Pigeon bigram / Slidex update…

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Having got hold of a WW2 Slidex manual, I’m starting to see what a travesty of a coding system it was – and how a smart German decrypter could (with a bit of practice) decipher it almost in real time.

But Slidex was never intended as a highly secure coding system: it was only supposed to be a convenient way for people to discuss very short-term matters mostly in the clear over the radio or telephone, encoding any individual items or details that should not be overheard by the enemy. In fact because of its obvious lack of security, I don’t believe it was even classified as a “low grade” cipher.

Yet for a whole host of pragmatic reasons, it seems that Slidex was chosen to be used on D-Day for all non-machine cipher traffic. So if the pigeon cipher is in Slidex, can we crack it?

The first big problem we face is that “Slidex as described in the manual” and “Slidex as used in the field” seem to be quite different beasts. For example, though both employ a 12 x 17 (= 204-cell) table, manual-Slidex used a 12 letter horizontal key at the top, whereas field-Slidex (as evidenced by various pictures) seems to have used a pair of characters per key horizontal cursor cell, hence a 24 letter horizontal key. Similarly for the vertical key, manual-Slidex used only 17 characters whereas field-Slidex seems to have used all 26 alphabetic characters. So unless someone kindly comes forward and tells us how Slidex was actually used circa D-Day, we’re kind of stuck in a no-man’s land between manual-Slidex and field-Slidex, uselessly trying to guess what’s inside the Baggins’s nasty little pocket, yessss.

The second big problem is that unless something rather miraculous emerges from GCHQ’s archives, it now seems fairly unlikely we will ever get retrospective access to the daily keys used. Key pairs were tightly controlled and never used for more than 24 hours at a time (keys were normally changed over at midnight each day).

And yet… Slidex is designed to be quick and easy to use, with exactly the same code table and key pair used by both encoder and decoder. And in practice, all the symmetries and shortcuts that yield all that convenience also compromise the security to the point of uselessness.

For example, every 12-column-wide code table is arranged into three groups of four columns: and in each one I’ve seen, each group includes all 26 letters of the alphabet in alphabetic order, as well as a third of the numbers from 00 to 99, and a few SWITCH ON and SWITCH OFF cells. Moreover, in the code half of the cells, all the words are arranged in alphabetic order from top to bottom.

For example, the first four columns of the Royal Engineers Series A code table “No. 1” proceed like this:-

[?] 08  N  T
0/? G   16 24
OFF 09  O  25
00  H   P  U
A   I   17 26
01  1/? 18 ON
B   J   19 V
C   10  2  27
02  11  Q  W
D   K   20 X
03  12  R  28
E   13  S  29
04  L   ON 3
05  14  21 Y
06  M   22 Z
F   ON  T  30
07  15  23 31

(Original picture from Jerry Proc’s Slidex page, second image from bottom. Note there’s also a photo of an Op/Sigs code table there that closely follows the same kind of layout pattern).

Moreover, the German cryptologists interviewed by TICOM after the war noted that before September 1944, most people using Slidex tended to use the leftmost group of columns almost exclusively, which compromised yet further what was already a poor system. And the widespread habit of using Slidex for entire messages made the daily keys easier to get to rather than harder. What a mess!

And so if our mysterious dead pigeon message is in Slidex, all those flaws and poor enciphering practices might give us enough to decrypt it without a daily key, or even without a code table at all! After all, if the Germans could do it (albeit usually with more depth to work with), surely so can we?

Looking again at the bigram, if we precede each bigram with the number of times the first half of the pair occurs, I suspect we can predict fairly reliably which part of the message is in code and which part is in cipher:-

6HV 3PK 3DF 3NF 2JW 2YI 3DD 2CR
4QX
... 1SR 3DJ 6HF 3PG 1OV 3FN 4MI
4AP 1XP 4AB 1UZ 1WY 2YN 3PC
... ... ... ... ... ... ... 4MP
3NW 6HJ 4RZ 6HN 2LX 4KG 4ME 4MK
4KO 3NO 2IB 4AK 1EE 4QU 4AO 4TA
4RB 4QR 6HD 2JO 3FM 4TP 1ZE 6HL
4KX 3GH 4RG 3GH 4TJ 4RZ 2CQ 3FN
4KT 4QK 2LD 4TS 3GQ 2IR

Because so many single instance “1nn” pairs are clustered in the middle section (“1SR … 3PC”), I’m pretty sure that this is in code, and the last part (“4MP … 2IR”) is in cipher. The first part I’m unsure about.

If we now concentrate purely on the final section and look at the frequency counts and patterns there, plenty of other interesting things jump out:-

... ... ... ... ... ... ... 3MP
2NW 4HJ 4RZ 4HN 2LX 4KG 3ME 3MK
4KO 2NO 2IB 2AK 1EE 3QU 2AO 4TA
4RB 3QR 4HD 1JO 2FM 4TP 1ZE 4HL
4KX 3GH 4RG 3GH 4TJ 4RZ 2CQ 2FN
4KT 3QK 2LD 4TS 3GQ 2IR

From the way they cluster, I think that M and Q probably refer to the same column: and from the few single-instance “1nn” bigrams in there, I suspect that “EE” and “ZE” probably both encipher “E” (while “JO” could well encipher “T”).

What’s interesting is that it seems likely that the four columns encipher letters in alphabetic order: so (say) A-F, G-M, N-T, and T-Z in the case of the Royal Engineers code table #1 (there are a couple of extra E and T characters inserted around the table). It may be that this is enough for someone to try to solve this directly without any other information!

