A few days ago I posted a list of open questions about the dead cipher pigeon, really as a way of externalizing the annoyance I felt from knowing so few basic facts. To my great delight, Mike Moor from Melbourne and (well-known military history buff) Christos T. stepped forward with a whole wheelbarrowful of answers. And here they are…
“Did any British pigeon handlers ever use “lib.” as an abbreviation?”
Mike Moor points out that the first message sent back on D-Day was by Reuters reporter Montague Taylor, attached to the eg of the war-seasoned (and subsequently Dickin-Medal-receiving!) carrier pigeon Gustav [NPS.42.31066]. At the bottom of the image (clearly on an RAF pigeon message pad), it says “Liberated 0830” (click to see the full message):-
“Why can’t I find a single other message written on the same printed pigeon service pad?”
For this, Mike Moor points to a message sent by Major General Roberts on a page talking about the Canadian armed forces’ involvement in World War Two. [Incidentally, the abortive Canadian raid on Dieppe was known as “Operation Rutter”, I wonder if Stu R knew that?] Even though the quality of the scan is frankly diabolical, it’s very much better than nothing at all, and tells us that this our pigeon message was (without any real doubt) an Army Pigeon Service message pad.
Mike also notes that this was an “Army Book 418B”, the updated version of the Army Book 418 used for pigeon messages in the First World War. It turns out that the National Army Museum near Sloane Square tube in London has an Army Book 418B in its collection described as “Army Book 418B, Pigeon Service Message Book, 1942”, accession number “1975-06-35”: it would be cool to ask the curators there to have a closer look.
“Was the pigeon message we have a hectograph or a carbon copy?”
Mike Moor notes “It is a carbon copy pad with 1 original retained in the book and 2 carbon copies made – which lines up with what you’d expect from the message i.e. 2 copies sent and the blue text of the cipher looks a lot like a carbon copy + black amendments by a second hand presumably prior to sending.” Excellent, thanks! 🙂
“When did Slidex change from having one letter per horizontal key slot to two letters per slot?”
The (plainly utterly indefatigable) Mike Moor points us to some December 1944 Slidex instructions available on Rob van Meel’s site (a copy will cost you two euros plus international postage from the Netherlands), by which time it had changed to two letters per key slot on the horizontal cursor. That narrows the range down dramatically to ‘sometime in 1944’… we’ll just have to keep digging to find out exactly when in 1944. At least this is a question that we can reasonably hope to get a solid answer on!
“When were Slidex Series B code cards introduced?”
In the Series A “RE No. 2” (Army Code No. 14070) Card 35 that I got from the excellent royalsignals.org.uk website, the three columns have had their shape changed to break up the columnar structure somewhat, which I believe may point to a rethink & upgrade of the Slidex code during WW2.
At the same time, another Series A card has two versions, one with an Army code and another with a different W.O. (War Office) code, which I suspect points to a post-WW2 handover from the Army to the War Office. But that’s as good an answer as this question has for now.
“Did Bletchley Park / GCHQ ever catalogue the tons of files brought back by the TICOM teams?”
Christos replies: “There are many TICOM file categories: I, IF, DF, M, D. Captured German documents had to be catalogued and then translated. This must have taken years. The question is whether there is a full list of those files. There is a DF list but I don’t know about any document covering the other files.”
Incidentally, p.38 of TICOM I-109 (a report by Lt Ludwig of Chi Stelle OB.d.L) says:
B. Slidex system.
Bigram substitution system.
In use in the army (front line units) and in air support networks (tentacle networks).
The system was known from the monitoring of exercises in Great Britain before the invastion, e.g. “Spartan”. The cryptanalytic detachments in army and GAF were able to get so much experience on these exercises that decoding worked well right at the start of the invasion.
Recovery was done in the army again at NAA St 5, in the GAF in 14/3 (W control 3).
Decoding was often done with so little delay that the messages could be dealt with like clear text in the evaluation.
The results were of more importance to the army than to the GAF, but theu provided the latter too with valuable indications, e.g. elucisation of the individual corps tentacle networks, reconnaissance operations (e.g. 400 and 414 Squadrons) etc.
The messages decoded daily were exchanged between Army and GAF in the form of written reports.
Here is a better image of the Dieppe message:
http://www.veterans.gc.ca/images/image-gallery/fullsized/20100630_dieppe_07.jpg
(from the article at http://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/gallery-index/gallery/98)
Rob: thanks for that, much appreciated! 🙂
Standing back from this, the question of ‘what sort of message would be sent from occupied France in code, in duplicate, by carrier pigeon’ doesn’t seem to have been fully considered.
Firstly, and inconveniently, it is not from Sgt ‘Stout’ (of the RE). Why would a sapper involved in front line demolitions be sending messages to somewhere as exotic as Bletchley Park using a system as vulnerable and unsustainable as a carrier pigeon? What could they possibly have to talk about? The audience for Sgt Stout’s information would be his formation HQ (either RE or the unit to which he was attached). Bletchley Park would not be interested in the demolition of small localised bunkers, but his HQ would. It is simply not possible that someone engaged in close quarter combat with the enemy and therefore liable to capture would have in his possession either code pads or a coding machine. These would be held at Regimental level or even further back. Any communication by him would be either a written report, by telephone or by radio. How would a front line combat unit even support and maintain carrier pigeons in the field anyway? Normal rules of combat state that he would not even be carrying a marked map in case it fell into enemy hands. The signature clearly states either ‘Stit’ or possibly ‘Stot’ or ‘Stet’ if you allow that the man’s handwriting closed the loops of lower case ‘o’ and ‘e’ letters. If it had been written by someone called Stout it would include an ‘o’ and a ‘u’ or at least some representation of them. It doesn’t. This is the man’s name – he would know how to write it! By the same token, it is possible that the ‘j’ in ‘Sjt’ is actually a ‘g’ and therefore reads ‘Sgt.’ The lower loop of the letter is very small and the three ‘t’ letters have no loops or ‘hooks’ either, so this may just be an anomaly of his handwriting. Also given that he is using a double carbon paper, it is difficult to write clearly through to a fifth bottom sheet without using a stabbing or jabbing handwriting. Ordinary writing wouldn’t work. This is reinforced by the fact that some letter groups have been overwritten (eg ‘UAOTA’) for clarity.
The ‘Time of origin’ has been underlined to emphasise that it was written at 1522. So whatever it was about was time related and it was important to the sender that the recipient was aware of the exact time of the report. This would relate to some event or activity which was time critical. The ‘1525/6’ at the end of the message may indicate the time it took to write out the message in clear (3 minutes) plus the day of the month (sixth). Translating whatever the message text is (which may include numbers as well as letters) would take some considerable time. The originator would have to have some plain paper on which to create the message in clear, plus his code book or one time pad, a reasonable writing surface, and somewhere discreet and sheltered to do this. Depending on the code used, each letter or number in the plain text message would be encoded as a letter below it. Once encoded it would then be transcribed onto the message form. It is not credible that a message as complex as this could be encoded straight from plain text into 27 five letter groups to exactly fit onto the message pad in neat columns without the risk of error. The sender would also want to double check his encoding from plain text to code, which would not be possible if the message was encoded directly onto the message form. It is therefore credible that by the time the message has been created in plain text at 1525, reporting something that happened at 1522 (three minutes earlier), it could take another hour to encode it, and then transcribe that code onto the message form found on the pigeon. Accepting that ‘lib 1625’ means that the pigeon was released an hour later is therefore entirely reasonable. It is also credible that the owner / holder of the pigeon would be someone different from the creator of the message – possibly Resistance or a ‘Jedburgh’? It is therefore possible that Sgt Stit wrote the message in private somewhere deliberately out of sight of the ‘pigeoneer’ and simply passed him the message. The ‘pigeoneer’ then wrote the numbers of the two pigeons and the time of release on the forms. This also explains why the ‘X02’ at the top of the form is in the same writing as the pigeon number. Sgt Stit wouldn’t know where the pigeons would fly to, but the pigeoneer would. If the pigeoneer was captured, he could entirely truthfully state that he had no sight of or knowledge of the contents of the message because of this system.
