Gimpy

From the day he got his feathers Gimpy was a superior bird. Master Sgt. Clifford Algy Poutre, the lean, leathery boss pigeon man at the Signal Corps pigeon lofts on the Jersey flats at Fort Monmouth, liked to say that the Army would hear from Gimpy some day. His breed was right. His father, old red Kaiser, captured in a German trench in the Argonne, is still the oldest military pigeon in the business (24 last month), and his Scotland-hatched mother had good blood in her.

Since Sgt. Poutre gave Gimpy the job of instructing younger pigeons last fall, he has turned out 150 graduates, trained to fly back to the trailer lofts as straight as a crow. Taken farther and farther away each day from Monmouth, he led them back unerringly to the loft, showed them that a pigeon can fly with a message capsule on leg or back. Last week, on his twisted right leg, three-year-old Gimpy stumped among a new class of 52 youngsters, fixed them with a hard eye.

Gimpy got the game leg that named him before he was two years old. One wintry day he was released in Trenton, got lost in a snowstorm, went over Brooklyn just over the housetops, finally ran out of ceiling. He cracked up in a backyard and broke his leg. Set by a man named Somervell (who had pigeons of his own), Gimpy's leg turned out badly, but within two months he was back on the job with a name instead of a number. Last spring Gimpy worked in the maneuvers in Louisiana, lost three of his 17 ounces in the fierce heat, but always came in with the tissue-paper message that front-line men had put in his capsule. And in the fall, when the Signal Corps started breeding and training 3,600 new birds, Gimpy was promoted to an instructor's job.

Among the 1,000 Army pigeons in the Fort Monmouth lofts, Gimpy is as monogamous as the next old soldier. His mate is a three-year-old hen named Matilda. He ran her out of his nest four times before they settled down. Today, like any suburban pigeon, he sits on the eggs six hours a day while Matilda gets a rest.

Gimpy's only fault is that he likes to land on the way home, sometimes leads his recruits into a grassy plot for a rest and stroll, while he stumps around, gabbling officiously. But no one in Fort Monmouth's pigeon company will admit that these fine feathered soldiers ever hitch rides on Army trucks.*

-As Major Leonard Nason charged last fortnight in a denunciatory book, Approach to Battle. "Dependence on pigeons as a means of signal communication," said he "is leaning on a broken reed." Week the book was published, Major Nason was ordered to active service.

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