War Dogs

by Rebecca Frankel

  But no commanding officer was better known for bringing his dogs on the battlefield than General George Armstrong Custer. From bird dogs to hound dogs, Custer traveled with an ever-changing and always growing legion of canines. And these dogs followed Custer wherever he went, including the battlefield (and there are many photographs of them together).25 He often wrote of them in his letters home to his wife, Libby. In one such report in June 1876 he wrote of Tuck, a favorite dog. “‘Tuck’ regularly comes when I am writing, and lays her head on the desk, rooting up my hand with her long nose until I consent to stop and notice her. She and Swift, Lady and Kaiser sleep in my tent.” During the Battle of Little Bighorn, Custer’s dogs who were not properly detained followed him into the worst of the fight; like their master, they did not emerge from The Last Stand.

  Lieutenant George A. Custer poses in Virginia during the Civil War with a dog. Custer was an avid dog lover and brought his dogs to stay with him on the front.

  Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

  Elsewhere during this time, canines of a variety of breeds were most often employed as sentry dogs to guard provisions, weaponry, and prisoners; they posed as a dual protection, both alarm raiser and deterrent. But it was in the trenches of World War I—the long stretches of open, uncovered ground in between troop encampments, marred by tangles of barbed wire and the enormous difficulties they posed—where the role of dogs evolved to become a more highly cultivated and respectable military asset.

  Rescue missions were complicated and risky, communication between trenches often impossible. Even the bravest, most daring soldiers had little chance of recovering wounded men whose whereabouts were so uncertain. In the aftermath of these battles, armies would dispatch Red Cross dogs, known as rescue dogs, sanitary dogs, or mercy dogs. Four legs in this case were infinitely more valuable than two. These dogs were trained to move soundlessly, sniffing out the wounded and bypassing the dead. Despite the overwhelming odds, thousands of injured men were found and rescued in the dead of night. The larger dogs were trained to quite literally pull or drag wounded men, and they were preferred over horses because they posed a considerably smaller target. They were also swift deliverers of messages, reportedly carrying important information five times faster than the average soldier on foot.26

  All tallied—including messenger dogs, mercy dogs, Red and Blue Cross dogs—upward of 75,000 dogs were on the ground in official war-related roles during World War I.27 In September 1916, less than a year before the United States Senate would vote 82–6 in favor of declaring war on Germany, Vanity Fair ran an article titled “Dogs of Battle, Dogs of Mercy.” The reporter describes the depths of the capabilities he saw among these animals:

  His task then is to lead the stretcher bearers to the spot where his find is lying. In this work the keen nose of the dog has been the means of saving many lives, for the wounded men not infrequently crawl into the thicket or other hiding place to get out of the way of shells or snipers, with the result that, hidden from sight, they are overlooked. Usually the ambulance dog carries at his collar or in small saddle pouches, a first-aid kit, by means of which the wounded man can succor himself if conscious, stimulants, and a pocket in the collar to receive any message that the soldier is able to write. Dogs in the trenches are sometimes provided with gas masks.28

  But the messenger and rescue roles that dogs executed with such success during World War I would not be applicable to the front lines of World War II. It was a new war with different terrain, different tactics, and different weaponry. This would be, however, the war when the United States would, finally, officially get its war dogs.

  The origin of the modern-day US war dog program resulted not from an order given within the military but rather from the efforts of a private citizen, a woman named Arlene Erlanger. As the story goes, within hours of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Erlanger picked up her phone and made a fateful call.29 On the receiving end of the line was Roland Kilburn, a noted reporter who at the time was working for the New York Sun and authored a column on dogs. Erlanger, a wealthy New York socialite and a longtime canine enthusiast and professional breeder, had long been aware of the United States’ reluctance to integrate dogs into its military efforts. With war once again calling on the nation’s doorstep, she wasn’t about to let the opportunity pass by to change the canine status quo. “The dog game must play its part in this thing,” she told Kilburn. The call that Kilburn later described as coming to his desk before “the echoes of the bomb blasts had hardly stopped reverberating through the Hawaiian hills”30 started a movement that would change the war.

  Soon after, Erlanger started Dogs for Defense. And after much haranguing, celebrity involvement, and negotiation, the War Department consented to the idea of dogs. The only question was, where would they get the dogs? At that time the US military had but a few huskies stationed in Alaska. If Dogs for Defense could provide the dogs, the US military would send them to war. And so the DFD appealed to the American public, asking them to give their dogs to a higher cause. The public responded with tremendous support, lending their dogs to the war effort, sending them off to the fight much the way they did their young men.

  Not all the dogs who were offered for enlistment were taken—likely they were not the right size, or they did not possess the proper temperament. Or, in the case of one disabled woman who wrote offering her dog, a dependable companion who carried her groceries for her in a basket, the authorities sent her kind thanks for her gesture of patriotism but ultimately—and politely—refused.

  Some people who put up their dogs for service later regretted and recanted. It wasn’t always such an easy sacrifice as one letter reveals:

  In answer to your recent letter I wish to say that the Army may not have my dog. Her license number is 7220 and you can cross her off your list.

  The Army has my husband, two brothers-in-law and my father-in-law, the Navy has one of my brothers and the Government two more. I think that is enough.

  My dog is the only protection left me. She is bodyguard and playmate for my two daughters and guards our house completely and faithfully each night. She sleeps in the children’s room and I can sleep in peace, knowing that no person can harm them. After all, we owe the coming generations as much protection as we can give them.31

  Still, the Army managed to pull together a robust legion, and in March 1942 it authorized the training of 200 sentry dogs. So successful were these dogs that by December of that same year, the quartermaster general came to the DFD with some news: they wanted more dogs, in fact, many more dogs for the Army, the Marines, and the Coast Guard—a whopping 125,000 of them.32 In those first two years, the DFD would provide the US military forces with over 20,000 dogs of multiple breeds and sizes, all of them given by their owners in the service of a worthy cause. The cost of each dog was estimated at fewer than seven dollars.33

  The military took its time figuring out which dogs were the best for service—which temperament, which skills, and which breeds fit the war dog bill. During World War II they finally settled on five breeds: German shepherds, Belgian sheep dogs, Doberman pinschers, farm collies, and giant schnauzers.34 They would try to implement examples of past achievement, as well as experiment with a number of roles for the dogs—including mine dogs and even suicide dogs (a program that was modeled off the Russian tank dogs and was, thankfully, very short-lived and never fully executed).

  Ultimately, the most effective dogs were the scout dogs. Their impact was nearly instantaneous. These dogs were reported to be able to detect Japanese soldiers at a distance of 1,000 yards “depending on terrain and wind condition” and were equally effective on “amphibious landings detecting the enemy on the beach and in the undergrowth.”35

  While in Sicily, a dog called Chips, who was part of one of the first K-9 detachments to go across the Atlantic to war, made headlines after overtaking an enemy den of Italian ma
chine gunners, even surviving a shot to the face in the process. The three-year-old dog was cited by the quartermaster general for “courageous action in single-handedly eliminating a dangerous machine-gunnest [sic] and causing the surrender of the crew.” The report noted that, incidentally, Chips was also “anxious to bite Hitler.”36

  Chips had been donated by the Wren family, who hailed from the pleasanter end of a nice, manicured neighborhood in Pleasantville, New York. In his suburban life Chips had earned himself something of a reputation. The large collie-shepherd-husky mix was notorious for chasing the postman and biting the garbage men. The family argued that it was his love for their eight-year-old daughter Gail that inspired his protective streak. He even followed Gail to school and lay by her desk during class, her teachers apparently either ardent dog lovers or, more likely, too intimidated to send the dog away.37 But the temperament that made him an unruly housedog would, the Wrens supposed, make him an exceptional candidate for a war dog.

