January 23, 2013 • 26 mins
Dogs have been used in war for a long time and are still used today. In this episode, Sarah and Deblina look at five war dogs known for their strength, loyalty and intelligence. Tune in to learn more about war dogs from World War I through Vietnam.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from housetof
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Fara Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chocolate Boardy and today Debilina
and I are going to be talking about dogs, but
specifically war dogs. Yes, I mean dogs are one of
(00:24):
my favorite topics. Anyway, I am a near dog. Yes,
I'm the owner of an adorable wheat and terrier named Dully,
and I talked about him, probably way too much, but
that's not what inspired this podcast. Um. Actually the news did, right, Sarah. Yeah,
war dogs have been in the news quite a bit lately,
as I'm sure many of you have realized. After Osama
(00:46):
bin Laden was killed and it was revealed that a
war dog, more appropriately a military working dog was present. Um,
it got people's attention. People wanted to know about these
militarily inclined dogs. But it it's been on our minds
really for longer than that, because we have quite a
bit of Animal Planet content that we work on here
at how stuffworks dot com, and UM, war dogs come
(01:09):
up from time to time, and those articles. Yeah, actually,
one that we're going to mention today came up last
year when we were editing some bully breed content, so
that will be something that you can read about later too, exactly.
And we even have an article on war dogs too,
which will throw to you at the end. But our
very own editor, Alison louder Milk, recommended it to her
to us and it was sort of the final push
(01:30):
to get us going on this topic. But we have
talked about dogs before, or rather Katie and Candice have
more like historical pooches of famous people, and Katie and
I have talked about war horses of history, so Napoleon's Marango,
Roberty Lee's traveler, Babiaka who is el Sid's horse. But
in case you haven't listened to that episode, we really
(01:53):
didn't get much beyond the Civil War because horses, of course,
even though they were used for thousands of year in
battle all around the world, eventually became obsolete military technology.
That is not the case with dogs. No war dogs
and s Air mentioned they're now more properly called military
working dogs were used probably as far back as when
(02:16):
humans domesticated the gray wolf, and they're still used today
since there's still no better means of detecting an i e. D.
Than a dog's nose. Even the most complex technology can't compete.
And there are a few qualities and you're gonna see
these pop up in the different dogs, the different individual
dogs we talk about. But a few qualities that make
dogs useful for warfare throughout history. One, their strength and
(02:39):
loyalty makes them really good fighters. Also, their endurance makes
them good messengers, and their intelligence and eagerness to please
make them trainable. Yeah, and then there's their fives too,
And that's something which of course varies a lot between breeds,
and it makes them either really big and intimidating and
strong or tiny and able to go where bull can't
(03:00):
very easily go. So, starting sort of in the early
days with ancient warfare, ancient Persians, Syrians, Babylonians, and Greeks
all are known to have used dogs in war, usually
as shock troops. They'd have a line of mastiffs, which
if I was fighting and a lot of mastiffs came
charging at me, I would definitely stop and give pause
(03:22):
for a minute. It's probably massives that you think of too,
if you're considering ancient warfare. Ancient dogs in warfare, Yeah,
they're Egyptian monuments to that effect as far back as
three thousand BC that show massiff like dogs. Caes are
actually imported mastiffs after seeing them fight with British soldiers
in fifty five BC, and he used them for things
like bull baiting, lion fighting, things like that, even fighting gladiator.
(03:46):
But if you're thinking about war dogs today or even
of the past century, you're probably not thinking of mastiffs.
You're probably thinking of two breeds in particular that are
now almost synonymous with military working dogs. These were both
developed around the turn of the twentieth century in Germany
and they've been used heavily in most of the centuries
major wars. And those are German Shepherds, which were bred
(04:07):
by Captain Max von Stefan. It's to be trainable, loyal,
and intelligent. The American Kennel Club describes them as or
their characters as incorruptible. Makes me imagine Elliott Nest German
shepherds or something. The other one of those major breeds
as the Doberman Pincher, which they were bred around the
same time as we mentioned in Germany, to have high endurance, speed,
(04:30):
and smart. And there are a few other large intelligent
breeds that pop up from time to time, the Belgian
sheepdog farm colleagues, giant Schnauzers, and a few notable MutS
too that we're going to mention. Uh, the U. S
Military now uses a lot of pure bred labs because
they are really good at sniffing things out and they
have that easy, friendly, calm demeanor. Well calm is probably
(04:53):
not the best word for labs, but easy going nice.
But we're not just going to talk about big dogs,
because little dogs certainly have their place in war history too, because,
as we said earlier, little dogs can go places where
people can't. Right. In World War One, little terriers were
actually used as cigarette dogs to distribute free tobacco to
(05:14):
troops and the trenches, and terrier breeds like Jack Russell's
would also patrol the trenches for rats, so they were
perfect for that because of their size and their prey drive,
their inclination too for those things, and a little less
likely to get shell shocked than kitties. Kitties and trenches
doesn't sound like a good combination. So our first dog
we're going to talk about was actually a rater, and
(05:35):
we don't know that much about her except that she
did her job really really well and this dog is
now nicknamed Hatch. We don't know what her real name was.
World discussed the origins of that nickname in a little bit,
but she was a two year old who lived aboard
the tutor warship the mary Rose, which we've talked about
before on our shipwreck episode. The mary Rose, as probably
(05:58):
a lot of you remembers, sank in battle July nine
and most of the men on board went down with
the ship, as did little Hatch. However, the mary Rose
Trust recovered hatches skeleton and eventually reassembled it and now
is in the process of analyzing the skeleton or the
(06:20):
skeleton is being analyzed by experts to try to figure
out what kind of breed it is. Yeah, and according
to Rear Admiral John Lippiatt of the mary Rose Trust,
quote analysis of Hatch's bones suggests that she spent most
of her life within the confines of the ship. It
is likely that the longest walk she took were along
the keyside at Portsmouth. So not a very exciting life
(06:42):
for poor little Hatch. But since she was found wedged
in the sliding door of the carpenter's cabin, that's the nickname. Yeah,
that's the nickname. Some have suggested that she was the
carpenter's pet or maybe a ship mascot, so at least
maybe she had an okay life on ship, but evidence
of only partial rap skeletons aboard the wreck suggests that
Pet or not Hatch, was a rat, as Sarah mentioned,
(07:04):
and a pretty good one if you're surprised that they
had a dog as a rat, as I kind of was.
