Bonzo's War (34 page)

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.

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 mortar 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.
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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'.

Was it a pet, a mascot, or a Prisoner of War? It seemed to be the latter for it had a US Medical Department label:

Name: Harry Hollmer

Line of duty: G.P.W. [German prisoner of war]

Location where tagged: D-V-POW A.P.O. 155 [The US

Army field post office, Dorchester]

Was it subject to the Geneva Convention? Was it a French civilian animal? Now it was a ‘stray' on police hands and in the same perilous boat as many thousands of abandoned British pets. Technically it had three days to live.

That night the female prisoner had a litter of puppies. On being informed of the development, the Chief Constable in Dorchester told the Ministry of Agriculture in London, who told Col Curley. The dog had been landed from LST 520 (a tank-landing ship) of the US Navy in the possession of a prisoner listed as ‘unknown, ex-Normandy beachhead'. It was the third such dog brought back from France. Two of its predecessors had been destroyed, so the police message for the Ministry reported. Would this one go the same way?

For a further twenty-five days, mother and pups awaited their fate at Portland police station. It was referred back to the Americans and reference made to the mysterious ‘Harry Hollmer', who had accompanied the dog. Was he an American GI or a German prisoner? With the quarantine
option still open for mother, offspring, or the whole family, it would be necessary to know who would pay, so Mr S. P. Maddison of the Ministry's Animal Health Branch told Colonel Curley.

But the Colonel politely insisted that, with their handover of the dog to the police, it was now a British problem. On 27 July the Ministry's Dog-Finder-General, Captain Fox, went to see the prisoners. The pups were now almost a month old. ‘Retention is becoming irksome and not without a certain amount of danger,' he reported. ‘The dog appears healthy but is restless. It should either be destroyed or removed to approve quarantine kennels.'

From the file it is clear that some Ministry officials were trying their best to save the D-Day dogs. It was suggested they be offered to a Major M.A. Murphy, RAVC, head vet of Eastern Command, to see if the War Office would take them. His superior, Major Bridgeman, was keen.

He contacted the War Dogs Training School. The report of what happened next is terse. Major D. Danby, chief vet at the school, telephoned the police at Portland and told them it was not a British Army dog that had somehow been waylaid. The Commandant, Major Bridgeman, decided that if they took them, it would somehow ‘impinge on the French authorities' right to ownership.' It went up to the ‘Brigadier responsible for war dogs (Brig. C. A. Murray, Director Army Veterinary and Remount Services),' who agreed.

There was to be no new home in leafy Hertfordshire for mother and pups. The report reads:

The decision to tell the local authorities that the Ministry would not object to the destruction of the bitch and her puppies was telephoned to Mrs. Fox for communication to Captain Fox.

The death notice was somewhat terse: