by Damien Lewis
The French dog was soaked from head to toe. But his ducking and his near humiliation would prove more than worth it in the end—for in making himself a laughingstock Paul had managed to break Judy’s icy English reserve. Without any further dissembling on her part she proceeded to lick his face dry, nuzzle against his wet body, and paw him all over.
Bonny stared at the two of them in amazement. From being a total no-hoper, via his exuberant misfortune Paul had gone in an instant to being the first love of Judy’s life. All of a sudden this had the promise of a match made in heaven. In which case, Bonny decided, the men of the Gnat needed to give their ship’s dog a good talking to.
By now Judy was approaching two years old, the equivalent of her early twenties in human years. Bonny figured she was as ready as she’d ever be to have a litter, and with the Francis Garnier’s dog being on hand they had a golden opportunity both to strengthen the entente cordiale and to breed a fine line of Franco–English pointers. But that didn’t mean that any nuptials could be entered into without Judy being fully acquainted with the facts of life, not to mention her responsibilities.
On the afternoon of Paul’s tumble into the harbor, five chosen men of the Gnat sat around the mess table, on which was perched a carefully groomed Judy of Sussex dressed in her smartest collar.
Bonny eyed her with a serious expression. “We feel that the time has come when we need a proper talk. We are so to speak your legal guardians, and we naturally want to do the best for your happiness. But you’ll understand that everything must be done properly and in accordance with the rules.”
He paused to let his words sink in. Judy cocked her head to one side quizzically. It was as if she was saying: come on—get on with it! At the same time she flicked out her tongue to lick Bonny’s hand as if to reassure him that she was glued to his every utterance.
Bonny nodded, happy she was paying proper attention. “Now, Paul is doubtless a very nice dog, with a pedigree too. Plus they are a very nice bunch on the Francis Garnier. So we’ve decided you can get engaged today and if all goes well you’ll be married tomorrow. But only on one condition—that you name your first pup Bonny.”
Judy appeared to nod her agreement, and so one of the ship’s engineers proceeded to lift her left paw and slip over it an anklet designed for this very occasion.
“That,” he announced, as he closed it more tightly around her ankle, “is your engagement ring.”
Judy stared at the loop of silver for a long moment. She knew from the tone and demeanor of the men gathered around her that something of great import was afoot, but she perhaps didn’t quite understand yet what all this signified.
The very next day Judy and Paul were to be married. They were led forth onto the center of the hulk so that both crews could watch the ceremony. Bonny officiated, together with his opposite number from the French ship. As the men of both vessels cheered and clapped enthusiastically—and a group of perplexed locals gathered to scratch and shake their heads—Bonny proceeded to pat both dogs on the head and rounded off the ceremony as appropriately as he could.
“And so, with no further ado I am pleased to pronounce you . . .” He struggled for a moment to find the right words. “Dog and bitch?” He glanced around the crowd, hoping for some inspiration. “Paul and Judy?”
Then a heavily accented voice called out from the bridge of the Francis Garnier. It was their first lieutenant. “One!” he cried. “Pronounce zem one!”
“Perfect—I pronounce you one!” Bonny confirmed.
And so Judy of Sussex and Paul of Paris—Paris because it sounded classy and thoroughly romantic—were duly married.
Paul was permitted onto the Gnat, where a special love nest had been constructed for the two dogs. After three days in doggie heaven he was returned to the Francis Garnier complaining loudly, but all were deaf to his protestations.
As was perhaps fitting, Judy would bring new life into the world just as death and destruction threatened to engulf all around her. During the weeks since her romantic liaison with Paul she had grown plumper and plumper, her eyes shining with anticipation of her soon to be realized responsibilities. But at the same time Japanese warplanes had started hitting the heart of the Chinese resistance hard, targeting the city of Hankow first and foremost.
