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DOGS OF WARBy Gary LyonThis article was inspired by a exhibit I saw a few years back at the Parachute museum in Aldershot , although I'm not sure if the museum is still there now that the paras have relocated to Colchester. This exhibit was of an Alsation dog that made a combat drop with the paras into Normandy in 1944 and then fought alongside them. This led me onto thinking of other instances in which dogs have fought. Early domestication of the wolf into the dog happened many hundreds of years ago and dogs were used in hunting from an early date, but I don't know when dogs were first used in war. Wardogs were used by the Aztecs and many medieval armies - something that WRG cover quite well with their use of "expendables". In more recent times the Belgian armies in the first world war had machine guns drawn by dogs though prize of place must go the Russian "suicide" dogs that were strapped to bombs and trained to go under tanks with the idea of destroying Germans. Unfortunately they had been trained on Russian tanks which is where they sought refuge. I cannot recall any instances of dogs being ridden (outside the pages of GW fantasy that is) though it is an intriguing thought. Various armies have used dogsleds in winter combat but I do not know of any dogs actually being ridden into combat. Can anyone out there expand on this? |