Bonzo's War (36 page)

Caged birds often died outright of shock when a V1 impacted, while backyard food animals were routinely blasted.
The Animal World
reported, ‘one street in north London in which all the human inhabitants had been killed or severely injured but their backyard fowls were untouched. Emergency feeding of a mass of hungry chickens was required.'

In the open fields meanwhile, ‘more cattle were killed by blast than flying splinters in V1 raids', according to a Farm Livestock Emergency Service (FLES) bulletin, while
a number of hapless cows died, ‘as a result of eating pieces of wire left lying around after explosions of V bombs'.

A Kent Land Girl recalled for the social historian Norman Longmate how the cows in her charge were ‘petrified' by the first V1s and tugged at the chains tethering them, but soon went back to their former placidity. Horses proved as impassive as cows. Rural hens were surprisingly resilient.

Useful quantities of meat could be recovered from blasted herds. ‘When a flying bomb dropped among thirty-two pedigree Friesians, the slaughterhouse manager and veterinary surgeon attended the incident,' an FLES report stated. ‘Highly satisfactory salvage of seven cattle resulted, 1,748 lb of meat were recovered and the nine cattle injured were all treated. Fifteen animals were unaffected.'

A week after the last flying bomb was launched from northern France, the first V2 rocket to hit London arced across the North Sea, fired from Holland. This was a different kind of war. It travelled at four times the speed of sound. For weeks to come the Government would claim the strange double bangs rocking the capital were ‘gas main explosions'. Nor would the Germans admit what they were. Animal instinct clearly knew better and there are plenty of stories of psychic premonitions.

The very first rocket hit Chiswick in the southwest of the capital on the evening of 8 September. An engineering worker's wife was alone in a house in Wilmington Avenue, about 300 yards from the impact. Home from work, she had put down a bowl of food for her cat, ‘Billy' – ‘large and white and not particularly friendly'. Billy ignored supper and, unusually for him, tried to jump onto his owner's lap. She recalled:

I stood up and lifted him up in my arms. He was quite still for a second then suddenly he leapt from my arms
and rushed out and through the cellar door, which was just outside. Before I could gather my senses there was an almighty explosion. The cat would not come up out of cellar, not even for his food.

A nurse living in Balham observed the family cat, ‘Junior', asleep on a chair. Suddenly he jumped up in the air, ‘gave a wail of terror' and rushed under the sideboard in the corner of the room, just before the ‘terrifying explosion' of the first local V2. Junior was to show the same prescient power on two more occasions. Quite soon pets themselves would intervene in the ‘revenge weapon' episode in a quite remarkable way (
see
p.308–14).

There was a happier event in the rocket-blasted autumn of 1944, but one still shrouded in the deepest mystery. Our Dumb Friends' League reported: ‘At the request of the Palace authorities, the League collected two kittens that had been born at Buckingham Palace. They were found good homes.'

The Royal Family, as far as is known, had had no cats since the time of Queen Alexandra (who adored Siamese). But there were plenty of dogs. Since the thirties, the favoured royal breed had been Corgis, starting with Golden Eagle, known as ‘Dookie', a Pembrokeshire acquired in 1933 from the Rozavel Kennels in Betchworth, Surrey, of the breeder and pre-war supplier of pets to top Nazis
(see
p.116), Mrs Thelma Gray.

Dookie died shortly after the outbreak of war and a second dog, ‘Rozavel Lady Jane', was run over in Windsor Great Park at Christmas 1943. As a replacement for ‘these two little oddities' (as
The Times
had unkindly called them on their first public appearance), Princess Elizabeth was given her own Corgi for her 18th birthday on 21 April 1944. The two-month-old puppy was named ‘Susan'.

So where did these mystery kittens come from? The Palace has stayed silent for seventy years. At the time the
Daily Mirror
sniffed out the story and reported on 17 November: ‘Puzzle of the Palace Kittens. “Belinda” and “Jane”, born in the Silver Room of the palace, have lived in the royal presence for ten weeks before being given to the Our Dumb Friends' League ten days ago.' The newspaper pursued a wildly ambitious stunt to have them adopted by the President of the United States.
⁴⁶
Described as ‘a diplomatic feeler', it did not stand a whisker of a chance.

Sally, the London Zoo tabby, meanwhile had had her two litters in the spring and summer, for which staff had just about managed to find homes. Then, remarkably, she had gone back into the reptile house (perhaps it was warm) and had a third litter of seven. They were found by Keeper Poole, who described them as ‘a colourful batch'.

Sally herself was ‘a friendly creature but the kittens bit, hissed and scratched', it was reported. Zoo staff were now ‘looking for homes for them' and they were on offer to the visiting public, ‘as we cannot have too many cats in the gardens, they would be a menace if they got into the aviaries'.

The seven kittens were reduced to two (it was not spelled out exactly how). One day Sally strolled in and ‘was mooching about as usual' – but without her two tabby kittens. The next day Sally herself disappeared. It was assumed that she had led them off into the Park whence she herself had come back in the early spring.

Two weeks later she reappeared, ‘bedraggled', with ‘two kittens tumbling behind her and settled down by some hot water pipes in the boiler room'. Presumably the cold had driven her back. But her dramas were not over: Sally and her young family were in the basement of the Alligator House!

‘She is too fond of romping about the reptiles,' said the keeper. ‘We had a cat before who was prone to getting near the alligators to get bits of meat. But one day a nine-foot alligator snapped and almost got her.' The alligators missed out again this time. Sally and her kittens were rescued from reptilian peril. One can only hope they found safer accommodation in nearby fashionable Primrose Hill.

45
  The Blue Cross medal, originating in 1906 for humans and from 1940 for animal bravery, never quite achieved the same kudos of the subsequently far better known Dickin Medal of the PDSA. In 1945, the RSPCA instigated the red collar and medallion ‘For Valour'.

46
  The loopy feline plan was advanced, so
Life
magazine reported later, by the
Mirror's
‘beauteous' New York correspondent, Georgina Campbell, along with Madison Avenue adman Robert Kendell, president of the American Feline Society. The plan was frustrated by the fact of the existence of ‘Fala', the Presidential Scottie, and Mrs Roosevelt's reported dislike of cats.

Pets recruited for the services were about to write a new chapter in military history. The War Dog School-trained patrol dogs sent to North Africa and Italy had had a tough time of it. At Northaw meanwhile, experiments had been in hand since early 1944 preparing dogs for action in the invasion of the Continent. A canine gas mask was developed, which in tests
⁴⁷
dogs found to be ‘perfectly comfortable', but rendered them useless in action because they could not smell anything.

That special doggy sense was paramount in a parallel programme to train former pets to sniff out land mines
⁴⁸
working with Royal Engineer clearance teams. In choosing the right dog, it was noted:

Dogs with black eyes are surly and erratic, dogs with light eyes are generally wilful, dogs with hazel
coloured eyes usually have the firmer character and should be selected.

The clever Mr Lloyd was in charge of training. The most difficult to deal with were so-called ‘Schu' mines, antipersonnel devices packed in a wooden box.

Mine dogs, like all good war dogs, had a trusted handler who would mark with a flag the spot of a Schu mine, on which the dog was trained to ‘sit'. Results were mixed. In extreme weather dogs ‘merely pretended to work'. They disliked noise and the smell of dead bodies. A report from Normandy complained about ‘bitches in season being distracted by the vagrant French curs that abound in this area'. ‘Handlers are far too kind,' noted a Royal Engineer lieutenant, ‘nevertheless the dogs are doing excellent work.' However the unfortunate commander of a dog platoon had his foot blown off by a Schu mine that a dog had missed.

The mine hunter dogs had all once been dog's home strays or beloved pets like Michael, the Golden Retriever who had been sent away in December 1943 in answer to the war dog appeal. At their chance railway station meeting, Dr Burnell had been told their former pet was being sent to France to search for mines. Had he survived? Would he ever come home? And would he recognize the family that had loved him?

Khan, the Alsatian from Tolworth, was now ‘Rifleman Khan', having passed out of Northaw and been posted to the 6th Battalion The Cameronians, the famous Scottish infantry regiment, as a patrol dog. On the night of 2 November 1944 he and his handler, Lance-Cpl Jimmy Muldoon, were fighting their way onto the Dutch island of Walcheren, a V2 rocket launch site, when shellfire hit their assault craft. Dog and handler were pitched into the icy dark waters. After a desperate search, the fearless Khan
grabbed his struggling master by the collar and paddled to the mud-flat shore. ‘Man and dog collapsed on the bank.' It was not the end of Khan's adventures.