Bigrams in the pigeon cipher…

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I’ve been wondering whether the pigeon cipher might be based around bigrams, i.e. where you split the cipher into pairs. If you disregard what seems to be the ‘AOAKN’ key indicator at the start and end, there are two basic ways to split the message into pairs. What is immediately interesting is that if you start immediately after AOAKN, you get three repeated pairs in the message (rather than just one), and that four of those six repeats occur every other pair along a short stretch towards the end of the message.

AOAKN
HV PK DF NF JW YI DD CR QX SR DJ HF PG OV FN MI AP XP AB UZ WY
YN PC MP NW HJ RZ HN LX KG ME MK KO NO IB AK EE QU AO TA RB QR
HD JO FM TP ZE HL KX GH RG GH TJ RZ CQ FN KT QK LD TS GQ IR U
AOAKN

AOAK
NH VP KD FN FJ WY ID DC RQ XS RD JH FP GO VF NM IA PX PA BU ZW
YY NP CM PN WH JR ZH NL XK GM EM KK ON OI BA KE EQ UA OT AR BQ
RH DJ OF MT PZ EH LK XG HR GG HT JR ZC QF NK TQ KL DT SG QI RU
AOAKN

The WW2 “Slidex” code works by having a table of codes particular to each arm of the armed forces (i.e. Royal Engineers, Operations/Signals, etc) where each bigram pair encodes a particular word often used by that arm. To encipher numbers or words, you bracket them inside a pair of SWITCH ON and SWITCH OFF bigram codes (there are several of each), and pick bigrams that correspond to each letter or digit or digit pair.

Hence I strongly suspect that what we are looking at in “GH RG GH TJ RZ CQ FN” is a sequence of letters enciphered in the Slidex SWITCH mode, i.e. where each letter is enciphered as a bigram.

Unsurprisingly, I would really like to read the 1944 Revised Instructions for using the Slidex R/T Code, and to have copies of the various Slidex code sheets and coordinate offsets used by the Royal Engineers and Infantry Brigade on D/Day, as I suspect these will allow us to read this message (does anyone have copies of these I can see?) Fingers crossed!

The unfortunate life of the Army’s Cysquare cipher…

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When I was trawling through WW2 pigeon / cipher-related documents at the National Archives, I found a brief mention of a medium grade Army cipher called “Cysquare”. I half-remembered the name and that it was (unsurprisingly) a cy[pher] based around a square, but couldn’t remember the context at all.

However, when I later searched for it on the Internet, it all started to come back to me… because Cysquare had been devised by my cryptological hero, master codebreaker Brigadier John Tiltman (‘The Brig’). Very much as the NSA PDF paean to him would have it, few would disagree that Tiltman was indeed “A Giant Among Cryptanalysts“.

Tiltman himself wrote a short introduction to his Cysquare (recently declassified, though brutally redacted) called “A Cryptologic Fairy Tale“, on the basis (a) that he’d lost the original material and had had to make up some examples, and (b) that it had a happy ending (which I guess was that the Allied Forces won the war). Here’s how The Brig described it (though with a few linefeeds added to make it acceptable to our modern short attention spans):-

Sometime later in 1941 I produced the “Cysquare” which was accepted by the War Office as a low-echelon cipher to replace the “Stencil” cipher and issued to the Eighth Army in North Africa, Figures 8 and 9 [both redacted, *sigh*] give photographs of two pages of the printed instructions.

The grille has 676 (26 x 26) squares. Each column and each line contains 10 white (permitted) squares, with the exception of 3 “plus” lines containing 20 white squares each and 3 “minus” lines which contain no white squares at all. The key for the day consists of 26 letters of the alphabet in random order with the numbers from 1 to 26 written under them also in random order. For each message the operator selects a 4-letter indicator from a random list of such groups provided him for use in turn. The indicator in the case of the example given [but redacted] is GMBX. The numbers corresponding to this indicator are 11 19 20 7, i.e., position 11, line 19, column 20, taking out number 7. The grille could be used with any of its sides at the top. Position II indicates that the grille is used as shown with numbers 8 to 13 at the top.

The numerical key for the day is written from left to right at the top of the grille and from the bottom upwards on the left hand side. The plain text is written into the grille starting at the next white square after the square described by the line coordinate 19 and the column coordinate 20, using the elements of the key to define the corresponding lines and columns. If and when the operator reaches the last white square in the grille he proceeds from the top left-hand corner. He then takes out the columns of letters starting at the top of the grille and in the column designated by the taking out number, i.e., in this case 7.

The message is written out in 4-letter groups preceded by the 4 letter indicator and followed by the number of letters, the indicator repeated, and the time and date. No message of more than 220 letters was permitted. If a message handed in for transmission exceeded this length it had to be divided into parts, none of them exceeding 200 letters in length.

However, somewhat contrary to Tiltman’s story’s name, Cysquare itself didn’t really have a happy ending. For a start, a number of people thought that cryptanalysts such as Tiltman shouldn’t be messing about with making their own cipher systems, and so there was a certain amount of resistance to it from within, right from the beginning.

The second problem was to do with implementation: even though it relied on disposable pads containing pre-printed grilles, somewhere along the line someone had the bright stupid idea that they could economize by getting the Army cipher clerks in North Africa to reuse the pads, by writing messages in pencil and then erasing them with a rubber. However, before very long it became impossible to tell a blank square from a dark square – everything in the grille ended up fifty shades or grey (so to speak). Hence the cipher clerks refused to use the system, and it was quietly abandoned.

However, when Germans captured Cysquare pads and implementation notes, their cryptographers rather liked it. And so in 1944, a new system started to appear in German messages: the Rasterschlüssel (also known as RS44), a system derived directly from Tiltman’s Cysquare cipher. Of course, Tiltman quickly recognized it: and had the Germans not made some mistakes when designing their pads’ grille designs, they might have been extremely hard to decipher.

So… was Cysquare a success, or a disaster? It was certainly quite secure (if somewhat awkward to use): but in the end, it nearly gave Germany a cryptographic edge late in the war.

For fans of the pigeon cipher story, it seems unlikely that its message used Cysquare… and so the search for that goes on.

PS: there’s an 2004 article in Cryptologia by Michael J. Cowan called “Rasterschluessel 44 — The Epitome of Hand Field Ciphers“.

Dead WW2 pigeon cipher cracked with WW1 codebook (says the Mail)… errr, really?

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According to today’s Mail on Sunday, Canadian expert Gord Young has cracked most of the dead WW2’s pigeon’s cipher message using a WWI Royal Artillery codebook. It’s not a big old message, so let’s line up the decrypt for ourselves, shall we?

What is immediately clear is that
* The decrypt is done down columns of groups, not along rows of letters (…which isn’t how it was usually done at all)
* Each five-letter cipher group is presumed to be a completely independent initial-based sentence (…which isn’t etc)
* Each independent sentence’s decryption is guessed at somewhat hopefully (…which isn’t etc)
* “J” mostly codes for “J[erry]”
* “Q” pretty much always codes for “[Head]q[uarters]”
* “P” mostly codes for “P[anzers]” (a word which was only coined in about 1940, awkwardly for the WW1 codebook idea)
* Eight of the five-letter cipher groups are skipped because they don’t fit this (already very loose) pattern. (What?)

(1)AOAKN (?)HVPKD (10)FNFJ[W/U] (?)YIDDC
(2)RQXSR (7)DJHFP (11)GOVFN (15)MIAPX
(3)PABUZ (?)WYYNP (12)CMPNW (16)HJRZH
(?)NLXKG (?)MEMKK (?)ONOIB (17)A[K/R/H]EEQ
(4)UAOTA (8)RBQRH (?)DJOFM (18)TPZEH
(5)LKXGH (?)RGGHT (13)JRZCQ (19)FNKTQ
(6)KLDTS (9)GQIR[U/W] (14)AOAKN

(1) AOAKN – Artillery observer at ‘K’ Sector, Normandy.
(2) RQXSR – Requested headquarters supplement report.
(3) PABUZ – Panzer attack – blitz.
(4) UAOTA – West Artillery Observer Tracking Attack.
(5) LKXGH – Lt Knows extra guns are here.
(6) KLDTS – Know where local dispatch station is.
(7) DJHFP – Determined where Jerry’s headquarters front posts.
(8) RBQRH – Right battery headquarters right here.
(9) GQIR[U/W] – Found headquarters infantry right here.
(10) FNFJ[W/U] – Final note, confirming, found Jerry’s whereabouts.
(11) GOVFN – Go over field notes.
(12) CMPNW – Counter measures against Panzers not working.
(13) JRZCQ – Jerry’s right battery central headquarters here.
(14) AOAKN – Artillery observer at ‘K’ sector Normandy.
(15) MIAPX – Mortar, infantry attack panzers.
(16) HJRZH – Hit Jerry’s Right or Reserve Battery Here.
(17) A[K/R/H]EEQ – Already know electrical engineers headquarters.
(18) TPZEH – Troops, panzers, batteries, engineers, here.
(19) FNKTQ – Final note known to headquarters.

Sorry, Mail editors, but you’ve landed yourself a bit of a dud story here. If there is something good about this theory (and I for one haven’t found it yet), it’s hidden beneath a tangled mess of obviously wrong & over-interpretative nonsense, the kind of foolishly hopeful non-decrypticity David Kahn termed “enigmatology”. Ohhhhh dearrrrry me. 🙁

At last, the secret history of that dead cipher pigeon…

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I spent last Saturday at the National Archives in Kew, accompanied by fellow programmer Stu Rutter who is just as fascinated by the whole pigeon cipher mystery as I am. Between us we did a kind of “Extreme Programming” two-man research team thing, where every time one found something unexpected or cool or had an insight, he would call the other over to see, or we’d both go downstairs to the café and discuss where we’d got to over a sandwich or whatever (reminder to self: don’t choose the double chocolate muffin again, it wasn’t very good).

The big result is that we ended up (I’m pretty sure) working out the secret history of this dead pigeon… and we didn’t even need to break its cipher (though Stu’s still on the case, more on that below). I’ll divide the overall argument down into a series of individual steps so that any passing Army historian who wants to take me to task over any detail can do so nice and easily. 🙂

1. Percy was an Army pigeon

I was already pretty sure of this: when I looked up all the “A Smith”s in the armed forces, every single “Serjeant” [with a ‘j’] was in the British Army. But what emerged at the National Archives were two widely-distributed pigeon-related documents (one from 1941, the other from 29th Jan 1944) that made it absolutely clear what different colour pigeon-carried canisters meant:
WO 205/225 – see pages 1/2/3 (at the back of the folder)
* Red = US Forces + British Army
* Blue = US Forces + British RAF
* Blue with coloured disk = British RAF
* Blue with white patch = RAF
* Red with coloured disk = British Special Service
* Grey = British Special Service
* Green = British Special Service
* Black = British Civil Police
* Yellow = British Commercial

Hence our dead pigeon was an Army pigeon; or (to be more precise) a NURP pigeon commandeered by the British Army.

