Our Dumb Friends’ League got involved at an official level with reports of US troops bringing in ‘mascots’ with no regard to quarantine. ‘An outbreak of rabies would mean wholesale destruction, which would be appalling,’ so Mr Keith Robinson reminded the Ministry, a menace made even more compelling because of ‘the shortage of muzzles in the country’.
Then, in June, came alarming reports from near Alconbury airfield in Huntingdonshire, now a US air base. A local dog breeder, Mrs Stanley Mulcaster of Great Stukeley, had gone to the police with suspicions about ‘illegally landed dogs’.
Sergeant Brookranks of the Huntingdonshire Constabulary had duly turned up at the airfield where the men of 412 Bombardment Squadron were stationed. In the barracks he had found a mongrel Chow and a Toy Terrier. The Chow ostensibly belonged to Staff Sergeant Charles F. Flynt. It was given to him by a woman in Newquay, Cornwall when they first arrived in Britain, he said.
The Terrier’s apparent owner was a Sergeant Russell Matherson, who would also claim he had acquired the dog in Newquay. But another airman said it had flown in with them from French West Africa.
The baffled policeman next visited Alconbury House, a nineteenth-century pile acting as the officers’ club, where he found a Lieutenant Mason with a Cocker Spaniel puppy purchased from Mrs Mulcaster, maker of the original complaint about the mystery dogs. Dogs were multiplying. The Cocker at least was undoubtedly a British dog. Lieutenant Mason could not add much.
The Sergeant and a MAFF Inspector took the matter up with the 1st Bombardment Wing Command based at Brampton Grange but on their return to Alconbury, the whole of 412 Bomb Squadron had flown, their dogs with them. Where they had gone was secret. But left behind in the base hospital they found an airman who had been injured in an accident. He told them that the Terrier was indeed his ‘ship’s mascot’ and that Sgt Russell Matherson had won it in a poker game in Cornwall.
It was an English dog – nothing remotely French West African about it. ‘The two dogs were now lodged in the Provost Marshal’s quarters and appear quite healthy,’ the police sergeant could report. In addition to the dogs, at least one cat had been landed by air from ‘abroad’ at Alconbury airbase, so Inspector Fox was informed.
And the plot deepened. The next day – 4 June – as well as dogs and a cat, it emerged that ‘a monkey and a honey bear’ had been landed from unknown points of origin, and had ‘been moved off elsewhere since’. US personnel seemed to regard pet smuggling as some sort of game. Ministry officials fumed – this must be dealt with at the highest level.
It was not that Americans could not have pets; they just had to be English ones. Second Lt Fred J. Christensen, for example, joined the 56th Fighter Group based at RAF Halesworth, Suffolk, in August 1943, flying P-47 Thunderbolt fighters. Soon to be renowned as an ‘ace’, the veteran pilot found a different kind of fame with the story of ‘Sinbad’, said to be ‘a small black kitten he had found and adopted while in Britain’. No Ministry cat catcher came after Sinbad, as far as the records show.
Contemporary photographs show a lithe black cat on a pile of parachutes, and jumping on the port wing of a P-47 Thunderbolt as Lt Christensen clambers aboard. Sinbad reportedly flew, ‘in the cockpit with him on many of his missions’.41
The lives of British pets generally were proving eventful. It might have been safer for them, like Sinbad, to keep out of the way by making combat missions over Germany. Our Dumb Friends’ League reported that left-hand drive US jeeps and trucks were causing carnage among horse-drawn traffic in London.
In the capital their volunteers had conducted mass purges of feral cats in the hospital grounds of Hackney and Mile End, finding ‘cases so dreadful it is quite impossible to print them’.
The Superintendent at the Chelsea Branch had been called to a flat one day that summer to ‘discover that the tenant was keeping tame mice, which he allowed to run loose … He explained tearfully that he was very fond of them and although there were over seventy, he knew each one by name. Unfortunately they had to be taken away.’
The League was also convinced ‘that the abominable practice of stealing cats for fur trade still continues’. That story never went away, although the ‘cats-in-pies’ rumours were wearing a bit thin. Also in the year-end report was the story of ‘Judy’, a little dog, who ‘while accompanying her sailor master, had been torpedoed twice’. She had been tended at the Blue Cross kennels and ‘now waits on shore with her mistress to greet her master on his leave’.