As the war along the Yangtze intensified, the Japanese Imperial Air Force deployed its modern twin-engine Mitsubishi G3M medium bomber, operating from land bases in Japan. Specialist units were formed to fly missions across the East China Sea, carrying out mass bombing raids over China’s key cities. The Mitsubishi G3M carried 800 kilograms of bombs—many times the payload of the carrier-based biplanes that had previously attacked the Yangtze gunboats—and boasted a 4,400-kilometer flight range.
None of these warplanes had yet targeted the gunboats tied up at the Hankow Bund. But each time they roared over the city, Judy would curl herself around her distended stomach, as if in an effort to safeguard her unborn litter, and snarl defensively at the skies. She was learning to hate these giant angry birds that pounced from the heavens, unleashing death and destruction and threatening to snuff out the lives she was carrying before they could even be realized.
But the morning duly came when—as yet another wave of Japanese bombers thundered through the skies above Hankow—there was the miracle of birth aboard the Gnat. A tired and unshaven Bonny (the Gnat’s self-appointed midwife) tumbled down the steps to the mess deck.
“They’re here!” he yelled triumphantly. “All thirteen of them!”
There was a rush for the ladder as the crew jostled one another to be first to see the new arrivals, not to mention their proud mother. Sure enough, squeezed into a ship’s basket that seemed barely able to contain them were thirteen tiny replicas of Judy—each liver-colored from the neck up just like their mother but with several also exhibiting their father’s distinguishing white streak running from forehead to nose.
Of the thirteen pups three of the weakest quickly perished, leaving ten to grow fat on their mother’s milk. Lying protectively with her brood, Judy appeared to be the perfect mom, and not even the constant stream of well-wishers who poured aboard the Gnat appeared able to disturb or discomfit her.
She seemed happy to show off her babies to all and sundry—Sew-sew, the Sung family, and Amah the boat lady’s children included. But the one individual prevented from seeing them was the pups’ father, Paul. Now that he’d done his business Judy seemed to have forgotten her French beau almost as if he’d never existed.
In no time at all, everywhere there were unsteady puppies tumbling about the Gnat, chubby little legs flailing as they tried to escape from the ship’s crew, who were equally intent on ushering them back to their nest. They got into every conceivable corner, chewed anything even remotely chewable, and everywhere they left spreading puddles of puppy mess.
Only when they were old enough so that each could be taken on a leash for a walk did Paul finally get to see his offspring. He sniffed at them curiously, as if trying to work out if they were really his doing, before they were ushered back aboard the Gnat. No one wanted to be out in the open for very long. With Japanese warplanes menacing the skies, any outing around Hankow spelled danger.
One afternoon shortly after the puppies’ first foray off ship, a squadron of Japanese bombers flew in to attack Hankow, using the river valley to mask their approach until the final moment. But Judy heard them coming. By now the attacks were so commonplace that she rarely had time or opportunity to issue her customary warning. Yet today she seemed to sense that this was different and that the enemy in the air was coming for her family—both her four-legged and two-legged ones.
Whining frantically, she called her pups to her, and as the bombers roared in to attack she attempted to wrap herself protectively around them, yelping out a desperate last-minute warning to the ship’s crew. Seconds later the lead aircraft swooped over the Gnat, releasing its bombs. Like evil black demons they plummeted toward the vessel, but at the last i
nstant their trajectory proved slightly off and they overshot the ship.
They hit the river ahead of the Gnat and detonated, throwing up huge plumes of tortured white water. The reverberations of the explosions punched through the ship’s hull as a protective mother curled closer around her cowering brood and blasted river water rained down all around. Taken by surprise—so far, the Japanese had kept their promise, made after the sinking of the USS Panay, not to attack any neutral ships—the crew of the Gnat raced for their battle stations.
Behind the lead bomber the rest of the squadron thundered in. But as the Gnat’s gunners swung the Maxim machine guns onto their target, a new sound rent the skies above the Hankow Bund—the howl of Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial engines. Judy couldn’t know it and her fear for her brood was doubtless redoubled under the aerial onslaught, but a flight of ace fighters had flown to the rescue, and by the looks of things just in the nick of time.
