Normandy. British paratrooper William Scott, 27, pushes behind enemy lines and entrusts a carrier pigeon with his mission accomplished message. The coded message contains 27 groups of words and begins with “AOKN HVPKD FNFJW FNFJW… and so on.” The pigeon will die in the chimney of a house in Bletchingley, Surrey. The skeleton of the pigeon with the red cylinder containing the message will not be discovered until December 2012 during renovations by the homeowner, 74-year-old David Martin. The dispatch is not immediately translated by the British intelligence services, but a Canadian who inherited an old Royal Artillery manual manages to do so. The message reads: “Jerrys [that’s the Germans] troops, tanks, artillery, engineers, here. Anti-tank countermeasures fail.”
