Cher Ami

The Meuse-Argonne campaign would be the war's biggest American battle. ... Early in the battle, Major Charles Whittlesey of the U.S. Seventy-seventh Division and more than five hundred men, trapped in a ravine behind enemy lines, were surrounded by a much larger force of Germans. For two days, the Americans fought off the enemy troops. On the second day, their food ran out. Then they were hit by an American artillery barrage intended for the Germans.

Private Omer Richards had carried into battle a cage holding eight carrier pigeons, birds trained to carry messages between specific locations. Several birds, dispatched with messages asking for help, had been shot down. By now there was just one bird left - a favorite named Cher Ami, French for "Dear Friend." Richards clipped a message to the pigeon's left leg, giving the Americans' location: "We are along the road parallel to 276.4. Our own artillery is dropping a barrage on us. For heaven's sake, stop it!"

Cher Ami flew off through a blizzard of enemy bullets and exploding shells. The bird reached his loft, twenty-five miles to the rear, just twenty-five minutes later. He had been shot through the breast and blinded in one eye. But he had delivered the message clipped to his leg, which also had been hit by a bullet and was dangling by a tendon. The shelling was immediately halted.

Nothing else was heard from the beleaguered Americans, who had become known to the world as the Lost Battalion. In an effort to rescue them, two divisions moved out toward the German lines, and as they approached, the Germans withdrew. On October 7, and after a five-day siege, the 194 survivors of the Lost Battalion's 554 men climbed out of their ravine and marched back to the American lines.

Cher Ami lost his shattered leg, but army medics carved a small wooden leg for him. The French awarded the doughty little pigeon their Croix de Guerre medal for bravery under fire. And he was sent to the United States to become an army mascot.

- from The War to End All Wars: World War I by Russell Freedman