by Ben Holt
BANDOOLA
In the war-torn jungles of Burma, a valiant Asian elephant led a refugee convoy safely away from the Japanese in a hurried evacuation…
Born in November 1897, Bandoola was named after General Maha Bandula, a courageous Burmese commander-in-chief who fought for the independence of his country. A man named Po Toke became Bandoola’s ‘oozie’ (elephant driver), training, riding and caring for the elephant right through his working life. He is credited with being the first oozie to train an elephant with kindness rather than by breaking its spirit, and Bandoola is believed to have been the first Burmese work elephant reared from birth in captivity.
As a young elephant he always seemed to be finding himself in scrapes (once he even stuck his trunk into a pot of hot oil), but when he came of age and was put to work, Bandoola showed himself to be an exceptional animal and was soon breaking records. In just one season, he extracted and transported 300 tons of teak an average distance of 2 miles from the forest to the river.
As with all Burmese work elephants, Bandoola was enlisted to assist with the war effort during World War Two and helped build roads and bridges, and carried heavy supplies. In 1944, during the evacuation of the Kabaw Valley in Burma, a party of 45 elephants, eight calves and 198 people were to travel over difficult terrain, climbing up to 5,000 feet and across into Assam, safely away from the Japanese. Po Toke insisted Bandoola should take the lead, as he was the only elephant that knew to keep his head at height by not looking down, and he was surefooted enough to choose a safe path.
High up in the mountains they reached a treacherous section of the path, where steep steps just big enough to take an elephant’s foot had been hewed into the sandstone rock. With Po Toke sitting on his head, Bandoola carefully negotiated the steps, at times looking as though he was standing on his hind legs, and continued along a narrow path with a sheer drop on one side. The other elephants all followed, and whenever they paused their hind legs shook from the strain of stretching up the steps. The party reached their destination, a tea plantation in Assam, with Bandoola carrying a pannier on his back containing eight children sick with fever.
On arrival, Bandoola was celebrated for his courageous achievement, and all the excitement seemed to go to his head – he broke into a pineapple grove and wolfed down 900 pineapples before he was caught in the act! An unpleasant bout of colic ensued, from which he did recover, and he was undoubtedly forgiven his mischievous behaviour in light of his heroic contribution to the evacuation mission.
Bandoola the elephant’s incredible story is recounted in full in the eponymously titled book by J. H. Williams, who was also known as ‘Elephant Bill’, a British Lieutenant-Colonel and elephant expert in Burma, famous for his work with the Fourteenth Army.
Elephants of war
◦ The Carthaginian general Pyrrhus had a huge army of elephants imported from the Atlas Mountains and used them in his invasion of Italy in 280 bc. The sight of these huge, strange stampeding animals caused many of the Romans to flee.
◦ Hannibal marched across the Alps with 37 elephants to launch an attack on Italy, but only one is supposed to have survived the cold journey. He imported more, but the crafty Romans figured out a way of diverting them, having noticed they would get bored and easily distracted after the initial charge.
◦ Before gunpowder was invented, elephants were used to carry great wooden towers on their backs, on which 30 archers could travel.
◦ The Indian army used elephants as battering rams to smash down the defences of fortified towns.
SADIE
In Afghanistan a Labrador used her nose to save the lives of hundreds of military personnel…
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York City on 11 September 2001, the united forces of the US and the UK launched an offensive against Afghanistan. The primary aims were to seek out terrorist organisation Al-Qaeda, who they held responsible for the attacks, and to remove the Taliban regime in order to install a democratic government. As the war progressed, the Taliban began to develop and use improvised explosive devices (IEDs) as their principal weapon, and so arms and explosive search dogs became hugely important to the US and UK forces during the conflict. A dog can perform a search eight times faster than a human, eliminating costly delays and ensuring troops can be moved from the vicinity if a bomb is detected.
On 14 November 2005, eight-year-old dog Sadie of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps (RAVC) and her handler, Lance Corporal Yardley, were assigned to search for secondary explosive devices after a suicide bomb attack on NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, Afghanistan. Leaving a second bomb is a typical terrorist tactic in these situations.
The pair began their search and it wasn’t long before Sadie took up the alert stance to indicate she had found something. She had sniffed out a booby-trap bomb concealed in a pressure cooker, hidden behind a 2-foot-thick concrete blast wall within the United Nations compound. It was packed with explosives and rigged up with a remote-controlled detonation device. Had the enemy succeeded in setting off the bomb, it could have killed and injured hundreds of military personnel in the surrounding area. Thanks to the Labrador’s razor-sharp senses, personnel could be evacuated to a safe distance and the device was disabled by the bomb disposal unit.
In 2007 Sadie was awarded the PDSA Dickin Medal ‘for outstanding gallantry and devotion to duty’. Lance Corporal Karen Yardley attended the ceremony at the Imperial War Museum, along with Sadie, and said: ‘She’s a lovely dog and I’m very proud of her.’
Dogs like Sadie also play an important role in raising morale among the troops, many of whom miss their own dogs back at home. Handlers do form a strong bond with the dogs they work with, but the animals are given uniform training so they can work with more than one handler. While the dogs usually do two six-month tours, handlers work on rotation and only complete six months in every two and a half years.
Underwater detectives
Dogs like Sadie aren’t the only animals to have been set to work seeking out explosives: the US Navy’s Marine Mammal Program has trained dolphins to detect underwater mines – a method most famously used during the Iraq War. With their echo location ability, bottlenose dolphins can locate mines with great precision, and they are light and deft enough to be able to mark the mines without triggering them. Sea mines are designed not to detonate when marine life such as sharks, whales and dolphins swim by, and so the chances of a dolphin being hurt when carrying out this work are low. The dolphins are trained using similar methods to those used for police and hunting dogs – and are given rewards such as fish on correct completion of a task.
MARY OF EXETER
During World War Two, a tenacious carrier pigeon named Mary of Exeter somehow always managed to deliver her messages safely…
Carrier pigeons had played an important role during the Great War, and yet as World War Two loomed on the horizon the British war office had no plans in place for a messenger-pigeon programme; with inventions such as radar, radio and the telephone to rely on, they thought they could do without them. But they were wrong. When the first British planes were forced down into the sea it soon became apparent that with water-damaged radios there was no way the pilots could communicate their position and request help. An urgent call for pigeons was sent out and private pigeon fanciers offered thousands of birds up for service. The pigeons also went on to do important work on the front line during the war, and some were dropped behind enemy lines in France in the hope members of the resistance would find them and send them back with vital intelligence.
Homing pigeons are raised in lofts and trained to return to them, where they know they will be fed. Wherever they are released, these birds are always able to find their way home. It might be due to an inbuilt compass, or perhaps they recognise landmarks and geographical features – no one really knows how they do it. In war time, messages written in code could be placed inside a tiny canister attached to the bird’s leg. These incredibly resili
ent, strong birds have been know to fly as far as 1,500 miles and to battle against gale-force winds and torrential rain in order to return home – so they really were a reliable form of communication where technological methods had failed.
Mary Stewart was one such carrier pigeon that served under the British National Pigeon Service during World War Two, from 1940. Such was her determination to return home on each mission that she did so despite numerous injuries and terrible ordeals during her five-year military career, by the end of which she had 22 stitches on her poor little body. On one occasion Mary vanished for nearly a week. When she finally arrived home her message was intact, but her neck and right breast had been ripped open, wounds most likely inflicted by one of the hawks that the Germans released in the Pas-de-Calais area to terrorise messenger pigeons.
Carrier pigeons were also constantly targeted by enemy gunmen, and two months after her run-in with the hawk Mary went missing again – this time for three weeks. When she pathetically fluttered back into the loft, there were three bullets in her body and part of her wing had been shot off. As if that wasn’t enough to endure, she also suffered an attack on her home. During the German raids on Exeter a large bomb fell outside her loft, killing many of the other pigeons inside. Mary was very distressed by these traumatic events, but after a short break she was back at work. Within ten days she was picked up in a field. She was painfully thin, and had a huge gash on her head and more wounds all over her body. Her owner carefully nursed her back to health but, due to the injuries to her head, she needed to wear a leather collar for support until she was fully recovered.
In November 1945 she was awarded the PDSA Dickin Medal, ‘for outstanding endurance on war service in spite of wounds’.
Homing is a natural instinct for pigeons, but it has been noted by handlers that some are more determined and less likely to be discouraged by difficult conditions and obstacles than others, and so the choice of which pigeon to entrust with an important mission had to be made carefully. Mary of Exeter certainly proved to be a reliable choice, time and again.
Winged messengers of war
The Sultan of Baghdad was sending messages out on the wing as far back as 1150 bc, and pigeons were used to spread the word of Ceasar’s conquest of Gaul. News of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo was also delivered by pigeon, and the birds were instrumental in transporting thousands of letters to the besieged Parisians during the 1870 siege. Although the telegraph and radio had been invented by World War One, they often broke down; more than 100,000 pigeons served Great Britain in that war, 95 per cent of those successfully delivering their messages.
SAM
Sam became the first army dog to win the PDSA Dickin Medal since 1944, for disarming a gunman while on duty in the Balkans…
In the late 1990s, after the Bosnian War of 1992–1995, the Balkans were still a hot-spot for conflict, with repeated uprisings as ethnic tensions played out across the troubled region. In 1998, British troops were stationed at the town of Drvar in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the return of displaced Bosnian Serb citizens had brought opposition from resident Croats, culminating in a series of riots and murders.
Dog handler Sergeant Iain Carnegie of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps Dog Unit, from Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire, was on duty with his German shepherd, Sam, when a gunman opened fire in the town. Sam wasted no time at all in charging after the man and skilfully bringing him down. ‘Sam performed brilliantly – just like a training exercise,’ said Sergeant Carnegie, who was able to rush to Sam’s side, disarm the man and retrieve the loaded pistol.
Sam also prevented a mob armed with crowbars, clubs and stones from attacking ethnic Serbs in the area six days later. The mob surrounded a group of around fifty Serbs, but the dog held them off until backup arrived.
When Sam was later awarded the PDSA Dickin Medal, Sergeant Carnegie proudly said: ‘Sam displayed outstanding courage in the face of the rioters, never did he shy away. I could never have attempted to carry out my duties without Sam. His true valour undoubtedly saved the lives of many servicemen and civilians.’
SIMON
A cat is credited with saving the lives of Royal Navy officers on board the HMS Amethyst during the Chinese Civil War in 1949…
In 1948, the British frigate HMS Amethyst was stationed in Hong Kong. One day, crew member George Hickinbottom, just 17 at the time, found an undernourished black-and-white cat wandering the dockyards. George smuggled the cat, soon to be named Simon, aboard the Amethyst, where he set to work catching and killing rats on the lower decks, and quickly became popular with the crew as the ship’s unofficial lucky mascot.
In April 1949, the Amethyst was travelling from Shanghai to Nanjing on the Yangtze River to relieve the HMS Consort from duty. The Consort had been standing as guard ship for the British Embassy there due to the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communists. As the Amethyst travelled upstream, it came under siege from the People’s Liberation Army. Later to become known as the Yangtze Incident, the siege lasted for 101 days. Throughout that time, Simon was hard at work killing off rats that had launched their own siege on the ship’s food supplies, having gained access to the vessel in great numbers as it was moored up in the river. Running out of food supplies would have been catastrophic for the crew – there was no way for them to replenish stocks while under siege.
Very early on in the siege, Simon suffered severe shrapnel wounds when an onslaught of shelling penetrated the captain’s cabin, killing Commander Bernard Skinner.
Simon managed to drag himself out of the cabin onto the deck, where he was quickly taken to the ship’s medical bay. Medical staff treated his burns and removed four pieces of shrapnel from his wounds – they didn’t expect him to last the night, but against all odds he made it through and went straight back to his duties of keeping the rat population under control. He also made regular appearances in the sick bay, helping to raise the morale of wounded sailors, many of whom were just teenagers.
By the time the ship escaped from the river, news of Simon’s heroic actions had spread and he’d become something of a celebrity. He was showered with praise at every port the ship called at on the passage back to Britain and received a hero’s welcome when the Amethyst finally returned to dock in Plymouth on 1 November 1949. Letters from fans and admirers arrived in their thousands – there was such a deluge that he was assigned his own naval officer to deal with the fan mail.
Although a celebrated hero, Simon still had to go through quarantine on his arrival back in the UK. Sadly, he died there three weeks later from a complication of the viral infection caused by his earlier wounds. A funeral with full military honours was held for him at the PDSA Animal Cemetery in Ilford, Essex. Hundreds attended, including the entire crew of the HMS Amethyst. He was posthumously awarded the PDSA Dickin Medal, the only cat ever to have received it, and was also recognised with the rank of able seaman.
Commander Stuart Hett, speaking at a ceremony in 2007 to commemorate Simon’s bravery, said: ‘Simon’s company and expertise as a rat-catcher were invaluable during the months we were held captive. During a terrifying time, he helped boost the morale of many young sailors, some of whom had seen their friends killed. Simon is still remembered with great affection.’ The director general of the PDSA, Marilyn Rydström, commented that: ‘The power of animals to support and sustain morale in times of conflict can never be underestimated.’
TIRPITZ
A deadly sea battle during World War One resulted in an unusual new addition to the crew of the HMS Glasgow…
On 14 March 1915, the British ships HMS Glasgow and HMS Kent engaged in battle with the German cruiser SMS Dresden, in the waters off Chile near Juan Fernandez Island (today known as Robinson Crusoe Island). Forced to scuttle their own vessel, the German sailors all abandoned ship, leaving just one crew member standing by the sinking vessel to the bitter end – a pig. The sailors aboard the Glasgow watched the Dresden disappear beneath the waves and their asto
nishment grew as the animal bravely struck out through the choppy water.
One sailor decided to rescue the animal. He leapt into the water and swam towards it, nearly drowning when the pig began to panic. But eventually he managed to grab it and the pair were hauled back aboard the Glasgow. As the crew gathered around the new arrival on deck, they were unanimous in their decision to make it the ship’s mascot and to name it Tirpitz, after the famous German admiral of the same name. They also thought the pig very brave for not abandoning the sinking Dresden and so honoured him with their own special award.
Tirpitz quickly adapted to life aboard the Glasgow and was a popular member of the crew. There wasn’t much he could do to help out with the war effort, but he did play a very important role in helping to boost morale. After many long months at sea in difficult conditions the sailors were war-weary and homesick – the sight of chubby Tirpitz snuffling around the decks on pig business was just what they needed to lift their spirits.
After completing his ship mascot duties, Tirpitz lived out the rest of his days at the Whale Island Zoo, Portsmouth, where many an animal mascot was sent to retire. His life came to a somewhat sad end in 1919 when he was auctioned off for charity – but even in death he proved his worth, as the £1,785 that was paid in exchange for his pork went to the British Red Cross. Tirpitz’s head was mounted and put on display in the Imperial War Museum, London, and his story was later featured in the Imperial War Museum’s ‘The Animals’ War’ exhibition.
Marvellous mascots
When it comes to military mascots it seems that anything goes. Here’s a round-up of some of the more unusual ones:
