‘Peter’ was a rumbustious four-year-old Collie-cross, who had been offered to the MAP for training as a guard dog by his Birmingham owner, Mrs Audrey Stable, in 1943. He was a house pet who joined up (and would go back to being a pet again) but not before he enjoyed some extraordinary adventures in London.
In spring 1945 he was the charge of the ‘Rescue Man’ Archie Knight based at the Chelsea depot (Peter was known as ‘Rescue Dog No. 2664/9288 Peter’). The Imperial War Museum archives have the record sheet of Peter’s big day, 27 March, when early in the morning one of the last rockets to be fired from Holland fell on a block of flats in Vallance Road, Stepney, inflicting severe casualties – 134 dead, 49 seriously injured. It reads:
Report of the working dogs, Peter and Rascal [who was there for training]. This was a very big incident and the indications given were many and various. During this long period of duty Peter worked hard and well and never once refused to do all I asked of him. At the end of this day Peter was very tired.
Dog and handler were recalled to the scene the next morning. ‘Peter worked very hard for two hours but was obviously affected by his exertions,’ wrote Rescue Man Knight on 29 March. A second dog, ‘Tailor’, was not very interested – ‘This was probably due to the unavoidable lack of proper food for the previous two days. Peter was completely played out and took 24 hours to recover his spirits. He is only a small dog and I consider his efforts very praiseworthy.’ Mrs Maria Dickin was struck by the fact that at the rear of the smashed flats was the original oil-lamp-lit Stepney cellar where the PDSA began its work in November 1917.
On the evening of the same day the last V2 rocket fell near Orpington, Kent. The capital’s pets’ long ordeal was over.
It was getting snappy in the Berlin bunker. Hitler was allowing Blondi to sleep in his subterranean bedroom, something resented by his mistress, Eva Braun, who preferred her two Scottish Terriers, ‘Negus’ and ‘Stasi’, who were also cooped up underground. Hitler thought they were ‘ridiculous’ and looked ‘like cleaning brushes’. He had brought them to cheer her up after a suicide attempt.
Fräulein Braun had been known to kick Blondi under the dining table. On or around 4 April, Blondi had a litter of five puppies having mated (with some difficulty) with the Alsatian, ‘Harras’, belonging to the architect Gerdy Troost. Hitler named the first of the male puppies ‘Wulf’.
On 13 April President Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia. His Scottie, Fala, attended the funeral in Washington DC two days afterwards but, it was reported, ‘seemed lost without his master’.
Five days later Berlin was bombarded by Soviet artillery for the first time. It was 20 April, Hitler’s birthday. The end was near but new pets at home kept spirits high. As it would be reported later, ‘Hitler was very attached to Blondi’s puppies and personally fed them several times a day. The dog and the little ones had the run of the bathroom of the bunker and Hitler spent much time with them. He often took one of the puppies and then sat on the bench in the waiting room silently holding it without paying any attention to his surroundings.’
‘Even Hitler set his affections on a dog which he treated very differently from the unfortunate prisoners in the concentration camps,’ noted Tail-Wagger Magazine. How true!
In the shattered city some of the worst devastation was around the Zoo. The end was utterly tragic. One solitary hippo swam round and round a blood-red pool. The famous Pongo lay dead on the cement floor of his cage. ‘Siam’, the only elephant to survive the destruction of November 1943, had been driven wild by explosions and was trumpeting in terror. Meanwhile, ‘Frightened apes clambered among the ruins and a few exotic birds flew from tree to tree trying to escape the acrid clouds of black smoke’.
Most of Berlin’s working animals, chickens and ‘balcony pigs’ (rabbits) had long since been eaten. The days were numbered for those that had not been. A Berlin woman in an anonymous memoir recorded the last days:
Someone came into the cellar with the glad tidings that a horse had collapsed outside. In no time the whole cellar tribe was in the street, which was still under [Russian] shellfire. The animal was still twitching when the first bread knife went into it.
On the afternoon of 29 April, Adolf Hitler sought to test the cyanide capsule he had been provided with by the SS. He reportedly ordered his physician, Dr Werner Haase, to give one to Blondi, aided by the Führer dog handler, Feldwebel Fritz Tornow. The dog munched it eagerly, whimpered, rolled over and died.
