Connie Goldsmith - Animals Go to War: From Dogs to Dolphins

Judy the English pointer receives a Dickin Medal in London on May 2, 1946. On the right is Judys owner, airman Frank Williams. He received the White Cross of St. Giles for bravery in saving an animal. Judy spent three and one-half years in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps and narrowly escaped death many times during the war.

Judy wasnt always a hero. In 1936, before the start of the war, she was a runaway pup from a breeding kennel in Shanghai, China. A girl named Lee Ming who worked at the kennels found the lost puppy in the busy streets of the city and took her back to the kennels. She called the puppy Shudi, which means peaceful one in Wu, the local Chinese dialect. The head of the kennel, who was British, called the puppy Judy. Wealthy British families in Shanghai adopted Judys littermates. But Judys fate would be very different from theirs.

When Judy was born, China controlled Shanghai, one of its most important cities. Shanghai had a large community of Americans, British, and other foreigners who lived and traded with the Chinese. Five years earlier, in 1931, Japan had taken over Manchuria, a part of China northeast of Shanghai. In 1932 the Japanese bombed Shanghai in a vicious attack hoping to gain more land. After a few weeks of fierce fighting between Japanese and Chinese forces, the League of Nations (a peacekeeping organization that preceded the United Nations) forced a treaty between the two countries. The agreement allowed only a few Japanese troops to remain in Shanghai along with the many international citizens and their military representatives. To protect against further Japanese aggression in Shanghai, the British kept part of its Royal Navy in China. It also maintained a fleet of small maneuverable gunboats on the Yangtze River, which flows into the East China Sea.

A few months after Lee Ming returned Judy to her kennels, two British sailors from the gunboat HMS Gnat visited the kennels looking for a ship mascot. When Charles Jeffery, the Gnat s bosun (the person in charge of ship maintenance), whistled at Judy, she jumped into his arms. He took Judy back to the ship. She is the most lovable creature, Jeffery wrote in his diary. The ships company love and treat Judy as a pet, and I am delighted that the men share her. By the next year, China and Japan were at war. The British were then neutral. But Japanese planes harassed and attacked the Gnat and other British gunboats on the Yangtze. Judy heard the planes and howled to warn her shipmates of incoming enemy aircraft.

With the threat of world war on the horizon, Judy and her human shipmates transferred to a bigger gunboat called the HMS Grasshopper . They steamed to Singapore, home to Britains largest naval base in the Pacific region. Frank Williams, a member of the British Royal Air Force (RAF), arrived in Singapore in 1941. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The day after the surprise attack, the United States declared war on Japan and officially entered World War II. Together, Britain, Australia, the United States, and other allies fought the Japanese in the Pacific. In Europe US troops joined Britain, France, and the Soviet Union (a union of republics that included Russia) to fight the armies of Adolf Hitlers Nazi Germany and other members of the Axis powers.

In Shanghai chaos reigned as the Japanese hunted down and bombed British boats in the South China Sea and on the Yangtze River. In February 1942, Williams and Judy were on separate gunboats about 40 miles (64 km) apart. The Japanese bombed and sank both boats. Williams and his crewmates escaped from their sunken boat, as did Judy and the crew of the Grasshopper . Judy set out with the Grasshopper s crew through the jungles of Sumatra (an island in Indonesia), hoping to evade the Japanese. Judy survived a crocodile attack and chased off a tiger to help her friends. Williams and his crew escaped by truck and then by boat. He happened to spot Judy headed into the jungle and wondered what an English pointer was doing there.