“Let slip the dogs of war”

America’s war dogs

Dogs have been mankind’s best friend since the dawn of human civilization. They protect us, hunt with us, work for us, make us happy just with their presence… and fight alongside us in war. Dogs have been used in war a number of roles since ancient times, but the United States only adopted the formal training of war dogs with the establishment of the K-9 Corps during World War II.
 
War dogs have already been in use in ancient times, mostly as sentries and patrols, but also as direct combatants that could be loosed on the enemy. Attila the Hun used large war dogs in his campaigns in the 5th century, and Frederick the Great of Prussia used dogs as messengers in the Seven Years’ War.

The United States first used dogs for military purposes during the Seminole Wars of the first half of the 19th century. Hunting dogs were used in the Civil War for protection and to send messages and guard prisoners, but this was done on an ad hoc basis rather than as a regulated, formal program.
 
America did not use dogs during World War I, except as mascots and for propaganda purposes, but several other nations did, giving American soldiers an idea of their utility. Messenger dogs were common, as were so-called mercy dogs. Mercy dogs carried water, liquor and first aid supplies, and were trained to quietly go into dead man’s land (Inside the World War I Trenches) to find wounded soldiers. If the wounded man couldn’t patch himself up, the dog would take a piece of his uniform back to the medics as a sign of a man in distress, and would lead them to him. If the soldier was beyond help, the dog would lie down next to him to keep him company in his final hour.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor caught the U.S. unprepared to fight in many ways, including the absence of war dogs. The singular exception was a contingent of sled dogs, which had been a part of the military since the early 20th century. These dogs could be dropped by parachute to rescue pilots downed in Northwestern Canada. This remained a minor and very specialized activity throughout the war, but still saved hundreds of lives. Some sled dogs served as part of the American-Greenlandic cooperation to seek out and shut down secret German weather forecast stations in Greenland. (The Weather War)

The mass acquisition and training of dogs for the war was first undertaken by a civilian organization, Dogs for Defense. Dogs for Defense exhorted the population to donate their dogs to the war effort, then trained them as sentry dogs to guard military and industrial facilities, as well as sections of the coastline where Axis spies or saboteurs might make landfall. The effort was formally embraced by the U.S. military on March 13, 1942, with the establishment of the K-9 Corps, the name being a portmanteau of “canine.” Dogs for Defense originally accepted some 30 dog breeds, but this one greatly cut down by the Corps: German and Belgian Shepherds, Dobermans, Collies and Giant Schnauzers for general use, Malamutes, Eskimo Dogs and Huskies for sled dogs, and Newfoundlands and St. Bernards for pack dogs. Most branches of the military preferred purebred male dogs, but were willing to accept females and crossbreeds. The Coast Guard was notable exception, as they had a preference for females.

Dogs were trained alongside their handlers from the get-go, with training taking between 8 and 12 weeks, or longer or certain special jobs. A particular handler and a particular dog sometimes proved unable to work well together, and were paired with other candidates. A number of roles were established for the dogs and their handlers beyond the already mentioned sled dogs:
 
Sentry dogs were the first role to be adopted. A single well-trained handler-dog pair was considered to be equal to six men with no dogs. Once a pair was assigned to a sentry track, the handler could not interact with any other dogs at all, and the dog was also forbidden to interact with other humans. This helped the dog develop the mentality that all other humans might be enemies. Sentry dogs were usually not trained to attack, but could intimidate by barking or lunging forward.

Scout dogs worked somewhat similarly to sentries, with the major difference that rather than being assigned to a certain location, they were assigned to a particular group of people they had to look after. They accompanied patrols and were expected to notice enemy ambushes and point them out quietly. This service proved vital in the jungles of the Pacific, where the Japanese often lay in wait for American soldiers. Some sources claim that no American patrol accompanied by a scout dog had ever been successfully ambushed or lost a man. This is not actually true: there are recorded ambushes and casualties, but always in cases where the men ignored the dog’s warning and went on ahead.

Messenger dogs had a very specialized job, and saw heavy use in the Pacific, where the terrain and the climate tended to wreak havoc with communications equipment. Messenger dogs were always trained in pair teams of two handlers and two dogs. Once one handler placed a special collar with a compartment for papers on a dog, it knew it had to find the other handler, locating him in a game of hide-and-seek while avoiding the enemy. Messenger dogs had to have an independent streak to make their own decisions while finding their way to the target. Once the message was delivered, the collar was taken off to let the dog know it was now off duty. Messenger dogs not only kept human messengers safe by taking their place on a dangerous mission, but were also four to five times faster. They sometimes also carried supplies such as telephone wire, or carrier pigeons, which could then be sent back with messages.
 