A ragged volley of cheers went up from the deck of the ship as the distinctive snub-nosed forms of eight Boeing P-26 Peashooters dived to attack. The P-26 was the first American all-metal fighter aircraft ever built, and the Chinese Air Force operated several flights of the redoubtable warplane. The Japanese had already felt the wrath of the Peashooter’s Browning machine guns, with a score of Mitsubishi G3M bombers having been shot down over Nanking.
In an instant the bombers targeting the Hankow Bund broke formation and jettisoned their bombs in an effort to lighten their load and escape. But some proved too slow. The Boeing P-26s were flown by Chinese pilots aided by a handful of ace British, American, and other volunteer airmen. They had swooped from where they’d been flying a holding pattern at altitude, and they tore into the Japanese warplanes.
Two bombers were raked from nose to tail by the Peashooters’ 7.62-mm machine guns. The Mitsubishi G3Ms shuddered under the onslaught before smoke and fire bloomed along their fuselages, and first one and then the other fell from the sky into the waiting Yangtze. The Gnat—and Judy and her brood with her—had been saved from what had seemed like almost certain annihilation, but the narrow escape only served to reinforce the urgent need to get the puppies out of danger.
Homes would need to be found for the ten pups, and quickly.
Unknown to any aboard the gunboat’s crew, the timely appearance of those Boeing P-26 fighters wasn’t quite as miraculous as it might have seemed. There was in place a secret early-warning system that signaled to the Chinese Air Force the impending arrival of enemy warplanes, and it was happening right under the very noses of the Japanese. Unwittingly, the British gunboat the Gnat had played a pivotal role in getting that early-warning system up and running.
Some months earlier Stanley Cotterrall, the Gnat’s telegraphist—her Morse code operator—had been landed at Wuhu to undergo an urgent medical operation at the American Mission Hospital. During his recuperation the hospital had needed to send a signal to the Wuhu docks to secure the help of a doctor who was serving aboard a ship moored there. Cotterrall had offered to send one using Morse code, which he duly did using a mirror from the hospital roof, employing flashes of sunlight to alert the ship.
In due course the hospital staff asked Cotterrall to teach some of them Morse so that they could do the same for themselves in the future. One or two of the Chinese staff proved to be particularly enthusiastic pupils. They very quietly went on to learn radio operation as well, and under a cloak of absolute secrecy they proceeded to install a radio on the hospital roof.
Whenever a flight of Japanese warplanes flew over Wuhu, using the Yangtze to navigate inland to their target, those Chinese medics would sneak onto the roof to send a radio warning in Morse code. Thus Hankow was forewarned, and the P-26 Peashooters were able to appear as if by magic to blast the Japanese aircraft out of the sky. Eventually the Japanese would discover that the radio messages were being sent, but they were never able to locate the transmitter hidden on the roof of the American Mission Hospital.
As far as possible, the giving away of Judy’s puppies was a gradual process so as to soften the blow. First choice went naturally to the officers and men of the Francis Garnier. Next in line was the Hankow Race Club, which made an offer that the ship’s captain felt unable to refuse: one Lewis light machine gun and four magazines of ammunition in exchange for the puppy. Further pups went to diplomatic staff based in Hankow, and one of the last was gifted to the American gunboat the USS Guam.
The tenth and final puppy went to a Scottish engineer who served aboard one of the steamers still operating on the Yangtze. Once more Judy was reduced to the company of her two-legged family on a diminutive British warship increasingly feeling the wrath of the Japanese. And in the coming days the steel of the gunboat crew was about to be tested as never before.
Toward the end of the summer of 1938, with Japanese troops poised to take Hankow, a Chinese customs ship, the Chianghsing, was out on the river moving marker buoys in an effort to make it more difficult for Japanese warships to navigate into the city’s harbor. Spotted from the air, the Chianghsing was pounced on by Japanese aircraft and strafed and bombed.
With his ship sinking and on fire, Captain Crowley, the Chianghsing’s British commander, rammed her into the riverbank in an effort to allow the crew to escape. But in the process of getting his men onto land, Captain Crowley, his first officer, and his engineer were machine-gunned by the Japanese warplanes. All three were killed. Several of the crew members were wounded, and the Japanese aircraft loitered in the skies seeking out survivors.
