First World War survivors

There’s a great article on the Guardian Online where some of the (very few remaining) WW1 survivors tell there story. One bit, from an RNAS aircrew, I reproduce as follows:

‘We never had any parachutes and we didn’t have radio. We had pigeons which we carried in a basket, but I never had to use them. Some of our people who were adrift in the drink could be there for up to five days, and they used to let the pigeons go. They would fly back to the loft at the station, and a search party would be sent out to look for them. As a general rule, after five days of searching, they would give up, and the men were lost. However, I met a fellow once who was on leave from the Halcyon; he was sitting beside me one afternoon by the river Dee, and he said how he had been lucky. He had ditched and they were about to give up looking for him when somebody thought they saw something – and sure enough, it was him. He was very lucky.’

The whole article is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/military/story/0,11816,1605959,00.html

Well worth a read.