JUDY COULD TAKE IT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 536, 30 September 1949, Page 6

JUDY COULD TAKE IT

.... The Story of an Animal V.C.

ir Sunday, September 25, listeners to the Main National and Commercial Stations heard a talk about a dog whose sagacity helped to save many prisoners-of-war in Japanese hands from starvation, and’ whose example of courage and the will to live became an inspiration\ to the men to carry on. For this she was awarded the Dickin Medal -the animals’ Victoria Cross. The talk, given by Gerard G. L. McLeod, of Auckland, who was with her throughout the war, served also to draw attention to Animal Welfare Week which began on Monday, September 26. For the benefit of those who did not hear the talk and of those who would. like to read it at their leisure, here it is.

N I first met Judy she ‘was only three, but very elegant, brave and_ wise. Four years later she was awarded a V.C. Judy was a _ well-bred pointer, and the V.C. she won was the. animals’ V.C.-the. Dickin Medal. Her citation stated that she was the only animal officially P.O.W. with the Japanese. But there was more to it than that. I should know. I was with her throughout the war. Her early history, as I heard it, may not be accurate. I got it from naval rat-ings-fellow P.O.W.’s. As a puppy she was purchased in Shanghai for 20 guineas and became the official mascot of H.M.S. Grasshopper, a Yangtse gunboat. Just before the Japanese invasion of Malaya this boat was called to Singapore. Some of her crew were transferred to H.M®. Prince of Wales and they took Judy with them. When the Prince of Wales was sunk, Judy was rescued and went back to H.M.S. Grasshopper with some of her old shipmates. On Friday, February 13, 1942, H.M.S. Grasshopper left Singapore loaded with evacuees. Like many other vessels leav‘ing Singapore that day she was bombed, set,\on fire, and beached on one of the uninhabited, waterless islands of the Rhio Archipelago. A few survivors, many badly wounded, reached the shore. The next day the ship was still blazing and her loose ammunition was exploding. Even above this din they heard Judy barking. She was imprisoned in the chart-room of the burning ship. One of her shipmates swam out and rescued her shortly before the magazine exploded. The next days were living hell. The wounded and dying screamed in vain for water. Two or three fit men undertook to swim to another island to see if they could get some, and took Judy with them. Their search was fruitless until Judy attracted them by her eager barks to a spring below. high-water mark. Her discovery saved the lives of the whole perty, which was finally rescued, taken up the Indragiri River in Sumatra, and 200 miles across the island to Padang on the west coast. The fortunes of war led me also to Padang, where I first met Judy on March 15.

She was rather aloof towards me at first, but we soon became firm friends. When the Japanese occupied Padang on March 17, they put us into a prison camp, but would not admit Judy. Next morning I awoke to find her under my bunk. How she got into the camp, which was surrounded by a high brick wall, remains a mystery. A few days later I escaped to the jungle, so that I didn’t see Judy again till six months later, when I was recaptured and brought back to Padang. She was in fine fettle. The Dutch, who had taken a big supply of rations into the camp, had _ helped greatly in feeding her. Although there were 1,100 men in the camp, about 200 of whom were English and Australian, I flatter myself that Judy recognised me. You see, we had become real friends during those few days before my escape. { IN THE BAG HORTLY before Christmas; 1942, we were told that the camp would move across Sumatra to Medan on the east coast of the northern end of the Straits of Malacca. The journey of 600 miles was to be done by lorry. No animals were to accompany us. What were we to do with Judy? She was so intelligent that we decided to train her to walk into a sack and stay quiet while we catried her about on our backs. The plan succeeded and, unknown to the

guards, she accompanied us. We kept her hidden for a fortnight after arriving in Medan, When the guards first saw her they were nonplussed, but we assured them that she must have followed the convoy on foot. They believed us and marvelled. Conditions deteriorated steadily in Medan. Our rations reached the bare minimum of existence. We had little food to spare for Judy, but while we gtew haggard she remained sleek. I decided to -find out the cause of this. At dawn one morning I caught sight of her near long grass round the Japs’ own cookhouse. She worked her way on her bellythrough the grass till she was in view of. the cook-house. Here she remained-in ‘hiding till the cook went for water. With one bound she was into the cook-house, and away with a large chunk of meat in her mouth, (We had never seen meat in months.) Her thieving in Medan was never discovered. Several times she came home with a large bone which we made into soup. In return she had her portion of soup and some of our rice. She was more fortunate than another dog owned by a Dutchman in the camp. Caught in the act of stealing from the Japs, the dog was put in a cage near the guardhouse. On the cage the Japs placed this notice-"Guilty of the gravest crime known to the Japanese, theft; this animal must not be fed." In five days the ‘dog was dead. This unbelievable example of sadistic barbarism I leave without comment. It’s only one of hundreds I could quote. Under the strain of the hardships in Medan some men went mad. Among them was a naval P.O., who could imitate a bosun’s pipe perfectly. It was heart-breaking in the extreme to hear him. pipe up "Liberty Boat" and to watch Judy, even after two years, react to it and scamper to every entrance of the camp, only to return distressingly disconsolate. ~She had always gone ashore in the first liberty boat when she .was aboard a naval vessel. In 1943 Judy became the mother of six delightful puppies. How she could have mated still baffles me, but she frequently accompanied us on working parties and must, somewhere in the jungle, have met a really well-bred dog, for the pups all had very good lines like hers, but were jet black. The Japs took the puppies as soon as they were weaned. In three months they were all dead through maltreatment. RATIONS FOR JUDY N June, 1943, Colonel Banno became Japanese Camp Commander. He had fought for the Allies in 1914-18, and I "