The message is definitely not written in Slidex. Slidex was a low level battlefield code mostly used at Unit (eg Regiment / Battalion level) and below. The reason is that the encoding for Slidex would be included in the day’s signal instructions for the particular radio net it was to be used on. These would be distributed by hand usually the day before, usually by a designated Signals NCO from Battalion to Company level and below, or by an officer passing on orders he has received from his superiors. Therefore it could only be used by radios in communication with each other on that day. Given the hierarchical structure of military units and therefore their radio nets, for an Infantry unit to communicate by radio with a Tank unit means that there would have to be a physical exchange of paper between the two units, necessitating a high degree of liaison. Not impossible, but difficult even today. Slidex messages are always sent as bigrams for clarity, each bigram representing a cell on the Slidex card. Any ambiguity between bigrams would completely scramble the message. It is not clear whether this message should be read down in columns or across in rows, and in any case it would make the task of both the sender and receiver unnecessarily difficult to transpose bigrams into 5 character sets, and then break them down again, for no purpose. To put the final nail in the Slidex coffin, both the sender and receiver would have to have the identical Slidex codes. Given that the sender is a Sergeant in France and the receiver is ‘Bletchley Park’, what system would have to exist to get both ends to have the identical Slidex codes and why would they want to do this anyway given the known weakness of Slidex?
Speculating on the circumstances of using two of a scarce carrier pigeon resource, and why it would be necessary to encode the entire message leads to the following. Sgt Stit has information which is critically time related to 1522 precisely. This is unlikely to relate to the crashing of an aircraft as has been suggested elsewhere. It is vital that this is got to Bletchley Park so two pigeons are sent with the same message. It is highly unlikely that either pigeon could be ‘taken prisoner’ so the encoding is far more likely there to protect the message should it be discovered on arrival in the UK, eg in some pigeon fancier’s loft, or indeed someone’s chimney. So what information was so secret that the average pigeon fancier couldn’t be allowed to see any of it? Simply using ‘veiled speech’ (eg ‘The Red Cow is flying tonight’) would give sufficient security. As stated elsewhere, the five letter groups could be a morse code groups. Has Sgt Stit intercepted and written down a morse code message that the sender didn’t have the power to send all the way to Bletchley himself? Is 1522 therefore the time of sending of this morse message?
HughT: thank you for detailed and thoughtful comment. But rather than try to squeeze answers and observations to so many questions and points into a single comment here, I’d prefer to reply via a blog post over the next few days – I’ll post a link here when I do, I hope that’s ok.
Hope some of the following explanations help to summarise the thinking. There are definitely 2 areas that I would call ‘working assumptions’ in the absence of a solid alternative:
– the name refers to Sjt William Stout
– the code is SLIDEX
I am positive Nick (and everyone else) would be eternally grateful if anyone was able to disprove either of those with better solution.
Why would a sapper involved in front line demolitions be sending messages to somewhere as exotic as Bletchley Park using a system as vulnerable and unsustainable as a carrier pigeon?
Lets not assume Bletchley Park was the destination but consider the GCHQ suggestion that the final destination was for Bomber Command on D-Day. I suspect GCHQ have very good reason to state X02 is bomber command and related to D-Day – presume it is a known code name.
If (and I agree it is a big if) this is from Sjt Stout at 3-4pm on D-Day, then we are talking about a VERY key part of WW2 where the invasion has stalled on the outskirts of Caen and most likely without reliable communications available. Plenty to talk about there – an update on a failed key objective of D-Day? Request for new bombing targets for the evening? It is certainly possible.
This is the man’s name – he would know how to write it! By the same token, it is possible that the ‘j’ in ‘Sjt’ is actually a ‘g’ and therefore reads ‘Sgt.’
I don’t think there is any real doubt that the rank is written ‘Sjt.’ which is completely consistent with the message canister designating an Army origin.
Do you have an alternative hypothesis about who Sjt Stet/Stit/Stot is? I can not locate anyone who would match those quite rare names.
It is also credible that the owner / holder of the pigeon would be someone different from the creator of the message
I think that is a given. Seems clear that one person has written the message on the carbon pad at 1525 and a pigeon handler has appended details directly on the sheet when it was released at 1625.
The message is definitely not written in Slidex. Slidex was a low level battlefield code mostly used at Unit (eg Regiment / Battalion level) and below.
It is worth tracking down a copy of TICOM I-109 … it is pretty clear that SLIDEX was used extensively for things like Air Support requests back to England as well.
In the absence of any more credible alternative, SLIDEX is far-and-away the most common cipher used at that time so is a reasonable starting point. The only other common cipher is the Double Transposition cipher and that is essentially eliminated by a simple letter frequency analysis (and it was basically ended in 1943 anyway).
t is not clear whether this message should be read down in columns or across in rows, and in any case it would make the task of both the sender and receiver unnecessarily difficult to transpose bigrams into 5 character sets, and then break them down again, for no purpose.
Very standard format – read in standard left-to-right top-to-bottom manner. 5 letter sets is not difficult and disguises the encoding method – no surprise there.
Given that the sender is a Sergeant in France and the receiver is ‘Bletchley Park’, what system would have to exist to get both ends to have the identical Slidex codes and why would they want to do this anyway given the known weakness of Slidex?
System would be issuing SLIDEX code cards prior to D-Day invasion. Only select Officers and NCOs were trained in SLIDEX but still tens of thousands of cards sets were prepared and distributed prior to D-Day. The assumptions is that the repeated message indicator AOAKN provides details to sync the cards used.
And why?
– It is very fast and easy to use
– is more secure than ‘veiled speech’
– it is portable
– does not risk the high-level codes/ciphers for mid-level information … eg carrying around a Enigma type coding machine that could be captured
Mike: well, that saved me a lot of typing! 🙂 I’d add:-
(1) “what sort of message would be sent from occupied France in code, in duplicate, by carrier pigeon?”
According to http://www.history.army.mil/html/reference/Normandy/TS/SC/SC3.htm , “Pigeons also landed on D-day, about five hundred of them. They were used to carry ammunition status reports, undeveloped film, and emergency messages.” Duplicate was the norm (the Army Pad 418B was a duplicate pad), simply because the odds of pigeon messages getting back to Blighty was never very good, I’m sorry to say.
(2) “Why would a sapper involved in front line demolitions be sending messages to somewhere as exotic as Bletchley Park using a system as vulnerable and unsustainable as a carrier pigeon?”
Wherever the message was intended to go, it almost certainly wasn’t Bletchley Park, because that was where Axis intelligence went. It’s possible that (with the vagaries of the carbon paper folds) the destination line actually reads “HQ”, which would make reasonable sense.
(3) “How would a front line combat unit even support and maintain carrier pigeons in the field anyway?”
The various advances on D-Day were made by Divisions, each composed of a multi-skilled set of brigades and platoons. There were sappers, infantry, tanks, signallers, and (yes) even pigeon handlers.
(4) “It is simply not possible that someone engaged in close quarter combat with the enemy and therefore liable to capture would have in his possession either code pads or a coding machine.”
Coding machines, I’d agree: however, I don’t believe anyone yet has a good overview of exactly who did have Slidex pads. The pool of Slidex users had certainly been widened from simply the Royal Signals, but by how much I don’t know.
I’ve done some more thinking on the name issue to consider the likelihood that we have the right person.
I’ll take a few things as fact:
– rank is Serjeant implying British Army
– first initial is W
– surname commences with ‘St’, ends in ‘t’ and the rest is debatable
– message is from D-Day
So how many people might fit those criteria?
