We have already spoken here other times about the participation of animals in war. We saw some famous horses, the use of flaming pigs against elephants, the conquest of a city using cats... The case that we are going to see today is a little different because its protagonist did not stand out so much for his participation in combat as for the fact of having gone down in history as the only dog registered as a prisoner of war. Or bitch, to be exact, because she was female and her name was Judy.
Originally his name was Shudo and he was a purebred white pointer with brown spots and born in February 1936 in a Shanghai kennel for animals of British masters, that is, of a certain lineage, if that can be applied. end to the canine world. In any case, she Shudo ran away from her when she was barely three months old and was taken in by a merchant who adopted her until she was six. After an altercation between her new owner and some sailors, she was returned to the kennel; Unfortunately for her, her parents were no longer there.
That same autumn she was acquired by the crew of the HMS Gnat , a gunboat patrolling the Yangtze River; they wanted to train her to perform functions of what was known as a gundog ie hunting dog. The truth is that Shudo, who was renamed Judy of Sussex, did not show good qualities for that task, having been raised in the streets of China instead of in the countryside, so the treatment they gave him was more of a mere pet of the ship, a tradition in the ships of the Royal Navy. The Sailor Tankey Cooper, who was also the butcher on board, was the one who was in charge of her care.
She had barely had time to get used to her new life when Judy she suffered her first mishap, falling overboard into the river; this incident would not have major transcendence -she was rescued immediately- were it not for the fact that in the logbook it was recorded as «man overboard» instead of «dog overboard» and it was considered a kind of baptism that turned the dog into a dog. full member of the crew. In fact, from there the men of the HMS Gnat They discovered that Judy was not as useless as they thought:she did not hunt but she did detect other ships with enough time to close the hatches and get on the alert. A good example was her when she set off the alarm in the middle of the night, allowing the attack of a pirate ship that had quietly docked ashore to be repelled. 
What's more, she was also able to hear enemy planes before they were even spotted, which she demonstrated when she barked angrily at a low-flying Japanese aircraft that went unnoticed by radar. The climate in those late 1930s was pre-war, and Judy's superb skills were obviously very well received. But it is that the dog came to save the life of Petty Officer Jefferey during an excursion around Jiujiang, when he pulled hard on the leash to change direction, leaving the sailor stunned until he discovered that he was taking him away from a stalking leopard. hidden.
Anyway, one of the funniest anecdotes from that period was at the end of 1937, when the dog was left behind on board an American gunboat, the USS Peach , after a small party between both crews. The British, who had set sail and did not notice her absence until later, returned and at the insistence of the American crew that Judy was not there, that night she surreptitiously boarded the ship and stole the bell from her, which was the bargaining chip to ransom her from.
Another equally comical episode occurred a few months later when Jeffrey and Cooper traveled to Britain on leave. As they were the ones who took care of her, Judy must have felt alone and that explains why, while anchored in Hankou, she met Paul, the dog of the French gunboat Francis Garnier . So much affection was shown to each other that the British and French crews organized a wedding ceremony for them and granted them a three-day honeymoon, which they spent aboard the HMS Gnat before Paul had to rejoin the service. Fruit of the marriage was Judy's pregnancy, which she gave birth to thirteen puppies, of which ten survived. As she could not be otherwise with those parents, many of them ended up enlisted in various warships.
War. That's the word that loomed on the horizon and was fast approaching, leading to Judy's first confrontation with Japan, even before hostilities began. It was in October 1938, while she was still in Hankou, that a classic fight broke out between two sailors from the HMS Gnat and Japanese soldiers who had aimed their rifle at the dog and ended up in the river. There was an official Japanese protest and, in order not to strain things, it was decided that Judy would not go back to land.
In June 1939 part of the crew was transferred to the newly arrived HMS Grasshopper and Judy went with them, in the care of Warrant Officer George White. In September, with the declaration of war on Germany, she was posted on the ship to Singapore, where life was fairly uneventful until in February 1942 the colony was attacked by Japan and HMS Grasshopper she had to collaborate, first in the anti-aircraft protection and then in the evacuation, before withdrawing towards Batavia, in the Dutch East Indies.
During the journey, passing by the Indonesian archipelago of Lingga, Judy warned of the approach of enemy planes that, despite fire to repel them, managed to set HMS Grasshopper on fire. and sink her companion, her twin, the HMS Dragonfly . The crew abandoned the ship and managed to reach the coast of one of the islands by boat and that's when the dog was missed and left for dead. As that piece of land lacked resources, White returned for supplies to the ship, which had been run aground, finding Judy trapped under a cabinet on the lower deck but alive.
Happy, White pulled her out of it and brought her ashore with what she could scavenge, but the lack of water was a problem…until Judy fixed it by finding a spring by digging up the dirt with her paws. Not only did they owe her their lives for that, but also because, for the next five days, she Judy protected them from the snakes. Finally, a tongkang (a typical local boat) rescued them from there by taking them to Singkep, the largest island, from where they could board a junk for Sumatra. It was quite an odyssey because upon arrival they had to go up a river to go unnoticed and then cross the Sawahlunto jungle on foot, bound for Padang.
During that painful march, which lasted more than a month, Judy survived a crocodile attack and the sailors had to sew up her six-inch wound. Quid pro quod , she would later warn them of the presence of a tiger. They finally reached Padang on March 18... to find the city in Japanese hands. They were taken prisoner and transferred to the Medan concentration camp in North Sumatra, managing to take with them the dog hidden among some empty rice sacks.
Thus began a hard stage, like those that all British captives in the East had to suffer:mistreatment, abuse, hunger... The food ration per person per day was miserable, a cup of rice, which RAF Corporal Frank Williams, shared with Judy, although it can be said that she was privileged because she could also eat the leftover pieces of leather that a saddler soldier named Cousens gathered from the belts he made for the guards; Cousens later died of malaria.
Williams, inseparable from her, was also about to die when he once stood before the rifles of the guards, who wanted to kill the dog for how aggressive she became when they hit some British. However, in the end the thing was fixed because the commander of the camp, who liked the animal, intervened. He proved it by officially registering him as a prisoner of war under the name Gloergoer Medan 81a . In exchange, he would keep one of the puppies he had, if that came to the case. And he arrived. Five of the litter survived:one was taken by him, as planned; another was killed by a drunk guard, a third was sent to the women's section and a fourth to the Red Cross; the fifth stayed with his mother.
She continued to help her comrades-in-arms, warning them when the guards were approaching or defending them from the abundant snakes and scorpions; he sometimes collaborated in providing them with food by hunting a rat or small animals, which in the end turned out that he could take advantage of that task. That was the trend until June 1944, when the progress of the war forced the transfer of prisoners to Singapore. They made the journey aboard the SS Van Warwuck , renamed Harukiku Maru , and the dog again had to go hidden in a sack because the captain did not want animals on board. Conditions were woeful, crammed on deck under the relentless Asian sun, but she didn't move a muscle and she was able to go unnoticed.
The ship did not reach its destination because on June 26 she was torpedoed by the British submarine HMS Truculent . As she sank, Williams jumped into the sea through a porthole; in the midst of the chaos she did not know what had become of Judy but she feared it, considering that five hundred of the seven hundred men drowned. Williams was rescued by the Japanese and sent to another camp, where he began to hear strange stories about a dog that had saved many people in a shipwreck by giving them buoys to hold on to and pulling those whose hands failed them to the surface. forces. It was Judy they were talking about.
The dog survived, then, the sinking and again accompanied his family to a concentration camp. Fate would have it that when a Japanese captain was about to shoot him, that commander who had stayed with his puppy was present, who intervened on his behalf. Thanks to him, Judy she resumed her prisoner of war status and was reunited with Williams in an emotional embrace. They stayed together for a month and then were sent into the jungle to build a railway, known by the sinister name of the Pekanbaru Death Railway. . Once again they had to share their meager portion of wormy tapioca.
Williams would say that by then he had changed the character of the dog a little; she was obedient but not docile, having had to sharpen her wits to get by. This did not prevent many Britons from owing their lives to him, warning of the presence of tigers among the foliage; conversely, the prisoners also prevented her from being eaten by local peasants or shot by Japanese soldiers because of her aggressiveness towards them. When they wanted to sacrifice her, blaming her for an epidemic, William sent her to the jungle to save her.
She did not need to be there for more than three days because the proximity of the Allies forced the Japanese to withdraw quickly and two paratroopers descended on the field announcing to the prisoners that they were free. Williams sailed for England taking his loyal hidden mate with him once again. They landed in Liverpool, but the dog had to spend a six-month quarantine in Hackbridge (Surrey) that her friend had to pay for; she was able to do it thanks to the donations received after placing an advertisement, since the animal's bizarre story had become very popular and the press nicknamed her Gunboat Judy (Gunship Judy).
At the end of the isolation they went to London, where Williams was decorated but also Judy, distinguished with the Dickin Medal , the animal version of the Victoria Cross. Photos of him were sold to raise funds and that human-canine couple participated in a media maelstrom with several BBC radio programs and other public events, including visiting relatives of the companions who did not survive the camp. They eventually settled in Portsmouth, but in 1948 Williams decided to emigrate to Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania) to work on a plantation. Of course, she took her friend with him, who left offspring in Africa again.
After her delivery, a breast tumor was detected; She had it removed, but a tetanus infection put an end to her adventures by forcing her to be euthanized. She was on February 17, 1950 and she was almost fourteen years old. She was buried right there, wrapped in an RAF combat jacket with her medals, in a granite and marble tomb on which a plaque was placed announcing her exploits.