Bonzo's War

by Clare Campbell

  Ordinary Seaman Stanley Allen, then aged twenty, aboard the destroyer HMS Windsor, recalled: ‘There was a little dog, a terrier-type mongrel, which came on board with some of the soldiers. He only understood French. When I spoke to him he wouldn’t leave me. That little dog came back with us on the other two trips that we made.’ He called the dog ‘Kirk’.

  Seaman Norman Battersby told his son years later that he gone into the blazing port with a Royal Navy shore party and ‘evacuated a very special person’ – a stray cat that he found hiding among the rubble and wreckage. He tucked the cat under his coat and smuggled it home, where it lived contentedly, a much-loved family pet, for several years to come.

  Our Dumb Friends’ League reported ‘one of the little ships put out to sea from the quay at Dunkirk leaving behind an Alsatian, which had been unable to get on board. The dog dived into the sea and swam for its life. A British naval rating dived into the sea and brought the dog to safety. It had been quarantined by the League. The dog’s owner has vanished but its rescuer will take it when he can.’

  ‘Men of the French Army rescued from Dunkirk and Calais had been accompanied by twenty-two dogs and one cat,’ said the reports. Two were snatched from German boats captured by the Royal Navy and one from a Danish ship. (‘The German and Danish dogs have now been placed in English homes,’ the League would later report.) The Daily Telegraph told the story of a French soldier with ‘a large, fierce looking Alsatian,’ coming ashore at an English port. ‘I found him in Lille. He marched and fought with us all the way to Dunkirk. I bring him over on the boat; he is staying, I think,’ said the Frenchman. And, according the Telegraph, the Alsatian did just that.

  Meanwhile, The Cat magazine got cross about pictures in the press of ‘returned soldiers with Belgian kittens’. Did people not understand that without paying for months of quarantine these poor creatures must simply be destroyed? Better they were allowed to stay alive in Belgium whatever the conditions were like there.

  Thus it was that hundreds of cats and dogs were involuntary participants in the ‘Miracle of Dunkirk’. Amid the chaos there must be order. What about rabies? What about quarantine? The RSPCA recorded:

  All along the Thames Estuary and the south and southeast coast where the little ships of all kinds landed wearied men, equally wearied and homeless dogs were also brought ashore. The danger to this country’s animals resulting from an outbreak of rabies in such circumstances is too obvious to be stressed and R.S.P.C.A. Inspectors did a great work by caring for these animals until something could be done for them.

  Frequently the soldiers would leave the ships and the dogs would still be aboard. In such cases the Society’s Inspectors would have to round them up.

  The Folkestone inspector found himself in the heat of battle when the ship he was on returned to the beaches still with a cargo of dogs – to pick up more men and their pets.

  Kirk, the HMS Windsor dog, made it. His rescuer would record later: ‘After Dunkirk was all over, he was collected by a PDSA van to go into quarantine for six months before he was taken on to the staff of the parish where our Sub-Lieutenant’s father was vicar. All of us cheered the old dog off.’ But many were not so fortunate: ‘Where the owners could be traced, the RSPCA placed a few dogs in quarantine at its own expense but the majority of the animals had to be painlessly put down as they were either severely wounded or suffering from hysteria owing to the strain they had undergone.’ They were innocent victims of a conflict they had not sought and could not possibly understand.

  And among the animals (but these were definitely not pets) that did not get away were some 1,700 Indian Army mules of so-called ‘Force K6’ sent to France to carry ammunition and stores for the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). One company was captured outright in the German advance, three more (each 400-strong) were left behind at Dunkirk and St Nazaire.15 The men got away.

  As news of the Dunkirk pets’ plight got out (the animal welfare charities could not resist the publicity), ‘there were many inquiries from animal lovers anxious to know whether arrangements can be made for individual soldiers to keep these animals,’ reported The Animal World in the July. The RSPCA was unsentimental: ‘All dogs entering this country must undergo six months quarantine at an approved kennel,’ it sternly stated. ‘The cost of maintenance for this period is around thirteen guineas.’ And most of them were ‘camp-follower dogs, not attached to any individual,’ so The Animal World reported. Their fate looked bleak:

  Hard facts cannot be ignored. There is a grave risk of rabies and full quarantine would entail heavy expenditure. Where it is not practicable or desirable to keep these refugee dogs they will be given a speedy and humane end. At one port, 66 have already been put down, 20 at another.

