Page 5 - 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
Judy’s 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.

would see her. “She was more dead than alive,” one survivor recalled.
“She had totally given herself to the drowning men.”
Who was POW # 81A? Judy—a purebred English pointer.

GUNBOAT JUDY

Judy wasn’t 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 Judy’s littermates.
But Judy’s fate would be very different from theirs.

Comrades in War 7