The Gnat was the nearest British warship that could go to their aid. She steamed out onto the Yangtze, needing only the thick black pall of oily smoke to guide her to the crippled vessel. With her men at action stations and her guns at the ready—plus one dog barking furious warnings about the danger in the skies—she sailed under the circling warplanes and lowered both of her boats. The Gnat’s crewmen were able to reach the survivors and evacuate them, along with the bodies of the dead, and for whatever reason the Japanese aircraft failed to interfere.
Shortly afterward, the Gnat received a gift of two footballs from the Hankow Customs House. With them was a handwritten letter of thanks from those on the staff most closely connected with the sinking of the Chianghsing. It summed up the wonderful esprit de corps exhibited by all aboard the Gnat, both man and dog.
You British Navy men, whatever your rank, are invariably and cheerfully ready to go to the help of anyone whoever they may be. Although you regarded this trip as just part of the day’s work, your attempt to pass off a very gallant act as a mere bit of routine work does not diminish in the least the feelings of respect and gratitude with which we civilians regard you.
But no amount of such selfless gallantry could prevent the Japanese from overrunning the city of the gunboats.
With the coming of the winter monsoon, fierce winds blew the Japanese invaders into Hankow. In the final moments the Chinese resistance had decided that it was better to melt into the bush and live to fight another day than to launch a last-ditch defense of the city. As Japanese warplanes buzzed overhead and Japanese warships steamed into dock at the Hankow Bund, heavily armed Japanese sentries were posted all across this, the newest Chinese city to fall under their dominion.
Aboard the Gnat, moored at her customary resting place beside the hulk, the chill wind of an approaching enmity blew across the decks and along the corridors. In her ammo-box-cum-bed on the ship’s bridge, Judy lifted her fine head and sensed the changed atmosphere that had descended upon her surroundings. The homely clatter and chatter of Chinese port life had been replaced by the low murmur of a people under an occupation of unprecedented savagery.
Judy’s first confrontation with the invaders was not long in coming. Just a few days after the fall of Hankow, Bonny—her erstwhile midwife—and Leading Seaman Law—her giant of a protector—took her for her customary early morning walk around the Bund. The trio had completed their usual circuit without incident and were returning to the Gnat when trouble st
epped onto the riverfront before them in the form of one of the dozens of Japanese sentries posted there.
Judy, in her customary fashion, trotted over and took a sniff of his knee-length boots. The sentry’s reaction was as unexpected as it was inept and was bound to cause trouble. Within seconds his voice had risen to a screaming frenzy as he berated the ship’s dog and her two fellow crew members. With flecks of spittle at his thin lips, the enraged guard gestured for the dog—and her sailor companions—to get the hell out of there.
Judy stood her ground. She raised her head from his boots, and no doubt with early memories coursing through her head of Soo, her Shanghai protector, and the beating he had endured, she curled her lips into a silent snarl. The sentry took a step backward, his face puce with rage. His hand went to his rifle, he unslung it, and the sharp clatch-clatch of steel on steel rang out across the largely deserted dock as he chambered a round.
The sentry went to level his gun, but this was no ordinary dog that he intended to shoot here: this was a dog of the Royal Navy, the mascot of the gunboat HMS Gnat, and a fully fledged veteran member of her crew. Leading Seaman Law didn’t so much as hesitate. The massive form of the crewman barreled forward, shoved Judy aside, and lifted the diminutive sentry into the air, and with him screaming unintelligible abuse Law threw both man and rifle over the dockside.
There was a despairing scream truncated by a splash, and the sentry was no more. Bonny, Law, and Judy made haste for their ship. Knowing how many of the Japanese soldiers were hopeless swimmers, the trio paused only long enough to see the bedraggled sentry crawl ashore before hurrying aboard to report the incident. The first reactions from the Japanese weren’t long in coming.