  The French Army dogs had ‘been segregated, provided with leads and given exercise and are being looked after until their owners go back’. The fate of the lone French military cat that escaped the débâcle was not recorded. Presumably it was not there to answer General Charles de Gaulle’s call for Free France to fight on.

  Our Dumb Friends’ League was less quick to condemn. ‘Many dogs attached themselves to the retreating British armies,’ stated its 1940 report. ‘What was to happen to these dogs? The answer was destruction or outside help. When asked by the Ministry of Agriculture for help, the League came back at once. We will take them! Send them to us at once! So the League has or had 107 dogs in quarantine.’

  There were ninety-five dogs, and one cat who had fled for safety with Allied civilians (rather than the military), so the League reported. Dumb Friends’ had ‘adopted the same policy of paying for their quarantine’ and although this had attracted anonymous criticism, ‘there was not just a national, but an international duty to save them.’ Formal thanks had been received from the Belgian and Dutch Governments in exile for the League’s humane intervention.

  There was ‘not a little difficulty caused by the separation of dogs and cats from their refugee owners,’ the RSPCA reported more sternly, resulting in ‘many inquiries made of quarantine kennels. In many cases the animals were traced but there are a few sad hearts among French or Belgian people who have lost trace of their canine or feline friends’ – often the only remaining link with their former homes.

  It would also seem that there were pet rescues by air. PDSA News would later tell the story of ‘Fortnum’, a ‘French red squirrel who flew to England with an RAF Flight-Lieutenant in May 1940’ and who later made ‘more than half a dozen trips over enemy territory’. ‘The squirrel was handed over to Miss Phyllis Kelway, a naturalist author and now lives in a hutch of rabbits,’ it was reported. What a story he could tell!

  The RSPCA’s 1940 report gave an account of ‘an RAF Squadron Leader’s dog – lost in the difficult days before returning home, the animal was last seen somewhere in northern France’. The dog, however, had had a collar plus a label: ‘Inquiries were set on foot although it seemed doubtful if the dog could have reached England unaided, but in the end she was found being cared for in a south coast kennel. Somehow, no one knows by what route or vessel, Nora had come over alone, guided by her own instinct and sagacity’. It looked very much as if ‘Nora’, the air force dog, had been flown out.

  In the chaos, plenty more dogs simply slipped though. ‘Many dogs were smuggled by the troops from the ports far inland, but common sense eventually prevailed and these dogs, one of which travelled as far as Leicester before being detected, were placed in quarantine and eventually found good homes. Those hopelessly injured or diseased were painlessly destroyed,’ said the RSPCA’s journal. It expressed particular pride in ‘that it was enabled to bring over the last dog from Dunkirk’.

  The National Canine Defence League announced that it too was paying for quarantine for French and Belgian refugees’ dogs, ‘just as it had done for those from Austria and Czechoslovakia’. ‘The Dogs from Dunkirk are the latest canine sufferers from Nazi terrorism whom the League has helped,’ recorded The Dogs Bulletin.


  The League was remarkably upbeat about the war’s progress. ‘The BEF dogs from Dunkirk are now in quarantine,’ said the Bulletin. ‘They will doubtless emerge in six months time to find Britain at peace.’ Or invaded and conquered.

  For Britain’s pets the real time of trial was about to begin.

  15 From the war diaries the animals appear to have been simply set free or with ‘great reluctance handed to the French’.

  Chapter 11

  Three Million Dogs to Die

  So far no German bomb had fallen on the nation’s pets. Some people were asking what was NARPAC for? On 10 June 1940, Edward Bridges Webb (who had just been made full-time controller of the organization’s registration branch) wrote to the Ministry of Home Security to say that ‘his’ Technical Officers ‘felt they had nothing to do of national value, standing by lest the public be attacked by panic stricken animals in the case of air raids’. There had been lots of panic but not yet on the part of pets.