2. The signature is that of Lance Serjeant William Stout

Knowing for sure that we’re looking at an Army message helps us narrow down the list of suspects to (I’m quite certain) one and only one individual – Lance Serjeant William Stout of 253rd Field Company of the Royal Engineers (as predicted here before), whose war grave says he died on 6th June 1944, the day better known as D-Day. You’ll read far more about Stout further down…

3. The pigeon was sent from France by a French speaker

I’m 99% certain that the “lib. 1625” writing on the cipher message was short for “libéré” (released) in French, and hence it seems overwhelmingly likely to me that the pigeon was released in France. But because there were no Royal Engineers at all in France (or indeed in Holland or Belgium) between the Dunkirk Evacuation (27th May 1940 – 4th June 1940) and D-Day (6th June 1944), the pigeon can therefore only have been sent either on or before 4th June 1940, or on or after 6th June 1944.

This gives us two “bubbles” of historical possibility to consider, the first ending with Dunkirk, the second starting on D-Day. How can we possibly tell which one of these was the right one? And can we be even more specific?

4. The pigeons were not released on or before Dunkirk

We’re helped here by the two pigeons’ ring tag identifications. Pigeon “NURP.37.DK.76” was the 76th pigeon to be ringed in 1937 by the DK (probably Dorking, we think) group of NURP [National Union of Racing Pigeons] pigeon fanciers, while “NURP 40 TW 194” was the 194th pigeon to be ringed in 1940 by the TW (almost certainly Tunbridge Wells) group. Yet having now read up on war-time pigeon-breeding administrivia at the National Archives, I know that (a) pigeons don’t normally breed in Winter; (b) pairs of pigeons will typically produce up to three pairs of eggs in a year, starting in Spring; (c) a young bird aged 6-8 weeks is called a “squeaker” and needs a fair bit of training before it is ready to race; and (d) pigeon races held in the first part of the summer almost never involve pigeons born earlier that year.

Hence if pigeon “NURP 40 TW 194” flew on 5th June 1940, it would have had to have been born in the middle of Winter right at the start of 1940: and the chances of there having been 193 other birds born and ringed earlier in 1940 among a single group of lofts around (say) Tunbridge Wells are extremely close to zero. Once you look at it like that, I think that there is no real chance that this pigeon was sent back from the Dunkirk evacuation, because it would simply have been too young.

5. The pigeons were released on D-Day itself – 6th June 1944

Here, the letter and number groups in the ciphertext itself give us the clues we need. Having also read up on the multitude of Army ciphers used in WW2 at the NA, I’m 99% certain how the structure of the wrapper around the cipher was contructed. Firstly, whatever system was employed for the cipher itself, the AOAKN letter group (which appears at the start and at the end of the message) is very likely an obfuscated or enciphered key reference for the message as a whole. And if this is right, then 1525/6 must surely hold the time and day of the month the cipher was sent at. “1525” = 3.25pm, “6” = “6th June 1944″… i.e. D-Day itself. But as we will see with Lance Serjeant Stout, this is the only day he could have sent it… though not quite as simply as you might expect from his gravestone.

6. Lance Serjeant Stout was mortally wounded on D-Day, and died on 28th June 1944

Right before the National Archives closed on Saturday, Stu & I managed to sneak a few minutes with the 1944 War Diaries for 253rd Field Company in the locked room at the back (someone else had put these diaries aside for photocopying this precise page, which made Stu and me both wonder if he or she might be a Cipher Mysteries lurker? Well, a big hello to you if that’s you!). Here’s what the entry for D-Day says:-

Well… not really very informative, you might think at first glance. Yet here’s where Stu Rutter really shone: having taken a photo of every page for June in these War Diaries, he then checked them all that evening and was pleasantly surprised to find an informative entry discussing Stout on the 28th June 1944:-

From this, we know for sure (a) that Stout was indeed in Normandy on D-Day; (b) that he was mortally wounded near Hermanville-sur-Mer (where he was later buried in the War Cemetery); (c) that he died of his wounds on the 28th June 1944; and that (d) he was in No. 2 Platoon. Stout was an NCO (“non-commissioned officer”, i.e. someone who had advanced through the ranks, rather than parachuted in from a public school fast-track), and at 37 was doubtless older than most of the men in in his Field Company. As my friend Ian suggested, perhaps this helped make Stout something of a father figure to many, for I think there’s definitely a warm combination of respect and fondness at play in this latter entry, quite a contrast to the consciously dry detachment evident in most of the others.

Combine what we know from this with the entry for 6th June 1944, and we can see precisely what Stout was doing on D-Day: assisting the tanks of 185th Infantry Brigade as they tried (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to push inland to take the town of Caen by nightfall. But… what happened to 185th Inf Bde on D-Day?

7. Meet the unnamed NCO who spiked them all.

Having gone looking for a history of 185th Infantry Brigade, I found this web-page from a group of historical re-enactors who have a particular interest in that very brigade on that very day. Essentially, according to their accumulated history of events on D-Day, what happened is that around about 2pm, 185th Infantry Brigade’s advance was being held up by a group of Germans shooting at it from the cover of some woods. It needed help to make progress against these very well dug-in defences. The web-page continues:-

Eventually a Pole was captured who knew the way through the wire at the back of the battery. The gunners fled into the woods, harried for some hundreds of yards by the Company. The guns were then blown up by an unnamed N.C.O. of the Divisional R.E.s, who, though badly wounded, succeeded in “spiking” them all.

