Bonzo's War (33 page)

The record cards of the Allied Mascot Club furthermore include ‘Anthony' (no. 46) a ‘Black Mongrel' owned by LACW P. A. Mills, enrolled on 22 October 1943. ‘Particulars of service: Flew over France and Germany on several night flights.' No further details are given.

‘Flying Officer Pim' (no. 670) was evidently a hugely travelled dog. The service record of the Terrier mascot of an unidentified RAF station is remarkable:

Accompanied his owner [Sgt J. R. Matthews] he has flown over almost every country in Europe and has about 400 flying hours to his credit. In December 1943 he baled out in Matthews's blouse. Very popular among personnel on the station.

Again there were no further details – just as well perhaps, as this was really breaking the rules. Wherever the animal originated, rabies was the fear. The seaborne Dunkirk dogs and refugee pets of 1940 from the Continent had been smartly whisked off to quarantine. They had been relatively easy to catch. So had ‘Tiger', the
Luftwaffe
cat who had crash-landed in Wales to be de-Nazified by Our Dumb Friends' League. Sundry arrivals had kept coming. There had been rumours in 1942 of dogs and cats being swiped in Commando raids on the Channel Islands. Concern was raised about the cats ‘which attach themselves to HM ships and which are prone to wander ashore when the ship is in port'. Animals kept arriving from all over.

‘No mascot is as popular as one captured from the enemy,' commented
Tail-Wagger Magazine
quite rightly, when recounting the story of ‘Peter', a German Navy dog captured in the water in February 1943 by the crew of the destroyer HMS
Montrose
after an engagement with an E-boat, off the Suffolk coast.

Our Dumb Friends' League could report, ‘by 1943, the Charlton Kennels were in effect an international institution, reporting animal guests from America, Canada, Norway, Germany, France, Belgium, Holland and many other countries'. They were held in quarantine as part of the island's ramparts against rabies, with the League proudly finding the funds to do so. But with American airmen now literally flying in every day across the Atlantic or from North Africa to Britain, there was a new concern. What did
these confident young men know about the Importation of Cats and Dogs Order, 1928, and would they even care? As it would turn out, they would not.

There were rumours that an American aircraft had made a forced landing at Cardinham, Cornwall, on 13 February 1943 and the crew had disappeared, along with a mysterious dog that had accompanied them, evidently from a point of origin not in Great Britain. The investigative trail was cold. Owing to operational secrecy and the dispersal of the crew it was impossible to establish where they had come from and what had become of the crew and its alleged canine member. But it was not the end of the matter.

That spring, Ministry of Agriculture sleuths discovered that ‘a white Pomeranian type dog' had possibly been brought to Britain in a Flying Fortress bomber in early April. Investigators found the aircraft, Boeing B-17F ‘Stella', had made a wheels-up ‘pancake landing' in a ploughed field at Lychett Minster in Dorset on the 7th. It had been trying to find the airfield at St Eval in Cornwall but had overflown the landing site and run out of fuel.

Sergeant Sidney Jeans of the Dorset Constabulary had discovered a little later that ‘a small white dog had been seen running about the field', which had subsequently been taken to an anti-aircraft gun site in the locality along with the crew and thence to RAF Hanworthy, the seaplane base at Poole Harbour in Dorset. After that they had gone on ‘to an unknown USAAF station somewhere in this country'.

From the records, a 1st-Lt Tallmadge G. Wilson was identified as the pilot, plus eleven other crew members. They were traced in early June to Bassingbourn aerodrome in Cambridgeshire. Originally they had flown in from Morocco. The Ministry was distinctly alarmed.

Overseeing the hunt was Captain J. Fox MC, Superintending Inspector of MAFF's Animal Health Division, a qualified vet. There was plenty for him to do. Police were also investigating reports that US Army officers at the camp at Kings Weston in Avonmouth had dogs, which they admitted having smuggled into Britain. When they got there, the police could find nothing: the officers and their alleged dogs had gone.

But Captain Fox was first on the track of the mystery Pom. He would soon discover that it had indeed arrived in the Cambridgeshire fens with the Flying Fortress crew but, ‘after a few hours had died in the barracks after an episode of anorexia, dullness and vomiting'. The dog had not been seen by a vet and was now buried on the edge of the aerodrome. It had not come into contact with any other dog.

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 torpid 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.