  A morale-raising letter from Sir John Anderson or a placed parliamentary answer would boost drooping morale, he said. The minister had to be reminded what NARPAC was. It was a voluntary organization covering the whole country, not just towns, but now farm animals as well with the recent launch of the so-called ‘rural scheme’.

  Statements of purpose appeared in the press. NARPAC was there, both ‘to protect the public from injured, frenzied and gas-contaminated animals at large’ and to ‘advise livestock owners on killing seriously injured animals and salvaging their carcasses for food purposes’. Farm animals were not the immediate problem. It was domestic animals in the seaside towns of southern England where the bedraggled survivors of Dunkirk were still coming ashore which were now in the front line of a German invasion. Like the inland cities before, a new effort began to empty them of children. And children had pets.

  It was announced publicly on 30 May: ‘The following towns on the southeast coast are to be declared evacuation areas: Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Felixstowe, Harwich, Clacton, Frinton and Walton, Southend, Margate, Ramsgate, Broadstairs, Sandwich, Dover, Deal and Folkestone.

  ‘Arrangements are being made for those children whose parents wish them to go, to be sent from these areas to safer districts in the Midlands [some would travel as far as the Peak District] and Wales. The movement will start by special trains leaving next Sunday.’

  The RSPCA moved in to rescue the seaside school pets, as it had in London nine months before. There were tearful separations all over again. From 13–18 June 1940, around 100,000 children were evacuated (in many cases re-evacuated) from ‘invasion corner’. As many parents and children were getting ready to follow. Would there be another wave of mass destruction of cats and dogs?

  As part of the new firmness of purpose, on 26 May prominent members of the British Union of Fascists were interned under wartime emergency powers. The BUF had political and personal links with anti-vivisection activists. Our Dumb Friends’ League had arranged with Scotland Yard to take their pets into care. Apparently included was ‘Goldie’ the ‘beloved ginger cat’ of BUF leader Sir Oswald Mosley.

  That same month came a general round-up of enemy aliens, Germans and Austrians, many of them Jewish refugees. Italians were also included, even though Britain was not at war with Italy until 10 June – all to be sent to improvised barbed-wire-strung camps amid general spy-frenzy. The fate of their pets was nasty, brutish and short. On 1 July over 1,000 internees were drowned when the liner shipping them to Canada was torpedoed. Among them was an Italian called ‘Sig. Azaria’. An 18-year-old Londoner, Colin Perry, had known him (he had clipped the family canary’s claws). He wrote in his diary:

  The man who owned the pet stores at the bottom of our road has lost his life in the Arandora Star. ‘The pet man’, we called him, it seems incredible that an old man who kept a pet shop in Upper Tooting Road had suddenly been snatched away to forfeit his life in the Atlantic.

  And what had happened to the Tooting pets?

  The German animal welfare magazine, Reichtierschutzblatt, meanwhile showed the triumph of the Blitzkrieg with photos of Hitler, the ‘animals’ true friend’, patting horses on the forehead and reaching out to pet ‘a French battlefield stray’. The little dog looked quite unperturbed by the Führer’s caress.

  The PDSA’s animal hospital at Bièvre, southwest of Paris, was overwhelmed, its staff lethalling a tide of refugee pets and exhausted military animals before its English staff members got out by car and on foot at the very last gasp. The clinic, endowed by an American millionaire, became a hospital for German Army horses.

  This really was ‘backs-against-the-wall’. In London a secret propaganda committee ‘in a position to tap into and guide every source of public expression’ agreed on 10 June to fire up an ‘anger campaign’ to rouse the people against the ‘fundamental rottenness of the Germans, the secret beast in the middle of otherwise civilised Europe who kills without pity as animals kill. They know no law as animals know no law.’ The weakest link in the chain of public courage is the lonely woman, the propagandists agreed, who could be moved to righteous anger by tales of enemy cruelty to the vulnerable.

  Results were swift in coming. A story reported ‘in neutral newspapers’ was picked up by the London press on the 13th. ‘Three Million Dogs to Die in Germany’ it stated starkly, ‘because, according to an official explanation, they need food that might be used for human consumption.’ How rotten, how beastly! Actually it was politically very useful considering what was being discreetly discussed in Whitehall.

