Trident K9 Warriors: My Tale From the Training Ground to the Battlefield With Elite Navy SEAL Canines

by Michael Ritland

  Here in North America, Native Americans also used canines as watchdogs. Like several other groups, they also used a dog’s strength and endurance to their advantage. Dogs hauled packs and served as draft animals, just as horses did. European settlers and their successors used dogs against the Indians. Benjamin Franklin was involved in organizing the Pennsylvania militia against the Native Americans and wrote a letter proposing how they might be used, based on his knowledge of how the Spanish utilized them in Mexico.4

  John Penn, the grandson of William Penn, also suggested using dogs against the “savages,” calling for the militiamen to be paid an allowance for the use of their dogs and stating that the owners should be responsible for leashing and leading their canines in pursuit of the enemy. In both Franklin’s and Penn’s cases, there’s no evidence that their suggestions were implemented. The same was true of a proposal brought forward during the Revolutionary War. Some evidence exists that dogs were used as messengers during the Civil War, but this was mostly the result of an individual soldier bringing his own dog to battle on his own initiative and not any kind of sanctioned use. Dogs did serve as mascots, and many of their names are included in honor roles. Several statues commemorating the Battle of Gettysburg depict dogs, but they most likely only served as mascots.5

  One of the more fascinating stories to emerge out of canine military history comes from World War I. The United States didn’t enter into the war until 1917, of course, after years of fierce and often fruitless battles. Trench warfare was a serious and deadly business, but it often seemed pointless, with victories measured in yards of territory gained. The trenches themselves could be another kind of horror, and dogs helped alleviate at least one element of that. Jack Russell terriers roamed the trenches attacking the rats that plagued the soldiers and their food supplies. More important, though, was the work that so-called Mercy Dogs did as a part of the Red Cross’s efforts to help the wounded. Red Cross institutions in multiple countries utilized dogs to carry medical supplies, find the wounded, and offer comfort to those who wouldn’t survive their injuries.

  Because many of the MWDs we use today can have their lineages traced back to Germany and the war dogs of that nation, I was particularly struck by stories of how the Sanitatshunde— “sanitary dogs,” as the Germans referred to these canine Red Cross workers—were trained to find the wounded among the battlefield casualties that lay littered across a no-man’s-land. These dogs were trained to go out into that legendary zone, with water or alcohol in canteens and with packs strapped to their bodies, to offer the injured what was often some small comfort before the men died. More important, the dogs were sent out to identify the location of the wounded, most often at night, and return with some token—a cap, a helmet, or other identifier—and then lead a handler to the site of the wounded man so that he could be recovered. This kind of human detection and the training methodologies and signals humans and canines shared to communicate a find are all very much like what we do today with our MWDs.

  It’s estimated that the Germans used a total of nearly thirty thousand dogs during World War I. They had six thousand on the front lines and four thousand in reserve at the beginning of the war. Most other European nations involved in the conflict also utilized dogs to varying degrees. We’ll never know the actual number of dogs involved, nor the number of casualties among these canine helpers. It’s a little easier to know the extent to which dogs helped support U.S. troop activities during the Great War.

  Because we didn’t have a long history of using dogs in battle, and possibly because we entered the war later and didn’t see all the other ways that other countries utilized dogs in World War I (as ambulance dogs pulling two-wheeled carts, for example), our use of canines as we entered into the War to End All Wars was essentially nonexistent. We eventually used dogs trained by the French and British, but a program to train American dogs and to supply our troops with them was never implemented. We did, however, supply the French army with four hundred dogs, which served in the alpine regions as draft animals, helping to haul artillery shells with far greater efficiency than humans, mules, and horses could.

  One of the primary uses in which the other combatants employed canines was as messenger dogs. Obviously, communication between troops on the front lines and their leaders at the rear are crucial in any military campaign. Often, more established lines of communication, in this case, literal lines for telephones, broke down. Human soldiers often served as messengers, but they not only were larger targets, fatigued more easily, and were slower than dogs, they were also considered a more valuable military asset to be utilized offensively. As a result, dogs served in that vital role, carrying written messages and carrier pigeons in a specially designed saddlebag from position to position. One French messenger dog, a mixed breed named Satan, earned great distinction for his bravery and was eventually immortalized in a short story used in schools in the United States in the 1920s. In a textbook entitled Junior High School Literature: Book Two, the editors, William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck, included a short story by the writer Ernest Harold Baynes.6

  Baynes must have based his work on the story that was told of Satan coming to the rescue of a group of French soldiers near the town of Verdun. They were encamped at a small village near that famous city, and the Germans had circled them, cutting off their supply lines, their communications, and virtually any hope of surviving. In addition to not having working phones, the soldiers were without carrier pigeons, so no one in the French command knew their exact location or their plight. The Germans did, and they pounded their location with heavy artillery, taking an enormous toll on another so-called Lost Battalion. According to the account in Michael Lemish’s book War Dogs, German soldiers later reported seeing a vision, a large-headed creature with wings.

