Operation Columba

I think there must be something about the nature of war that sometimes causes those involved to think out of the box. Ukraine's recent attack on a Russian air base using drones launched from trucks, strikes me as an excellent example. But so, too, does the idea of using pigeons (aka Columba livia) as couriers in wartime, because that's what Gordon Corera's book, Operation Columba, is all about. 

During WWII, smuggling information out of Nazi occupied territories in Europe was hard, if not impossible. So some creative minds in Great Britain hit upon the brilliant idea of dropping courier pigeons into those territories to aid the process. The pigeons would be delivered by planes. Resistance fighters would then attach specially prepared information to tiny canisters attached to the pigeons' legs and then send them on their way back across the channel where the information would be quickly conveyed to whomever needed it the most.

Operation Columba, as it was called, evidently proved surprisingly helpful to Allied forces in numerous ways. And Corera's retelling of that story drew me in deeper and deeper page by page and chapter by chapter. So much so that I'm now hot on the trail of some of Corera's other books.