The Dogs of War
In the 1943 Battle of Bougainville, the Americans’ best hope lay with specially trained canine soldiers. By Jason daly From truly*adventurous
It’s 1943, the Battle of Bougainville. The Americans attacking this South Pacific island are outnumbered and outgunned. Their best hope lies with specially trained soldiers named Jack, Andy, and Caesar. Two problems: The trio has never seen combat, and they’re canines.
THE soldiers filed off the beach and into the twilight world of the jungle. The enemy lay concealed ahead, they could be sure. They followed an unlikely leader: a black-and-tan Doberman named Andy who betrayed no sense of the danger of the situation. Some of the men bristled at the arrangement.
This was to save them all from enemy fire? The canine was a ruined show dog. To make matters worse, the platoon’s backup was a German shepherd who months before had been roaming the streets of the Bronx with the three boys who owned him.
As they moved up the trail, they heard gunfire and artillery in the distance as the rest of the Second Marine Raider Battalion fought to secure the shoreline. It was 1943; the assault on Bougainville, a speck of land in the South Pacific, had just begun. Allied forces needed to capture a safe zone large enough to build an airfield for an eventual attack on the nearby island of New Britain, the final Japanese stronghold in the region.
From there, the Allies would hop from island to island until they were within bombing range of Japan itself.
The campaign in the Pacific depended on Bougainville. For the Marines marching blindly into the dense, enemy-occupied jungle, the future depended on dogs who were never supposed to have been part of the war in the first place.
Alene Erlanger was a 46-year-old New Jersey socialite with a love for show poodles when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Days after the attack, she invited her friend Roland Kilbon, a journalist who covered the dog world, to lunch. “Other countries have used dogs in their armies for years and ours have not,” she told him. “Just think what dogs can do guarding forts, munitions plants, and such.” She envisioned dog fanciers around the country as drill sergeants, grooming a new kind of warrior for a new war.
Kilbon agreed, and the two created Dogs for Defense, an organization that would train dogs for the military. One problem: The military wanted nothing to do with animals. Over the years, jeeps had replaced horses, trucks had taken the place of pack mules, and radios had made carrier pigeons obsolete.
Then, in June 1942, in the dead of night, four German saboteurs laden with explosives landed on Long Island, New York. Four more surfaced on a Florida beach. The FBI tracked down
all eight, but the incidents showed how vulnerable munitions factories and other highvalue operations were. Facing a shortage of men due to the war, Uncle Sam reluctantly realized the country needed dogs to patrol 3,700 miles of coastline. Erlanger went to work.
Soon, people from around the country—including actress Greer Garson and crooner Rudy Vallee— were enlisting their dogs for the war effort. Brothers Max, Morris, and Irving Glazer of New York City owned Caesar, a purebred German shepherd. Caesar was smart. The brothers could buy a parcel at the butcher shop and tell him to “take it to Mom.” The dog would carry the package through the city blocks and to the door of the Glazers’ fourthfloor walkup without trying to eat the contents—even steak.
When the war broke out, the Glazer sons headed into the military, leaving