And that's not all; my Dad, a Lancaster III pilot until shot down and captured near Munich, told us shortly before he died in 1975 about some very secret trials he was deeply involved with.
The powers-that-be were getting very concerned at the loss rate of bombers who, although they survived the raid itself, then got lost over the blacked-out UK, and crashed due to fuel starvation before they could find a runway.
The idea was to have squadrons of pigeons based on the airfield as their home, so that they would want to return to it. Then, once that was established they would be taken on sorties over Germany. They would be kept in a box for the outward flight, and remain there on return until over the sea and approaching the English coast.
They would then be launched through the DV window attached to a 60ft piece of light string, and, in theory all the pilot had to do was to follow the direction indicated by the pigeon. Unsurprisingly, this trial failed as the clean stall speed for the Lanc was pretty much the max speed the little birds could manage, and they tired within minutes.
A boffin then came up with the solution; let the bird walk about on the coaming above the pilot's panel, in the hope that it would normally point unerringly toward the destination. This was a success, and the loss rate quickly began to decrease. The whole project was shrouded in secrecy, and eventually dropped as better homing devices were introduced. The records won't be released until 2045.