When a Messenger Pigeon Stopped Friendly Fire in World War I
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2026
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, during World War I, carrier pigeons were woven into the U.S. Army’s communication system. When phone lines were cut and runners could not cross open ground, messenger pigeons carried handwritten notes over smoke and shellfire. At one point in the war, an American unit was pinned down by its own artillery. Cut off and taking heavy losses, the men turned to a wounded homing pigeon that had been trained to fly back to its loft. That small bird became their final line of communication.
Frank Blazich of the National Museum of American History tells the tale of how pigeons entered modern military service and how one battered carrier pigeon altered the course of a battlefield in World War I.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.3 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:14.3 | And we continue with our American stories. |
| 0:17.9 | And up next, we have a history story from Frank Blazich, a curator at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. |
| 0:26.9 | During World War I, Europe began to look to homing pigeons as a means of communication. |
| 0:33.2 | Trench warfare was no place for radio or wired lines that were easily tapped or damaged. And so they |
| 0:40.7 | turned to pigeons. Here's Frank Blazich with a story. |
| 0:48.7 | Why pigeons of all things? |
| 0:57.0 | Well, ancient history is a bit sketchy and about how accurate it is. |
| 1:01.0 | We do know that in the 19th century, pigeons could be used to reliably send small messages from essentially point A to point B. |
| 1:10.0 | This was most notable in the Siege of Paris. small messages from essentially point A to point B. |
| 1:17.2 | This was most notable in the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War from 1870 to 71, |
| 1:23.2 | where the French were able to, in some cases, move pigeons out of Paris by balloon, |
| 1:29.9 | and then the pigeons could transmit, they would actually carry essentially early microfilm messages from outside Paris back into Paris and vice versa. |
| 1:34.3 | And so the French use us to get around the German siege with some success. |
| 1:41.3 | After the siege was over, a lot of the world's militaries took note of this and said, |
| 1:46.2 | hmm, we might want to develop this capability, if you will, for our uses. |
| 1:51.5 | And so you see a number of governments in Europe begin to develop homing pigeon effort, |
| 1:56.8 | offices, programs, and so forth within their militaries. |
| 2:00.1 | The United States doesn't. We begin to |
| 2:01.9 | kind of play around with pigeons, experimenting and best. But long story short, we just don't |
| 2:07.8 | really develop the capability until in 1917, the German government informs Wilson that |
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