Cats apparently were considered bad luck in Tutor times to
have aboard your ship, although since Mary Rose think anyway,
I don't know if it really would have helped or
hurt much more. But now we're gonna go ahead, fast forward,
way past Tutor times into the twentieth century, and that's
(07:26):
where the rest of our dogs lives. They are going
to take place in their story. Yeah. So we've talked
about dogs used in ancient warfare and a dog on
the Mary Rose, But when you fast forward to the
twentieth century, as Sarah said, they're pretty much it's pretty
much not done dogs in warfare, at least in the US.
Even though state side kennel clubs have lobbied for dogs
(07:47):
in combat, there was no formal war dog program during
World War one, for example. But there were still some
mascot dogs here and there in the trenches with US troops,
and America's first Canaan war hero, a bull Terrier mix
named Stubby, was one of them. So Stubby got involved
in the war effort during the spring of nineteen seventeen,
(08:07):
kind of by accident. He just wandered onto the grounds
of Yale where a training camp for the hundred and
second Infantry, twenty six Yankee Division was taking place, and
he seemed to be a few weeks old, definitely astray,
and he proved to be a hit with the soldiers.
They let him stay and supposedly the dog would became
one of them pretty quickly too. He would drill with them,
(08:29):
he learned to salute, and Private J. Robert Conroy became
Stubby's primary caretaker and they named him Stubby because of
his cropped tail, so a little affectionate ribbing there with
the dog. So when it was time for the one
second Infantry to ship out to Europe, they smuggled Stubby
aboard the s S Minnesota by pulling him through a
(08:51):
porthole with a rope. So they went to Great Links
to take their friend along with them, and after they
landed in France, Stubby stayed with his unit, went to
winter training with them, and then joined the troops and
the trenches. He participated in seventeen engagements altogether in four
World War One offensives, and he never seemed to want
to flee even with all that shelling going on around
(09:11):
him constantly. So there are several stories about Stubby's war adventures,
including how he got gassed once and this made him
more sensitive to the smell of gas and better able
to detect gas attacks, so he would be able to
detect them and then sort of warn his fellow soldiers
about it. But perhaps the most famous story about him
is one that involves the capture of a German spy. Yeah,
(09:33):
and there are a few different versions slightly different versions
of that story. According to one, Stubby was sleeping in
a trench one night when he suddenly awoke and ran
off into this small patch of brush, and his caretaker, Conroy,
heard a voice cry out soon after and went to
check and see what was going on with it. He
found Stubby with his teeth sunk into the rear end
(09:57):
of a German spy who had been bi the making
a map of the Allied trenches, so the soldiers disarmed
the spy. Stubby, however, wasn't so willing to let go
and finally had to be Coke's pride, off of off
of the guy. Yeah, and you can see pictures of
Stubby online if you look him up, and he's not
a very large dog. So it's kind of funny to
(10:19):
imagine this little dog hanging off the back of someone's
but basically it looks like a dog who could who
could bite in and hold on there he does. Yeah.
I mean that Animal Planet content that we mentioned at
the beginning of the episode that we edited last year,
and it was a batch of content about bully breeds
and that's where Stubby came up in in our research
with that. And one thing that people kind of associate
(10:41):
with bully breeds is that they have a really strong bite.
So then his blood Yeah, so I think you're probably
right about that. But Stubby received many honors for his
heroics after the armistice. He met President Woodrow Wilson when
the President visited his regiment in France on Christmas Day
nine eighteen, and he returned with his unit to the
States in nineteen nineteen Stubby did. That is, in nineteen one,
(11:02):
General John J. Pershing awarded him a Gold medal, and
later Stubby was designated an honorary sergeant, So that's usually
how you see his name put out there. Meanwhile, though,
back in the state, Stubby was participating in veterans parades
and went to American Legion conventions. In nineteen nineteen twenty three,
he became the official mascot of Georgetown University because his
(11:24):
still master Conroy, was attending law school there. And by
nineteen Stubby died, but he was not forgotten. He was stuffed,
although that's not exactly the best way of putting it. Instead,
a plaster cast was made of his body and his
skin was mounted over that cast, and his cremated remains
were interred within the cast. Kind of complicated, And for
(11:48):
a while he was on display at the National Red
Cross Museum, and then in nineteen fifty six, Conroy presented
him to the Smithsonians National Museum of American History, and
today he's on display the National Guard Armory in Hartford, Connecticut,
so you can still go check out what Stubby looked like.
So Stubby made an into World War One sort of
by chance. He had to hitch a ride, essentially. But
(12:10):
just because the US didn't officially use dogs in World
War One combat didn't mean that other countries didn't use
dogs a lot. So the Germans deployed approximately thirty thousand
dogs during the war, the French and the British another
twenty thousand dogs. And we're going to talk about a
few of those dogs, a few French dogs in our
next entry. And French dogs are interesting because they had
(12:33):
a lot of different roles in war. They'd work as sentries, ratters,
and cigarette dogs. Some were Red Cross casualty dogs or
mercy dogs who would bring medical supplies to troops injured
on the field. Prustco, a French Red Cross dog, for example,
supposedly saved the lives of more than a hundred men
in a single day, dragging some of them back to
(12:53):
the trenches. But in World War One, one of the
most important responsibilities of war dogs was actually message delivery.
