The Diggers' Menagerie: Mates, Mascots and Marvels - True Stories of Animals Who Went to War

By Barry Stone

The fascinating stories of Australian and New Zealand soldiers and the animals that have accompanied them, from the Boer War through to the conflict in Afghanistan.
From the Boer War to the conflict in Vietnam, from the Somme to Afghanistan, from beasts of burden and bomb detectors to providers of companionship and light relief for the men and women in war, animals have played a vital role in Australian military campaigns. Dogs, cats, pigeons, camels and horses among others, all took part.Here Barry Stone documents, through letters, journals, photographs and first-hand accounts, the stories of the myriad creatures who went off to various wars with Australian soldiers - adding a poignant layer to our military history. Highlighting individual stories, he follows not just their wartime adventures, but in some cases what happened to animals after the wars had ended, who survived and how.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Mar 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780730496953

Barry Stone

Barry Stone is a freelance writer and researcher. His previous books include HISTORY'S GREATEST HEADLINES(Murdoch Books, October 2010); MUTINIES ON THE HIGH SEA (Murdoch Books, February 2011) and PRISON BREAKOUTS (Murdoch Books, April 2011).

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Contents

Cover

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

The Second Boer War (1899–1902)

CHAPTER TWO

The Great War (1914–18)

The Paintings of Harold Septimus Power

Simpson and his Donkey

CHAPTER THREE

The Second World War (1939–1945)

People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA)

The RSPCA: Rescuing Animals on the Home Front

The USSR’s Secret Weapon

Project Pigeon

Release the Bats!

CHAPTER FOUR

Korea, Malaya & Vietnam

The Malayan Emergency (1950–1960)

The Vietnam War (1962–1975)

Stan, the Tobacco-chewing Ram

CHAPTER FIVE

Keeping the Peace: Somalia, East Timor and the Solomon Islands

1993 – Somalia

1999 – East Timor

2003 – The Solomon Islands

CHAPTER SIX

Afghanistan (2001–)

Lest We Forget

Bibliography

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

Introduction

The first animal to be adapted for military use was the horse. Domesticated on the Eurasian steppes near present-day Ukraine around 5,500 years ago, horses were raised mostly for their meat, and archaeological findings suggest it wasn’t long before herdsmen began to ride them. In the late second millennium BCE larger horses were being bred in Eurasia and central Asia, allowing for sustained riding and the emergence of the first cavalry units around 900BCE. The horse’s evolution into a vehicle for war was a gradual one and had come on the back of three pivotal inventions: the chariot, the saddle and the stirrup. The stirrup allowed horsemen to traverse vast distances in relative comfort, and in the first millennium CE the breast-and-shoulder harness was invented, superseding the inefficient throat-and-girth harness. Control over horses enabled the elite to exercise their power over large areas of land. They could now subjugate, intimidate and dominate peasant communities within their own borders – and covet and acquire new lands beyond those borders.

Horses were used extensively as cavalry by Muslim armies throughout the Middle East in the seventh and eighth centuries, and in the 13th century became draught animals for the first time when gunpowder began to be adapted for use in artillery. With the development of heavy artillery pieces in the 19th century, sturdier, heavier breeds were used to haul increasingly burdensome loads. During the American Civil War it was calculated that a single artillery horse could haul 1,300 kilograms over 30 kilometres in a single day if the roads were paved, and 500 kilograms if the ground was rough. One and a half million horses perished during the four years of America’s Civil War.

The use of elephants in warfare is first recorded in the eighth century BCE Indian epic the Mahabharata, 400 years before Alexander the Great used them to help guard his tent while campaigning. In 225 BCE, as Roman Legions advanced on Carthage, the Carthaginians placed 100 elephants side by side in front of their own infantry. The Romans ‘fell in heaps’ according to the Greek historian Polybius as the elephants encircled them. ‘The greater number,’ Polybius wrote in The Histories, ‘were trampled to death by the vast weight of the elephants, while the remainder were shot down by the numerous cavalry in their ranks as they stood.’

Not even insects were spared in warfare. The ancient Romans catapulted beehives over the defensive walls of medieval towns and forts to create confusion prior to an attack. In the 11th century the soldiers of Henry I of England hurled bees into the army of Duke Giselbert of Lorraine, and during the Third Crusade in the 12th century, King Richard the Lionheart threw beehives into the ranks of the Saracens.

War dogs have been deployed on the battlefields of Europe and Asia for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks and Persians wrapped their dogs in armour and adorned their necks with spiked collars to prevent enemy dogs from tearing away their dogs’ soft flesh. The Roman Empire took hundreds of giant Molossian dogs with them on their conquests, sending them into battle not only with spiked collars on their necks but around their ankles too. The Molossians – most likely ancestors of the Tibetan mastiff – were starved by the Romans prior to a fight; their jaws, capable of exerting up to 1,500 pounds (around 680 kilograms) of pressure per square inch, could crush the bones of their adversaries.

The first-century Roman historian Pliny the Elder left several accounts of dogs charging down heavily armed human opposition, without any regard for the odds or their own well-being. In the first book of Natural History, Pliny wrote:

Two hundred dogs restored from Exile a King of the Garamantes; fighting against all that opposed him. The Colophonians … possessed Squadrons (Cohorts) of Dogs for War; and these were put in front of the battle, and were never known to draw back.’

Attila the Hun took Molossian dogs on his marches of conquest through Europe in the fifth century, while the Middle Ages saw the continued development of canine body armour such as chest plates and hinged side-plates. The Irish used wolfhounds to attack marauding Norman conquerors in the 12th century; Frederick the Great used dogs as messengers during the Seven Years War (1756–63); and in 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte chained dogs outside the fortifications surrounding the Egyptian city of Alexandria to provide an early warning against night-time assaults. Napoleon even took poodles into battle. He ordered their hair be brushed out to ‘puff them up’ so they would appear as larger targets in the hope enemy fire would pass through their fur and leave their bodies unharmed.

Australia’s story of involving animals in battle began when it sent 40,000 horses to assist the British in South Africa during the Second Boer War of 1899–1902. In the Great War, the Imperial Camel Corps participated in campaigns throughout the Sinai and Palestine, and the Walers of the 4th Light Horse Brigade charged towards and then over the entrenched lines of Turkish machine guns at Beersheba. In the Second World War Australian pigeon fanciers donated their birds to the military who used them to keep lines of communication open across the inhospitable highlands of Papua New Guinea when heat and humidity combined to render useless a unit’s portable wireless.

As the world’s armies became increasingly mechanised, the need for animals to haul artillery and supply wagons ended. Advances in communications technology saw pigeon corps disbanded; horses were left overseas and sold as remounts, given over to local communities or sold to butchers; and donkeys and mules again became beasts of burden. Dogs, however, still had skills that technology could not surpass. As new threats evolved, dogs were trained in how to counter them – tracker dogs became Mine Detection Dogs, and as explosives became more complex, the dogs were trained to become the Explosives Detection Dogs the Australian military are using to locate Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Afghanistan today.

Animals have made an essential contribution to the conflicts in which Australia has participated in over the last two centuries. Animals have been through the muck and mire of battle beside soldiers of their country and other allied nations. These loyal beasts, toiling away in the background, are the often forgotten victims of war.

CHAPTER ONE

The Second Boer War

(1899–1902)

I’m in favour of the war, and of half-a-dozen more;

And I think we should have had one long before

There is nothing to deplore; I’m in favour of the war

Independent of all statements made by Briton or by Boer.

‘The Blessings of War’ by Henry Lawson, 1899

In 1899 Australia was into its fourth year of the seven-year-long Federation Drought, which killed half the nation’s sheep and almost half of its cattle and for six months bled the Murray River dry; the leaders of the six colonial governments met in Melbourne to discuss the pros and cons of confederation, and southern New South Wales was chosen as the region for the new ‘bush capital’; an electric tramcar, with two timber bench seats able to carry 22 passengers and an outside canopy over its driver, rattled along George Street towards Circular Quay for the first time; and Merriwee, a three-year-old colt from Condoblin, won the 39th Melbourne Cup.

Contemporary estimates put Australia’s population in 1899 at about 3,700,000 (not including Indigenous Australians, who were ignored in official statistics but whose numbers are estimated to have been anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million). Australia was also home to more than 1.5 million horses; around half a horse for every non-Indigenous man, woman and child in the country.

Then in November 1899, in what would be the first of five phased troop deployments over the coming three years, our six colonial governments began kitting out and despatching their first contingents of soldiers to South Africa to assist the ruling British in their growing conflict with the local Dutch Boer settlers that had been raging since war was declared by the Boer Republic on 11 October.

The pioneering settlers in the United States conquered the West under the banner of the doctrine of ‘Manifest Destiny’, the belief that God had given them the task of settling the ‘New World’ regardless of the presence of the land’s traditional owners. The Boer, too, believed their land had been bequeathed to them by God and their stewardship of it reflected as much: they were beyond the threats and pronouncements of the British government. They had been there for generations, ever since the ‘trekboere’, semi-nomadic pastoralists, arrived in the eighteenth century and began to settle the sparsely populated regions of the Great Karoo. This was their land and it would not be surrendered without a fight. And to make sure they were in a position to wage that fight, the government of the Transvaal had been busily buying up weapons and ammunition since 1897, including Krupp artillery and Vickers machine guns.

When 8,000 Dutch men, women and children packed up and embarked on their Mormon-like ‘Great Trek’ north in 1836 over the Drakensberg Mountains and the high veldt, into the lands that would soon come to be called Transvaal and Orange Free State – lands previously considered by the British to be worthless – few but the region’s traditional owners, who the Dutch displaced, took much notice. However, when diamonds were discovered at Kimberley on the Orange River in 1867, attempts by the British to gain control of the region were quickly set in motion, resulting in the annexation of the Griquas territory in 1871 and the annexation of Transvaal in 1877. The Transvaal Rebellion or First Boer War (1880–81) saw the Dutch successfully re-establish their sovereignty. Despite gold being discovered in pockets throughout the Transvaal in the 1870s and early 1880s, production levels remained low. This led to a relatively benign period of peaceful coexistence between the Boer and the British (once the issue of Transvaal independence was settled) until a chance discovery of gold on a farm by British prospector George Harrison in 1886 – the discovery that ignited the famous Witwatersrand Gold Rush.

As a result of that single find, 17,000 square miles of land became a public gold field open to whoever possessed a pan and a sieve. The country’s mineral revolution was now in full swing, and South Africa would never be the same again. The gold seam, the largest ever discovered, resulted in the creation of the city of Johannesburg and a new socio-economic class of miners and industrialists determined to protect their interests. Transvaal, close to bankruptcy in 1885 was, by 1896, earning in excess of 4 million pounds a year. It was now wealthier and had greater economic influence than the British-owned Cape Colony, a fact that convinced the British government that it was high time Transvaal entered the Empire.

Miners soon flooded into the Transvaal from across the world, which, in turn, ignited bitter resentment among the Dutch. The illegal settling by British citizens of non-British lands coupled with British ownership of the mines was bad enough, but when the British government insisted that the 65,000 expatriate Britons now mining the gold fields of the Witwatersrand be allowed to vote, thus threatening to make the Dutch a politically disenfranchised minority within their own territory, this was a step too far. The Boer president of the Transvaal, Paul Kruger, baulked and called for the immediate withdrawal of British troops. The British refused and Kruger declared war.

For those in Australia wishing to enlist, a set of criteria, which varied slightly from colony to colony, had to be met. Recruits needed to be medically fit, older than 21, and not apprenticed to a profession. They were required to pass an exam on the subject of military discipline and the importance of maintaining a proper chain of command, as well as a marksmanship and riding test.

Over the course of the three-year conflict Australia sent just over 16,300 men to fight in South Africa. Virtually all joined as mounted troops, imbued with the idea that as ‘bushmen’ they were natural combatants whose lives spent riding and acquiring the skills of horsemanship back home were little more than preparation for the adventures on which they were about to embark.

Support for the maintenance of a strong mounted militia in Australia had been the consensus since the withdrawal of Britain’s garrison troops from the colony in 1870–71, and was made a matter of policy in 1877. In a country like Australia, with a small population and large expanses of land, this strategy made a lot of sense. Not only were mounted troops able to advance on and retire from enemy lines at speed, they could also pack six days’ worth of rations as well as axes, picks and shovels into their saddlebags, enabling them to travel independently of columns of infantry, forced to plod along while herding their cattle, some of which they would slaughter each day for food.

The West Australian government sent the 1st Western Australian Mounted Infantry, and mounted rifle and infantry units sailed from South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania, all bound for Cape Town, where they were organised into the 1st Australian Regiment and placed under the command of the astute and innovative military strategist Colonel Sir John Hoad. December also saw the arrival of the 250-strong 1st Queensland Mounted Infantry. Queensland was not only the first colony to offer Britain troops, but even magnanimously insured the lives of every Queenslander sent to South Africa for a period of 12 months at a cost of 250 pounds per man.

The first Australian soldiers to arrive in South Africa’s Cape Colony were two officers and 70 non-commissioned officers of the New South Wales Lancers. By the beginning of the new century, the reputation of the New South Wales Lancers for discipline, horsemanship and fighting spirit had spread to every town in the country, and their numbers swelled accordingly, from 428 men in 1898 to almost 700 by the end of 1902. There was a visible sense of pride within the Lancer ranks and they had benefited from years of training at the hands of seasoned veterans within the British military. By the 1890s the lances, the weapons that had given the Lancers their name, were only used ceremonially, being next to useless in battle against forces armed with rifles.

If you were a Lancer, the regiment was your life. If not on active service, Lancers were expected to be available for every parade, ceremony and government function as well as tournaments, public displays and community events. Troopers participated in as many as two parades a week with some squadrons called upon so frequently that they could make themselves available with as little as 24 hours’ notice of a hastily arranged social or vice-regal occasion. The Lancers were, in effect, ‘on call’ seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. Lancers were also expected to attend the organisation’s social functions, contribute to its benevolent fund, participate in its regimental camps twice a year, and escort their wives or sweethearts to the annual Lancer Ball.