Who was that “unnamed NCO”? Unless anyone can demonstrate otherwise, I think it’s not being overly romantic to believe that this man was Lance Serjeant William Stout – he was an experienced NCO in the Royal Engineers, he was in No. 2 Platoon assisting 185th Infantry Brigade outside their temporary base in Hermanville, he was badly wounded, yet he did the right thing in obviously difficult and trying circumstances. If anyone can be said to be “Stout-hearted”, it was surely him.

8. What kind of cipher did he use?

According to diagrams in the documents we found in WO 193/211, Royal Engineers were only supposed to use low grade ciphers in the field. But which?

One likely candidate is the Double Transposition Cipher (introduced 5th Nov 1943 in document 32/Tels/943). Yet one problem with Double Transposition as a candidate here is that encipherers were required to finish up the message with a pure number group containing the number of letters in the cryptogram followed by a forward slash and the day of the month (i.e. “179/12”), which plainly wasn’t what was used here. For a number of reasons like this, Double Transposition was thought to be “difficult and slow to operate”… possible but not ideal for use in the field.

The other major possibility here is the low grade “Syllabic Cipher”, a system I unfortunately failed to find described in any of the National Archives documents I looked through (which, let’s face it, do tend to be more administrative than operational). However, I do know that this cipher used a book marked “BX 724”, while the Royal Engineers had their own specific version marked “BX 724/RE”: these presumably comprised tables of syllables, which were then offset / obfuscated using a key from a Daily Key Allocation List. Stu has already gone off looking for anything like this and/or any other information on the Army’s Syllabic Cipher, but please email me or leave a comment here if you know where in the archives to find more information on these!

9. After all that… what did Stout’s pigeon message say?

It’s 3pm in the afternoon of D-Day. Lance Serjeant William Stout has just destroyed the arms of a German battery to help clear the way for 185th Inf Brde to move on towards Caen. He’s wounded. He wants to get a message back to his field company, but radio traffic has to be kept to a minimum. My best guess? 185th Infantry Brigade have brought with them some pigeons and a bilingual (but English-born) translator who is also a pigeon fancier. Despite his pain, Stout writes down his message and he (or someone else) rapidly enciphers it using a Syllabic Cipher (or possibly a Double Transposition Cipher, though I somewhat doubt it). This contains 27 groups of five letters, i.e. up to 135 plaintext letters – roughly 25 to 30 words. So, perhaps we can guess it says something along the lines of… SPIKED ARMS OF GERMAN BATTERY OUTSIDE HERMANVILLE 185 INF BDE NOW MOVING FORWARD AM BADLY WOUNDED TELL WIFE AND CHILDREN ETC. He starts copying the enciphered message onto the form at 15:22 (British Time), finishes copying it at 15:25, passes it off to the bilingual pigeon fancier, who signs them off at 16:25 French Time, places them in red Army canisters, attaches them to a pair of commandeered pigeons and then releases them.

However, it’s worth remembering that of the 16,000+ pigeons released on the Continent by SOE, I believe that only around 1,250 returned safely. So perhaps unsurprisingly, it could well be that one of these two pigeons failed to make it back at all; while the other did make the 136 or so miles back to Bletchingley, which I suspect will turn out to be remarkably close to its home loft: flying at 45mph or so, the bird likely took about three hours. Yet as it briefly rested there on top of a roof at about 6.30pm at the end of what had been a thankfully clear day (or else D-Day would have been an unmitigated disaster!), could it be that someone in the house below lit an evening fire in a hearth, unknowingly sucking the poor pigeon to its death down in the chimney?

* * * * * * * * *

All of which makes a great dinner-table story, with the added bonus that a fair proportion of it is certainly true… but will this turn out to be the whole story? Perhaps we’ll find out before too long… fingers crossed that we do! 🙂

Incidentally, has anyone tried to trace Lance Serjeant William Stout’s son (also William Stout) or daughter (Urula Stout)? Perhaps they already know even more about this than we do… I for one hope they do!

2012 Advent Calendar, Day #2: A Nice Saturday Morning In Kew…

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Next Saturday (8th December 2012) morning at 9.30am or so, I’ll be at the National Archives in Kew for a WW2 dead cipher pigeon research session. If any Cipher Mysteries reader or lurker would like to come along and join in, please email me or leave a comment below, I always enjoy meeting up with other people who like all this stuff.

My basic reason for going to the National Archives is this: everyone keeps asking me questions about the dead WW2 cipher pigeon story, which would be great if I had anything like a halfway-decent answer for any of them… but in all honesty, right now I don’t. As it is, I – just like everyone else, it would seem – keep trying to latch onto half-details revealed by close examination of the pigeon’s teeny-weeny payload as if any one of them alone might be sufficient to magically elicit a definitive answer (hint: History rarely yields up her secrets so easily).

Of course, as with pretty much every historical challenge, the most reliable research approach is to build up such a strong sense of context that any individual fragment you happen to be looking at still makes sense within that much larger framework. So the immediate need here is to build up a picture of what was happening with pigeons in WW2.

However, from what I’ve learnt so far, it seems fairly clear that everyone below the stratospherically strategic level of Churchill and Viscount Alanbrooke in the British WW2 effort was working in a silo, and each silo used pigeons in a quite different way.

Hence it is easy to get sidetracked (and very possibly misled) by accounts of how individual silos (Army, RAF, RAF in the Middle East, RAF in India, National Union of Racing Pigeons, National Pigeon Service, Eastern Command Pigeon Service, etc) used and managed pigeons – moreover, it now seems unlikely to me that there will be any über-account of “Pigeons At War” out there. (Though I’m eagerly waiting for Freddy Dyke’s book to arrive, because that may prove to be as close as we can currently get).

The first question, then, is which silos we should be looking at. For me, the presence of “Sjt” in the signature is a strong – and, I suspect, necessary – indication that we are look at a pigeon used by an Army regiment. So it would seem that the right place to look for historical context would be in documents relating to the Army Pigeon Service rather than anywhere else.

Luckily the National Archives have quite a few (which I’ve listed below, having stripped out quite a few relating to the Middle East or India). I’ve marked the six I’ve preordered for next Saturday, & hope some of you will be able to join me for a peek into pigeony history. If you haven’t already got a National Archives reader’s ticket, getting one is really very straightforward (errrm, as long as you’ve got the ID with you they need) and quick (I got mine in 20 or so minutes), so come along and get yourself a ticket, should be a bit of fun!

ARMY
[*] AIR 2/4969 – (1943-1945) – ARMY (Code B, 88): Special section (Army) National Pigeon Service
[*] WO 208/1338 – (1941 Mar.-1944 Dec) – Signals; carrier pigeons
[*] WO 205/224 – (1944 Jan.-1945 Mar) – Instructions on carrier pigeons: reports
[*] WO 32/9959 – (01 January 1941 – 31 December 1942 ) – EMPLOYMENT OF MILITARY FORCES: General (Code 53(A)): Pigeon service holding unit: Royal Signals.

NATIONAL PIGEON SERVICE
[*] AIR 15/716 – (1939 Oct.- Dec) – National Pigeon Service

War Office / General
[*] WO 32/10681 – (1942 – 1947) – COMMUNICATIONS: General (Code 76(A)): Pigeon Service [file opened in 1972]
T 161/1442 – (20 July 1935 – 29 May 1947) – LIVESTOCK. Birds: Establishment of Pigeon Service for communication in time of war.

RAF
AIR 14/1581 – (01 May 1940 – 31 July 1941) – Air Ministry: Bomber Command: Registered Files. Pigeon service.
AIR 14/1582 – (01 July 1941 – 30 September 1943 ) – Air Ministry: Bomber Command: Registered Files. Pigeon service.
AIR 14/1583 – (01 January 1942 – 31 July 1944) – Air Ministry: Bomber Command: Registered Files. Pigeon service.
AIR 2/4129 – (01 January 1939 – 31 December 1946) – COMMUNICATIONS (Code B, 25): Pigeons: special services. [File opened in 1972]

SOE
HS 6/92 – (01 January 1942 – 31 December 1944) – GIBBON mission: Jean Ceysens; organisation of carrier pigeon information service for Political Warfare Executive (PWE).

COLUMBA (i.e. MI 14(d))
WO 208/3560 – (01 April 1941 – 31 December 1941) – COLUMBA: messages No 1 to 91.

That dead cipher pigeon – the facts…

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Looking back at the cipher pigeon media brouhaha of the last week, I think it’s time we all (myself included) stopped jumping in the air at every flickering shadow, and pause long enough to get some kind of solid perspective on what we actually know.

(1) It has been claimed that enciphered pigeon messages were as rare as, errrm, hen’s teeth. However, as (a very young) John Harding recalled it, WW2 “Pigeongram” messages were “nearly allways” in code. Moreover:-

“It was decided that use should be made of the existing pigeon fanciers who had lofts nearest to the south coast, that they should be approached and checks made as to their background, nationality and allegiance to their country, so it was that the Pigeongram Service was established and was much refined for it’s better use in the second World War.”

(2) “S[er]j[ean]t” as written on the pigeon form is most definitely an Army spelling, not an RAF spelling. Of all the military records for “A Smith” (a simple sampling methodology) I looked at, every single “Serjeant” was in an Army regiment. [Hence everything said so far about SoE and RAF bombers is probably interesting but irrelevant].

(3) The only “Serjeant” I’ve found in forces databases with a name close to the one as written on the pigeon form would seem to be “3650400 Serjeant William Stout” in 253 Field Company of the Royal Engineers. [Hence everything written about other military personnel called “Stott” is probably insteresting but irrelevant].

(4) The pigeon form was written by two hands, one English (Stout’s) and one apparently French because it uses the abbreviation “lib.” (presumably short for “lib[éré“. [Speculation: because the “7” digit in the French hand is not crossed, might it be that the second writer was French/English bilingual?]

(5) I think it is reasonably safe to infer that the pigeon found dead in a Bletchingley chimney was probably returning from France to its loft in South-East England: “DK” / “TW” could well stand for ten-mile-radius geographic areas around Dorking and Tunbridge Wells (or possibly Twickenham). [Even so, I think it’s a bit odd that nobody with access to National Union of Racing Pigeon archives has yet worked out any kind of reasonably definitive answer to this – you’d think they’d be overjoyed for pigeons to be in the news in such a big way].

(6) Even though racing pigeons do often live to ten or more, their active racing life is typically only 6-7 years. However, I’m pretty sure that Freddy Dyke said the military had a preference for young birds (so many jokes present themselves that I simply can’t bring myself to choose). Put together, these suggest the two pigeons were sent after mid-1940 (when the younger of the two pigeons was born) but before (say) 1944, because by 1945 the “[19]37” pigeon would have been 7 or 8 years old.

(7) According to Freddy Dyke, the figure of “over 200,000 pigeons” often quoted could only be reached by combining the numbers for the “National Pigeon Service, Army Pigeon Service, RAF Pigeon Service, Middle East Pigeon Service, Australian Army Signal Corps, and the Signal Corps United States Army”.