They could be trained to deliver messages either one way,
or to carry messages back and forth with two handlers
in different units. You normally think of messengers in World
War One as carrier pigeons, but unlike carrier pigeons. Dogs
(13:14):
obviously couldn't avoid the gas clouds by just flying over them,
so these messenger dogs were sometimes outfitted with gas masks
to protect them while they were carrying these important notes
between camps. But one of the most famous messenger dogs
from World War One was an all black English Greyhound
working Collie cross named Satan. And Satan turns out to
(13:37):
be a really good dog, so terrible name. I guess
she just got that name because she might have been
a little scary looking. But during the Battle of Verdun,
Satan's French handler and a small garrison that was with
him were cut off from the rest of their troops
and were under terribly heavy fire behind enemy lines. They
had run out of their pigeons, and they had nothing
(14:00):
laughed to pass along the specifics on their situation, like
the coordinates of the German forces that were selling them
that needed to be silenced in order to relieve the garrison.
So it really seemed like a hopeless situation. They were
just going to get shelled until they were all gone. Yeah. Finally, though,
the men saw a black dot racing towards them across
the field, and it turned out to be Satan. In
(14:22):
a gas mask delivering a message from the French. But
when he was almost to safety, Satan was hit in
the leg by a German sniper and he laid down
on the ground. Supposedly, according to the Harper's magazine article
that the story was originally told in, when Satan's handler
saw the dog shot, he got to the top of
(14:43):
the trench to call him himself, to try to urge
him on, to try to get him to keep going.
A handler was shot dead, but not until after Satan
heard his voice and did in fact get up and
started on three legs, yeah, and he arrived finally. His
neck to contained a message that said, for God's sake,
hold on, will send troops to relieve you tomorrow. But
(15:07):
more importantly than that message, he had a basket with
two it's always described as two very frightened pigeons. I'm
sure they were frightened, and the French used these pigeons
dashed off two identical messages that had the coordinates of
the Germans and sent the birds off. One pigeon was killed,
but the other safely delivered the coordinates and thus saved
(15:30):
the garrison. So it was a joint effort of that
pigeon and Satan but managed to to help him out.
So that was World War One. But by the time
World War Two rolled around, the Army finally agreed that
it needed to involve canines and its efforts, so they
started what was called the Canine Core, and the first
official canines were enlisted by their owners. Owners actually donated
(15:52):
more than forty dogs to this cause, which is pretty
amazing to think of just signing your dog up to
to go off to war, but you don't know if
he's going to come back or not. I mean, in
an environment where you're probably sending your kids off too,
it wouldn't have been so strange. Exactly. One of those
dogs that was donated to the war effort was Chips,
a German Shepherd mix who was born and basically just
(16:14):
living a dog's life in Pleasantville, New York when he
was appropriate right whose owners enlisted him in the Canine Core.
But from Pleasantville, Chips went into training and got sent
to Morocco, and later he was part of the security
force that protected Roosevelt when Roosevelt met with Churchill at Casablanca.
But Chips probably best known for the work he did
(16:37):
in July nine with General George Patton's seventh Army as
they came ashore in Sicily. So the morning of July tenth,
Chips and his handler were pushing inland into Sicily from
the beach and they approached this hut, or at least
that's what it looked like, that was up on a hillside. Suddenly, though,
the hut erupted with machine gun fire. It is really
(17:00):
a disguised pillbox. All the human soldiers at this point
hit the ground, but Chips broke free and he stormed
the hut from the rear. Moments later, several Italian soldiers
spilled out, with Chips kind of going at them. He
was supposedly tearing at the arms and the throat of
one of them, and chips handler called him off, but
the American side took the prisoners, but Chips didn't come
(17:22):
through this unharmed himself. He had a small scalp wound
and powder burns on his coat, to which kind of
suggested that he had been fired at point blank, but
he didn't get to rest right away. You would think
that he would be done at this point, But after
taking that nest, Chips helped his handler capture ten more
prisoners later in the day, so naturally he celebrated across America. Chips, however,
(17:46):
he wasn't the most gracious hero. When General Dwight Eisenhower
actually tried to congratulate him and give him a little
pat Chip bit him. Well, he is still a dog
after all. But that behavior didn't keep Chips from getting
other honors. He was awarded the Silver Star for valor.
He got a Purple Heart for his wounds, which ended
up making him the most decorated dog hero of World
(18:08):
War Two. Unfortunately for Chips, or you know, maybe not
so much. He probably didn't mind getting all those medals
are losing them, but all of the media attention surrounding
his awards attracted the attention of the commander of the
Order of the Purple Heart, who felt that by honoring
a dog, they were really demeaning all of the men
who had been awarded a Purple Heart. He complained to
(18:30):
President Roosevelt in the War Department, and ultimately chips medals
were taken away and the dog was returned to his family.
Like I said, Chips probably didn't mind, but it is
a little a little sad. Yeah, I doubt he was
too offended by it, and he got to go back
to a pleasantville, so I didn't have to do that
hang out with the general anymore. There's actually I found
(18:51):
when researching us. There's a nine I think Disney film
that's called Chips the War Dog, and I think it's
based on the story. I'm interested to know if anyone seen,
and I certainly haven't. I would have thought that I'd
seen every dog movie. Well, we were discussing motivational animal
movies earlier today Homeward Bound, and I'd like to see
some movies made on these war dogs stories. They're pretty interesting.
(19:13):
Maybe not this last one though, This last one's kind
of a sad ones When's the tear Jerker. So a
lot of stories you see about war dogs touch on
the special bonds that developed between the animals and the soldiers,
particularly between dogs and handlers. They work alongside each other,
they sleep alongside each other. Some handlers stayed with the
same dog from training to the battlefront, so it makes
(19:35):
sense that they would get close. But a great example
of the spond is the story of an eighty five
pound German shepherd named Bruiser who served in Vietnam. So
in September of nineteen sixty nine, a young marine named
John Flannely was leading a twelve man patrol with Bruiser
twelve miles south of Don Long, and when Flanney and
(19:56):
Bruiser stepped into a clearing, suddenly, bruiser his ears perked up,
and then, as Flannely put it, quote, the whole clearing
seemed to explode. They were being fired on from all sides.
That seemed everything from grenades to mortar rockets hit the clearing,
and the sergeant yelled to move back, but it was
too late. Flannely was hit. His chest was actually ripped
(20:19):
open so that he could see his own lung, and
he tried to shoot back, but he couldn't move. It
seemed like he was a gonner. So at that point,
thinking that he's not going to survive, he tries to
save his dog. He told Bruiser to leave, to get
out of there, to get out of danger, but the
dog stayed and started kind of tugging at his shirt.
So Flannely reaches up and he grabs Bruiser's harness, and
(20:43):
Bruiser is able to drag him to a shell crater
hole about three hundred yards away to kind of protect him,
and Bruiser took two bullets in the process while he
was doing this, and Flannely was taken to the nearest
mobile Army hospital and later he was reunited with Bruiser.
In an interview with the Tampa Tribune in Flannely recalled
(21:04):
this reunion. He said a quote, he climbed on the
bed talking about Bruiser, put his head on my shoulder
and licked my face. I just held him and cried,
what do you say to someone who saved your life?
So yeah, it's a tear jerker. Flannely, whose life had
been saved, did finally make it home, but no one
knows what ultimately happened to Bruiser. And this is true
(21:27):
for many of the thousands of dogs that served in Vietnam.
Although a lot of the world where two military dogs
were successfully returned to civilian life, detrained essentially and adopted out,
Vietnam war dogs were considered equipment and in fact surplus equipment,
even if they were spoken for by handlers. So when
(21:47):
the US pulled out, the dogs were left behind. Some
of them were just left there and abandoned. Some were
turned over actually to the Vietnamese Army. Some were destroyed
and I think about a couple hundred I read were
returned to the US. So kind of a sad ending
for these dogs. But we don't want to end on
a sad note. No, we don't not not a notice
that as that. Um. Fortunately times have changed since the
(22:12):
day's US war dogs were just left behind. Is their
plus equipment since the average training costs, I mean, we
can look at this from a real rational perspective. First,
the average training costs of these war dogs is about
twenty dollars to forty dollars per dog. So while they're
in service, they're treated very well, you know, to get
(22:33):
the best care. They're provided with top equipment, bulletproof, best doggles.
They're seriously called that. You should look up a picture
if you want to see dogs looking kind of cool
with some black dogs. Yeah, and they do get serious
veterinary treatment, including I didn't know this psychological treatment if
the need occur, Yeah, doggy PTSD. I didn't even realize
(22:55):
that there was such a thing. But after several deployments,
most dogs get to retire at about eight or nine
and then they're adopted out. A bill that was passed
in two thousand allowed for this. After dogs are detrained,
of course, and many end up with their handlers after
that natural fit, you'd imagine they'd have the ultimate war
buddy sort of bond. But some dogs don't just go
(23:17):
into a life of pure retirement. They are, after all,
dogs like German shepherds, you know, ones that like to
have some sort of job or task that they do.
So some join a police force or work for a
security agency, and then some really just do kick back.
I read a quote from one former handler who was
adopting his dog, and he said, I'm gonna make life
(23:39):
so easy for him. He's going to be able to
do whatever he wants and finally relax a little bit.
And I think it's interesting that more and more people
are interested in adopting these war dogs now, these retired
war dogs. Going back to the recent news we were
talking about earlier, I think something like four hundred applications
were put in for adopting these dogs after the raid
on Osama than on his compounds. Well, and I also
(24:01):
came across information about adopting dogs that weren't war dogs.
They weren't trained by the U. S. Military, they weren't retiring,
They were dogs, usually from Afghanistan or Iraq, that were
strays or abused and had been taken in by soldiers
there and kind of turned into like the mascot dogs
of today, cared for and ultimately, when the soldiers were
(24:25):
ready to redeploy or couldn't keep the pets that that
there were cats involved to couldn't keep the pets at
the base, there were some organizations that had come into
existence to taken those animals and help them with any
veterinary needs, hold them through quarantine, and eventually send them
to the US to live with the soldiers or to
(24:46):
join other adoptable families. A couple of them were the
Soldiers Animal Companions Fund and now Zad I'm not sure
if that's how that one is pronounced, but um I
just was looking at the little pictures of the animals
soldiers had adopted, and it was also kind of heartwarming.
This has been a it's been a heart strings pulling episode,
hasn't it. It really has. Before we wrap up, let's
(25:09):
take a minute. Well maybe for some more cool or
uplifting photos we should post some of those photo essays
that you sent me earlier of war dogs. Yeah, there
are a couple of great Rebecca Shaffer war dog galleries
that went viral on the internet a while back, and
they have amazing pictures dogs jumping out of planes, dogs
with these high tech doggles on as I mentioned earlier,
(25:32):
or just dogs looking like dogs cuddling with soldiers and
looking cute. But I mean, I really I enjoyed this,
and I'd kind of like to hear from listeners about
other dog war dog suggestions he might have, because I
know we did stick mostly to World War one, World
War two, little bit of Vietnam, little tutor stuff in there. Yeah,
(25:52):
it was a very US focus, So especially love to
know about any international war dogs that we didn't learn about.