The Lancers, who had been training with the British regular cavalry in England since arriving in London the previous April, disembarked the SS Nineveh at Cape Town on 2 November. They were the first volunteer troops to arrive from either England or its colonies and during a time when the idea of volunteering in the armed forces was still very much in its infancy. They had left England in such a hurry that there was no time to organise horses. But let not the absence of horses stand in the way of a New South Wales Lancer! Within days the Lancers were inland at Stellenbosch, rounding up and training dozens of wild Cape horses, most of them no higher than 14 hands, which prompted the Australians to nickname the horses ‘the guinea-pigs’. Some of the horses were so small that the Lancers would have to lift their feet from the stirrups over rough ground so as not to dash their feet.

The Lancers were attached to the 1st Cavalry Brigade of Major-General John French, and lost little time in carving out an enviable reputation. Two weeks after their arrival and with their broken-in Cape horses beneath them, engagements at De Aar Junction, Belmont and Modder River saw 29 Lancers under the command of Lieutenant Osborne begin to be referred to as ‘The Fighting Twenty-Nine’ by their British counterparts. Back home in Sydney, the city’s premier daily newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, said of the 29:

[they] possess the proud distinction of having men who hold the record for engagements, against the whole of the regiments in the British Empire.

It was not hyperbole. Eight men in the squadron eventually came to wear with distinction the maximum ‘eight battle bars’ on the Queen’s Medal, one for each of the battles in which they had fought: Belfast, Paardeberg, Modder River, Driefontein, Kimberley, Johannesburg, Diamond Hills, and Belmont.

And then there was the 1st Australian Horse, raised in 1897 and made up entirely of New South Wales volunteers, mostly farmers’ sons, station hands and bushmen from the pastoral districts of Braidwood, Bungendore, Goulburn, Cootamundra, Gundagai, Gunnedah, Scone, Mudgee, Rylstone and Quirindi.

The 1st Australian Horse was the creative vision of one man: James Mackay. An outstanding horseman, in 1885 Mackay had organised a volunteer troop, the West Camden Light Horse, and, 12 years later, in 1897, tapped into a resurgent interest throughout New South Wales in the raising of volunteer units to establish the 1st Australian Horse. According to

Reviews for The Diggers' Menagerie

[scuzzy_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Before heading away on holiday to spend some quality time with the wife and kids I got a bunch of books out of the library to read…so pretty much sealed the fate of the holiday. Well, no, not really, I just love to read and also (before you start flaying me alive) had plenty of fun with the family.So this was the first book I read while away which I wasn’t sure if I would get into; I love animals, no doubt being some sort of Dr Doolittle myself, and I love books on war too. However combining the two didn’t grab me, but this book is a very good read.While the title (in full, “The Digger’s Menagerie – Mates, Mascots, and Marvels – True Stories of Animals Who Went to War) suggests it is a historical account of Aussie fauna doing its bit against evil and tyranny it does also drop the odd tale of famous animals from other nations, amongst them an American dog famous for sniffing out a German soldier and then chasing him down on the run, Napoleon’s Poodles (yep, you heard right), ‘Unsinkable Sam’, the survivor of no less than three sinkings at sea and so on.Starting with the Boer War this is a very good record of the cost that our four-legged and winged friends also paid in the theatre of war – the stats of Aussie’s sought after horses in Sth Africa and WWI are shocking to say the least, the life expectancy (if they survived the trip) was less than six weeks alone. And those that did survive were left abroad due to Australia’s tough quarantine laws.Pigeons had it tough too, used extensively in WWI and II it seems that both sides not only had a Pigeon Corps, but an anti-Pigeon Corps ranging from a barrage of rifles to trained falcons to bring them down in flight. The humble pigeon, the bane of town councils the world over is actually a remarkable bird. Second fastest in flight, it is also able to navigate its way by following actual roads and junctions!The book continues into Korea, Malaya, Vietnam and finally into Afghanistan and Iraq where the horses and pigeons have moved aside for the most adaptable combat animal – the dog. As an owner of two dogs I am well aware of just how clever they can be, and trained right we see them as disposal experts, drug sniffers, guards, and rescue animals, but the thought of them actually being faced with enemy fire, being blown apart by mines or shells, or shot as spies can be beyond belief – we make a conscious decision to fight war, what choice do they have? However, unlike with previous wars, of late Aussie restrictions on overseas travel has allowed dogs of war to return home, to be repatriated with families after retirement. The anguish as handler and mutt are separated is traumatic, if necessary, and it is this bond between man and beast which makes this book…A good, easy read, a recommendation for any animal lover.