  Chips would become the most famous war dog of World War II—he was awarded the Silver Star and the Purple Heart and met President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill. When he met General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Chips bit him on the hand. After Chips returned home to the Wren family, they were immensely proud of their dog, but they saw a change in their pet—Chips was not the same. The rambunctious dog who’d once given chase to the neighbors shrank from the limelight of his newfound fame. As Mr. Wren would tell the New York Times, the dog suffered from battle fatigue: “He doesn’t seem to wag his tail as much as before going to war.”38

  When it came time for the remaining war dogs to reintegrate back into civilian life in 1945, so great was the admiration for the dogs that the Dogs for Defense headquarters was inundated with adoption applications, receiving over a total of 15,000—a steady stream of requests that at its height reached 500 per day and stretched well into 1947.39 But soon after the war ended, the dog program that had been started and built to great heights was no more. And while all would be mostly quiet on the war dog front until 1965, when the United States sent combat troops to Vietnam, those relevant lessons used to build the formidable World War II canine force were shelved and would need to be relearned.

  Booby traps, land mines, trip wires, and the enemy’s intricate tunnel system put American soldiers and Marines who made early entry into the Vietnam War at a tremendous disadvantage. During World War II mines and booby traps accounted for only 2 percent of casualties, but in Vietnam that number rose to 11 percent.40

  From the beginning of their use in Vietnam, these canine teams gave patrols negotiating the froth and fray of the jungle an advantage against the guerilla tactics used by Vietcong. With a dog leading a patrol, such tactics lost their element of surprise. What human eyes couldn’t detect was far more “visible” to the canine ears and nose. Within a year of scout dogs’ arrival in Vietnam, they are reported to have saved over 2,000 lives.41 After the dogs came to Vietnam, requests to have dogs accompany units on missions were so abundant that, sometimes, they were rejected only because there weren’t enough dogs.42

  Jesse Mendez, who headed up the scout dog program at Fort Benning in Georgia during the Vietnam War, described these dogs as “the only weapon system [the military] ever devised to save lives.”43

  If a soldier was injured on the battlefield during the Revolutionary War, say by the sharp end of musket’s bayonet, his chance of dying was roughly 42 percent. During the Civil War—which saw the arrival of the Ambulance Corps and the swifter delivery of the wounded to surgery—the likelihood of dying from a combat-related injury dropped to 33 percent. The chance of survival didn’t increase all that much over the next hundred years. During World War II, the mortality rate was 30 percent, despite the availability of antibiotics and blood transfusions. During Vietnam, even with helicopters to evacuate wounded men from the field, the death rate only dropped to 24 percent. However, the chance that a serviceman or woman would return home from Operation Iraqi Freedom or Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan after being wounded is 90 percent or higher, the highest wartime survival rate in the history of American-engaged conflicts.44

  While US wartime fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan are at an all-time low—the result of the superior medical advances and the immediacy with which they are administered after injury—the number of recorded casualties in a combat arena has steadily increased since 2003, as has the number of amputees.45 Even though the number of battle injuries reached an all-time high during the troop surge of 2007, the number rose again the following year in Afghanistan. By 2011, the Department of Defense said the number of troops who had lost limbs during wartime was, in that year, the highest they’d seen in the conflicts.46

  The role of military working dogs in these wars has almost exclusively been devoted to combating IEDs—the single biggest threat to US troops on the ground. IEDs are the most pervasive and pernicious weapon employed by insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, a weapon that has only became more widespread and complex as the wars in both of these countries has continued. IEDs have claimed both limbs and lives, and in large numbers. But quantifying these numbers—calculating the human cost—is no simple task. Getting the “correct figure,” as Andrew W. Lehren wrote in the New York Times, “depends on how you define the boundaries of the war.”47 Operation Enduring Freedom, for instance, isn’t limited to military efforts in Afghanistan alone; the United States’ efforts to stamp out terrorism stretches across the globe and includes a number of different countries. The Department of Defense keeps track of US military casualties and as of April 2014 the counts are as follows: During Operation Iraqi Freedom there were 4,410 total deaths and 31,942 wounded in action. During Operation Enduring Freedom (in Afghanistan only) there were 2,178 total deaths and 19,523 wounded in action.48 How many of these deaths and injuries were the result of IED attacks is even more difficult to parse out. But just as they were in Iraq, IEDs were a “leading cause of death and injury” in Afghanistan.49

  Because IEDs are typically crudely made, the kinds of explosives used and formed are something of a mixed bag. How much damage they do depends on a variety of elements—where they are placed, how deep into the ground they’re buried, how many pounds of explosives are used, if it’s freshly made or has been sitting for days, weeks even. The list of mitigating factors is long. But in general, it’s believed that in order for someone to altogether escape the blast of an IED alive they must be at a distance of at least 50 yards. To avoid injury from the resulting shrapnel spray, the safe distance is estimated to be about half a mile.50

  On May 25, 2005, the US military launched a new tactical campaign to reduce the number of deaths and injuries caused by IEDs. Called “5-and-25,” it was adapted from the model British forces were already using with success in Northern Ireland. The idea was that when a convoy or patrol stops and dismounts from their vehicles, the first thing a unit does is clear a distance of 5 meters around the vehicle, spanning out until a 25-meter perimeter is cleared. And it should begin with a soldier’s first step, for “in addition to bombs striking moving targets, patrols have been hit after being stationary for as little as four minutes.” In the three weeks before the Army officially pushed out the 5-and-25 program, no fewer than 52 US service members were killed in Iraq, many of them by IEDs.51

  As the rate of IEDs continued to increase, so did the Pentagon’s efforts to counter them.52 In 2006, the Department of Defense created the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO): its sole purpose (and its many billions of dollars in funding) was to combat the IED.53 Over the next few years, JIEDDO would spend upward of $19 billion pursuing numerous technological innovations—from handler sensors to aerial sensors to enhanced optics.54

  In 2010 JIEDDO’s director, Lieutenant General Michael Oates, gave a report on the organization’s progress. After all the money spent, and all the tools developed during those years, Oates said the b
est detection ability US forces had against the threat of IEDs was a handler and his detection dog.55

  Nearly two years later, on a sunny September day in 2012, the man who succeeded Oates as head of JIEDDO, Lieutenant General Michael D. Barbero, addressed the US House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations’ Subcommittee of Defense in Washington, DC. In his calm, leaden voice, Barbero reported that the threat would not only persist, but become even more deadly in the future.56 US forces were going to continue to operate in an IED environment; that was, Barbero testified, a reality of twenty-first-century warfare, and the country must prepare accordingly. Not only had it surpassed artillery as being the greatest killer on the modern battlefield, but “the IED and the networks that employ these asymmetric weapons,” Barbero said, “are here to stay—operationally and here at home.”57

  So while the United States may have taken its forces from Iraq and is already drawing down its troops in Afghanistan, the rate of IEDs is expected only to climb in the coming months and years—and not just in these battleground countries. Modern warfare’s deadliest weapon is not only here to stay, but there’s reason enough to think that the United States is not and will not be immune. In the past 20 years the United States has endured three massively destructive incidents where explosives were used to incite terror and cause mass casualties—in Waco in 1993, the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.

  In truth, the battleground of bombs on American soil began many years before. And when it did, there were actually dogs trained to find them, protecting our homeland, even if few people knew about them.

  At 11:30 on the morning of Tuesday, March 7, 1972, an anonymous caller phoned in to the Third Avenue headquarters of Trans World Airlines. The switchboard patched the call through to the secretary of a company executive. The voice on the line directed them to a locker, one of the 25-cent rentals in Kennedy International Airport’s TWA terminal. The New York officials who searched the locker found two large Army duffel bags and a note demanding ransom in the amount of $2 million. If it was not paid, the note said, bombs planted on four of the airline’s flights would detonate at six-hour intervals. The executive notified TWA security, and so began a 24-hour race against the clock that would set panic to skies and airports all over the world. The airline had thousands of passengers scheduled to fly their nearly 240 planes, and the task of finding the bombs in time seemed nearly impossible.