  Animal lovers were appalled when they read it. Martina Corfe, aged 26 and an auxiliary ambulance driver in Greenwich, reported in her Mass-Observation diary that her friend, Mabel Cooper, ‘was more upset than anything else by the slaughter of all the dogs in Germany, she keeps talking about and crooning affectionately over her own dog’.

  Edgware schoolgirl Helena Datz saw ‘a newsboy [who] had drawn a crowd with his completely unintelligible shouts. The cause of the furore was the command to kill all the dogs in Germany. My friend made a feeble joke about that including Hitler and all the Nazis.’

  It was in the papers, on the BBC News. The American press would pick it up. ‘Can it be true? Three million dogs doomed to death in Germany?’ asked Our Dogs on 21 June. ‘This hideous holocaust must be the greatest slaughter in the history of dogs,’ wrote columnist Thelma Gray, Corgi pioneer and royal confidante. She had an inside view when she wrote:

  From a dog breeder’s point of view it is a disaster of the first water. Without German stock, quality will diminish. Alsatians have varied blood line and as for Wire-haired Dachshunds, Schnauzers, and Boxers – we could get by with stock from Switzerland and America – but what of Rottweilers?

  Alas the poor rotties, there is not enough material here and America cannot help. Germany has all the best stock and they are condemned to death. What a tragedy for a fine breed fast becoming better known in England.

  She was sure however that at least four dogs would survive – the two Chows which she had personally sold to Reichsmarschall Göring and the two Corgis belonging to Herr von Ribbentrop. ‘These two Nazi officials are very fond of their dogs and I can’t help thinking that they will wangle things so that their pets get off unharmed,’ she wrote.

  The humane Amy Golightly wrote in ‘Kennelmaid’s Corner’: ‘It must have been with horror that each of us heard the broadcast telling us that over three million dogs in Germany are to be destroyed. No matter what else they may be, the majority of these owners are fond of their dogs.

  ‘They have shared their meagre rations with them and they have tried, as we under like circumstances have tried, to spare the horrors of war from them,’ she wrote. ‘To know that, if we are careful and sensible, such an edict is unlikely ever to go forth in England, must be of great comfort to us. There Must Be No Waste!’ Actually, she was on exactly the right track.

  A Home Office official made a note about the German ‘dog destruction order’. He saw it as a bid to
get the ‘glycerine and the fertilisers which their destruction by scientific method would provide’. With the ‘national interest in mind,’ he suggested, could not the same be done in the south coast towns being evacuated? ‘I gather that Morel’s [a firm of animal renderers] are in Folkestone collecting dead dogs and treating them already.’

  While invasion panic gripped the seaside, a new scare stalked the wider nation. It had begun with the German move into Holland when paratroops had seized bridges and airfields. The first admission that Britain might be readying a canine answer was a statement in Parliament on 21 May that ‘training experiments [were] now in progress’ with patrol dogs.

  Britain’s tentative war-dog trials were indeed in progress, in the hands of the Crufts ‘grandmaster’, Mr Herbert Lloyd.16

  The War Office had agreed in late April 1940 that four dogs should be trained at Mr Lloyd’s kennels at Washwater, near Newbury (they would soon move to the requisitioned nearby Woolton House), with a junior officer, Lt. H. A. Buxton, and six other ranks as the beginnings of an elite dog-squad. The Labrador-crosses were set to go to France with the BEF on night patrols, but the Dunkirk débâcle had ended that plan.

  Alsatian enthusiast Major James Y. Baldwin (whose doggy impact on the war would be considerable, see also p.231–2) expressed his anguish in early May in The Dog World – in an article condemning the ‘British government for saying no to dogs which can help to win the war.’ An old War Office chum dismissed him as a nostalgist: ‘But you see, my dear chap, how different things are from what they were last time.’

  Alsatian owners who had offered their dogs for war service had been told to enlist as police Special Constables. A proper start on mobilizing the nation’s dogs must be made now, said the Colonel.