1. How many British Army personnel landed on D-Day?
61,715 across all British services but lets call that all Army for now
Ref: http://www.ddaymuseum.co.uk/d-day/d-day-and-the-battle-of-normandy-your-questions-answered#troops
2. How many were Serjeants?
Difficult to tell but let’s use readily available WW2 casualty lists to see what percentage of Army troops were Serjeants … and it is 15,509 across all forms (L/Sgt, Staff Sjt, Sjt, Quartermaster Sjt, Colour Sjt, etc) our of 210,228 … so lets call it 7.5% and conclude around 4,600 Army Serjeants on D-Day.
Ref: http://www.cwgc.org/find-war-dead.aspx
3. How many were Sjt W. somebody? ie W as a first initial
Again using the WW2 casualty list as a sample of common British Army names, we find 18178/210228 or around 8.5%.
This implies we have around 400 British Army Serjeants with the first initial W … wow – that is more than I expected !!!
4. How many were Sjt W. St***t?
Same method as before … 550/210228 or 0.25% of surnames match that pattern …
Coincidentally that is 1 in 400 or implying ON AVERAGE we expect only 1 “Sjt W St***t” in the entire D-Day landing force.
Does that make sense?
I think it does … D-Day landings comprised only 5% of the total troops landed in the first month so by mid-July 1944 there were probably 20 of “Sjt W St***t” running around France and across the whole war probably closer to 50 of them (based on 3 million strong Army)
What is the name likely to be?
Not sure… Based on the 3,600 or so military and civilian British casualties in WW1 & WW2:
– not a single on had a 4-letter surname making any form of Stat/Stet/Stit/Stot quite rare
– strong candidates based on frequency and would be Stott (300), Stout (59) and various forms of Stait/Start/Stent/Stitt/Stunt
Based on that we have some likely candidates from WW2 records:
– Lance Sergeant WILFRED Stout, R.E. 2130369
Awarded British Empire Medal (Military Division), 13th June 1946
http://www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/37598/supplements/2807
– Serjeant WILLIAM Stout, R.E. 3650400
253rd Field Coy, Died 6-Jun-44
– Acting Corporal William Henry Stout, Lancaster Infantry 3709824 (as of 1940)
awarded Military Medal 1940
http://www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/35020/supplements/7200
– Lance Sergeant William Stitt, R.A.S.C. S154078
http://www.forces-war-records.co.uk/ViewRecord/3145931
Not sure what is going on with Wilfred vs William and different service numbers – possibly 2 Sjt W Stout in the R.E.?
And then another NCO WIlliam Stout also from Lancaster in the Infantry … very strange !
Mike: one thing I should have added is the Lance-Serjeant vs Serjeant business. A Lance-Serjeant was a Corporal acting in a Serjeant’s capacity, and hence was lower-ranked than a Serjeant. William Stout’s grave describes him as a Serjeant, which is entirely consistent with the pigeon message signer: the only place we have seen him described as a Lance-Serjeant was in the note made about his death in the War Diary (that Stu Rutter & I examined at the National Archives).
Hence for me the balance of probability is that the pigeon message signer wasn’t Lance-Serjeant Wilfrid Stout, Corporal William Henry Stout, or Lance-Serjeant William Stitt, because a Lance-Serjeant would almost certainly have instead signed it “L/Sjt”. Well, unless that person was a Serjeant at the time of signing but had subsequently been demoted to a Corporal (which is possible, but fairly tenuous).
So as things stand, I’m fairly convinced that we’ve got the right Stout (and that the War Diary writer had Stout’s rank wrong), but (as you say) I’m perfectly happy to be proved wrong by something fairly definitive on the matter. 🙂
Sorry – I should have been very clear … I am in complete agreement.
The point of that exercise was to confirm there should have been VERY few potential candidates that could be placed in Normandy on D-Day … and for the rest of those you need to start making even more ‘generous’ interpretations of the signature before even considering where they were on 6th June.
