Judy: The Unforgettable Story of the Dog Who Went to War and Became a True Hero

by Damien Lewis

  After an exchange of terse messages, a stiff-legged officer from the Imperial Japanese Army was piped aboard the Gnat, complete with a sword that threatened to trip him. Of necessity, the British gunboat captains had learned to be consummate diplomats. During the past year of hostilities superhuman efforts at diplomacy had been required to navigate the Yangtze. Accordingly, Judy had been well hidden, and by the time the Japanese visitor had departed he’d been mollified via a combination of soothing verbal exchanges and plenty of ship’s rum.

  There were several further such visits as the Japanese commanders tried to ascertain how and why one of the “glorious liberators” had been treated with such disrespect and who exactly was responsible for the dog. But the stocks of wardroom rum obviously held out, for nothing more was ever said to Bonny and Law about the incident. Yet one signal change was afoot: Judy of Sussex was henceforth confined to the ship.

  Any further close encounters between Judy and the Japanese might well prove the death of her.

  Chapter Seven

  By the turn of the year the gunboats of the British fleet were becoming decidedly old ships. Launched in 1916, they’d first seen service during the First World War and were approaching a quarter of a century in age. For some time now the Admiralty had been intending to replace them with more capable, modern warships.

  In the early months of 1939 the first of those new vessels, HMS Scorpion, Grasshopper, and Dragonfly, sailed from Britain to take over duties from the veteran gunboats HMS Bee, Ladybird, and Gnat. The first vessel, HMS Scorpion, the new flagship of the fleet, had been built at a cost of £168,000. She was the model design for her sister ships.

  Slightly shorter and narrower in the beam than the Bee, HMS Scorpion nevertheless boasted greater speed, armaments, and protection than her predecessor, plus more powerful communications and targeting facilities. Bulletproof plating was fixed around her pair of 4-inch guns, her eight .50-caliber machine guns, wheelhouse, wireless office, and vulnerable machinery housings.

  But ironically, these new and more potent warships would hit the waters of the Yangtze just as the rule of the gunboats was all but over.

  In June 1939 the crew of the Gnat—ship’s dog included—transferred to their gleaming new home, HMS Grasshopper. Much was different aboard the vessel. She came with a new captain, one Lieutenant Commander Edward Neville, which meant that by now both of those who had purchased Judy from the Shanghai Dog Kennels—Chief Petty Officer Jefferey and Lieutenant Commander Waldegrave—were no longer at her side.

  HMS Grasshopper also had a crew of seventy-five, meaning that the atmosphere aboard ship was somewhat less tight-knit and convivial than it had been on the Gnat. Sadly, Judy would have to make do without even the companionship of Bonny and Law, for they were remaining with the Gnat as part of her skeleton crew. Yet it was now, just when all the certainties of the previous years were being taken from her, that Judy would face the greatest challenges of her life so far.

  Hardly had the ship’s crew gotten used to their new vessel when Britain declared war on a belligerent Germany. Japan had still to enter into the hostilities, yet few doubted upon whose side she would fight when this truly became the second conflict of the twentieth century to menace the entire world. The Grasshopper had barely had the chance to enjoy a few good turns of her screw up the Yangtze when she was ordered by the Admiralty to set sail for open seas.

  The Grasshopper would accompany the Scorpion and the Dragonfly steaming via Hong Kong and Macau to the British island stronghold of Singapore. The route would take her some 3,000 kilometers, arguably in the right direction—away from Japan—but for Judy this would be the very first time she’d left the Yangtze River valley and headed onto the wide ocean.

  Forced to leave her offspring and most of her friends, Judy planted her brave paws on the shifting deck as the Grasshopper pulled away from Shanghai, setting a course for the waters of the South China Sea. Behind her, the Gnat and many of the other gunboats were preparing to sail to Singapore with skeleton crews. The Yangtze had been the Gnat’s home for two and a half years and Judy’s for three, but neither ship nor ship’s dog would ever grace her waters again.

  Designed as a river gunboat, HMS Grasshopper had only a six-foot six-inch draft. As a result, she rolled, slewed, and heaved her away into the ocean swell, pushing ahead at close to her maximum speed of seventeen knots. At first Judy was violently seasick. In spite of all the cajoling of those who knew her, she refused to eat or to leave her ammunition-box bed. But finally the crew got her out on deck doing regular exercise in an effort to aid her recovery. By the time the Grasshopper was approaching Hong Kong, Judy had found her sea legs and was eating like the proverbial horse. She would never suffer from seasickness again.

  Sandwiched between modern-day Malaysia and Indonesia, Singapore was supposedly Britain’s unassailable fortress in the Far East, one that would halt Japanese forces in their tracks should Japan declare war. Known as the Gibraltar of the East, this island citadel was protected by massive 15-inch guns dug into apparently impregnable coastal batteries.

  Should Japan enter the war, everyone up to Winston Churchill himself expected Singapore to hold out for three months at least, buying time for reinforcements to reach the island fortress and drive back the attackers. Unfortunately, there were several flaws in this assumption. One, the Japanese had air superiority. The British warplanes based at Singapore were few and obsolete, and they were no match for a Japanese Air Force equipped with the Mitsubishi A6M2, the dreaded Zero.

  Moreover, the defenders of Singapore possessed few if any tanks, and all of the coastal guns were set on the seaward side of the island. There were none positioned to defend Singapore if an invasion were to come from overland. As an added drawback, though Singapore was well garrisoned, practically none of the troops stationed there had any training in what they were about to face—jungle warfare, a discipline in which the Japanese military was to excel.

  But with Japan yet to declare hostilities, the Grasshopper and her sister ships arrived in Singapore when it was still a place that lived up to its early wartime reputation of “business—and pleasure—as usual.” As the conflict raged across Europe and British and Allied troops were driven out of France, Singapore remained seemingly remote and untouched by the entire conflict.

  As for Judy, gradually she was settling into this strange new life aboard a warship that no longer cruised the waters of the mighty Yangtze River. Compared with the months she had spent aboard a gunboat on active duty patrolling China’s waterways, Singapore proved remarkably uneventful—but it would remain that way for only so long.

  Judy had made a new set of special friends aboard ship, most notably Petty Officer George White, whom she had first met in the strangest of ways. The morning Coxswain White joined the Grasshopper at Singapore’s Keppel Harbor he strode up the gangway to report for duty, little expecting what was coming. He stepped aboard and threw up a smart salute, only to be half knocked over by something that cannoned into his shoulders and seemed to cling there—before whipping off his sailor’s cap!

  Coxswain White’s attacker was himself a relatively new arrival aboard the ship—Mickey the monkey. The crew of the Grasshopper had agreed to look after Mickey temporarily while his ship and crew were away on duties in the Persian Gulf. Judy hated the monkey, but she watched with a peculiar fascination that morning as Coxswain White was assaulted. The man proved more than a match for the monkey. Quick as a flash he grabbed Mickey before he could escape, reclaimed his cap, and dumped the little animal unceremoniously on the deck.

  Screeching with rage, Mickey tried to reclaim his prize, but Coxswain White was having none of it. He replaced the cap firmly on his head, and it was then that he spied Judy. Head cocked to one side in amusement, she was sitting well out of range of Mickey, who was attached by a leash to a length of wire running the length of the ship. Coxswain White would have been struck by how beautiful she was if it hadn’t been for the fact that she was watching
him almost as if she’d set him up.

  “She’s laughing her silly head off,” he muttered, suspecting that ship’s dog and monkey had colluded in the attack.

  Very quickly White would learn that there was no love lost between the two animals. The first time Judy had run into Mickey had been perhaps her most ignominious since her plunge into the Hankow cesspit. Unknown to her, Mickey had just been installed aboard the ship, the wire being strung up with a sliding metal ring so he could shimmy back and forth. Judy had stepped into range, unaware of the threat, and Mickey had proceeded to vault onto her back.

  The entire crew appeared to be watching as Judy leaped, bucked, sprang, and cavorted like a rodeo horse, but Mickey had clung on with both hands and would not be thrown. Eventually, confused and defeated, Judy did the same thing she’d done when trapped in the Hankow cesspit—she cried out for help at the top of her lungs. Seemingly realizing the distress he was causing, Mickey had dismounted. He went to try to put a comforting arm around his steed’s neck, but Judy was having none of it.

  She backed away slowly, keeping her eyes on the little brute until she was able to dart down the mess steps—all to a loud round of applause from the ship’s crew. From then on Judy tolerated Mickey, but that was about all. Whenever he succeeded in leaping onto her back, she’d carry him to wherever she was going, suffering in dignified silence. But she was determined to get some enjoyment out of the little devil’s presence, which she’d just had in watching him ambush Coxswain White.

  A second new arrival joined the gunboat flotilla that day, and like Coxswain White he was fresh out of England. Upon reporting for duty, Leading Stoker Les Searle managed to dodge the cheeky monkey, but very quickly he would be drawn to Judy—a ship’s dog who had started to gain legendary status as the staunchest of defenders of the gunboats, a reputation that was about to be tested to the limit and beyond.

  Driven by a hunger for natural resources—Japan possessed few of her own—and with the war going badly for Britain and her allies in Europe, Imperial Japan decided now was the time to strike. The chief aim of its carefully coordinated series of surprise attacks was to seize the rich oil and coal reserves of modern-day Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and the Philippines. With Singapore lying right in the center of the territory that it coveted, the island fortress would have to be pounded into oblivion for the Japanese plan to succeed.

  Several thousand miles across the ocean in the mid-Pacific, the American base of Pearl Harbor would also have to be reduced to a burning ruin if Imperial Japan was to prevent U.S. forces from coming to the aid of their allies. American bases on the Philippines—also within easy striking distance of Malaysia and Indonesia—would also have to be bombed into submission.

  So it was that at 0400 hours on the morning of December 8, 1941—although it was still December 7 across the international dateline in Hawaii—the first waves of Japanese bombers swept in to hit an unsuspecting Singapore. Simultaneously, flights of Japanese carrier-based warplanes launched a savage attack against Pearl Harbor. Striking with complete surprise, they caused considerable damage to the United States Pacific Fleet. Further Japanese air attacks struck bases in the Philippines as ships landed troops in Malaysia for the overland push on Singapore.

  With waves of Japanese warplanes bombing Britain’s island fortress, the British warships HMS Repulse and Prince of Wales set sail from Jamaica to come to her aid. Part of the so-called Force Z, the battleship and battle cruiser had four destroyers as escorts but no protecting shield of air cover. En route they had the misfortune of being spotted by a Japanese submarine, the I-56, which was able to vector the first of the warplanes onto them.

  Successive waves of Japanese Mitsubishi G3M bombers—the same type that had bombed the gunboats along the Yangtze—hit the warships with torpedoes and bombs. At 12:35 on December 11 the Repulse was the first to go down, with the Prince of Wales sinking less than an hour later. Just four enemy warplanes had been lost.

  The news that both ships had been sunk was received with utter shock in Britain. Churchill’s initial response was one of disbelief. “Are you sure it’s true?” he asked. It was a crushing blow for those forces tasked to defend Singapore and to halt the Japanese in their tracks.

  Unbelievably, the three Yangtze River gunboats that had ended up in Singapore were now some of the largest warships available to the defenders. In the days that followed Japanese forces rolled onward, pushing ever southward through Malaya (now Malaysia) toward Singapore. The defenders fought valiantly, but they were outgunned, outmaneuvered, and menaced everywhere from the air.

  The Grasshopper and Dragonfly, plus their sister ship, HMS Scorpion, were in action repeatedly, although they could move only at night because of the threat from the skies. They bombarded enemy forces, they lifted retreating troops out of the jungle in daring rescue operations, and everywhere they relied upon Judy’s ferocious barking as an early-warning system, enabling them to hide from any marauding Japanese warplanes.

  In one daring operation the three gunboats evacuated 1,500 British troops from under the very noses of the Japanese, bringing them safely to Singapore. During another mission Leading Stoker Les Searle—who’d only just recently joined the gunboats in Singapore—was put ashore as one of a party of five to try to locate and rescue Allied troops. Instead, his tiny force ran into the enemy in the darkness, and Searle was shot in the leg.

  The leading stoker and his fellows made it back to their ship, and he was taken to the naval hospital in Singapore. Since the opening of hostilities Judy had made a habit of accompanying the Grasshopper’s sick berth attendant during his visits to sick and injured crewmen ashore. She seemed to sense that her presence among the wounded offered them great comfort.

  Les Searle knew all about the Grasshopper’s miracle dog, but the time convalescing with his leg wound was his first real chance to get to know her. As he ran his fingers through her fine, glossy coat, his mind would drift to thoughts of home. That was the beauty of having a dog like Judy aboard ship—or visiting the sick, as she was now. It took minds away from the savagery of the war to thoughts of gentler times, ones that sadly seemed to be fading into a distant past.

  There was a deep and instinctive connection between Les Searle the wounded seaman and Judy the ship’s mascot. Theirs would prove to be a long-lived and life-affirming friendship in the bloody months and years that lay ahead.

  It was February 11, 1942, when the fleet of little ships remaining in Singapore was finally given permission to evacuate. Over the preceding eight weeks the island fortress had been pounded into near ruin from the air. The port’s huge oil storage tanks were burning fiercely, casting a thick pall of choking, toxic smoke across the harbor, which mingled with that from the fires burning all across the city.

  Hoping for another Miracle of Dunkirk, many believed the flotilla would somehow evacuate all to safety—disregarding the nearly total Japanese superiority in the air and at sea. The gunboat HMS Scorpion, already badly damaged by Japanese bombing, was one of the first of the little ships to leave. Packed with civilians fleeing the besieged island, she reached as far as the Berhala Strait, some 300 kilometers south of Singapore, before running into the vanguard of the Japanese invasion fleet—the light cruiser Yura and the two destroyer escorts Fubuki and Asagiri.

  Though her guns barked defiance, the diminutive gunboat stood little chance. As it was blazing from stem to stern and out of control, there were only twenty survivors by the time the ship went down, all of whom were picked up by the Japanese. One of those who perished was Chief Petty Officer Charles Goodyear, whose marriage to the Russian barmaid had been so ominously received by the Chinese soothsayer back in Shanghai. Many more of Judy’s treasured friends would lose their lives before the week was out.

  On February 13 the final evacuation of Singapore got under way, with some fifty little ships preparing to evacuate the besieged island city. Priority was given to women and children. As the crew of the Grasshopper carried frightened i
nfants aboard and comforted bewildered mothers, they were trying to work out how on earth they were going to accommodate the hordes of extra passengers.

  Judy of Sussex didn’t have to worry herself with such niceties: she was everywhere that day, dashing from one new arrival to the next, tail wagging ceaselessly and nose nuzzling into the hands of those who were the most tearful and distressed. She seemed to sense somehow the gravity of the situation and to know how the presence of a dog, a symbol of normality and of home, would comfort the evacuees, many of whom had been forced to leave behind their own much-loved pets.

  She was especially fantastic with the children. Judy led them around the ship, showed them the finest hiding places, and played her favorite games with those who still possessed the spirit to play. But there was precious little room for any fun, for the Grasshopper was becoming a very crowded ship indeed. Her normal complement of 75 had been swollen fourfold as some 200 extra bodies crowded her decks.

  Petty Officer White—recently the victim of Mickey the monkey’s assault—was coxswain of the ship, which meant it was his job to see to the chief needs of all evacuees. Somehow, in war-ravaged Singapore he had to find enough water and food for 200 extra souls and satisfy all their special needs, such as baby milk, soap, toilet paper, and the odd piece of chocolate for the children, if such could be found.

  Since the previous September the Grasshopper had had a new captain. Together with his senior officers Commander Jack Hoffman was busy on the bridge studying possible escape routes, though none seemed to offer them much of a chance of making a getaway. News had just reached him that three of the little ships crammed with escapees—local vessels the Redang, Siang Wo, and Giang Bee—had been intercepted and sunk that very day.