Bonzo's War (37 page)

On the 19th ‘Thorn' and MAP trainer, Mr M. Russell, and ‘Storm'
⁴⁹
with his trainer, Mrs Margaret B. Griffin of the famous Crumstone Kennels, arrived in London, driven
urgently from Gloucester by Colonel Baldwin. Canine history was in the making.

From the correspondence files it is clear that veteran Civil Defence rescuers were deeply sceptical of these doggy amateurs turning up at ‘incidents' in their little utility van. There was ‘strong language' amid the dust, rubble and tangled limbs as the search went on for the living and the dead.

Mr Russell complained of ‘very poor cooperation' at an incident at Hazlehurst Road, Wandsworth, on 19 November when the bodies of two adult males, a child and ‘particles of flesh' were found (fragmentary remains were a common occurrence, something the dogs found difficult to deal with). But he predicted, ‘It is only a matter of time before there is complete harmony at every incident.'

He was right. The suspicion of the old hands turned to a sense of near wonderment at what the dogs could do. Four more dogs had arrived by early November and been posted to depots in Hendon and Lewisham, expected to learn on the job. It would take a month. Mr Russell and Mrs Griffin were enrolled as part-timers in the Civil Defence and given uniforms. Margaret Griffin set up an extemporized kennel in Station Road, Loughton, in suburban Essex to cover northeast London with six dogs, including two rather special ones, ‘Crumstone Irma' and ‘Crumstone Psyche'. They would become very famous dogs.

Reports of the dogs in action sent into the London Civil Defence Region headquarters in the bombproof basement of the Geological Museum in Exhibition Road make harrowing reading. Bodies in a workers' canteen at Erith, Kent hit by a rocket were so fragmented it was impossible to number the casualties. In Epping, Essex, the dog discovered ‘blood marks in a garden hut and later small
portions of a human body. This accounts for the missing child,' as the incident report put it.

By 14 December, Irma and Psyche were ready for work. Working together in Southgate, northeast London, they found a large mound of rubble in a ruined row of houses, where Irma became excited. ‘A call for silence was sufficient for a rescue officer to hear a cry from a woman saying she and her sister were in a Morrison shelter,' the incident report recounted. They were dug out, although the sister was dead. Rescue dog ‘Peter' (of whom more will be heard) found three further bodies in the rubble.

The story of Miss Hilda Harvey, a schoolmistress, appeared in a newspaper the next day concerning a ‘V-Bomb incident in southern England.' In very dramatic terms she told how she had been buried in rubble but could hear the ‘jumbled cries of rescuers in the darkness'. Then she heard a dog sniff. ‘A woman's voice said, “Leave him alone, he'll find somebody alive down there”.' She heard ‘the sniff again and then the bark, then the rescuers broke through the debris' and lifted her out.

No one needed further convincing. More dogs were set to training in the rubble. At the Hendon depot, the Misses M. and D. Homan were in charge of ‘Rex' and ‘Duke'. Mrs Griffin, now with eight dogs at the Loughton kennels, required 60 lb of meat a week to feed them and proposed getting it from the local butcher. She was informed instead she must obtain condemned meat from the Caledonian cattle market in Islington. The Waste of Food Order still applied. Rescue dogs or not, they were civilians.

Photographs show Margaret Griffin at rescue sites with her dogs, wearing a swaddling blue-serge Civil Defence greatcoat, leather gauntlets and a floppy beret with an Alsatian's head badge and shoulderflash. She is utterly magnificent, enough certainly to convince the Germans
firing their beastly rockets at London that their space-age endeavour was doomed.

Mrs Griffin's own accounts are full of admiration for her animals. Irma ‘had a special bark when she located someone she sensed to be alive (her “living indication”).' In one incident she refused to leave a scene for two days until two young girls were found alive in the rubble. Psyche could also find pets as well as people, including ‘a nice Red Setter,' badly injured but alive in a ruined house.

