees grew. The US Post Office selected reindeer for its Kotzebue-Point Barrow route because the animals could subsist on lichen under the snow while traveling, whereas dog teams used on other routes required someone to carry their food. Reindeer-driven routes continued to operate under Sami, Nenets, and Inupiat drivers until motor vehicles and airmail eliminated the need for reindeer mail routes.

On the Western Front in WWI, the incessant artillery barrages frequently severed telegraph lines, and snipers made short work of humans tasked with carrying messages. Military institutions on both sides of the war, such as Britain’s War Dog School, established by Lt. Col. Edwin Richardson, trained tens of thousands of messenger dogs, mostly Airedales, Collies, and German Shepherds. Carrying dispatches in cylindrical waterproof collars, the dogs scurried along the ground through mud, barbed wire and gas clouds from the front line to command posts.

From medieval times into the 1930s, everyone from Mughal emperors to later colonial post offices in India, Burma, and Thailand used Asian elephants to move official messages and mail sacks during the monsoons. Flooded rivers and impassable mud rendered horse- and foot-based couriers useless. Loaded down with heavy mail packs or howdahs, the elephants waded through swollen rivers and cleared jungle paths that nothing else could cross to keep the mail moving.

Between the 1800s and WWII, military formations and mountain post offices used pack mules to carry mailbags and field dispatches between isolated posts when horses couldn’t manage the steeper mountain routes. From the Alps to the hills of Burma in the 1940s, Italian Alpini soldiers and the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps sent these animals up the crumbly cliff edges of some of the most treacherous paths in the world, knowing that a mule would be steadier on rocky ledges and less likely to spook at artillery fire than a horse.

From the 13th century to the beginning of the 20th century, the Mamluk sultanate, and then the Ottoman Empire, operated an express mail system known as barid across Egypt, Syria, and Arabia. To carry imperial communications and military messages across vast tracts of arid terrain, postmasters used specially bred fast camels called mehari, ridden by dedicated couriers known as hejjanah. Unlike horses, these camels could travel continuously without stopping in the barren desert, which would kill a horse courier, allowing the Mamluk and Ottoman Empires to maintain communication between cities such as Cairo and Damascus.

Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist, wrote that Romans used wild swallows as messengers for rapid short-distance communication, not to send written letters. A wealthy Roman named Caecina of Volterra owned several chariot-racing teams. Whenever one of his teams triumphed, he released swallows whose feathers had been dyed in the colors of his racing faction, so his estate would learn the news immediately. Pliny also records that a commander named Fabius Pictor attached knotted threads to swallows’ legs to inform a besieged garrison of how many days remained before help would arrive.

From the 1890s to the 1940s, the US Post Office and Canadian postal service employed professional mushers like John “Iron Man” Hegness to transport winter mail via dog sled through Alaska and the Yukon. Alaskan Huskies and Malamutes dragged sleds stacked with mail and dispatches along icebound paths, such as the 1,000-mile trail that eventually gained fame as the site of the Iditarod. There was no other practical way to get mail from place to place during the seven months when every waterway froze over each year, until airmail came along.

This content was created with the help of AI.