Military Dogs at War: Pelusium, Sergeant Stubby and Smoky the Yorkie

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The story of dogs in war runs from armored mastiffs to parachuting special operators. Greek and Roman armies fitted mastiffs with metal plates and spiked collars and loosed them to break enemy formations. In 525 BC at Pelusium, the Persian king Cambyses II placed dogs and other animals sacred to the Egyptians on his front line, and the Egyptian defenders reportedly stopped firing rather than kill them. In World War I the Belgian army hitched the Matin Belge to Maxim guns and supply carts, and trainers solved the two master problem so messenger dogs would run between two handlers through artillery fire.

Not every program worked. Soviet anti-tank dogs, trained to find food under stationary Russian tanks, ran back toward their own armor on the battlefield. Marine Corps mine dogs trained with electrified wires could work only 20 to 30 minutes before nervous exhaustion. Dogs in Vietnam detected ambushes, caches and even fighters breathing through reeds underwater, and the Viet Cong put bounties on dogs and handlers; yet at the end of the war the surviving dogs were left behind as surplus equipment. A law signed by President Bill Clinton in 2000 finally allowed retired military dogs to be adopted.

• A four-pound Yorkshire Terrier named Smoky pulled telegraph wire through a 70-foot pipe only eight inches wide.
• Sergeant Stubby, a stray that wandered onto Yale's grounds, warned of shelling and caught a German spy, becoming World War I's most decorated dog.
• The Army Surgeon General gave medals to research dogs Trixie and Josie; the controversy helped pass the Laboratory Animal Welfare Act of 1966.
• After Abu Ghraib, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld banned using dogs to intimidate detainees.
• Belgian Malinois such as Cairo, on the 2011 bin Laden raid, and Conan, on the 2019 al-Baghdadi raid, now jump from aircraft wearing cameras.