A black cat called ‘Ralph’ was found lying against the wall of a house. His owners had been killed nine months previously and somehow he had managed to survive. ‘He would let no-one near him, but Mrs. Francis of the League’s Norwood local branch, with enormous patience, tempted him out gradually with food,’ said the report. ‘Eventually, he gained enough confidence to come into the house and rub against her legs. He allowed himself to be stroked and from that day he did not look back.’
There were awards for humans who had shown bravery and compassion in the care of animals including, ‘a Land Girl called Doris Adams, who saved two lambs from an infuriated bull’. She was awarded the League’s silver medal. Quite right, too.
The war had turned. RAF Bomber Command was now flying deep into Germany to attack population centres by night. Animals would suffer terribly. On 24 July 1943, devastating Allied air raids destroyed three-quarters of the famous Hagenbeck Tierpark Zoo in Hamburg, killing over 700 animals.
Thus far, Berlin Zoo had been hit by a few stray bombs while a huge concrete flak-tower-cum-air-raid-shelter had risen in the nearby Tiergarten. Then on the night of 22 November, blazing ‘Christmas tree’ target markers dropped by Pathfinders began falling in the park as the main force followed in the darkness. The nearby UFA cinema was quickly set on fire, one tower of the eastern-pagoda style Elephant House tumbled down. ‘“Jenny” and “Toni”, the Indian cow elephants, were standing motionless with Inra the baby elephant sleeping between them, half buried in the straw,’ wrote Lutz Heck, director of the Zoo. Four others were trapped by the fallen tower now blocking the entrance to their cages.
The second wave of bombers unloaded their blast bombs and incendiaries. The roof of the Elephant House collapsed entirely, ‘a curtain of fire had fallen in which the elephants and “Mtoto”, the fully-grown African rhinoceros, went quickly to their doom,’ wrote Heck.
The antelopes got it, the pheasantries were smashed to pieces and ‘the sea-lions’ basin was ringed with flames’. The Pets’ Corner ‘farmhouse’ was set ablaze. In the big cats’ house, all the leopards were dead but five ‘frightened’ lions came through unscathed. The dwarf hippopotamuses had been led from their blazing enclosure but repeatedly dashed back into the flames. Only one survived – found wandering, hours later, in the Tiergarten.
Two giraffes were overcome by smoke and flying glass. Monkeys escaped, chattering and whooping into the trees. ‘Cleo’, the orangutan, climbed up a tree and disappeared, to be found dead four days later close to the Zoo’s coke heap, which had been set on fire by incendiaries. It would smoulder for a month.
The giant gorilla, ‘Pongo’, the ‘Treasure of the Gardens’, described by Heck as a ‘black haired monster with blazing little eyes’, escaped from his cage into the Head Keeper’s house to plunge his teeth into Herr Leibetreu’s leg.
There were wild stories of mass escapes; an ape and its young were seen travelling on the U-bahn, a wolf taking tea in the Eden Hotel. A diplomatic official wrote two days after the raid: ‘Fantastic rumours are circulating. There are crocodiles and giant snakes lurking in the hedgerows of the Landwehr Canal.’ There was a story that an escaped tiger made its way into the Café Josty on Potsdamer Platz, gobbled up a piece of pastry and promptly died.
The RAF returned the next night. The Aquarium was comprehensively wrecked, smashing the ‘Forest River’ and tumbling crocodiles and alligators into the sub basement, ‘wounded by bomb splinters and writhing in pain’. Liberated snakes became torpi
d as the Berlin November cold stole into the smashed tropical tableaux. Days would follow rounding up survivors and striving to somehow keep them warm. Many animals, ‘ponies, zebras, horned hogs and anthropoid apes’, were lodged with well-wishers in the suburbs and countryside around.
The Herr Director was frank about the fate of the dead. ‘Very good were the crocodiles’ tails cooked until they were very soft,’ he would write. ‘The deer, buffaloes and antelopes supplied meals for humans and animals. Later bear bacon and bear sausages became a particular delicacy for us.’
41 In September 1944, when his tour of duty ended, the Suffolk cat went with Christensen to the United States to live with his family and surprised them by producing kittens.
