It’s 1943.
Nazi Germany still has it’s clutches across most of Europe, but after a crushing defeat
at Stalingrad, they’re begining the retreat that would eventually lead to their downfall.
But even with the Germans in retreat in the east, the war was far from over.
In the summer of 43 they still occupied some 20 countries, controlled more than a million
square miles [3 million square kilometers], a size nearly equal to that of the United
States, and had subjugated more than a 100 million people.
This left the Americans stuck trying to solve a tricky puzzle.
Rocket technology had advanced considerably over the course of the war.
The following year the Germans would begin launching their V2 rockets at London, the
same rocket technology that would eventually lead humans to the moon just two decades later.
But while rockets could travel further than ever, guiding them was becoming a real challenge.
Missiles could now launch 100’s of kilometers [160 mi], enough to cross even the widest
parts of the English channel that separated Britain from Nazi occupation.
But over such vast distances, they proved difficult to aim, especially if you wanted
to target anything smaller than an entire city.
GPS technology wouldn’t be invented for another 30 years.
Most missiles of the day weren’t even guided, at least not in real time.
Using guide books, soldiers would do the calculations in advance and try to estimate things like
how much fuel was needed and what angle to launch at to reach their target.
And any local variations, like if there was a breeze or if it was raining, would have
to be factored into the math.
The Germany V2, one of the most famous and influential technologies to come out of the
war, had questionable accuracy, with half of the rockets falling within only 12km of
their target.
Although, the side story behind this accuracy is actually pretty interesting.
A big part of this lack of accuracy was thanks to the British Special Operations Executive
(basically Britain's counter-intelligence agency).
During the war those german soldiers doing the math couldn’t just call up the Brits
and ask them.
“Hey, you know that missile we just launched at you?
How accurate was it?
We need to know so we can adjust our calculations and make them even more accurate next time!”
So instead the Germans had spies in London that would report back where the missiles
landed.
Unknown to the Germans, most of these spies had been turned by British intelligence and
were sending back false reports about the impact locations.
They continually reported that the missiles were going long and impacting beyond London.
As a result, the Germans would correct and give their rockets less umph.
As the war progressed, the German average impact point kept moving farther and farther
east.
And by the end of the war, the average impact point for the entire campaign ended up on
the far eastern edge of the Greater London Air Defence Zone.
If it wasn’t for this misinformation campaign, it’s believed that the rockets would have
been 4x more accurate, on average landing within just 6 km of their target.
But as most of the internet likes to do, let’s put our focus back on the Americans.
Not wanting to let Hitler get the best of them, they wanted to develop something even
more accurate.
A missile that could hit specific targets from a 100 km away, like the defences that
dotted the German coast line or individual ships out at sea.
That’s where America Psychologist B.F. Skinner comes into play.
Skinner approached the National Research Defense Committee with his very secretively named
plan, “Project Pigeon.”
The idea was to use pigeons to physically guide missiles to their targets.
Members of the committee were doubtful, but granted Skinner $25,000 to get started, that’s
about $400,000 today.
Skinner had already used pigeons in his psychological research, training them to press levers for
food.
With their exceptional vision and unflappable behavior in chaotic conditions, pigeons were
an ideal avian for this task.
He built a nose cone for a missile fitted with three small electronic screens and three
tiny pigeon cockpits.
On the screens he projected an image of the ground in front of the rocket.
He would then train the pigeons to recognize the pattern of the target, and to peck the
screen when they saw it.
When all three of them pecked, it was thought you could reliably aim the missile in that
direction.
As the pigeons pecked, cables attached to their heads would mechanically steer the missile
until it finally reached its target.
Without an escape hatch, these brave avian soldiers were not only guiding the missile
to its target, but themselves to their own demise...
Despite a successful demonstration of the trained pigeons, military officials remained
skeptical.
Who knows, maybe they thought the pigeons could be turned just like the German spies
had been.
After two years, military officials canceled the program as they believed that further
development would seriously delay other projects that the military considered to have more
immediate potential for combat application.
Skinner of course, would go on to become one of the country’s most influential psychologists,
popularizing behavioralism, a conception of psychology that views behavior as a reaction
to one’s environment (basically the crux of the nature versus nurture debate)
As for the pigeons, they still had their brave history on the battlefield, couriering messages
between troops.
Throughout the course of the war, the United Kingdom had enlisted a quarter million pigeons,
but shortly after the war ended the UK would dissolve the Air ministry that managed the
war pigeons, and MI5 (the UK’s current spy agency) claims to have stopped using pigeons
in 1950.
In the late 70’s and early 80’s the US coast guard even tried using pigeons in a
similar setup to help find people lost at sea.
Equipped to a small device under search helicopters, the pigeons would search for the red or yellow
life jackets of people floating in the water.
The pigeons were not only found to be more reliable than humans but they were also many
times quicker when it came to spotting survivors from a capsized or sinking boat.
In testing missions, the pigeons spotted targets on the first pass 90 percent of the time,
while the human crew was only successful 38 percent of the time.
And in passes where both humans and the pigeons spotted the target, the pigeons spotted it
first 84 percent of the time.
Despite an audit of the program in 1981 recommending the program be vastly expanded, budget cuts
that year ended up killing the program entirely.
Today, it seems their descendants prefer being fed bread by tourists and pooping on your
car over their time on the battlefield.
If you liked learning about the once great dream of Kamikaze missile pigeons, be sure
to let us know in the comments section below, the analytics really help us smaller channels
and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an upload.
As always, have a great day, and remember, there is always more to learn,