I mean, we mainly focused on once we could find
information on. But if there are others out there that
you guys love, please send them to us, or you
can look us up on Facebook or on Twitter at
this industry And if you want to learn a little
bit more about war dogs of old and war dogs today,
(26:13):
how they're trained, all of that, we do have an
article on the website. It's called how war Dogs Work,
and you can search for it by looking for war
dogs on our homepage at www dot how Stuff works
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other
topics because it how stuff works. Dot Com
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from housetof
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Fara Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chocolate Boardy and today Debilina
and I are going to be talking about dogs, but
specifically war dogs. Yes, I mean dogs are one of
(00:24):
my favorite topics. Anyway, I am a near dog. Yes,
I'm the owner of an adorable wheat and terrier named Dully,
and I talked about him, probably way too much, but
that's not what inspired this podcast. Um. Actually the news did, right, Sarah. Yeah,
war dogs have been in the news quite a bit lately,
as I'm sure many of you have realized. After Osama
(00:46):
bin Laden was killed and it was revealed that a
war dog, more appropriately a military working dog was present. Um,
it got people's attention. People wanted to know about these
militarily inclined dogs. But it it's been on our minds
really for longer than that, because we have quite a
bit of Animal Planet content that we work on here
at how stuffworks dot com, and UM, war dogs come
(01:09):
up from time to time, and those articles. Yeah, actually,
one that we're going to mention today came up last
year when we were editing some bully breed content, so
that will be something that you can read about later too, exactly.
And we even have an article on war dogs too,
which will throw to you at the end. But our
very own editor, Alison louder Milk, recommended it to her
to us and it was sort of the final push
(01:30):
to get us going on this topic. But we have
talked about dogs before, or rather Katie and Candice have
more like historical pooches of famous people, and Katie and
I have talked about war horses of history, so Napoleon's Marango,
Roberty Lee's traveler, Babiaka who is el Sid's horse. But
in case you haven't listened to that episode, we really
(01:53):
didn't get much beyond the Civil War because horses, of course,
even though they were used for thousands of year in
battle all around the world, eventually became obsolete military technology.
That is not the case with dogs. No war dogs
and s Air mentioned they're now more properly called military
working dogs were used probably as far back as when
(02:16):
humans domesticated the gray wolf, and they're still used today
since there's still no better means of detecting an i e. D.
Than a dog's nose. Even the most complex technology can't compete.
And there are a few qualities and you're gonna see
these pop up in the different dogs, the different individual
dogs we talk about. But a few qualities that make
dogs useful for warfare throughout history. One, their strength and
(02:39):
loyalty makes them really good fighters. Also, their endurance makes
them good messengers, and their intelligence and eagerness to please
make them trainable. Yeah, and then there's their fives too,
And that's something which of course varies a lot between breeds,
and it makes them either really big and intimidating and
strong or tiny and able to go where bull can't
(03:00):
very easily go. So, starting sort of in the early
days with ancient warfare, ancient Persians, Syrians, Babylonians, and Greeks
all are known to have used dogs in war, usually
as shock troops. They'd have a line of mastiffs, which
if I was fighting and a lot of mastiffs came
charging at me, I would definitely stop and give pause
(03:22):
for a minute. It's probably massives that you think of too,
if you're considering ancient warfare. Ancient dogs in warfare, Yeah,
they're Egyptian monuments to that effect as far back as
three thousand BC that show massiff like dogs. Caes are
actually imported mastiffs after seeing them fight with British soldiers
in fifty five BC, and he used them for things
like bull baiting, lion fighting, things like that, even fighting gladiator.
(03:46):
But if you're thinking about war dogs today or even
of the past century, you're probably not thinking of mastiffs.
You're probably thinking of two breeds in particular that are
now almost synonymous with military working dogs. These were both
developed around the turn of the twentieth century in Germany
and they've been used heavily in most of the centuries
major wars. And those are German Shepherds, which were bred
(04:07):
by Captain Max von Stefan. It's to be trainable, loyal,
and intelligent. The American Kennel Club describes them as or
their characters as incorruptible. Makes me imagine Elliott Nest German
shepherds or something. The other one of those major breeds
as the Doberman Pincher, which they were bred around the
same time as we mentioned in Germany, to have high endurance, speed,
(04:30):
and smart. And there are a few other large intelligent
breeds that pop up from time to time, the Belgian
sheepdog farm colleagues, giant Schnauzers, and a few notable MutS
too that we're going to mention. Uh, the U. S
Military now uses a lot of pure bred labs because
they are really good at sniffing things out and they
have that easy, friendly, calm demeanor. Well calm is probably
(04:53):
not the best word for labs, but easy going nice.
But we're not just going to talk about big dogs,
because little dogs certainly have their place in war history too, because,
as we said earlier, little dogs can go places where
people can't. Right. In World War One, little terriers were
actually used as cigarette dogs to distribute free tobacco to
(05:14):
troops and the trenches, and terrier breeds like Jack Russell's
would also patrol the trenches for rats, so they were
perfect for that because of their size and their prey drive,
their inclination too for those things, and a little less
likely to get shell shocked than kitties. Kitties and trenches
doesn't sound like a good combination. So our first dog
we're going to talk about was actually a rater, and
(05:35):
we don't know that much about her except that she
did her job really really well and this dog is
now nicknamed Hatch. We don't know what her real name was.
World discussed the origins of that nickname in a little bit,
but she was a two year old who lived aboard
the tutor warship the mary Rose, which we've talked about
before on our shipwreck episode. The mary Rose, as probably
(05:58):
a lot of you remembers, sank in battle July nine
and most of the men on board went down with
the ship, as did little Hatch. However, the mary Rose
Trust recovered hatches skeleton and eventually reassembled it and now
is in the process of analyzing the skeleton or the
(06:20):
skeleton is being analyzed by experts to try to figure
out what kind of breed it is. Yeah, and according
to Rear Admiral John Lippiatt of the mary Rose Trust,
quote analysis of Hatch's bones suggests that she spent most
of her life within the confines of the ship. It
is likely that the longest walk she took were along
the keyside at Portsmouth. So not a very exciting life
(06:42):
for poor little Hatch. But since she was found wedged
in the sliding door of the carpenter's cabin, that's the nickname. Yeah,
that's the nickname. Some have suggested that she was the
carpenter's pet or maybe a ship mascot, so at least
maybe she had an okay life on ship, but evidence
of only partial rap skeletons aboard the wreck suggests that
Pet or not Hatch, was a rat, as Sarah mentioned,
(07:04):
and a pretty good one if you're surprised that they
had a dog as a rat, as I kind of was.