To respond to some comments above:
It is definitely not Slidex. I have used Slidex, and this isn’t it. Leaving aside the logisitical and administrative difficulties (or impossibilities) of ‘Somewhere in England’ having the same Slidex code settings as someone in France, Slidex is always encoded in bigrams, eg AU TL EV QR CV etc. If there is a transposition error, eg ..UT LE VQ RC etc… then the message becomes entirely meaningless. Creating 5 letter groups out of bigrams is going to add nothing to the security of the message and merely serve to make it far more complicated to transcribe and to introduce the very high likelihood of error, for no purpose. In addition any Slidex message must include, in clear, a reference to the Slidex Card being used, otherwise the receiver is not going to know which one (of many) to use. The message contains no such reference. I would suggest that it is a code based on a one time pad or possibly a coding machine. The repetition of the group AOAKN at the beginning and end may give a clue as to what this is. Certainly this would never be allowed in Slidex, even if it was possible to exactly repeat the same series of two and a half bigrams.
What evidence is there to suggest that this is anything to do with D Day? I may have missed this, but the only suggestion of a date is in ‘1525/6’ which could mean ‘3.25pm on 6th.’ This conveniently happens to be the afternoon of D Day, but there were many 6ths of the month in World War 2. Unless there is any other evidence to support D Day, then it is pushing the bounds of credibility to suggest that simply because the message was sent on the sixth of a month, then this has to be 6 June 1944.
A reference has been made to the use of carrier pigeons on D Day. This was by the Americans – is there any reference to their use by UK forces? The document referred to includes a great deal of detail about the US Signals effort on D Day which turned out to be far more successful than hoped for. Pigeons were presumably taken as a reserve in case of signals failure, although the document does state that they were used to send ammunition returns and film. But do we know where they were sent to? Given that the US bases for D Day were in Devon and the South West, this is the most likely place to send a carrier pigeon message to. Were the Americans anywhere near Bletchingley? Bear in mind also the distance from Normandy to Bletchingley, across the channel, in very poor weather on D Day (remember it was postponed by 24 hours because of a storm, which was still blowing itself out on 6th, and caused the loss of many swimming tanks). Could a pigeon have covered this distance in this weather?
In my opinion, no case has been made for it to be from a ‘Lsgt Stout RE’. It definitely says ‘Stit / Stot / Stet’. This is the man signing his own name after all. Just because there is someone with a conveniently similar name who happened to die on the 6th of a month does not mean that it is possible to ’round up the usual suspects’ and assume that they are the same person!
Comparing this to the ‘Dieppe message’ shown in a link above raises some further anomalies. The Dieppe message is from a Major General, stating that his mission is about to collapse in disaster and yet it is all written in clear. This is the man at the top reporting back to his superiors, but none of it is encoded. This would have been of great intelligence value to the Germans if intercepted. But our message is from a lowly Sergeant and the whole thing is encoded. What then is so important compared to the disaster of Dieppe?
A new thought: it is sent to ‘X02.’ ‘X’ is the designator for an Army Brigade. The destination could therefore be 2 (Infantry) Brigade. In 1940 2 Inf Bde was part of 1 Division retreating to Dunkirk. 2 Bde administrative HQ is today based in Kent (at Shorncliffe), and given that UK based Infantry Brigade HQs are static and historic establishments as they are administrative, it is likely that the wartime 2 Infantry Bde HQ was also based in Kent. 1 Division HQ was evacuated from Dunkirk on 2 June 1940, and the fighting arm of 2 Bde, comprising mostly Scottish units, formed the ‘last stand’ with their backs to the sea at St Valery en Caux near Dieppe. In effect they took the pressure off Dunkirk to allow the evacuation to take place. They eventually surrendered on 12 June. It is therefore entirely plausible that because the Divisional HQ to which they belonged and to which they reported had ceased to exist on 2 June, in retreat they were sending messages via the only means at their disposal, pigeon, back to their HQ in UK. We know from the ‘Dieppe message’ that pigeon post from this area was practicable and workable. Given that on 6 June they had not reached the sea, it would be entirely sensible for a message giving their locations, strengths, ammunition and casualty states or whatever to be encoded in case it fell into German hands before it reached the sea. Given that there was still at this stage some hope that they could also be evacuated by sea, a message giving the best place to be evacuated from or similar vital information would also be encoded. It would be interesting to find out what was happening on 6 June 1940, and if there was anything critical about the timing of 1522. Had an important defensive action just taken place, such as the blowing of the last bridge across a river? It would also be interesting to find out what was happening on the 6th of every month at 1522!
