The Tragic Unknown Lives of Animal Soldiers in WWII

Rather than training the dogs to drop explosives, the Soviets rigged up an explosive vest that would detonate automatically once the canine was underneath the tank. This would obviously kill the dog, but in the grim mathematics of war, this was reckoned a net positive for the Soviets. After all, it’s easier to train a new dog than build a new tank. But if the idea worked in theory, it wasn’t as useful in practice. The dogs were trained to run underneath tanks, but they often had a hard time telling a Soviet tank from a German tank.

So assuming that they could get the dogs to run underneath a moving tank, there was no guarantee it would be the right one. And that was already a big assumption. As it turns out, most dogs were reluctant to run underneath 23 tons of rolling armor. Many dogs would instinctively bolt back towards the Soviet lines, detonating their explosives there. While the Soviets claimed that the dogs knocked out hundreds of German tanks, they probably weren’t nearly as effective in combat as Soviet planners hoped. And other armies found that dogs are much more useful when you don’t try to turn them into bombs.

America also used dogs in the war

The Americans, for instance, used dogs extensively during the war as sentries and guards who alerted their handlers of enemy troops trying to sneak through the lines. And dogs often served as messengers delivering orders between units on the battlefield. Attempts were even made to train dogs to detect mines, a standard use of canines in war today. But due to a lack of understanding about how dogs can detect the scent of explosives, the army tried to teach them to recognize disturbed patches of dirt instead, and the dogs didn’t perform well enough to make them effective tools for finding mines.

The Americans also tried to train dogs to do some more disturbing tasks. In the earlier years of the war, the Americans fell on the idea of training packs of dogs to attack Japanese people indiscriminately. They could then be released on Japanese-held islands in the Pacific and clear out the defenders. A number of Japanese-American soldiers were chosen to serve as bait to train the dogs to only attack Japanese people, the idea being that the dogs would be able to tell an American soldier apart from a Japanese one. But the program made little progress and was ultimately scrapped.

That’s not to suggest that dogs were useless in war. One of the most famous dogs in the American Army was Chips, a sentry dog who saw action across Europe. During the invasion of Sicily, Chips found himself pinned down with his unit in front of an Italian machine gun nest. Chips broke free from his handler and ran into the gun emplacement, attacking the Italians inside. The gunners fled the pillbox and surrendered to the Americans. Chips was awarded a number of official medals, but these were revoked due to army policy, and Chips was given some unofficial commendations by the men in his unit instead.

Corporal Wojtek: the Polish Bear and Hero of WWII

Of course, it wasn’t just dogs and horses that played a role in World War II. One of the most distinguished soldiers of the conflict was actually a bear named Wojtek. Wojtek was purchased as a cub by a Polish soldier who had him officially enlisted in the Polish army at the rank of private. Wojtek served throughout the Italian Campaign with his unit, and during the Battle of Monte Casino, he famously helped carry artillery shells to the guns without dropping a single crate. In recognition of his efforts, Wojtek was promoted to Corporal before retiring to a zoo at war’s end.

In addition to bears, pigeons played a significant role in the war. The British army employed hundreds of thousands of birds in a traditional role as messengers, relaying important messages over significant distances. But attempts were also made to weaponize the pigeon. During the war, famous behavior scientist B.F. Skinner led a project fittingly named “Project Pigeon.” The idea behind the project was to find a way to train pigeons to guide bombs into targets. To do this, the pigeons were taught to peck at an image on a screen in front of them.

Whenever the target drifted out of the center of the screen, the pigeons would peck at it, guiding it back into line. After placing the birds into a glider bomb, this behavior would let them steer bombs into their targets, effectively creating pigeon-guided missiles. For his part, Skinner was very confident that he could have a working weapon ready within a few years. But the military didn’t share his enthusiasm for the project, and it was canceled to make way for other weapons. It was however briefly revived after the war before radar guidance systems began to make the whole concept obsolete.

However, the strangest attempt by far to turn animals into weapons during the war has to be the “Bat Bomb,” which was in development under the codename “Project X-Ray.” The idea was to create a canister with thousands of nesting bats that could be dropped from the air. Once the bats dispersed, they would nest under the roofs of Japanese buildings. Each bat would have a time-activated incendiary bomb on its leg that would detonate at a certain time, spreading fires across the entire city. Luckily for the bats, the Atomic Bomb project was nearing completion and made the Bat Bomb unnecessary.

Of course, while most of the animal-based weapons like the Bat Bomb proved to be busted, animals still played a huge part in the war. And in many ways, the conflict was a transition point for the way people use animals in war. Older roles like pulling equipment were proven to be obsolete, while newer, more innovative uses like detecting mines were born. Many of the roles for animals first invented during the war are still in use today. And as war continues to change, no doubt the roles of animals will change as well. But they will almost certainly still be there.

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