Cats apparently were considered bad luck in Tutor times to
have aboard your ship, although since Mary Rose think anyway,
I don't know if it really would have helped or
hurt much more. But now we're gonna go ahead, fast forward,
way past Tutor times into the twentieth century, and that's
(07:26):
where the rest of our dogs lives. They are going
to take place in their story. Yeah. So we've talked
about dogs used in ancient warfare and a dog on
the Mary Rose, But when you fast forward to the
twentieth century, as Sarah said, they're pretty much it's pretty
much not done dogs in warfare, at least in the US.
Even though state side kennel clubs have lobbied for dogs
(07:47):
in combat, there was no formal war dog program during
World War one, for example. But there were still some
mascot dogs here and there in the trenches with US troops,
and America's first Canaan war hero, a bull Terrier mix
named Stubby, was one of them. So Stubby got involved
in the war effort during the spring of nineteen seventeen,
(08:07):
kind of by accident. He just wandered onto the grounds
of Yale where a training camp for the hundred and
second Infantry, twenty six Yankee Division was taking place, and
he seemed to be a few weeks old, definitely astray,
and he proved to be a hit with the soldiers.
They let him stay and supposedly the dog would became
one of them pretty quickly too. He would drill with them,
(08:29):
he learned to salute, and Private J. Robert Conroy became
Stubby's primary caretaker and they named him Stubby because of
his cropped tail, so a little affectionate ribbing there with
the dog. So when it was time for the one
second Infantry to ship out to Europe, they smuggled Stubby
aboard the s S Minnesota by pulling him through a
(08:51):
porthole with a rope. So they went to Great Links
to take their friend along with them, and after they
landed in France, Stubby stayed with his unit, went to
winter training with them, and then joined the troops and
the trenches. He participated in seventeen engagements altogether in four
World War One offensives, and he never seemed to want
to flee even with all that shelling going on around
(09:11):
him constantly. So there are several stories about Stubby's war adventures,
including how he got gassed once and this made him
more sensitive to the smell of gas and better able
to detect gas attacks, so he would be able to
detect them and then sort of warn his fellow soldiers
about it. But perhaps the most famous story about him
is one that involves the capture of a German spy. Yeah,
(09:33):
and there are a few different versions slightly different versions
of that story. According to one, Stubby was sleeping in
a trench one night when he suddenly awoke and ran
off into this small patch of brush, and his caretaker, Conroy,
heard a voice cry out soon after and went to
check and see what was going on with it. He
found Stubby with his teeth sunk into the rear end
(09:57):
of a German spy who had been bi the making
a map of the Allied trenches, so the soldiers disarmed
the spy. Stubby, however, wasn't so willing to let go
and finally had to be Coke's pride, off of off
of the guy. Yeah, and you can see pictures of
Stubby online if you look him up, and he's not
a very large dog. So it's kind of funny to
(10:19):
imagine this little dog hanging off the back of someone's
but basically it looks like a dog who could who
could bite in and hold on there he does. Yeah.
I mean that Animal Planet content that we mentioned at
the beginning of the episode that we edited last year,
and it was a batch of content about bully breeds
and that's where Stubby came up in in our research
with that. And one thing that people kind of associate
(10:41):
with bully breeds is that they have a really strong bite.
So then his blood Yeah, so I think you're probably
right about that. But Stubby received many honors for his
heroics after the armistice. He met President Woodrow Wilson when
the President visited his regiment in France on Christmas Day
nine eighteen, and he returned with his unit to the
States in nineteen nineteen Stubby did. That is, in nineteen one,
(11:02):
General John J. Pershing awarded him a Gold medal, and
later Stubby was designated an honorary sergeant, So that's usually
how you see his name put out there. Meanwhile, though,
back in the state, Stubby was participating in veterans parades
and went to American Legion conventions. In nineteen nineteen twenty three,
he became the official mascot of Georgetown University because his
(11:24):
still master Conroy, was attending law school there. And by
nineteen Stubby died, but he was not forgotten. He was stuffed,
although that's not exactly the best way of putting it. Instead,
a plaster cast was made of his body and his
skin was mounted over that cast, and his cremated remains
were interred within the cast. Kind of complicated, And for
(11:48):
a while he was on display at the National Red
Cross Museum, and then in nineteen fifty six, Conroy presented
him to the Smithsonians National Museum of American History, and
today he's on display the National Guard Armory in Hartford, Connecticut,
so you can still go check out what Stubby looked like.
So Stubby made an into World War One sort of
by chance. He had to hitch a ride, essentially. But
(12:10):
just because the US didn't officially use dogs in World
War One combat didn't mean that other countries didn't use
dogs a lot. So the Germans deployed approximately thirty thousand
dogs during the war, the French and the British another
twenty thousand dogs. And we're going to talk about a
few of those dogs, a few French dogs in our
next entry. And French dogs are interesting because they had
(12:33):
a lot of different roles in war. They'd work as sentries, ratters,
and cigarette dogs. Some were Red Cross casualty dogs or
mercy dogs who would bring medical supplies to troops injured
on the field. Prustco, a French Red Cross dog, for example,
supposedly saved the lives of more than a hundred men
in a single day, dragging some of them back to
(12:53):
the trenches. But in World War One, one of the
most important responsibilities of war dogs was actually message delivery.
