The Pigeon That Saved 194 Men

In October 1918, in the Argonne Forest, roughly 550 men of the US 77th Division were cut off and surrounded. They became known as the Lost Battalion, and their problem was not the Germans. It was their own artillery.

American shells were falling directly on their position. Major Charles Whittlesey had already lost most of his runners, and every pigeon he sent with a ceasefire request was shot down. He had one bird left.

The pigeon was called Cher Ami. He was carrying a message on a small canister attached to his leg: "We are along the road parallel to 276.4. Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven's sake, stop it."

Cher Ami launched into fire. He was hit almost immediately. A bullet passed through his breast. Another destroyed the leg holding the message, leaving it attached only by a strip of tendon. He was blinded in one eye. He kept flying. He covered about 25 miles in under half an hour and reached division headquarters, where the message was taken from his ruined leg.

The barrage stopped.

Of the roughly 550 men who had gone in, 194 walked out.

Cher Ami was treated by army medics and given a wooden leg. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre with palm — a French military decoration for bravery — and became a celebrity in the United States. He died in June 1919 from his wounds, and he is still there: taxidermied, one-legged, in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

There's an uncomfortable detail here worth sitting with. The army had tried radio, telephone, runners and signal flares. All of them failed. The thing that worked was a bird that nobody had much faith in, doing something that cost it almost everything.