(8) If we are looking an Army pigeon, then we would probably need to look for information relating to the Army Pigeon Service / Army Carrier Pigeon Service. Luckily, there are quite a lot of documents relating to this at the National Archives in Kew. If only I had time…

If you want to read more, the best pigeon-related war book seems to be Freddy Dyke’s (2005) “Memoirs of a Wartime Teenager”. I’ve ordered myself a copy from tiny publisher Dreamstake Books (it doesn’t currently seem to be available anywhere else) – PayPal them your £8.99 + £1.99 p&p from this page.

Tunbridge Wells, and a pigeony bombshell…?

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Yet more dead WW2 cipher pigeon thoughts for you all (though I rather hope normal service will be resumed shortly, *sigh*).

Peter Hibbs runs a website called Pillblogs (to which commenter Germo passed me a link, thanks very much!), part of “The Defence of East Sussex Project”, a research project. But rather than throwing yet more unsubstantiated pigeon-related speculation onto the media bonfire of the last few days, Pete had some interesting opinions based on actual documents he had recently gone through to do with the military’s Eastern Command Pigeon Service set up in 1940.

Plotting the location of pigeon lofts as found in a 1940 war diary (and with the TW and DK pigeon tags fresh in his memory), Pete noticed that there were quite a few pigeon lofts in Tunbridge Wells, a mere ten or so miles south-east of Bletchingley (where our pigeon ended up dead). What’s more, when he totted up the number of pigeons in those lofts able to be used by the Eastern Command Pigeon Service, the total ended up very close to the magic number “194” (as in “NURP 40 TW 194“).

So… could TW in fact be Royal Tunbridge Wells? It’s a pretty good question, and may (despite a few apparently showstopping problems) indeed lead us all to a surprisingly good answer.

When I first started thinking about this pigeon story, I also considered Tunbridge Wells as a possibility for “TW”, but the immediate issue is that Bletchingley is simply the wrong side. Would a pigeon flying from the continent overshoot by ten miles, I wondered? Probably not, on balance.

What’s more, racing pigeons lead a simple, cosseted, safe life, and often end up living to an age of ten or more: which means that the number of newly-ringed pigeons per year in those Tunbridge Wells lofts would probably only need to be 20 or 30 (say, 40 max), far lower than would be needed to reach 194 in a single year, I would have thought.

And yet, and yet… put all these fragments together, and an entirely different possibility emerges. “TW” or “DK” could very easily be not so much a single town as a regional postcode, a grouping for a whole set of pigeon loft owners over a wide geographic area to share between them. In which case, the extraordinary possibility we should immediately consider is whether the loft to which our pigeon was returning was (whether DK/Dorking or TW/Tunbridge Wells) right in Bletchingley itself – this deceased ex-bird you sold me (etc) might already have been a street or two away from its home. Hence the old adage about most car accidents happening within half a mile of home might well have an unexpectedly pigeony analogue here!

I therefore urge the meticulous and hardworking Mr Hibbs to look again to see if there are any pigeon loft addresses listed far closer to Bletchingley itself. It may be that one of these falls within a “TW” or “DK” pigeon-postcode, something that I didn’t at all expect myself! All the same, before too long I suspect we will have a proper answer as to who the pigeon’s owner was… and he/she might just turn out to live rather closer to Bletchingley’s High Street than one might at first think. 🙂

But today’s bombshell is that I now suspect the Serjeant’s name was not “W Stott” but “W Stout” – having enhanced the image above like crazy this last day, this now seems a marginally more likely reading. Yet the Allied forces seem to have had only a single Serjeant (definitely with a ‘j’) William Stout 3650400 from St Helens in Lancashire in 253 Field Company of the Royal Engineers, who died on 6th June 1944 aged 37. His grave is 1. C. 11 in Hermanville War Cemetery in Calvados, Normandy: he was the son of William and Margaret Stout, and husband of Ursula Ann Stout, all of St. Helens.

But that’s as far as straightforward web-searching has taken me – so perhaps a Cipher Mystery reader with helpful database subscriptions might see if there’s anything more we can tell about him? I know you all like a bit of a challenge… 😉

Incidentally, 253 Field Company served in France and Belgium, which would seem to be entirely consistent with what (little) we know so far: the story of much of its war is retold in “Sword of Bone: Phoney War and Dunkirk, 1940” by Anthony Rhodes, which I’ve ordered (of course) – there are copies on Abebooks and elsewhere for only a few pounds, if you are interested.

Is it Stott or Stout? The jury’s out! 🙂

Dead WW2 cipher pigeon timeline…

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It’s been a busy day here at Cipher Mysteries Mansion, with loads of people making suggestions via comments to my first dead pigeon webpage and my second dead cipher pigeon webpage.

I’ll try to bring all the pieces together into a single dead pigeon timeline, with a few additional thoughts to flesh out the gaps. But the first place to start is with a contrast-enhanced highish-res scan of the page (click on it to see a bigger version)

The contextual evidence we have to help us reconstruct a story is actually quite large:-
* The pigeon appears to have been coming back from France, in a line from Paris to Dieppe to Bletchingley to Twickenham
* The message was not sent in 1939 (because one of the pigeons was ringed in 1940)
* The “Sjt” seems to imply that this was sent by an RAF airman “W Stott” (though opinions differ on this)
* The note is addressed to “X02”, which I believe was Bomber Command in High Wycombe, Bucks
* Two pigeons were sent back to X02 carrying (presumably) the same message
* RAF bombers used to carry a pair of pigeons in case of emergency
* The note has two different inks (blue and black)
* The note is written in two different hands (Stott’s and a possibly French hand)

The first thing to look closely at is the very top line, which seems to have evaded everyone’s notice:-

I think this could well be “110”, for “110 Squadron”. The history of 110 squadron is that it was based at RAF Wattisham in East Anglia until 17 March 1942, before departing to India for the remainder of the war – so if this “110” indicates “110 Squadron”, it would have been before 17 March 1942 (which is entirely consistent with what we know).