Mrs Griffin recalled, ‘I feared his heart would give out and he could not stand up by himself. We gave him some hot tea and wrapped him in a blanket, left him quiet and telephoned for the PDSA van.'

Psyche and Irma would regularly work together. At one incident, the dogs dug around two-and-a-half feet down and found ‘a lovely cat'. Irma kept giving her ‘live' signal. Digging further down, rescuers ‘found an old lady, her daughter and her sailor fiancé, all dead'.

‘When anyone who was found by Irma was brought out dead,' wrote Mrs Griffin, ‘she would try and lick the lifeless face or a hand and look up as if entreating that something more should be done.'

Mr Keith Raven was a baby when a V2 fell on Chingford in suburban Essex. With Irma and Psyche, Mrs Griffin was soon on the scene. Five years later, Raven met the heroic dogs and their trainer at Crufts and made a visit to the Goring Kennels, where he was told the story of how he survived the drama of 5 February 1945.

The row of houses in which his family had lived had been pulverized. Irma made a ‘live indication' in the rubble and, as he recalled much later, ‘After about 20 minutes' work, silence was called for, they could hear a baby (me) crying, after more digging and tunnelling, a way was made in and voice contact was made with our
mother.' The family were buried in the Morrison shelter. Keith and his brother were found wrapped in an eiderdown and both brought out unhurt. Their mother had lost consciousness and now lay dead in the rubble.

‘Peter' was a rumbustious four-year-old Collie-cross, who had been offered to the MAP for training as a guard dog by his Birmingham owner, Mrs Audrey Stable, in 1943. He was a house pet who joined up (and would go back to being a pet again) but not before he enjoyed some extraordinary adventures in London.

In spring 1945 he was the charge of the ‘Rescue Man' Archie Knight based at the Chelsea depot (Peter was known as ‘Rescue Dog No. 2664/9288 Peter'). The Imperial War Museum archives have the record sheet of Peter's big day, 27 March, when early in the morning one of the last rockets to be fired from Holland fell on a block of flats in Vallance Road, Stepney, inflicting severe casualties – 134 dead, 49 seriously injured. It reads:

Report of the working dogs, Peter and Rascal [who was there for training]. This was a very big incident and the indications given were many and various. During this long period of duty Peter worked hard and well and never once refused to do all I asked of him. At the end of this day Peter was very tired.

Dog and handler were recalled to the scene the next morning. ‘Peter worked very hard for two hours but was obviously affected by his exertions,' wrote Rescue Man Knight on 29 March. A second dog, ‘Tailor', was not very interested – ‘This was probably due to the unavoidable lack of proper food for the previous two days. Peter was completely played out and took 24 hours to recover his spirits. He is only a small dog and I consider his efforts
very praiseworthy.' Mrs Maria Dickin was struck by the fact that at the rear of the smashed flats was the original oil-lamp-lit Stepney cellar where the PDSA began its work in November 1917.

On the evening of the same day the last V2 rocket fell near Orpington, Kent. The capital's pets' long ordeal was over.

It was getting snappy in the Berlin bunker. Hitler was allowing Blondi to sleep in his subterranean bedroom, something resented by his mistress, Eva Braun, who preferred her two Scottish Terriers, ‘Negus' and ‘Stasi', who were also cooped up underground. Hitler thought they were ‘ridiculous' and looked ‘like cleaning brushes'. He had brought them to cheer her up after a suicide attempt.

Fräulein Braun had been known to kick Blondi under the dining table. On or around 4 April, Blondi had a litter of five puppies having mated (with some difficulty) with the Alsatian, ‘Harras', belonging to the architect Gerdy Troost. Hitler named the first of the male puppies ‘Wulf'.

On 13 April President Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia. His Scottie, Fala, attended the funeral in Washington DC two days afterwards but, it was reported, ‘seemed lost without his master'.

Five days later Berlin was bombarded by Soviet artillery for the first time. It was 20 April, Hitler's birthday. The end was near but new pets at home kept spirits high. As it would be reported later, ‘Hitler was very attached to Blondi's puppies and personally fed them several times a day. The dog and the little ones had the run of the bathroom
of the bunker and Hitler spent much time with them. He often took one of the puppies and then sat on the bench in the waiting room silently holding it without paying any attention to his surroundings.'

‘Even Hitler set his affections on a dog which he treated very differently from the unfortunate prisoners in the concentration camps,' noted
Tail-Wagger Magazine
. How true!

In the shattered city some of the worst devastation was around the Zoo. The end was utterly tragic. One solitary hippo swam round and round a blood-red pool. The famous Pongo lay dead on the cement floor of his cage. ‘Siam', the only elephant to survive the destruction of November 1943, had been driven wild by explosions and was trumpeting in terror. Meanwhile, ‘Frightened apes clambered among the ruins and a few exotic birds flew from tree to tree trying to escape the acrid clouds of black smoke'.

Most of Berlin's working animals, chickens and ‘balcony pigs' (rabbits) had long since been eaten. The days were numbered for those that had not been. A Berlin woman in an anonymous memoir recorded the last days:

Someone came into the cellar with the glad tidings that a horse had collapsed outside. In no time the whole cellar tribe was in the street, which was still under [Russian] shellfire. The animal was still twitching when the first bread knife went into it.

On the afternoon of 29 April, Adolf Hitler sought to test the cyanide capsule he had been provided with by the SS. He reportedly ordered his physician, Dr Werner Haase, to give one to Blondi, aided by the Führer dog handler, Feldwebel Fritz Tornow. The dog munched it eagerly, whimpered, rolled over and died.

After midnight Hitler married Eva Braun in the Führerbunker. The next day the newlyweds committed suicide. The dog handler rounded up Blondi's puppies, scampering hopefully as they sniffed fresh air, and shot them in the garden of the Reich Chancellery. He also killed Eva Braun's Scotties (another source has one of them surviving in Munich), the dogs of the Führer's secretary, Frau Gerda Christian, and his own Dachshund.

The charred remains of Hitler, Eva Braun and two dogs (thought to be Blondi and little Wulf) were discovered three days later in a shell crater in the devastated Reichs-chancellory garden. Blondi's body was photographed by the Russians like road kill.

It was five-and-a-half years since fear of what her master had in store for them had caused Londoners to destroy almost a million of their pets. Blondi had not even been born. Millions more of Europe's innocent animals had perished in the meantime.

47
  The dogs were held at ‘Animal Farm', the Chemical Defence Experimental Station, Porton Down, Wilts, which in the course of the war consumed 15–20,000 dogs, cats, monkeys, goats, guinea pigs, etc. They too had no choice.

48
  In training, a scrap of meat was concealed under the mine. Gradually the meat lure was diminished, and the dog rewarded for pointing out the now meatless mine by being given a scrap from its handler.

49
  ‘Crumstone Storm' had already found pre-war fame starring in the film
Owd Bob
as ‘Black Wull', the evil sheepdog champ the newcomer Collie hero has to beat (
see also
p.37).

 

 

Dogs have dug into wrecked homes looking for their owners.

Cats have mewed for days outside piles of rubble, telling rescuers their owners are buried there.

Animals have quietened frightened children.

Yet when the history of the war is written, these things will not be recorded.

The Dogs Bulletin
, autumn 1944

The war in Europe was over. The London Zoo's Occurrences Book was inscribed: ‘Tuesday May 8th 1945, VE Day'. Arrivals that day were a Nyasaland lovebird and a blossom-headed parakeet. Departures included a ‘West Indian Agouti, escaped from cage (found dead)'.

Viktor Klemperer had escaped deportation and death in the Dresden firestorm. In May 1945 he was in American-occupied Munich. Surveying the devastation, he mourned the death of his cat three years before:

Today is the anniversary of Muschel's death, every hair of his thick little fur has been paid for by a German life.

The MAP rescue dogs Storm plus Peter and his handler were on parade at the Civil Defence stand-down ceremonies in Hyde Park on 10 June. After inspection by the King, the contingents marched past. It was reported: