Judy: The Unforgettable Story of the Dog Who Went to War and Became a True Hero (10 page)

Whenever a flight of Japanese warplanes flew over Wuhu, using the Yangtze to navigate inland to their target, those Chinese medics
would sneak onto the roof to send a radio warning in Morse code. Thus Hankow was forewarned, and the P-26 Peashooters were able to appear as if by magic to blast the Japanese aircraft out of the sky. Eventually the Japanese would discover that the radio messages were being sent, but they were never able to locate the transmitter hidden on the roof of the American Mission Hospital.

As far as possible, the giving away of Judy's puppies was a gradual process so as to soften the blow. First choice went naturally to the officers and men of the
Francis Garnier
. Next in line was the Hankow Race Club, which made an offer that the ship's captain felt unable to refuse: one Lewis light machine gun and four magazines of ammunition in exchange for the puppy. Further pups went to diplomatic staff based in Hankow, and one of the last was gifted to the American gunboat the USS
Guam
.

The tenth and final puppy went to a Scottish engineer who served aboard one of the steamers still operating on the Yangtze. Once more Judy was reduced to the company of her two-legged family on a diminutive British warship increasingly feeling the wrath of the Japanese. And in the coming days the steel of the gunboat crew was about to be tested as never before.

Toward the end of the summer of 1938, with Japanese troops poised to take Hankow, a Chinese customs ship, the
Chianghsing
, was out on the river moving marker buoys in an effort to make it more difficult for Japanese warships to navigate into the city's harbor. Spotted from the air, the
Chianghsing
was pounced on by Japanese aircraft and strafed and bombed.

With his ship sinking and on fire, Captain Crowley, the
Chianghsing
's British commander, rammed her into the riverbank in an effort to allow the crew to escape. But in the process of getting his men onto land, Captain Crowley, his first officer, and his engineer were machine-gunned by the Japanese warplanes. All three were killed. Several of the crew members were wounded, and the Japanese aircraft loitered in the skies seeking out survivors.

The
Gnat
was the nearest British warship that could go to their aid. She steamed out onto the Yangtze, needing only the thick black pall of oily smoke to guide her to the crippled vessel. With her men at action stations and her guns at the ready—plus one dog barking furious warnings about the danger in the skies—she sailed under the circling warplanes and lowered both of her boats. The
Gnat
's crewmen were able to reach the survivors and evacuate them, along with the bodies of the dead, and for whatever reason the Japanese aircraft failed to interfere.

Shortly afterward, the
Gnat
received a gift of two footballs from the Hankow Customs House. With them was a handwritten letter of thanks from those on the staff most closely connected with the sinking of the
Chianghsing
. It summed up the wonderful esprit de corps exhibited by all aboard the
Gnat,
both man and dog.

But no amount of such selfless gallantry could prevent the Japanese from overrunning the city of the gunboats.

With the coming of the winter monsoon, fierce winds blew the Japanese invaders into Hankow. In the final moments the Chinese resistance had decided that it was better to melt into the bush and live to fight another day than to launch a last-ditch defense of the city. As Japanese warplanes buzzed overhead and Japanese warships steamed into dock at the Hankow Bund, heavily armed Japanese sentries were posted all across this, the newest Chinese city to fall under their dominion.

Aboard the
Gnat
, moored at her customary resting place beside the hulk, the chill wind of an approaching enmity blew across the
decks and along the corridors. In her ammo-box-cum-bed on the ship's bridge, Judy lifted her fine head and sensed the changed atmosphere that had descended upon her surroundings. The homely clatter and chatter of Chinese port life had been replaced by the low murmur of a people under an occupation of unprecedented savagery.

Judy's first confrontation with the invaders was not long in coming. Just a few days after the fall of Hankow, Bonny—her erstwhile midwife—and Leading Seaman Law—her giant of a protector—took her for her customary early morning walk around the Bund. The trio had completed their usual circuit without incident and were returning to the
Gnat
when trouble stepped onto the riverfront before them in the form of one of the dozens of Japanese sentries posted there.

Judy, in her customary fashion, trotted over and took a sniff of his knee-length boots. The sentry's reaction was as unexpected as it was inept and was bound to cause trouble. Within seconds his voice had risen to a screaming frenzy as he berated the ship's dog and her two fellow crew members. With flecks of spittle at his thin lips, the enraged guard gestured for the dog—and her sailor companions—to get the hell out of there.

Judy stood her ground. She raised her head from his boots, and no doubt with early memories coursing through her head of Soo, her Shanghai protector, and the beating he had endured, she curled her lips into a silent snarl. The sentry took a step backward, his face puce with rage. His hand went to his rifle, he unslung it, and the sharp
clatch-clatch
of steel on steel rang out across the largely deserted dock as he chambered a round.

The sentry went to level his gun, but this was no ordinary dog that he intended to shoot here: this was a dog of the Royal Navy, the mascot of the gunboat HMS
Gnat
, and a fully fledged veteran member of her crew. Leading Seaman Law didn't so much as hesitate. The massive form of the crewman barreled forward, shoved Judy aside, and lifted the diminutive sentry into the air, and with him screaming unintelligible abuse Law threw both man and rifle over the dockside.

There was a despairing scream truncated by a splash, and the sentry was no more. Bonny, Law, and Judy made haste for their ship. Knowing how many of the Japanese soldiers were hopeless swimmers, the trio paused only long enough to see the bedraggled sentry crawl ashore before hurrying aboard to report the incident. The first reactions from the Japanese weren't long in coming.

After an exchange of terse messages, a stiff-legged officer from the Imperial Japanese Army was piped aboard the
Gnat
, complete with a sword that threatened to trip him. Of necessity, the British gunboat captains had learned to be consummate diplomats. During the past year of hostilities superhuman efforts at diplomacy had been required to navigate the Yangtze. Accordingly, Judy had been well hidden, and by the time the Japanese visitor had departed he'd been mollified via a combination of soothing verbal exchanges and plenty of ship's rum.

There were several further such visits as the Japanese commanders tried to ascertain how and why one of the “glorious liberators” had been treated with such disrespect and who exactly was responsible for
the dog
. But the stocks of wardroom rum obviously held out, for nothing more was ever said to Bonny and Law about the incident. Yet one signal change was afoot: Judy of Sussex was henceforth confined to the ship.

Any further close encounters between Judy and the Japanese might well prove the death of her.

Chapter Seven

By the turn of the year the gunboats of the British fleet were becoming decidedly old ships. Launched in 1916, they'd first seen service during the First World War and were approaching a quarter of a century in age. For some time now the Admiralty had been intending to replace them with more capable, modern warships.

In the early months of 1939 the first of those new vessels, HMS
Scorpion, Grasshopper,
and
Dragonfly
, sailed from Britain to take over duties from the veteran gunboats HMS
Bee, Ladybird,
and
Gnat
. The first vessel, HMS
Scorpion
, the new flagship of the fleet, had been built at a cost of £168,000. She was the model design for her sister ships.

Slightly shorter and narrower in the beam than the
Bee
, HMS
Scorpion
nevertheless boasted greater speed, armaments, and protection than her predecessor, plus more powerful communications and targeting facilities. Bulletproof plating was fixed around her pair of 4-inch guns, her eight .50-caliber machine guns, wheelhouse, wireless office, and vulnerable machinery housings.

But ironically, these new and more potent warships would hit the waters of the Yangtze just as the rule of the gunboats was all but over.

In June 1939 the crew of the
Gnat
—ship's dog included—transferred to their gleaming new home, HMS
Grasshopper
. Much was different aboard the vessel. She came with a new captain, one Lieutenant Commander Edward Neville, which meant that by now
both of those who had purchased Judy from the Shanghai Dog Kennels—Chief Petty Officer Jefferey and Lieutenant Commander Waldegrave—were no longer at her side.

HMS
Grasshopper
also had a crew of seventy-five, meaning that the atmosphere aboard ship was somewhat less tight-knit and convivial than it had been on the
Gnat
. Sadly, Judy would have to make do without even the companionship of Bonny and Law, for they were remaining with the
Gnat
as part of her skeleton crew. Yet it was now, just when all the certainties of the previous years were being taken from her, that Judy would face the greatest challenges of her life so far.

Hardly had the ship's crew gotten used to their new vessel when Britain declared war on a belligerent Germany. Japan had still to enter into the hostilities, yet few doubted upon whose side she would fight when this truly became the second conflict of the twentieth century to menace the entire world. The
Grasshopper
had barely had the chance to enjoy a few good turns of her screw up the Yangtze when she was ordered by the Admiralty to set sail for open seas.

The
Grasshopper
would accompany the
Scorpion
and the
Dragonfly
steaming via Hong Kong and Macau to the British island stronghold of Singapore. The route would take her some 3,000 kilometers, arguably in the right direction—
away from Japan
—but for Judy this would be the very first time she'd left the Yangtze River valley and headed onto the wide ocean.

Forced to leave her offspring and most of her friends, Judy planted her brave paws on the shifting deck as the
Grasshopper
pulled away from Shanghai, setting a course for the waters of the South China Sea. Behind her, the
Gnat
and many of the other gunboats were preparing to sail to Singapore with skeleton crews. The Yangtze had been the
Gnat
's home for two and a half years and Judy's for three, but neither ship nor ship's dog would ever grace her waters again.

Designed as a river gunboat, HMS
Grasshopper
had only a six-foot six-inch draft. As a result, she rolled, slewed, and heaved her away into the ocean swell, pushing ahead at close to her maximum
speed of seventeen knots. At first Judy was violently seasick. In spite of all the cajoling of those who knew her, she refused to eat or to leave her ammunition-box bed. But finally the crew got her out on deck doing regular exercise in an effort to aid her recovery. By the time the
Grasshopper
was approaching Hong Kong, Judy had found her sea legs and was eating like the proverbial horse. She would never suffer from seasickness again.

Sandwiched between modern-day Malaysia and Indonesia, Singapore was supposedly Britain's unassailable fortress in the Far East, one that would halt Japanese forces in their tracks should Japan declare war. Known as the Gibraltar of the East, this island citadel was protected by massive 15-inch guns dug into apparently impregnable coastal batteries.

Should Japan enter the war, everyone up to Winston Churchill himself expected Singapore to hold out for three months at least, buying time for reinforcements to reach the island fortress and drive back the attackers. Unfortunately, there were several flaws in this assumption. One, the Japanese had air superiority. The British warplanes based at Singapore were few and obsolete, and they were no match for a Japanese Air Force equipped with the Mitsubishi A6M2, the dreaded Zero.

Moreover, the defenders of Singapore possessed few if any tanks, and all of the coastal guns were set on the seaward side of the island. There were none positioned to defend Singapore if an invasion were to come from overland. As an added drawback, though Singapore was well garrisoned, practically none of the troops stationed there had any training in what they were about to face—jungle warfare, a discipline in which the Japanese military was to excel.

But with Japan yet to declare hostilities, the
Grasshopper
and her sister ships arrived in Singapore when it was still a place that lived up to its early wartime reputation of “business—
and pleasure
—as usual.” As the conflict raged across Europe and British and Allied troops were driven out of France, Singapore remained seemingly remote and untouched by the entire conflict.

As for Judy, gradually she was settling into this strange new life aboard a warship that no longer cruised the waters of the mighty Yangtze River. Compared with the months she had spent aboard a gunboat on active duty patrolling China's waterways, Singapore proved remarkably uneventful—but it would remain that way for only so long.

Judy had made a new set of special friends aboard ship, most notably Petty Officer George White, whom she had first met in the strangest of ways. The morning Coxswain White joined the
Grasshopper
at Singapore's Keppel Harbor he strode up the gangway to report for duty, little expecting what was coming. He stepped aboard and threw up a smart salute, only to be half knocked over by something that cannoned into his shoulders and seemed to cling there—before whipping off his sailor's cap!

Coxswain White's attacker was himself a relatively new arrival aboard the ship—Mickey the monkey. The crew of the
Grasshopper
had agreed to look after Mickey temporarily while his ship and crew were away on duties in the Persian Gulf. Judy hated the monkey, but she watched with a peculiar fascination that morning as Coxswain White was assaulted. The man proved more than a match for the monkey. Quick as a flash he grabbed Mickey before he could escape, reclaimed his cap, and dumped the little animal unceremoniously on the deck.

Screeching with rage, Mickey tried to reclaim his prize, but Coxswain White was having none of it. He replaced the cap firmly on his head, and it was then that he spied Judy. Head cocked to one side in amusement, she was sitting well out of range of Mickey, who was attached by a leash to a length of wire running the length of the ship. Coxswain White would have been struck by how beautiful she was if it hadn't been for the fact that she was watching him almost as if she'd set him up.

“She's laughing her silly head off,” he muttered, suspecting that ship's dog and monkey had colluded in the attack.

Very quickly White would learn that there was no love lost between the two animals. The first time Judy had run into Mickey
had been perhaps her most ignominious since her plunge into the Hankow cesspit. Unknown to her, Mickey had just been installed aboard the ship, the wire being strung up with a sliding metal ring so he could shimmy back and forth. Judy had stepped into range, unaware of the threat, and Mickey had proceeded to vault onto her back.

The entire crew appeared to be watching as Judy leaped, bucked, sprang, and cavorted like a rodeo horse, but Mickey had clung on with both hands and would not be thrown. Eventually, confused and defeated, Judy did the same thing she'd done when trapped in the Hankow cesspit—she cried out for help at the top of her lungs. Seemingly realizing the distress he was causing, Mickey had dismounted. He went to try to put a comforting arm around his steed's neck, but Judy was having none of it.

She backed away slowly, keeping her eyes on the little brute until she was able to dart down the mess steps—all to a loud round of applause from the ship's crew. From then on Judy tolerated Mickey, but that was about all. Whenever he succeeded in leaping onto her back, she'd carry him to wherever she was going, suffering in dignified silence. But she was determined to get some enjoyment out of the little devil's presence, which she'd just had in watching him ambush Coxswain White.

A second new arrival joined the gunboat flotilla that day, and like Coxswain White he was fresh out of England. Upon reporting for duty, Leading Stoker Les Searle managed to dodge the cheeky monkey, but very quickly he would be drawn to Judy—a ship's dog who had started to gain legendary status as the staunchest of defenders of the gunboats, a reputation that was about to be tested to the limit and beyond.

Driven by a hunger for natural resources—Japan possessed few of her own—and with the war going badly for Britain and her allies in Europe, Imperial Japan decided now was the time to strike. The chief aim of its carefully coordinated series of surprise attacks was to seize the rich oil and coal reserves of modern-day Malaysia,
Indonesia, Brunei, and the Philippines. With Singapore lying right in the center of the territory that it coveted, the island fortress would have to be pounded into oblivion for the Japanese plan to succeed.

Several thousand miles across the ocean in the mid-Pacific, the American base of Pearl Harbor would also have to be reduced to a burning ruin if Imperial Japan was to prevent U.S. forces from coming to the aid of their allies. American bases on the Philippines—also within easy striking distance of Malaysia and Indonesia—would also have to be bombed into submission.

So it was that at 0400 hours on the morning of December 8, 1941—although it was still December 7 across the international dateline in Hawaii—the first waves of Japanese bombers swept in to hit an unsuspecting Singapore. Simultaneously, flights of Japanese carrier-based warplanes launched a savage attack against Pearl Harbor. Striking with complete surprise, they caused considerable damage to the United States Pacific Fleet. Further Japanese air attacks struck bases in the Philippines as ships landed troops in Malaysia for the overland push on Singapore.

With waves of Japanese warplanes bombing Britain's island fortress, the British warships HMS
Repulse
and
Prince of Wales
set sail from Jamaica to come to her aid. Part of the so-called Force Z, the battleship and battle cruiser had four destroyers as escorts but no protecting shield of air cover. En route they had the misfortune of being spotted by a Japanese submarine, the I-56, which was able to vector the first of the warplanes onto them.

Successive waves of Japanese Mitsubishi G3M bombers—the same type that had bombed the gunboats along the Yangtze—hit the warships with torpedoes and bombs. At 12:35 on December 11 the
Repulse
was the first to go down, with the
Prince of Wales
sinking less than an hour later. Just four enemy warplanes had been lost.

The news that both ships had been sunk was received with utter shock in Britain. Churchill's initial response was one of disbelief. “Are you sure it's true?” he asked. It was a crushing blow for those forces tasked to defend Singapore and to halt the Japanese in their tracks.

Unbelievably, the three Yangtze River gunboats that had ended up in Singapore were now some of the largest warships available to the defenders. In the days that followed Japanese forces rolled onward, pushing ever southward through Malaya (now Malaysia) toward Singapore. The defenders fought valiantly, but they were outgunned, outmaneuvered, and menaced everywhere from the air.

The
Grasshopper
and
Dragonfly
, plus their sister ship, HMS
Scorpion
, were in action repeatedly, although they could move only at night because of the threat from the skies. They bombarded enemy forces, they lifted retreating troops out of the jungle in daring rescue operations, and everywhere they relied upon Judy's ferocious barking as an early-warning system, enabling them to hide from any marauding Japanese warplanes.

In one daring operation the three gunboats evacuated 1,500 British troops from under the very noses of the Japanese, bringing them safely to Singapore. During another mission Leading Stoker Les Searle—who'd only just recently joined the gunboats in Singapore—was put ashore as one of a party of five to try to locate and rescue Allied troops. Instead, his tiny force ran into the enemy in the darkness, and Searle was shot in the leg.

The leading stoker and his fellows made it back to their ship, and he was taken to the naval hospital in Singapore. Since the opening of hostilities Judy had made a habit of accompanying the
Grasshopper
's sick berth attendant during his visits to sick and injured crewmen ashore. She seemed to sense that her presence among the wounded offered them great comfort.

Les Searle knew all about the
Grasshopper
's miracle dog, but the time convalescing with his leg wound was his first real chance to get to know her. As he ran his fingers through her fine, glossy coat, his mind would drift to thoughts of home. That was the beauty of having a dog like Judy aboard ship—or visiting the sick, as she was now. It took minds away from the savagery of the war to thoughts of gentler times, ones that sadly seemed to be fading into a distant past.