suspect him of having had leanings towards both animals and the English. With him came a guard commanderthe most brutul man I have had the misfortune to encounter. This fellow decided to kill Judy because she invariably snarled when he passed her, One night he called out the guard and had them surround Judy with fixed bayonets, It was obvious what their orders were. At the critical moment Batino appeared on the scene. He slashed the guard commander sévyeral times across the face with his scabbard and, much to our delight, showed his displeasure in other unmentionable ways. Next day we approached Banno to obtain a rice ration for Judy. We pointed out that she had been on.the ration strength of the Navy as an official mascot and was therefore a combatant and a P.O.W. like ourselves. The idea pleased him immensely, so he made her: an official P.O.W., adding her name to the camp rolls. Without Judy’s help we could not have built- the radio we operated in Medan. We had all the essentials for the set except the valves. One party of prisoners went frequently to work at a Japanese store where a large quantity of radio equipment was kept. To steal the necessary valves was a simple process, but to get them into camp was almost impossible, as we were searched -even down to our boots-as we entered the camp each evening. Judy was allowed to accompany this party and, of course, was not searched. So we tied the valves under her collar and in this way got them past the guards. The news we received on, this set helped tremendously to improve the morale of the prisoners. i We operated the set each night, and it was quite a dangerous business; one man who had been caught at it had been shot a few months before. The guards made frequent tours of the camp during the night, and we would certainly have been caught operating the set had it not been for Judy, who wandered outside whenevef we were at work, and returned to utter & low grow] whenever

a guard was approaching. This allowed us to dismantle the aerial and "pretend to be asleep. ON THE MOVE AGAIN ER instinct in these cases seemed almost human; and she made it possible for ,us to do things-things important to our survival-which otherwise could never have been done. In May, 1944,: we were warned that we would soon be moving from Medan by sea, ‘our destination unknown, and no animals allowed. What about Judy? We had got away with it before, so why not again? One of us had a suitcase. Daily we trained Judy to stay quietly in it closed for hours at a time. At first she complained, but soon it became a game. On June 22 came the orders to move. Luggage fad to be restricted to one small sack each. We could never hope to get the suitcase past the guard. However, six men abandoned their meagre possessions and swore to the guard that their joint baggage was in the case. It worked, and Judy went aboard with us -never a whimper from the case. The ship, the Van Wearijk, was an old Dutch coaster. There were no lifeboats. A thousand of us were battened down in the holds, There were no sanitary arrangements. Ventilation was one small hatchway. But Judy was in her element -aboard a ship, among her pals, and no guards to trouble her. At 2.0 p.m. on June 4 we were struck by two Allied torpedoes, and the ship sank in three minutes. Two hundred and forty men were drowned, but Judy was pushed to safety through a _ porthole which we broke with an iron bar, I shall always remember her with her forepaws over a spar to which three of us clung for four hours till we were picked up. We were taken to Singapore. When we came ashore one of the guards who had already arrived tried to bayonet her, as she should not have been with us. But she was saved again by Banno, who had left. Medan some months before and was on the wharf when we arrived, After a month in Singapore we were taken back to South Sumatra up the Kampar River, and our last year was spent building a railway through a jungle marsh on the east coast of Southern Sumatra, from Pekan Baharu to Rengat-about 200 miles. Now we were driven to labour 12 hours a day, seven days a week, right on the equator with meagre rations of only rice and tapioca. How the railway was built through the most noisome,marsh in the world-a marsh where the deathly smell of decay and corruption was everywhere, where every form of dangerous and revolting animal and reptilian life abounded, and how disease and death in its most shocking forms stalked us all along the route -is not for this talk. It is enough to say that only 40 per cent. of those who went there returned, ~ ._But through all this Judy followed us, a constant example of what even a dog, far from the native heath of her ancestors, could endure. She became a vital inspiration to us to carry on, and in the darkest days one heard often the expression, "While Judy can take it, so can I." I do not exaggerate when I say that this dog, by the example of her courage and will to live, saved many of us who would surely have died. (The Commercial stations will take note of Animal Welfare Week this Friday, September 30, with a special talk, "Man and the Animals," by Bryan O’Brien, It will be heard from all ZB stations and 2ZA at 7.30 p.m.) a