They could be trained to deliver messages either one way,
or to carry messages back and forth with two handlers
in different units. You normally think of messengers in World
War One as carrier pigeons, but unlike carrier pigeons. Dogs
(13:14):
obviously couldn't avoid the gas clouds by just flying over them,
so these messenger dogs were sometimes outfitted with gas masks
to protect them while they were carrying these important notes
between camps. But one of the most famous messenger dogs
from World War One was an all black English Greyhound
working Collie cross named Satan. And Satan turns out to
(13:37):
be a really good dog, so terrible name. I guess
she just got that name because she might have been
a little scary looking. But during the Battle of Verdun,
Satan's French handler and a small garrison that was with
him were cut off from the rest of their troops
and were under terribly heavy fire behind enemy lines. They
had run out of their pigeons, and they had nothing
(14:00):
laughed to pass along the specifics on their situation, like
the coordinates of the German forces that were selling them
that needed to be silenced in order to relieve the garrison.
So it really seemed like a hopeless situation. They were
just going to get shelled until they were all gone. Yeah. Finally, though,
the men saw a black dot racing towards them across
the field, and it turned out to be Satan. In
(14:22):
a gas mask delivering a message from the French. But
when he was almost to safety, Satan was hit in
the leg by a German sniper and he laid down
on the ground. Supposedly, according to the Harper's magazine article
that the story was originally told in, when Satan's handler
saw the dog shot, he got to the top of
(14:43):
the trench to call him himself, to try to urge
him on, to try to get him to keep going.
A handler was shot dead, but not until after Satan
heard his voice and did in fact get up and
started on three legs, yeah, and he arrived finally. His
neck to contained a message that said, for God's sake,
hold on, will send troops to relieve you tomorrow. But
(15:07):
more importantly than that message, he had a basket with
two it's always described as two very frightened pigeons. I'm
sure they were frightened, and the French used these pigeons
dashed off two identical messages that had the coordinates of
the Germans and sent the birds off. One pigeon was killed,
but the other safely delivered the coordinates and thus saved
(15:30):
the garrison. So it was a joint effort of that
pigeon and Satan but managed to to help him out.
So that was World War One. But by the time
World War Two rolled around, the Army finally agreed that
it needed to involve canines and its efforts, so they
started what was called the Canine Core, and the first
official canines were enlisted by their owners. Owners actually donated
(15:52):
more than forty dogs to this cause, which is pretty
amazing to think of just signing your dog up to
to go off to war, but you don't know if
he's going to come back or not. I mean, in
an environment where you're probably sending your kids off too,
it wouldn't have been so strange. Exactly. One of those
dogs that was donated to the war effort was Chips,
a German Shepherd mix who was born and basically just
(16:14):
living a dog's life in Pleasantville, New York when he
was appropriate right whose owners enlisted him in the Canine Core.
But from Pleasantville, Chips went into training and got sent
to Morocco, and later he was part of the security
force that protected Roosevelt when Roosevelt met with Churchill at Casablanca.
But Chips probably best known for the work he did
(16:37):
in July nine with General George Patton's seventh Army as
they came ashore in Sicily. So the morning of July tenth,
Chips and his handler were pushing inland into Sicily from
the beach and they approached this hut, or at least
that's what it looked like, that was up on a hillside. Suddenly, though,
the hut erupted with machine gun fire. It is really
(17:00):
a disguised pillbox. All the human soldiers at this point
hit the ground, but Chips broke free and he stormed
the hut from the rear. Moments later, several Italian soldiers
spilled out, with Chips kind of going at them. He
was supposedly tearing at the arms and the throat of
one of them, and chips handler called him off, but
the American side took the prisoners, but Chips didn't come
(17:22):
through this unharmed himself. He had a small scalp wound
and powder burns on his coat, to which kind of
suggested that he had been fired at point blank, but
he didn't get to rest right away. You would think
that he would be done at this point, But after
taking that nest, Chips helped his handler capture ten more
prisoners later in the day, so naturally he celebrated across America. Chips, however,
(17:46):
he wasn't the most gracious hero. When General Dwight Eisenhower
actually tried to congratulate him and give him a little
pat Chip bit him. Well, he is still a dog
after all. But that behavior didn't keep Chips from getting
other honors. He was awarded the Silver Star for valor.
He got a Purple Heart for his wounds, which ended
up making him the most decorated dog hero of World
(18:08):
War Two. Unfortunately for Chips, or you know, maybe not
so much. He probably didn't mind getting all those medals
are losing them, but all of the media attention surrounding
his awards attracted the attention of the commander of the
Order of the Purple Heart, who felt that by honoring
a dog, they were really demeaning all of the men
who had been awarded a Purple Heart. He complained to
(18:30):
President Roosevelt in the War Department, and ultimately chips medals
were taken away and the dog was returned to his family.
Like I said, Chips probably didn't mind, but it is
a little a little sad. Yeah, I doubt he was
too offended by it, and he got to go back
to a pleasantville, so I didn't have to do that
hang out with the general anymore. There's actually I found
(18:51):
when researching us. There's a nine I think Disney film
that's called Chips the War Dog, and I think it's
based on the story. I'm interested to know if anyone seen,
and I certainly haven't. I would have thought that I'd
seen every dog movie. Well, we were discussing motivational animal
movies earlier today Homeward Bound, and I'd like to see
some movies made on these war dogs stories. They're pretty interesting.
(19:13):
Maybe not this last one though, This last one's kind
of a sad ones When's the tear Jerker. So a
lot of stories you see about war dogs touch on
the special bonds that developed between the animals and the soldiers,
particularly between dogs and handlers. They work alongside each other,
they sleep alongside each other. Some handlers stayed with the
same dog from training to the battlefront, so it makes
(19:35):
sense that they would get close. But a great example
of the spond is the story of an eighty five
pound German shepherd named Bruiser who served in Vietnam. So
in September of nineteen sixty nine, a young marine named
John Flannely was leading a twelve man patrol with Bruiser
twelve miles south of Don Long, and when Flanney and
(19:56):
Bruiser stepped into a clearing, suddenly, bruiser his ears perked up,
and then, as Flannely put it, quote, the whole clearing
seemed to explode. They were being fired on from all sides.
That seemed everything from grenades to mortar rockets hit the clearing,
and the sergeant yelled to move back, but it was
too late. Flannely was hit. His chest was actually ripped
(20:19):
open so that he could see his own lung, and
he tried to shoot back, but he couldn't move. It
seemed like he was a gonner. So at that point,
thinking that he's not going to survive, he tries to
save his dog. He told Bruiser to leave, to get
out of there, to get out of danger, but the
dog stayed and started kind of tugging at his shirt.
So Flannely reaches up and he grabs Bruiser's harness, and
(20:43):
Bruiser is able to drag him to a shell crater
hole about three hundred yards away to kind of protect him,
and Bruiser took two bullets in the process while he
was doing this, and Flannely was taken to the nearest
mobile Army hospital and later he was reunited with Bruiser.
In an interview with the Tampa Tribune in Flannely recalled
(21:04):
this reunion. He said a quote, he climbed on the
bed talking about Bruiser, put his head on my shoulder
and licked my face. I just held him and cried,
what do you say to someone who saved your life?
So yeah, it's a tear jerker. Flannely, whose life had
been saved, did finally make it home, but no one
knows what ultimately happened to Bruiser. And this is true
(21:27):
for many of the thousands of dogs that served in Vietnam.
Although a lot of the world where two military dogs
were successfully returned to civilian life, detrained essentially and adopted out,
Vietnam war dogs were considered equipment and in fact surplus equipment,
even if they were spoken for by handlers. So when
(21:47):
the US pulled out, the dogs were left behind. Some
of them were just left there and abandoned. Some were
turned over actually to the Vietnamese Army. Some were destroyed
and I think about a couple hundred I read were
returned to the US. So kind of a sad ending
for these dogs. But we don't want to end on
a sad note. No, we don't not not a notice
that as that. Um. Fortunately times have changed since the
(22:12):
day's US war dogs were just left behind. Is their
plus equipment since the average training costs, I mean, we
can look at this from a real rational perspective. First,
the average training costs of these war dogs is about
twenty dollars to forty dollars per dog. So while they're
in service, they're treated very well, you know, to get
(22:33):
the best care. They're provided with top equipment, bulletproof, best doggles.
They're seriously called that. You should look up a picture
if you want to see dogs looking kind of cool
with some black dogs. Yeah, and they do get serious
veterinary treatment, including I didn't know this psychological treatment if
the need occur, Yeah, doggy PTSD. I didn't even realize
(22:55):
that there was such a thing. But after several deployments,
most dogs get to retire at about eight or nine
and then they're adopted out. A bill that was passed
in two thousand allowed for this. After dogs are detrained,
of course, and many end up with their handlers after
that natural fit, you'd imagine they'd have the ultimate war
buddy sort of bond. But some dogs don't just go
(23:17):
into a life of pure retirement. They are, after all,
dogs like German shepherds, you know, ones that like to
have some sort of job or task that they do.
So some join a police force or work for a
security agency, and then some really just do kick back.
I read a quote from one former handler who was
adopting his dog, and he said, I'm gonna make life
(23:39):
so easy for him. He's going to be able to
do whatever he wants and finally relax a little bit.
And I think it's interesting that more and more people
are interested in adopting these war dogs now, these retired
war dogs. Going back to the recent news we were
talking about earlier, I think something like four hundred applications
were put in for adopting these dogs after the raid
on Osama than on his compounds. Well, and I also
(24:01):
came across information about adopting dogs that weren't war dogs.
They weren't trained by the U. S. Military, they weren't retiring,
They were dogs, usually from Afghanistan or Iraq, that were
strays or abused and had been taken in by soldiers
there and kind of turned into like the mascot dogs
of today, cared for and ultimately, when the soldiers were
(24:25):
ready to redeploy or couldn't keep the pets that that
there were cats involved to couldn't keep the pets at
the base, there were some organizations that had come into
existence to taken those animals and help them with any
veterinary needs, hold them through quarantine, and eventually send them
to the US to live with the soldiers or to
(24:46):
join other adoptable families. A couple of them were the
Soldiers Animal Companions Fund and now Zad I'm not sure
if that's how that one is pronounced, but um I
just was looking at the little pictures of the animals
soldiers had adopted, and it was also kind of heartwarming.
This has been a it's been a heart strings pulling episode,
hasn't it. It really has. Before we wrap up, let's
(25:09):
take a minute. Well maybe for some more cool or
uplifting photos we should post some of those photo essays
that you sent me earlier of war dogs. Yeah, there
are a couple of great Rebecca Shaffer war dog galleries
that went viral on the internet a while back, and
they have amazing pictures dogs jumping out of planes, dogs
with these high tech doggles on as I mentioned earlier,
(25:32):
or just dogs looking like dogs cuddling with soldiers and
looking cute. But I mean, I really I enjoyed this,
and I'd kind of like to hear from listeners about
other dog war dog suggestions he might have, because I
know we did stick mostly to World War one, World
War two, little bit of Vietnam, little tutor stuff in there. Yeah,
(25:52):
it was a very US focus, So especially love to
know about any international war dogs that we didn't learn about.
I mean, we mainly focused on once we could find
information on. But if there are others out there that
you guys love, please send them to us, or you
can look us up on Facebook or on Twitter at
this industry And if you want to learn a little
bit more about war dogs of old and war dogs today,
(26:13):
how they're trained, all of that, we do have an
article on the website. It's called how war Dogs Work,
and you can search for it by looking for war
dogs on our homepage at www dot how Stuff works
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other
topics because it how stuff works. Dot Com
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