Chapter 26
The D-Day Dogs
Britain’s dogs had seen off the threat of state-sponsored destruction. Their numbers were up and their tails were wagging. The perils now faced by pets in this fifth year of war, 1944, were the usual ones of casual cruelty, abandonment and intermittent food supply. Feral packs of cats and dogs roamed urban bomb-sites and the fringes of military encampments, which bloomed across the country from end to end. The pickings were good.
But one pampered pet was in trouble. The Metropolitan Police intervened when a Wire Haired Fox Terrier was reported for ‘assaulting ladies in the street’. It happened to belong to General Martin Valian, commander of the Free French Air Force. A Foreign Office memo recorded a series of springtime 1944 incidents in London – when the dog ‘bit one lady on the right thigh and tore a considerable rent in the coat of another lady’. The fate thereafter of the General’s dog was not recorded.
A hidden drama was about to begin at London Zoo. Its year-long course would be lovingly reported by the Evening Standard’s Zoo Correspondent. In the early spring a tabby cat who had evidently been living wild in Regent’s Park had somehow got into the depleted ‘reptiliary’ and found an empty ‘hidey hole’ where venomous snakes once basked and gave birth to five kittens. She had another litter close to the piggery. The keepers called her ‘Sally’. But what to do with the cat and her multiplying offspring? Would they be a threat to the other creatures, the exotic birds or small mammals perhaps? Sally, as it turned out, would have her own ideas.
The so-called ‘Baby Blitz’, the Luftwaffe air attacks on southern England between January and May, did not affect pets much. What pet owners could not know (but British Intelligence did) was that the Germans were planning a renewed aerial assault on the capital using ‘flying bombs’ launched from northern France (‘V1s’) and rockets (‘V2s’) of as yet undetermined destructive power. They might contain gas or worse. Plans were being made anew for the wholesale evacuation of London.
The summer 1943 saga of the flying pets had meanwhile developed multiple new sub-plots. In November, three US Army Air Force NCOs had been dedicated to ‘special duty in detecting illegally imported animals’. The smuggling of cats and dogs had become a matter for the ‘Chief Veterinarian, ETOUSA’ (American Army, European Theater of Operations), Colonel Edward M. Curley.
Miscreant officers and their pets were being tracked down. Examples must be made. It emerged that in January 1944 a certain Captain A. M. Russell arrived by air with a dog at St Mawgan in Cornwall and had been detected by a US Army vet. Eighth Air Force HQ was notified, as was the Ministry of Agriculture, but dog and owner had since disappeared into the fog of war. Five months of hunting ended when the Captain was found – to say the dog in question had been accidentally killed a month before.
The US dog catchers could also report meanwhile that a Pekingese had been smuggled ashore from a Cunard liner troopship at Liverpool in April. More dogs arrived in the north-western port aboard the SS Mauretania. They had all disappeared.
The Agriculture Minister was asked in the Commons about ‘a dog belonging to a Flying Fortress crew, which was spared on the personal intervention of President Roosevelt’.
‘Everything we see in the Press is not necessarily correct,’ the Minister replied. The bizarre story was all over the US papers and had been picked up in London. ‘Rob Roy’, a Cocker Spaniel, had been seized on arrival after a transatlantic flight by the British authorities from B-17 Bombardier Lt Jack Roberts. He had written to his mother in Atlanta, Georgia, to tell her that his pet ‘might be executed’.
Mrs Roberts had appealed to the President. After all, Rob Roy was an all-American dog. Whatever the diplomatic trail of events, it turned out that the Cocker was now in quarantine in Croydon under the care of Captain F. J. Richmond, who promised the pet was safe so long as its board and keep were paid for. ‘Telek’, General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Scottie acquired in North Africa, was in the same pound, the British Army vet pointed out.42 One dog that slipped through undetected was ‘Recon’, a Jack Russell Terrier, who was obtained by a Sgt Nelson at Boise Air Force Base, Idaho. Having recovered from a rattlesnake bite, Recon became something of a squadron hero. According to the unit history: ‘Recon went through all of the 1942 stateside training, was smuggled aboard the Queen Mary for the trip to England, was a faithful 427th Bomber Squadron mascot at Molesworth [Cambridgeshire] and was transferred to North Africa.’ The unfortunate dog was promptly ‘killed in a Jeep accident in Casablanca’.