Meanwhile the end of the war was in sight. The Third Reich, source of so much inconvenience for pets, was crumbling. Before too long, Adolf Hitler would retire into the Berlin bunker with Blondi, his pet German Shepherd.

Pet lovers in the services were now with the Allied armies on the German frontier. The concern of military vets was how to deal with the enormous number of enemy animals, horses especially, being taken ‘prisoner'. Pets meanwhile were thin on the ground.

Private John Keet, a peacetime member of the Edinburgh General Terrier Club, was in an ENSA concert party entertaining troops. The retreating enemy had taken all the best animals, although some secretly hidden had survived, so he told
Our Dogs
of his canine observations in the winter of 1944.

The authorities in liberated Belgium were allowing ‘some meat, oatmeal and bread for dogs, cats and rabbits' he reported. There were well-groomed Poodles on the streets of Brussels. Dogs were non-existent in famine-gripped Holland apart from occasional toys – Papillons, Pekes and Griffons.

Mrs Sugden of St Brelades, Jersey, would tell
Tail-Wagger Magazine
that the Germans were quite nice to the dogs on the island, giving them scraps of food, up to the end of 1944 when suddenly they all disappeared. She supposed they had been eaten.

Private Gunnar de Wit was in a cellar on the banks of the River Maas that winter, ‘a far cry from the Tooting dispensary of the PDSA' where he had been a volunteer worker. ‘Animals over here have had a raw deal,' he told
PDSA News
, ‘Horses and cattle have been killed by
shellfire, caught while they were still chained up, sometimes in wrecked sheds or in open fields.' He had to despatch a few pigs, which had been wounded by shrapnel.

‘There are crazy dogs in the villages (“slap happy” the troops call them) dashing around.' He made sure they were ‘disposed of humanely'.

‘I have had to attend to several dogs with broken legs,' he reported. ‘One of the chaps has one of them with him now, the pet of the battery.' You can guarantee he was.

Rockets fired from northern Holland continued to torment southern England. Through the autumn and winter of 1944–45, British and American bomber fleets flew almost unopposed to wreck German cities from end to end. Japan's cities burned. Pets were annihilated. Rescuers on all sides did what they could.

In London, the canine contribution to search and rescue work would be different this time. The amateur Terriers of the Blitz were yesterday's dogs; for German Shepherds, this would be their Finest Hour.

There had been abundant evidence from the Blitz that dogs (and indeed cats) were natural rescuers. If they could smell out a Schu mine, they could find a buried body. Yet in spite of their widespread training as guard and ‘tactical' animals, no official rescue dogs had been used in the flying-bomb summer.

There is a story that Lt-Col Baldwin had seen a dramatic documentary in a Cheltenham cinema –
Heroic Stalingrad
– about the battle and this had given him the idea that dogs could be trained to ‘point' snipers. It was certainly more complicated than that, but the idea had developed into finding buried casualties. With London now under sustained rocket attack, some doggy people thought that they might still be useful, as indeed they were.

Two ‘lend-leash' pet Ministry of Air Production (MAP) guard dogs were recalled to Gloucestershire for special training in late summer 1944. Among them was Jet, the Alsatian brought up on Government rations since he was a Liverpool pup, who had lately been guarding an American airbase in Ulster. After a month of rockets killing Londoners, there was a demonstration in Birmingham in early October, where RAF volunteers hid themselves deep under rubble from 1940-era ruins. Home Secretary Herbert Morrison watched it all with senior Civil Defence officials.

At the command ‘Find!' all but one was found in less than three minutes. Jet led the way. After that, it would be said, ‘when Jet was satisfied that he had a find, then he would indicate it by starting to dig. He was never known to give a wrong indication, but frequently burnt his feet by the attempted digging.'

Unlike the Blitz, rockets fell arbitrarily on the giant dartboard of the capital. The outer suburbs, as well as the centre, were taking a pounding. Jet and his RAF handler, Cpl Wardle, arrived on 16 October 1944 to be based at Civil Defence Depot 1, Cranmer Court – a mansion block in Whiteheads Grove, Chelsea. Cpl Wardle's first act was to take Jet to the mortuary at St Stephen's Hospital – ‘He sniffed, stepped over the bodies and took no further notice.' This was good. After all, he was supposed to be interested in living survivors. The next night in Norwood, south London, he found two under the rubble.