  What they actually saw was Satan, approaching the French position, with a carrier pigeon with its wings flapping on each of his sides. He also wore a gas mask as he maneuvered stealthily to avoid enemy fire. Satan was struck twice by German gunfire, but he managed to complete his mission and deliver the two carrier pigeons. Eventually, one of those birds successfully evaded being shot down, and later the French artillery responded to the German fusillade. Without that dog’s courage and intelligence, as well as the intelligence contained in the message the bird carried, the battle would have been lost. As it was, the Germans were trumped.

  In Baynes’s version, Satan was a mixed breed, but the author identified him as the product of an English greyhound sire and a Scotch collie dam. That could seem to be a bit of English propaganda, but one thing is certain: the work of an English officer, E. H. Richardson, was so instrumental that he became known as the father of modern war-dog training. Later on, during both World War II and in Vietnam, the United States relied on British expertise and experience to assist us in developing programs that utilized military working dogs.

  Satan wasn’t the only dog to earn fame as a result of experiences during World War I. Rin Tin Tin, the subject of a recent book by the renowned writer Susan Orleans, also has roots in the European battlefield. According to the legend, a German mascot pup, Rin Tin Tin, was discovered abandoned in a German trench by a group of American soldiers. His owner and trainer, Lee Duncan, claimed that this was the case. Some skeptics state that the dog that would later star in a series of American films—and was likely one of the main causes of the popularity of the German shepherd dog breed in the United States—was actually an offspring of an adult dog found in Germany. Regardless, Rin Tin Tin’s box-office success (he was the top-grossing movie star of 1926) is as indisputable as is his impact on breeders and buyers.

  Less well known is the pit bull Stubby, who an American soldier smuggled aboardship on his way to Europe to fight in late 1917. Stubby spent nineteen months overseas, and returned to a hero’s welcome, eventually earning honors from the American Red Cross, the YMCA, and the American Legion, and was presented with a gold medal by General John Joseph “Black Jack” Pershing, the comman
der of the American Expeditionary Forces, on behalf of the American Humane Society. Three American presidents also met Stubby during the dog’s lifetime.

  The American public clearly liked the idea of dogs serving with our troops, but the military was less enthusiastic about the idea. Despite seeing what effect dogs had on the conduct of the war and the morale of soldiers and civilians alike, following World War I no branch of the American military created a formal program for training and using dogs on the field of battle between the end of the First World War and the beginning of World War II. The U.S. military had hired private contractors as early as the 1900s to drive sled dogs in the Alaska Territory. The famous Tenth Mountain Division, originally formed at Fort Lewis in Washington State and later relocated to Camp Hale in Colorado, also included dogsled drivers. Once the war was under way and more military activity, particularly the flying of planes, was taking place in Alaska, the USAF Tenth Air Rescue Squadron was supplied with as many as two hundred dogs to take on that mission of finding downed crews—both U.S. and Russian—on the route from Alaska to Siberia, as well as in Greenland.7 The latter was part of the “Bolero Movement,” ferrying planes to the North Atlantic as a prelude to the Allied invasion of Western Europe and the USAAF bombing campaign against the Nazis.

  Obviously, Pearl Harbor changed a great deal for Americans. It did the same to a lesser degree for the country’s dogs as well. That surprise attack, rumors of German spies coming ashore, and the acknowledged need for tremendous vigilance all combined to see dogs take on an expanded role within the United States as sentries. With so many vital installations, including the industries that made up the so-called war machine, and the ever-present threat of what we’d today call terrorist activity, the Coast Guard took the lead in deploying handler-dog teams along our vast shoreline. With everyone willing and wanting to contribute to the war effort, dog owners and dog lovers led a campaign to promote the use of dogs in wartime activities.

  Several influential members of the canine community, including the director of the American Kennel Club, got together and established the Dogs for Defense (DFD) organization in 1942. It brought together professional and amateur trainers and breeders as well as private individuals who wanted to support the cause of utilizing dogs to a greater extent than ever before as a part of the American military. At first their efforts were met with resistance. The American military was reluctant to let civilians take the lead in establishing any kind of policy. Eventually, those barriers were overcome when the need for protection of military depots around the country became more of a priority. In July of 1942, Secretary of War Harold Stimson issued a directive calling for the quartermaster general to train dogs to serve a variety of functions beyond sentry duty. This would include search and rescue, hauling, detection/scouting patrols, and messengering. All the branches of the armed forces received the orders, but it was up to them to decide individually how many dogs to recruit and how to utilize them.

  The U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps (QMC) took over from the Plant Protection Branch by September of 1942. The program, unofficially, was known as the K9 Corps early on, and the army adopted a part of that name with its K9 Section. Eventually the quartermaster general announced that the United States would need 125,000 dogs for the army, navy, marines, and Coast Guard combined. American citizens had already joined breeders and trainers in “volunteering” their dogs as part of the DFD programs. DFD had been providing dogs for the army, while the navy and marines briefly relied on private individuals and sources. All four branches, including the navy, eventually turned to the DFD as a source for suitable recruits.

  The DFD established regional centers to accept the donations, and the dogs were considered gifts, with no promise made that the dogs would be returned—except if the dogs didn’t meet the basic requirements. In the first two years, the DFD received forty thousand dogs; eventually about eighteen thousand passed initial inspection, and ten thousand actually saw duty. While those numbers may not seem particularly impressive, they are when you consider that this was an entirely volunteer program staffed by people whose only desire was to aid the war effort.

  By August of 1942, dogs were patrolling the beach with their Coast Guard handlers. By the end of the first year of the combined efforts of the quartermaster general’s office and the DFD, eighteen hundred teams were doing that work, with another eight hundred handlers being fully trained by the end of the war. Though initially the quartermaster general’s office issued an Army Technical Manual bulletin identifying thirty-two potential breeds and crosses as candidates, by the end of 1944 they’d narrowed that field of candidates to seven breeds: “German shepherd, Doberman pinscher, Belgian sheepdog, collie, Siberian husky, malamute, and Eskimo dog.”8

  The main function of these Coast Guard units was eventually fully clarified. The Coast Guard was responsible for spotting trouble and reporting it. The army was in charge of protecting the coastline and turning back any hostile troops. By May of 1944, it became clear that no hostile invasion was forthcoming and that any acts of sabotage were unlikely. The coastline-protection program was drawn down, with the dogs then being transferred to the army.

  Interestingly, one of the places that the army used as a training ground for canines was named, ironically enough, Cat Island. Just off Gulfport, Mississippi, the environment was ideal for training dogs that might eventually serve in the Pacific theater. The island was also the site of a failed experiment to train a group of dogs to be offensive weapons—attack dogs. The program was once classified, but in recent years the PBS television show The History Detectives, the Biloxi-Gulfport Sun Herald, and various online outlets have featured stories on this unusual program.

  A Swiss émigré by the name of William A. Pestre, a former Swiss army officer, sent a proposal to the War Department in 1942, claiming that he could train a group of dogs to attack Japanese positions. He believed that the dogs could either kill the enemy soldiers or cause enough of a distraction that the American soldiers would easily be able to take those positions. He suggested that the U.S. Army could recruit as many as twenty thousand to thirty thousand dogs for the effort. The army had already selected Cat Island as a training center, and it was run by the Army Ground Forces and not the Quartermaster Corps. Army Lieutenant Colonel A. R. Nichols was swayed by Pestre’s arguments and agreed to get the program off the ground. Nichols insisted that the training be done in thirty days.

  Pestre proved to be a very demanding and selective taskmaster. Of the four hundred dogs sent to him, he only approved of twelve for further training. That number was trimmed to nine—the only ones who would be acceptable as attack dogs. In order to train these dogs, he would need humans to act as “live bait,” in this case, Japanese men, since the dogs needed to be trained to identify their distinctive odor. This is where the story turns even more bizarre. Not only would it be, in my opinion, nearly impossible in three months to train dogs to do anything with the kind of precision necessary to accomplish any mission under battlefield circumstances, the program now necessitated the use of nontrained volunteers to act as what we would today call decoys.

  Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, depending upon your attitude toward this program, Japanese-American soldiers were available for this duty; members of the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Combat Team were also in training on a nearby island at Camp Shelby. From among these nisei (Japanese-Americans) twenty-five volunteers were sent to Cat Island.9 The volunteers engaged in questionable training practices designed to get the dogs to attack them as stand-ins for the Japanese soldiers on whom the dogs would eventually be set loose. Pestre trained the dogs for three months and then put on a demonstration of the dogs’ capabilities. It was a miserable failure. Either the dogs failed to attack the padded nisei with any kind of ferocity or they had to be led directly to them rather than track them. Pestre was given one other chance to prove the value of his program, but that wasn’t good enough either to convince the army leadership that it had any military v
alue. The program was terminated, despite Pestre’s protests.

  The idea of using dogs in a jungle environment wasn’t abandoned. The marines suffered a high casualty rate in places like Guadalcanal and the other chain of islands that led to the Japanese mainland. The dense vegetation made them particularly prone to ambush and sniper fire. In November of 1942, the marines began a training program, aided by the efforts of the Doberman Pinscher Club of America, to prepare dogs and handlers to serve on point during jungle patrols. Again, the Dogs for Defense group served as the liaison between the dog clubs, private citizens, and the military. In time, the marine dogs became known as Devil Dogs, a name with origins dating back to World War I and the Germans’ description of the human marines they encountered in battle.

  The Marine Corps treated the dogs like human soldiers in one respect: they assigned them ranks. In this case, it was based on length of service, from private first class to master gunner sergeant after five years of duty. Dogs could also receive honorable or dishonorable discharges, all in the hope of developing a fighting spirit among the canine corps. At first these dogs were trained for typical canine sentry duty, but the marines wanted the dogs to be combat participants, given the nature of the work they did. In early 1943, a scout and messenger dog-training program began.