Animals and the military (see also horses). Man has made use of the strength, speed, and stamina of his companion animals, in war as well as in peace, from the earliest recorded times. Domesticated animals have shared with their human comrades all the hardships of military service, suffering and dying from the effects of disease, thirst, hunger, the violence of the enemy, and privations stemming from military necessity or financial callousness. Even harmless farm stock or household animals have become casualties of war, killed in land or air bombardments of the fields and towns in which they lived alongside their owners, or sometimes deliberately slaughtered in acts of economic warfare or as part of a policy of terror.
Dogs, the first animals to be domesticated, and man's associate since at least the 11th century bc, served originally as auxiliaries in the hunt and protectors against other predators. These roles were easily adaptable to military purposes, and dogs were then used to detect the location of enemy patrols, to give the alarm, or to attack as the occasion arose. Large aggressive animals were used as attack dogs in the armies of Ptolomaic Egypt, the Persian empire, classical Rome, and in medieval Christendom, where they were used against armoured cavalry. A similar role was performed by dogs of the Red Army during WW II, who were trained to run under enemy tanks, where explosive charges carried on their backs would be triggered. In the 16th century, English mastiffs were famous for their courage and ferocity as war dogs, and were used in Spanish armies both in Europe and America. The best counter to the fighting dog, who usually wore a spiked collar or other protection, was found to be another dog of similar type and training. In WW I, both the French and Belgian armies used large dogs (which in the civilian society of the day were commonly used to pull milk floats) as light draught animals for wheeled machine guns. Such dogs could pull loads of up to 441 lb (200 kg), or carry backpacks of up to 33 lb (15 kg) of ammunition or emergency rations to troops pinned down by enemy fire. In both world wars of the 20th century, dogs were also used to carry messages to and from the firing line, as they could move much faster than human runners and presented a smaller target to the enemy. In static conditions, dogs were employed to lay field telephone cable, paid out from a small drum strapped on their back. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, German, French, and other armies used dogs, sometimes fitted with medical packs, to find casualties after a battle, and either to help them to safety or else go for help. Dogs continue to serve as patrol or guard animals, especially in extensive but lightly manned installations such as ordnance depots or airfields, and as ‘sniffers’, trained to detect mines, explosives, etc.
Many kinds of beast have been employed in military transportation, generally the same ones used in ordinary local transport of the period. Such animals include horses, ponies, mules, asses and donkeys, elephants, camels, reindeer, buffaloes, oxen or bullocks, yaks and zebus. The suitability of all these for pack transport makes them particularly useful for operations in wild or roadless terrain. The mule, famous for its sense of balance, was the favoured animal of the Indian Mountain Artillery, which drew most of its animals from Missouri. During WW II, mules, with their vocal cords cut to prevent them giving away concealed positions, were included in the glider-borne ‘Chindit’ forces, landed behind Japanese lines in Burma.
Elephants were used not only for transport but also for a variety of military pioneer tasks, such as demolishing obstacles, acting as mobile cranes to move materials of all kinds, forming living bridges over which armies could cross shallow rivers, or pushing down the gates of besieged fortresses. They were used in combat in India from at least the 6th century bc and were taken into use by the successors of Alexander ‘the Great’, who first encountered them in force at the battle of the Hydaspes. Elephants, probably of a small North African species, were first used in European warfare by the Carthaginians at the siege of Agrigentum (262 bc). The war elephant, fitted with a formidable weapons array and capable of great speed in the charge, later became a powerful component of Roman and other armies in the Levant and Asia Minor, but was eventually displaced by the cataphract (armoured heavy cavalry) as the shock action element of the battle line. Indian generals continued to place great reliance on their elephants, despite the fact that time and again in the medieval period they were routed by invading armies from Central Asia. Despite their terrifying effect on men and horses unfamiliar with them, elephants could easily be defeated by well-trained troops, or panicked into trampling down either side indiscriminately. Elephants were finally driven from the Indian battlefield by the advent of modern musketry, though they retained their old role as mobile command posts until the Sikh wars of the 1840s. The Royal Artillery in India used these sagacious pachyderms to pull its siege guns as late as the beginning of the 20th century.
Camels, both the one-humped Arabian or dromedary and the two-humped Bactrian variety, have been used to support campaigns in desert areas from biblical times onwards. Frequently ill-tempered and ill-used, their natural ability to survive for long periods without food or water nevertheless makes them valuable both as baggage animals and troop-carriers. The mehari or fast riding-camel provided a passable substitute for horses when cavalrymen had insufficient mounts and was ideal for mounted infantry or reconnaissance patrols operating in arid regions. Both the British and the French made full use of camel corps in their colonial campaigns in the Sahara, the Sudan, Somalia, the Levant, and Sind, in a period stretching from the 1840s until after WW II. At Sardis (547 bc), Cyrus II of Persia, faced by the predominantly cavalry and chariot army of Croesus of Lydia, positioned his baggage camels in front of his army. Their unfamiliar appearance and smell so unsettled the enemy horses that the Lydian troopers were forced to dismount and fight on foot, where they were decisively defeated.
Domestic cats, though by their nature not amenable to military discipline, have nevertheless played their part in war. The ever-inventive Cyrus II is said to have used cats to defeat an army of Egyptians in 500 bc. Each of his soldiers was ordered to carry a cat on his shield, thus preventing the Egyptians, to whom the cat was sacred, from striking a blow. The continuing value of cats as self-operating anti-rodent systems allows them to be tolerated, sometimes even encouraged, in military installations. ‘Simon’, ship's cat of the British frigate HMS Amethyst, despite being wounded by the fire of Chinese shore batteries, continued his part in the fight against rats which infested this ship while she was trapped in the Yangtse river from April to June 1947. He became the only British cat to be awarded a posthumous decoration for gallantry. The Russian cat ‘Murka’ became a Hero Cat of the USSR for services at the battle of Stalingrad in 1942-3. Rats are the common enemy of all soldiers, as they spoil or consume food and other military stores, scavenge on the fallen, and carry numerous diseases. In siege conditions starving garrisons have found roast or stewed rat a valuable source of protein. During WW II, the USAAF experimented with bats, who were to be fitted with incendiary devices and released over Japan, where it was hoped that they would roost under the eaves of wood and paper buildings before the incendiaries ignited.
The military have long sought to use wild animals as auxiliaries. Samson's legendary exploits included the destruction of Philistine crops by releasing 150 pairs of foxes with torches tied to their tails. The classical Hindu treatise on statecraft, the Arthasastra, recommends the use of monkeys or birds to set fire to the thatched roofs of enemy towns. Even the friendly and highly intelligent dolphin has been trained by the US navy to serve in roles similar to those performed on land by dogs, including planting or finding explosive devices, and patrolling to detect and attack enemy frogmen. The US army has experimented with coyotes, ferrets, skunks, and racoons as landmine detectors.
Homing or ‘carrier’ pigeons are known to have been used in Mesopotamia as early as c.1150 bc and have been employed for this purpose in various times and places ever since. During WW I, the British army alone used some 10, 000 carrier pigeons, with a 95 per cent successful delivery rate, despite many birds arriving injured by enemy action or hawk attacks. The services of their French comrades are memorialized in the citadel of Lille. During WW II, the British employed 20, 000 homing pigeons. Many aircrews of RAF bombers forced to come down in the sea owed their rescue to such messengers. Canaries were used by military as by civil miners to detect the presence of dangerous gases in their workings. Geese performed the duty of sentinels from the days of Ancient Rome, where a sacred flock was kept on the Capitoline Hill to commemorate their giving warning of a night attack by the Gauls during the sack of Rome (390-386 bc).
Many insects harbour diseases to which soldiers are as vulnerable as other men, but often without the acquired immunity of the native inhabitants of the countries where they are required to serve. The anopheles mosquito, carrying the scourge of malaria, was the unwitting executioner of thousands of European soldiers sent to garrisons in the West Indies, Africa, or India. The US army fighting in Cuba during the Spanish-American war and subsequently in the Philippines insurrection, lost far more men to malaria than to enemy action. During WW I, insects played a direct part in the battle of Tanga during the German East Africa campaign in October 1914, when the attacking Indian troops were routed by swarms of angry wild bees. On the western front, one officer of the British Tank Corps used glow-worms to mark the way forward in the dark. Fleas carrying plague may have been used by the Japanese in China in the 1930s. In the Vietnam war, the US army tried using parasitic bugs (creatures stimulated by the approach of humans) to detect enemy infiltrators.
Many kinds of animals have been adopted as mascots, sometimes with official approval to enhance the appearance of units on ceremonial parades or otherwise build up esprit de corps. These include goats, ponies, rams, antelopes, bears, and tigers. Smaller creatures such as piglets, rabbits, cats, and dogs are the more usual companions of sentimental soldiers. A domestic fowl, ‘Myrtle the Parachick’, made several landings with the British 4th Parachute Brigade and was killed at Arnhem. Dogs remain the favoured companion of most soldiers, in legend as in history. Homer's Odyssey records the name of ‘Argos’, Odysseus' dog, the only creature to recognize him when he returned to Ithaca from the Trojan war. In the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, the hero Yudhisthira refuses to enter heaven without his faithful dog (generally regarded as the only favourable mention of this animal in all Sanskrit literature). In the British civil wars, Prince Rupert's dog ‘Boy’, regarded by his Puritan enemies as his familiar spirit, was killed at Marston Moor. In the late 1970s, during the troubles in Northern Ireland, ‘Rats’, a stray terrier, achieved fame by attaching himself to successive British units in their dangerous post at Crossmaglen. He was deemed a ‘legitimate target’ by the IRA, but survived several wounds and eventually retired to a Kentish farm.
Bibliography
- Cooper, Jilly, Animals in War (London, 1983).
- Gray, Ernest A., Dogs of War (London, 1989).
- Harfield, Alan, Pigeon to Packhorse (Chippenham, 1989)
— Tony Heathcote