The training of casualty and mine detection dogs ended up something of a failure. The casualty dogs of other nations already proved their viability in World War I, but the American training methods proved insufficient, as most dogs ended up incapable of distinguishing between dead, wounded and healthy soldiers, and raised alerts for all of them.
 
Mine detection was considered to be a vital task, but the training methods were faulty. Part of the training was to shock the dogs with electric wires buried underground to teach them to be wary of buried things. This proved countereffective, as dogs respond to negative reinforcement poorly. Another method was to reward finding the mines. This was a better approach, but trainers did not yet have a full appreciation of the dogs’ supreme sense of smell, and concentrated on finding the visual effects of mine placement, such as disturbed ground. For their part, the dogs continued to use their noses and began to look for the odor of the men placing the mines, and not the mines themselves.

The use of attack dogs was an obvious idea, but not all dogs were aggressive enough to serve in this role. Most attack dogs supported sentry dogs and were often used to guard prisoners or transports.
 
Several dogs participated in a special attack project that went nowhere. In June 1942, a New Mexico dog trainer named William A. Prestre wrote to the War Department to suggest a new role for war dogs. He proposed dog packs that could be trained to tell the difference between Americans and Japanese by scent; these packs would be then put ashore on Pacific islands and allowed to roam without human supervision, only attacking the enemy.

The War Department was interested, but how could they train the dogs to distinguish between ethnicities? They couldn’t use Japanese prisoners of war; if they did so and the information leaked out, the Japanese were certain to visit harsh reprisal on American POWs in their hands. Instead, men from the 100th Infantry Battalion, an all Japanese-American unit, were “volunteered” for the project. A secret training base was established off the Mississippi coast on an island, called Cat Island with unintentional irony, and nearby Ship Island, where the soldiers spent their nights.
 
The men were given helmets, padded clothing and slabs of raw horse meat, and were told to hide in trees and foxholes while avoiding the local alligators. The dogs were then loosed and allowed to follow their instincts.

This didn’t work, as the packs broke up immediately, most dogs didn’t care about the men, and the few that did were clearly in it for the meat. Prestre then tried to train the dogs to not only find, but also “kill” the targets, sometimes wrapping meat around their neck to encourage bites to the jugular. Most soldiers got various scars despite the thick padding. As the dogs became more familiar with the men, they stopped attacking and just grabbed the meat and ran. Prestre, in turn, had the dogs tethered and the soldiers were ordered to beat and whip the animals to draw blood to get them to attack. The soldiers found the practice despicable, and the ill-conceived project was shut down early next year.
 
Overall, the dogs serving with U.S. forces all around the world performed valuable services and saved many lives, sometimes at the cost of their own. But what happened to them after the war? Returning the dogs to civilian life became a matter of importance even while the war was still going on, as many dogs had to quit serving due to illness, wounds or shell shock (The Terror that Lingers), which could affect them as much as humans. Some dogs who lost their handlers were so deeply affected that they couldn’t be retrained with a new handler, and also had to be sent home.
 

As mentioned earlier, most dogs were donated by civilians; whenever possible, they were returned to their former owners. Sometimes a handler grew so attached to a dog that he contacted the original owners to ask if they would be willing to give the dog up for him, a request that was usually granted. Dogs that couldn’t be returned to their owners and couldn’t stay with their handlers were offered up for adoption, with volunteers outnumbering dogs several times over.
 
Before a dog could be returned to anyone, however, it had to go through detraining to make it forget all behavior patterns that could cause a problem in civilian life. Dogs had to be reacquainted with the noise and activity of town life, and had to learn not to attack people, even aggressive ones. One of the final tests was a walk in a bustling city full of noises impulses and a simulated encounter with an aggressive person. If the dog behaved, it could be returned home. Most dogs passed, with only a small handful that couldn’t adjust to peacetime due to aggressive temperament or trauma and had to be euthanized. Even so, every detrained dog was sent home with a manual outlining the proper care for war dogs, which included a list of commands and behaviors that the owner should never use.
 

The proper post-war treatment of canines fell out of public interest and discourse after the war, and our faithful friends receive far worse treatment than they deserved throughout the Cold War. Most of the 4,000 dogs that served in the Vietnam War were classified as “surplus equipment” and left behind when U.S. forces left the country. Military dogs were usually abandoned or euthanized en masse. The practice only ended in 2000, when President Clinton signed “Robby’s Law,” which guarantees that all retired military dogs are put up for adoption.

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