Britain Had One Military Dog When World War I Began. Then Trained Dogs Started Finding Wounded Soldiers in the Dark

When the First World War began in 1914, Germany had thousands of dogs in its military. Britain had exactly one.

A former army officer named Edwin Richardson thought that was a mistake. He had spent years training dogs to work with soldiers and police, and he was sure they could carry messages and find wounded men on a battlefield.

The British Army did not agree and turned down his offer. The British Red Cross, however, gladly took a number of his specially trained dogs.

Then Richardson’s dogs started to prove him right. In 1916, two Airedale terriers named Wolf and Prince carried messages for the artillery and proved so reliable that officers began giving them other jobs. A dog could run a message back from the trenches in about a quarter of the time it took a man, and it was a much smaller target.

In 1917 the War Office finally set up the British War Dog School with Richardson in charge. It was based at Shoeburyness in Essex, where the guns on the Western Front could be heard across the North Sea. Hundreds of dogs were trained there, many of them taken from rescue centres such as Battersea. When more were needed, the public was asked to donate their pets.

The training was as realistic as he could make it. Shells from practice batteries roared overhead and army lorries rattled past. Richardson even paid unemployed local men to lie in the woods pretending to be wounded, so the dogs could practise finding them.

The dogs learned to ignore the dead, follow hand signals and wear gas masks. They were also taught to tell British uniforms from enemy ones, so they would never lead a rescue party to the wrong soldier.

On the battlefield, these Red Cross dogs went out at night with first-aid supplies and small canteens of water strapped to their backs. A lightly wounded man could treat himself and follow the dog back to his own lines.

If a soldier could not move, the dog ran back to its handler carrying a cap, a glove or a scrap of cloth from the man. Then it silently led a stretcher party to him in the dark. If a flare lit the sky, each dog had been taught to freeze flat on the ground.

One surgeon said the dogs sometimes led them to men who seemed to have no life left in them. Yet when they were carried back to the doctors, there was always a spark.

A book from 1915 about the Red Cross dog on the battlefield put it this way: to a wounded, despairing soldier, the dog’s arrival was “a messenger of hope.”

The video above tells the story of the mercy dogs of the Great War.