This is whole ‘Stit / Stot / Stet’ thing is certainly a challenging part and one that I have pondered a lot.
Let’s look at them one at a time .. .
Stit
Is just not a name that would fit.
– Looking Birth/Death/Marriage records up until 1915 there are simply no occurrences of this name.
– Likewise census records from 1900-1910s show no records other than a couple of transcription errors.
– For the current London phone book, there just 1 Stit listed .. pretty rare name
Stet
Again using the same basis sources, this is just a name that is in usage.
– Nothing in BDM or census records and only 2 records for the whole of the UK in phone books from the 1940s to 1980s
– There are some usages of this name creeping in during latter years ie well beyond WW2
Stot
– This one is a bit more interesting as it appears in a handful of old records from Yorkshire, Lancashire and the Angus region of Scotland.
– But it appears to have died out by around 1900 and only appears as a transcription error is Stott in a few entries.
– As an example, I could not find a single Stot in the current London whitepages.
So looking through that, none of these names in British use around 1900-1950 making them extremely unlikely.
But the signature seems to read as ‘Stit / Stot / Stet’ making for quite the dilemma
If anyone can locate a Milltary record for a “Serjeant W. ” with any of these names then given the rarity I think we could almost definitively close the book on the identity.
Any idea how one would do a complete search of all WW2 service personnel ?
Mike: I used http://www.forces-war-records.co.uk/ – it didn’t have a single Stit, Stet, or Stot for WW2. That was also where I found the two “Sergeant William Stott” I blogged about before.
Interestingly, for those of you who suspect that the pigeons would have been too young for 1940 and too old for 1944, perhaps the right person to look at is William Henry Stout 3709824. It seems that he was a Lance Corporal in 1940 (when he was decorated for bravery) and a Captain in 1945, so could well have been a Serjeant in 1942-1943, i.e. when the pigeons were the right age. Of course, this doesn’t seem completely consistent with the cipher’s profile, but it’s probably worth pursuing. 🙂
Slidex card just posted to eBay…
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Original-Cipher-Code-Card-for-a-SLIDEX-Cipher-Code-Device-RARE-Crypto-item-/200884220300?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2ec5a1f18c&autorefresh=true
Not sure if someone has covered this or not, but if you zoom in close on the signature there appears to be a crease in the paper. There is a very clear line running down the middle which makes the third letter difficult to make out. In addition, judging by the elongated cross of the ‘T’ in the last word, I would guess that the second letter is actually an ‘L’. So the name could be W. Slot/Slat/Slet.
A search on Ancestery.com under ‘All UK, Military Campaign Medal and Award Rolls, 1793-1949 results for Slot’ reveals two entries for ‘W Slott’ and at http://www.forces-war-records.co.uk there is a Flight Lt. J M H Slot. So my money is on the second letter being an ‘L’ and not a ‘T’.
I also considered Sl_t and looked for a better image of the signature. I found several scans in the BBC videos at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20456782.
I also searched for W Sl_t but since a red capsule could be US Forces, I included American records. I found two William Slat’s in the National Archives at http://aad.archives.gov/aad/display-partial-records.jsp?s=3360&dt=893&tf=F&bc=%2Csl%2Cfd&q=slat&btnSearch=Search.
Is it possible that Sjt W St_t was an American?
Rob: right now, I really don’t believe that the spelling ‘Serjeant’ was used anywhere apart from the British Army, which would seem to rule out the US and Canadian Armies fairly straightforwardly. Please correct me if I’m wrong! 🙂
Rob (as the Americans say) may have hit ‘pay dirt.’ The fact that there is no credible record in the British Army archive doesn’t tell us that we have the search text wrong (eg ‘Stout’ etc) – it tells us that he wasn’t British. In the US Archive there is a record for 33081218 Slat, William, enlisted 4 June 1941, born 1919 In Allegheny, Pennsylvania. The ‘Branch: Code’ section gives the following as values that could be entered in this field:
Sample Values:
General Staff Corps
Inactive Reserve
Inspector General’s Department
Military Intelligence
No branch assignment
Professor US Military Academy
Undefined Code
Women’s Army Corps
Clearly, ‘Military Intelligence’ is an excellent fit, and the use of 5 letter group code would appear to match with US coding machinery in use at the time.
