The Coast is more replete with frankly incredible war stories than one might expect. That I learned while covering Remembrance Day last week. In case you aren’t convinced, here is one example.
Ann Watson spent the Second World War in Scotland. Her father was a pigeon fancier who was asked to join for that reason. For the first year of the war he supplied pigeons to Royal Air Force (RAF) Leuchars, an airbase on Scotland’s east coast. He collected pigeons from his friends and would send them over to be used in the war effort.
War pigeons were vital; the British used about 250,000 of them during the Second World War alone, mostly for communication and reconnaissance. They received special rations of corn and seed, while birds of prey were killed along the coast of the U.K. to ensure the pigeons’ safe passage.
Pigeons also saved the lives of aviators.
They would be placed into watertight containers that were squeezed into reconnaissance planes and bombers such as Avro Lancasters and Vickers Wellingtons that flew over enemy lines. If a plane went down, the pigeons would be released with the crew’s coordinates and sent back to their home RAF base.
Watson’s father trained a pigeon that ended up on one of those planes, a Bristol Beaufort if you’re curious. His name was Winkie.
In February 1942, the torpedo bomber crash landed into the North Sea’s frigid waters after it was hit by enemy fire, and with no radio – let alone GPS or any other modern communications – Winkie was their last resort.
The crew released him and off he flew, more than 200 kilometres back home. Air-sea rescue were deployed and using calculations of the bird’s arrival time and when the plane went down, the four crew members were located and rescued alive.
For his service, Winkie was honoured with the most prestigious British military award for non-human animals, the Dickin Medal. His stuffed likeness has since been memorialized at an Edinburgh museum. “We saw him there one of the times we were home and I was telling my children the story of Winkie,” Watson said.
Watson told the story again while standing in front of Rockwood Lodge last week, where 73 years ago, a ratchet was twirled by owner William Youngson to alert the residents of Sechelt that the Second World War was over.
Watson was still in Scotland at the time, though just barely. She was nearly sent to Canada on a refugee ship, but her mother prevented the passage after the ship that left before theirs was torpedoed.
Watson finally found her way to Canada in 1958, when she moved from Scotland to be with her husband. Today, she is the Sechelt Community Archivist.