Faced by such shenanigans, Sir Daniel Cabot, Chief Vet of the Ministry of Agriculture, despaired of tracking down any American dogs. He suggested to Col Curley that ‘one of his officers be entrusted with the task’.43
This was getting political: flying dogs had reached the White House. A major diplomatic incident involving animals would be most unfortunate. Colonel Curley appointed Lt-Col Benjamin D. Blood of the US Army Veterinary Corps to bring some rigour to the proceedings.
Lt-Col Blood could report on 19 July that fifty-nine dogs had been illegally imported by US Army Air Force personnel, of which thirty-seven had been destroyed and nineteen placed in quarantine. In addition there were nine monkeys, two parrots and one honey bear, all of which had been reported to the authorities and disposed of in accordance with British law.
One dog was missing. Another had died on landing and one was missing in action, having been ‘taken on a bombing mission’.
Some English pets were meanwhile being flown into action officially, at least in training. ‘Brian’, for example, Miss Bettie Fetch’s Alsatian-Collie cross from Loughborough, had passed out of Northaw in early 1944 as a patrol dog and been chosen to go to the 13th Parachute Battalion for special training at Larkhill Camp in Wiltshire.
He would be a member of the unit’s scout and sniper platoon. In charge was Lance Cpl Kenneth Bailey, formerly of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps. There were three more dogs: ‘Bing’, lent by the Cory family of Jackson Avenue, Rochester, and another dog, name unknown. War Dog ‘Glen’, origin unknown, was assigned to A. Coy, 9th Parachute Battalion.
The dogs’ jump training began in early April. Lance Cpl Bailey recalled: ‘I carried with me the dogs’ feed consisting of a two-pound piece of meat, and the dog was readily aware of this.’
Of Glen it was said, ‘he loved to jump’, equipped with a parachute harness and a little red light on his back, and was trained to stand still as soon as he hit the ground. ‘Everybody loved him, he was the pet of the battalion, but no one was allowed to pet or feed him, say good dog or anything like that.’
Brian jumped readily on the green light and ‘wagged his tail vigorously’ during the descent. According to his trainer: ‘The dog touched down completely relaxed, making no attempt to anticipate or resist the landing, rolled over once, scrambled to his feet and stood looking round.’ Each dog made four descents, after which they resumed a normal existence. Then came D-Day.
At fifty minutes after midnight on 6 June, the dogs took off from airfields in Oxfordshire. Brian and Bing, and a third dog, descended by parachute around the village of Ranville; Brian got hung up in a tree and was shot at. He was rescued by his handler and reported to his post on the edge of the Bois de Bavent – ‘He subsequently endured heavy m
ortar and shellfire, during which he was slightly wounded, but, with the provision of his own slit trench, survived.’ Bing was wounded; the third dog disappeared.
On the approach to the Merville jump, Glen was terrified by the ground-fire and had to be dragged out from under the seat and physically thrown out of the transport aircraft door. The drop was way off target. Glen and his handler, nineteen-year-old Pte Emil Corteil, managed to rendezvous with their brigade commander, Brigadier James Hill, at the village of Varaville in the early hours of 6 June.
But on the trek towards the objective, Pte Corteil and Glen were killed, along with many others, by a disastrously mislaid stick of RAF bombs. They were buried together on the insistence of Major Parry, Corteil’s company commander, who had led the assault force against the Merville Battery the night before. Parry believed that since they were so devoted to each other in life, it was proper that they should share the same grave.44 Glen was once someone’s pet. Like his young master, he would not be returning to a loving family.
Two dogs that went to France were ‘Scruffy’ and ‘Knocker’, who crossed the Channel with an RASC service unit not long after D-Day. They seem to have been smuggled. One of their number recorded, ‘I got over there a few days later and there was Scruffy, hanging round the kitchen as usual.’ But where was Knocker? ‘I was told he had been killed by enemy fire two days after getting to France. I found Scruffy scrabbling by Knocker’s grave,’ he wrote. ‘Was he burying a bone? I don’t know. I left him there.’
D-Day had opened a second front in the war on smuggled pets. Allied forces were ashore in strength in Normandy. Prisoners were being shipped back across the Channel. Would seaborne pets be coming with them? On 2 July the US guards of the extemporized Prisoner of War camp at Portland, Dorset, handed over to baffled local police a ‘black and tan Alsatian bitch’.
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