As mentioned above, “X02” apparently denoted Bomber Command in High Wycombe. But I suspect this tells us a great deal: for if we have an RAF airman sending a pair of enciphered messages by pigeon from France to Bomber Command, this perhaps points to a bomber having crashed in France or Belgium – and up until March 1942, 110 Squadron flew Bristol Blenheim IV bombers.

There are three numbers on the image in the two hands, which I would suggest tell a very specific story. The first hand is RAF airman W Stott’s: these indicate a time of origin of 15:22 and a time of completion of 15:25 (perhaps on the 6th of the month). Whereas to my eyes the other hand looks French, with “lib.” almost certainly short for “lib[éré]“, released. But what is most convincing to me is that this is 16:25 French time – an hour ahead of British time.

The two pigeon ring references here refer to “NURP” (the National Union of Racing Pigeons), ringed in [19]”40″ and [19]”37″, and from “TW” (for which Twickenham is my best guess) and DK (which, as Matt Peskett points out, was probably Dorking rather than Denmark Hill). I’m pretty sure that I’ve read we’re looking at NURP 40 TW 194, which would have been the 194th pigeon ringed in 1940 by its Twickenham owner: which perhaps points to either a very large pigeon loft or a pigeon ringed late in the year (or perhaps a bit of both). Put it all together, and I suspect this means we can discount the first half of 1940.

My shaky inference is therefore that we could well be looking at a message from a RAF Bristol Blenheim IV bomber from 110 Squadron (“110Sq”) [possibly crash-] landed in Northern France after June 1940 and before 17 March 1942, not far from a line running through Dieppe and Paris. I’ve asked the Blenheim Society about this, let’s see if they can help!

Dead WW2 pigeon – a ring of truth?

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Some further notes on our poor plucky pigeon with his red Bakelite cipher payload.

People have been leaving some very interesting comments here, presumably spurred into action by today’s BBC piece on the mysterious bird. Moshe Rubin and Keoghly independently pointed out that “27” is a check figure to confirm that the sheet should contain 27 blocks of encrypted letters (as indeed it does), and both say that this was “standard fare for crypto“; while Keoghly adds that “1525/6 is likely [a reference] to [the] one time pad/offset used“. Bob Yeldham also helpfully notes that “the 37 & 40 on the rings denotes the year the bird was ringed that’s assuming the correct year ring was used, ringing was usually done 7 days after hatching.” Thanks to all of you!

What is also nice is that plenty of people seem to have rushed off to buy copies of Leo Marks’ very enjoyable book “Between Silk & Cyanide”, one of the best code-related books ever written, I’d say (even if some people have since asserted that Marks may have been an unreliable witness). Read it with care, for sure, but definitely read it! 🙂

I also ought to add my own thoughts from the last few weeks… and perhaps there’s an answer of sorts hidden in there.

My first reaction (that it might be a poem code sent from Douai early in the war) didn’t really stand up to analysis – having played with this in an Excel spreadsheet, I don’t think any kind of pure transposition is going to jump out from it. Though it resembles a poem code, Leo Marks specifically describes SoE’s sending cryptograms later in the war (particularly towards D-Day) that resembled the earlier poem codes, mainly to mislead Axis codebreakers: but by then Marks had (so he said) managed to persuade The Powers That Be to use one-time pads which were, to all intents and purposes, uncrackable then – or now, for that matter.

Having said that, what interests me (as an historian) is what we can tell from the rest of the message. For example, we know that the same message was sent back to the UK on two different pigeons, both of whose owners were members of the National Union of Racing Pigeons – “NURP 40 TW 194” (our dead pigeon) and “NURP 37 DK 76”. Yet we still have no word from the Racing Pigeon magazine (who presumably have all manner of racing-pigeon-related archives) on who those owners were, or where they lived.

Yet I think we can make a sensible guess at what happened here!

The message was addressed to X02, which (I believe) was Bomber Command in High Wycombe, Bucks (of which my aunt was once Mayor, incidentally), so it’s likely that we’re looking for locations in South-East England not too far from there. Hence I’ve already noted that our pigeon’s “TW” owner id could well have meant “Twickenham”, while similarly “DK” could very easily have been “Denmark Hill”. And we also know that the pigeon ended up in the chimney of David Martin’s house in Bletchingley (near Redhill) on its way home.

So let’s put it all into Google Maps and trace a possibly Twickenham-based pigeon backwards in time as the crow pigeon flies:-

If I’m right that “TW” is Twickenham (and it could just as easily be “Thomas Wilson”, I know, I know), then I think what we have here could be a pigeon flying back from Dieppe to Twickenham via Bletchingley. And one of the most [in]famous missions of WW2 was the Dieppe Raid of 19 August 1942, which went just about as badly as could be feared. So… could this have contained a desperate message sent back to Bomber Command to get help from the air on that dreadful occasion? Of all the possible scenarios discussed for our mystery pigeon’s journey, perhaps this is the one that has a (if you’ll forgive my pigeon-related pun) ring of truth!

Update: having said all that, if you follow the same line directly into the heart of France you hit Paris almost directly. Dieppe just happens to be the nearest point to Britain: all the same, until anyone knows any better, my pet name for this dead pigeon is going to be “Johnny Dieppe”, I hope nobody minds too much. 😉