Army Signal Corps in France flew more than 600 birds of which one, Cher Ami, was awarded the French Croix de Guerre for his heroic service in delivering 12 important messages, despite having been very badly injured. World War I saw further military pigeon mail use during the Siege of Przemyśl and the U.S. The use of pigeons to carry mail has been associated with military situations though, after experiments in 1896, a regular pigeon post was inaugurated on the Great Barrier Island on May 14, 1897. : 253 Essentially this was a similar process to the lightweight photographic Airgraph or V-mail systems of World War II. : 29 Upon arrival, the message was projected onto a wall and transcribed before delivery. The pigeons were flown out of the city on the balloons and sent by railway to the Espérance (Paris society of pigeon-fanciers) base in Tours where despatches, initially hand written and later microphotographed onto tiny flimsies, : 253 were placed inside quills and fixed to the tail feathers of the birds. Pigeons were used during the 1870–71 Siege of Paris to bring messages back to the city. In the Middle Ages, Egyptian sultans established their own National Pigeon Post. The caliph of Baghdad, Nur-Eddin, established his own homing pigeon post from Cairo to the Euphrates river, : 253 but it terminated after the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258. : 253 Prior to this it was used mainly in the orient. It was brought to Europe by crusaders in the 12th and 13th centuries. In the Middle Ages the homing pigeon was also in great demand for message delivery. A particular example was his use of carrier pigeons to communicate the disturbances in conquered Gaul. The Roman commander Julius Caesar used this special method to send commands to his troops as quickly as possible. Soon, pigeons were also used by several other advanced cultures. In 1279 B.C., the news of the coronation of pharaoh Ramesses II was spread by this method. More and more military, political, and economic importance was attributed to this fast method of delivering messages. The earliest known records of homing pigeon use for message delivery in ancient Egypt are from 5600 B.C. Nineteenth century oil paining of a young oriental lady with a carrier pigeon and its mail such as the Zeppelins, which were used until the 1930s. Cite error: A tag is missing the closing (see the help page). The same method was employed in May 1807 by Admiral Cochrane to send propaganda messages to the French during the Napoleonic Wars and again during the Peninsular Campaign. : 188 The Chinese are recorded as having used kites to deliver messages to a beleaguered city in AD 549. : 13 In ancient times messages were delivered by airmail through various breeding methods it became possible to use homing pigeons to carry communications, though tame frigatebirds were used in the South Pacific Ellice Islands in the mid-19th century. Arrows with tiny scrolls attached were a common form of short distance communication. During the 5th century seige of Potidaea messages attached to arrow shafts were fired from behind the besieging lines and a traitor within the city received these missives. The origins of airmail reach back to long before the invention of the first flying machines. 3.1 Unofficial and semi-official airmail stamps.1.7.2 Modern airmail and the influence of philately.1.3 Invention of the airplane and early flights.