I didn’t even know how to reach into the creek to take the bird out without hurting its feathers, I thought, “Gee, I’m gonna create a problem here.” Anyway, I became an instant authority on birds diseases there of, and so forth. And there probably were about 6,000 birds in this Signal Pigeon Company. Patton was the only officer in Europe that I knew of that insisted on this, this was his backup for communication. And I learned a lot about homing pigeons about the guys that care for them, and really a bunch of good guys, mostly Eastern kids from, I’d say the state of Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, were the ones that were in this particular group of pigeon people. And then I’d occasionally do some food inspection work too, but the silliness that went on trying to train these birds to work when the lines were moving so quickly was beyond belief because homing pigeons are very reliable when they have a permanent base. And the Brits, for example, used them in the early start of the war when the bombers would leave England to go across the channel, they all had pigeons with them. And if a plane was going down, they’d release the birds with where they were, best they knew where they were, and the people back home knew how to go look for them. The birds probably have an average flight time for a daytime flight of about 3 to 400 miles.
