G.I. Joe

He hatched in Algiers in March 1943 and served with the US Army Pigeon Service in Italy, attached to the 5th Army. In October the British 56th (London) Infantry Brigade was ordered to take the village of Calvi Vecchia, and expected a fight; the Allied air forces had accordingly been asked to bomb it in support. The Germans withdrew, and the brigade walked into the village on the morning of 18 October with hours to spare before the bombers were due. Their radios were out. A message cancelling the raid went out with G.I. Joe, who flew the twenty miles to the air support base in twenty minutes and landed as the aircraft were running up their engines on the runway. The raid was scrubbed. The estimate afterwards was that he had saved the lives of a thousand or more men of the brigade, and the village with them. He was given the Dickin Medal at the Tower of London in November 1946 — the first awarded to an animal of the United States. He lived out his life in the Army's pigeon lofts and then at the Detroit Zoo, dying in 1961 at eighteen, and is preserved at the Army's communications museum at Fort Monmouth.

Honours

• 1943Flew 20 miles in 20 minutes to cancel a bombing raid on Calvi Vecchia, 18 October
• · Credited with saving the brigade in the village and its inhabitants — a thousand lives or more
• 1946Dickin Medal at the Tower of London — the first to an American animal
• · Preserved at the US Army Communications–Electronics Museum, Fort Monmouth

Their kind

Selectively bred from the rock dove for the instinct to return, and raced for centuries before armies used it — a trained bird navigates home from hundreds of miles away by a sense we still argue about.

A life in seasons