Page 6 - Animals Go to War: From Dogs to Dolphins

When Judy was born, China controlled Shanghai, one of its most
important cities. Shanghai had a large community of Americans,
British, and other foreigners who lived and traded with the Chinese.
Five years earlier, in 1931, Japan had taken over Manchuria, a part of
China northeast of Shanghai. In 1932 the Japanese bombed Shanghai
in a vicious attack hoping to gain more land. After a few weeks of
fierce fighting between Japanese and Chinese forces, the League
of Nations (a peacekeeping organization that preceded the United
Nations) forced a treaty between the two countries. The agreement
allowed only a few Japanese troops to remain in Shanghai along with
the many international citizens and their military representatives. To
protect against further Japanese aggression in Shanghai, the British
kept part of its Royal Navy in China. It also maintained a fleet of small
maneuverable gunboats on the Yangtze River, which flows into the
East China Sea.
A few months after Lee Ming returned Judy to her kennels, two
British sailors from the gunboat HMS Gnat visited the kennels looking
for a ship mascot. When Charles Jeffery, the Gnat’s bosun (the person
in charge of ship maintenance), whistled at Judy, she jumped into his
arms. He took Judy back to the ship. “She is the most lovable creature,”
Jeffery wrote in his diary. “The ship’s company love and treat Judy
as a pet, and I am delighted that the men share her.” By the next
year, China and Japan were at war. The British were then neutral.
But Japanese planes harassed and attacked the Gnat and other British
gunboats on the Yangtze. Judy heard the planes and howled to warn
her shipmates of incoming enemy aircraft.
With the threat of world war on the horizon, Judy and her human
shipmates transferred to a bigger gunboat called the HMS Grasshopper.
They steamed to Singapore, home to Britain’s largest naval base in
the Pacific region. Frank Williams, a member of the British Royal Air
Force (RAF), arrived in Singapore in 1941. On December 7, 1941, the
Japanese attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The day

8 Animals Go to War