After midnight Hitler married Eva Braun in the Führerbunker. The next day the newlyweds committed suicide. The dog handler rounded up Blondi’s puppies, scampering hopefully as they sniffed fresh air, and shot them in the garden of the Reich Chancellery. He also killed Eva Braun’s Scotties (another source has one of them surviving in Munich), the dogs of the Führer’s secretary, Frau Gerda Christian, and his own Dachshund.
The charred remains of Hitler, Eva Braun and two dogs (thought to be Blondi and little Wulf) were discovered three days later in a shell crater in the devastated Reichs-chancellory garden. Blondi’s body was photographed by the Russians like road kill.
It was five-and-a-half years since fear of what her master had in store for them had caused Londoners to destroy almost a million of their pets. Blondi had not even been born. Millions more of Europe’s innocent animals had perished in the meantime.
47 The dogs were held at ‘Animal Farm’, the Chemical Defence Experimental Station, Porton Down, Wilts, which in the course of the war consumed 15–20,000 dogs, cats, monkeys, goats, guinea pigs, etc. They too had no choice.
48 In training, a scrap of meat was concealed under the mine. Gradually the meat lure was diminished, and the dog rewarded for pointing out the now meatless mine by being given a scrap from its handler.
49 ‘Crumstone Storm’ had already found pre-war fame starring in the film Owd Bob as ‘Black Wull’, the evil sheepdog champ the newcomer Collie hero has to beat (see also p.37).
Epilogue
Dogs have dug into wrecked homes looking for their owners.
Cats have mewed for days outside piles of rubble, telling rescuers their owners are buried there.
Animals have quietened frightened children.
Yet when the history of the war is written, these things will not be recorded.
The Dogs Bulletin, autumn 1944
Pets Come Home
The war in Europe was over. The London Zoo’s Occurrences Book was inscribed: ‘Tuesday May 8th 1945, VE Day’. Arrivals that day were a Nyasaland lovebird and a blossom-headed parakeet. Departures included a ‘West Indian Agouti, escaped from cage (found dead)’.
Viktor Klemperer had escaped deportation and death in the Dresden firestorm. In May 1945 he was in American-occupied Munich. Surveying the devastation, he mourned the death of his cat three years before:
Today is the anniversary of Muschel’s death, every hair of his thick little fur has been paid for by a German life.
The MAP rescue dogs Storm plus Peter and his handler were on parade at the Civil Defence stand-down ceremonies in Hyde Park on 10 June. After inspection by the King, the contingents marched past. It was reported:
They were led by two rescue dogs walking beside their trainers. At the word of command the animals barked as they passed the royal dais. One, an Alsatian bitch, is credited with having located 21 living people buried in air raid incidents, and wears a medal, the other, a brown and white collie dog, saved five persons in the same way.
Clever dogs! Peter, when presented to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, became especially excited at Her Majesty’s fox-fur stole.
In Colchester, Essex, a Mrs Winifred Airlie, a pet shop owner, was prosecuted for breaking the Waste of Food Order, seemingly the last case of its kind. She had been reported for feeding bread to non-humans – a number of tame mice, the keeping of which the prosecuting counsel found ‘impossible to understand’. Feeding mice was ‘morally offensive’ Mr Proudfoot sternly pronounced. Mrs Airlie claimed ‘well-wis
hers posted bread through her letterbox so that she might feed her menagerie.’ She was found guilty.
The end of war in the Far East and mass demobilization meant many happy reunions for returning servicemen with pets they had left behind. But Whitehall officialdom quailed at the prospect of a global zoo of adopted overseas pets also heading for British shores.
From far-off Burma came the report: ‘Never has there been such a diversity of livestock as is to be found to-day in the Fourteenth Army.’ Along with bears, sheep, snakes parakeets, monkeys and Siamese cats, ‘Indian Army officers have brought Dachshunds, Bull Terriers, and Spaniels with them. Lieutenant-General Sun Li-jen, commanding the Chinese First Army, has an Alsatian called Mogaung and no fewer than six puppies.
‘Small monkeys are to be seen riding with the drivers of trucks. Nearly every unit has a little poultry farm of its own.’ One such ‘farm’, full of ducks and turkeys, had been created in the back of a 15 cwt truck, whose driver was ‘anxious to take them back with him to Derbyshire when his term of service is up’.
But there was a way for servicemen to get pets home. A ‘Special Services Scheme’ for the quarantine of pets began to be discussed between the War Office, Admiralty and Air Ministry, in autumn 1944, by which ‘a limited number of dogs’ might be imported under special licence from the Army veterinary authorities. Quarantine facilities were to be created at a former airfield at Chilbolton Down, near Andover, with subsidized fees depending on rank (£20 for senior officers, £5 for other ranks) – ‘Commanding officers must be satisfied that the dog in question is a genuine pet.’ Royal Army Veterinary Corps clearing stations for service pets were established at Antwerp and Milan. According to the history of the Corps: ‘The disposal of surplus horses and mules involved much work,50 but nothing gave more trouble than the repatriation of dogs, both the pets of returning soldiers and the hundreds of dogs loaned by the public for war service.’ Not everyone was happy: dog columnist Huldine Violet Beamish expressed her ‘horror’ in Country Life that servicemen should be allowed to bring ‘the various canine oddments collected in Europe and the Near East back to this country’, to add to the already over-large mongrel population.
The Government scheme was terribly benign really, considering. But it was dogs only. Cats (‘and all other feline animals’), returning pet lovers would have to pay for themselves. Swine, ungulates and anything more exotic were to stay out altogether.
The Royal Navy was presumably going to have to ship them all home. A sympathetic admiral noted, ‘I consider we should not forbid the use of HM ships, assuming that the dogs it is desired to land in this country may have been pets on board for some months.’ They would however be limited to four per ship, confined to kennels on the upper deck, and, ‘be the responsibility of the ship’s butcher’. An excellent arrangement!
In April, the RSPCA, not to be upstaged by the PDSA with their Dickin Medal, asked Brigadier George Kelly, the Army’s chief vet, to supply details of the war careers of pets loaned by the public for the duration especially deserving of commendation so that they could be returned to their owners with ‘a collar and medallion’. The War Office said it had no such information but would endeavour to find out. It would be a little while in coming.
And so the commendations came in. Brian from Loughborough and Bing from Rochester, the two Alsatians that had parachuted into Ranville, Normandy on D-Day, were recommended ‘For Valour’. ‘Ricky’, a Welsh Collie, had been wounded in the head while mine hunting by the Nederweert Canal in Holland but had carried on working.
‘Scamp’ of Rock Ferry, Cheshire found twenty-five Schu mines in the same operation. ‘Raf’, an Alsatian from Erdington, Birmingham, had been ‘blown up during the Ardennes push’. He was now recovered and working with a Corps of Military Police (CMP) Company. Brave dogs all!
Other dogs had been engaged guarding HM Government stores. There was ‘Blackie’, an Alsatian from Maryhill, Glasgow, who had in July 1944 beaten off eight thieves attempting to burgle a clothing store. Blackie had rendered invaluable assistance to his handler in pinioning the chief malefactor and ‘taking random bites at the other Italian civilians’.
‘Piggy’, a Boxer employed by the military police in Cairo, had attacked four ‘native thieves’ and lost an eye in the fray but had carried on devotedly. She had now recovered and returned to duty.
‘Snook’, a Doberman Pinscher, had been blown up by a land mine in the Egyptian desert in pursuit of more native thieves but was now back on duty.
But how would these combat veterans take to civilian life? Would they remember their families, would their families remember them? The War Dog Training School had transported itself from Potters Bar, north London, to the Continent in late 1944 and was now set up in a former German Army tank range at Sennelager with a full complement of ATS kennel maids. Numbers of ex-Wehrmacht Schäferhunde swelled the ranks, along with sundry Belgian Bouviers de Flandres and Malinois liberated along the way. There were several marriages celebrated at the garrison church, with war dogs providing the guard of honour. It was noted: ‘Now that hostilities have ceased the War Office has no authority to hold these dogs. They have no further training but are handled and exercised to make them more amenable as pets on return to their owners.’
But would they be? ‘Brutus’, a demobilised Alsatian from Syston, Leicestershire, met his master at the railway station after three years of war service, but ‘failed to recognise him’, according to The Dogs Bulletin. But when he reached home ‘he recognised the voice of his mistress at once and was in transports of joy. With the two children aged five and two, he at once became a firm friend and playmate.’
Michael, the Burnell family’s Golden Retriever, had been out of their lives for three years as a mine dog. Other than his handler, troops had been under strict orders not to make him a pet. A letter arrived asking if they would like him back. One day he appeared at the door with his handler. As Elizabeth Burnell told the story:
Michael, on hearing my mother’s voice, broke free from his lead, shot through the gate and flew into the house and up the stairs to where my mother was standing. He jumped up, put his paws on her shoulders and licked her face as she started to cry with joy. He then came and sniffed all round us.
Of the twelve mine dogs who had gone to France, only eight came back. Michael was one of them.
The tales of heroic animals tumbled out, pounced on by an eager press. Jet, Beauty (the PDSA dog) and Irma all received the Dickin Medal on 12 January 1945, while Thorn was presented with his at the Civil Defence football match at Wembley on 2 March.
The civilian animal memorial that Maria Dickin had proposed was quietly forgotten. Who wanted to remember all that upsetting stuff? The PDSA’s north London organiser, former concert singer Dorothea St Hill Bourne, published a book about hero war animals in 1947 and it was a huge hit. The same year, Jet and Judy, Dickin medalists, made fundraising appearances with the film actresses Jane Walsh and Norah Swinburne, ‘at various London West End stores and restaurants’. Edward Bridges Webb’s populist agenda triumphed in the glow of victory. And why not? At least animals got a mention.
Little Rip, the Poplar star of 1940, got a medal, along with Rex and Peter, the MAP Alsatians of the V2 episode. War dog ‘Rob’, another parachuting dog, was awarded for bravery under fire and ‘Sheila’, a Border Collie who rescued four US bomber crewmen from a crash in a snowstorm in December 1944 got the Dickin Medal.
Brian the parachuting dog had gone into action again in March 1945 during the Rhine crossing. Described by an RAVC major as an ‘obedient dog who responded to the words of command at once’, he remained on military duty until April 1946. Brian returned to Britain, where he spent his time at the Chilbolton quarantine kennels – where it was noted he had a broken tooth and scarred leg. He went home in October 1946 and seemed to have adjusted readily enough to a less eventful life. On 26 April 1947, he was awarded the Dickin Medal in a special ceremony held in London.
Rifleman Kha
n, the hero of Walcheren, was also nominated by the battalion commander for the Dickin Medal, presented on 27 March 1945 at a full battalion parade. The citation read: ‘For rescuing Corporal Muldoon from drowning under heavy shellfire during the assault at Walcheren, November 1944, while serving with the 6th Cameronians.’
Corporal Muldoon wrote to the War Office asking to be allowed to keep Khan after the war ended. The Railton family also asked for their dog to be returned. The Alsatian was now that rare thing: a tug-of-love war pet.
Corporal Muldoon returned to civilian life in Scotland. Khan was in quarantine not far from his original home. Barry Railton, now twelve, visited Khan three times a week. At the end of six months, veteran Khan was returned to leafy Tolworth.
In August 1947, the plucky Alsatian was invited to participate in a War Dog Parade at Wembley Stadium. Harry Railton wrote to Muldoon via the War Office, asking him to lead Khan in the parade. The Scot was overwhelmed at the thought of seeing Khan again – ‘Two hundred of the most intelligent, skilful dogs in Britain, including sixteen Dickin medallists, were to appear.’ In a moving account of the big day:
Khan was one of a huge crowd of dogs milling around. Suddenly he stopped, lifted his head, his ears at the alert. He sniffed the air. His legs tensed. He jerked the leash from Mr. Railton’s hand and bolted, a streak of fur, across the parade ground, barking loudly.
Ten thousand people in the viewing stand saw the joyful reunion of man and dog. Applause thundered as Muldoon and Khan took their places in the parade line. Afterwards Harry Railton searched out Muldoon in the crowd. He watched as Muldoon, tears bathing his cheeks, buried his head in the dog’s fur. Sobbing, he held out the leash. Mr. Railton shook his head. ‘Barry and I talked it over during the parade,’ he said. ‘Tell him, Barry.’ ‘We think Khan belongs with you,’ said Barry. ‘He is yours. Take him home.’
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