He was enlisted on 4 June 1941 at Fort George G Meade, Maryland. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_George_G._Meade which ‘includes the Defense Information School, the United States Army Field Band, and the headquarters of United States Cyber Command, the National Security Agency, and the Defense Courier Service. ‘ Again, an excellent match.
So how do we rationalise away the fact that the text appears to say ‘Stot / Stit / Stet’ etc and ‘Sjt’ (with a ‘j’)?
Allow that the cross of the ‘t’ in ‘Sjt’ starts in the upper loop of the ‘S’ of ‘Sjt’ and carries across to the far right. The cross of the second ‘t’ in ‘Slat’ also starts in the upper loop of the ‘S’. This would let the second letter be an ‘l’ (lower case L) not ‘t’. Additionally, both the ‘t’ in ‘Slat’ and in ‘Sgt’ is formed from a straight vertical stab, without the characteristic loop at the bottom that you would expect to see. The second letter in ‘Slat’ however does have a loop, joining it to the the third letter. This supports it being an ‘l’ (lower case L) not a ‘t’. The third letter of ‘Slat’ (‘a’) is poorly formed as well. The loop of the ‘g’ in ‘Sjt/Sgt’ has gone the same way as all the other loops in his writing. (Perhaps a graphologist could enlighten us to what this means?) The US army record shows his Civilian occupation as ‘semiskilled occupations in mechanical treatment of metals (rolling, stamping, forging, pressing etc). His education is shown as ‘4 years of high school.’ Clearly handwriting was not a priority in Allegheny schools which were turning out semi skilled metal workers.
So here we have a man, enlisted on 4 June 1941 into the US Army Cyber department, sending a coded message using characteristic 5 letter groups as used by US Army coding machines in use at the time. It is entirely credible that 3 years later he has been promoted to Sergeant. The fact that the entire message is in code supports the use of a machine as it would be simpler to encode everything in a message rather than only the parts that needed to be if using a one time pad or similar manual system. Basically he set up the machine and ground away, transcribing the letters onto his pad as they displayed on the machine. The ‘AOAKN’ setting repeated at the beginning and end suggests some sort of set up code for the receiver’s machine.
This also brings us back to D Day possibly being the day the message was sent as the US Army was not active prior to this (although every subsequent 6th day of the month afterwards could also be a candidate), and would anyone in the US Army really be encoding and sending messages from ‘somewhere in England’ to ‘somewhere else in England’ using two pigeons when much more reliable and secure means were available?
In summary: 33081218 Sgt William Slat, 25 years old, from Allegheny, Pennsylvania, US Army Intelligence (or whatever the current nomenclature was at the time) goes ashore on D Day with his coding machine. He is given a message to send by pigeon, possibly because radio links back to UK at this time on D Day have not been set up or are not working. This message is sent using two pigeons to ‘XO2’, possibly the ‘second XO (Excutive Officer)’ or Second in Command. The real addressee, title etc would presumably be included in the encoded message.
It would be interesting to find out where and what he was actually doing on D Day.
Nick: I suspect that Sjt is actually Sgt…
And it looks like William Slat (1919-1997) eloped with Hilda Schall just before he enlisted in 1941. Her obituary at http://www.greenfuneralhomes.com/obituaries/hildaslat.html states “In 1945, while her husband served as a technical sergeant with the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II…”
So now we have a Sgt W Slat in Europe in 1945!
We need to be clear for Sgt W Slat that branch assignment is actually “No branch assignment” from that list rather than possibility of Military Intelligence.
This was the standard starting point for all new recruits in WW2 – no training had been done and they were starting at basic training, so no branch had been assigned yet.