The forgotten animals of America’s wars

DUANE CROSS
MCO Publisher•Editor

By the time the Marines at Outpost Vegas needed another load of ammunition, Reckless already knew the way.

The little Mongolian mare climbed a steep Korean hillside 51 times in a single day in March 1953. Enemy artillery pounded the American positions, and every trip exposed her to gunfire. She carried ammunition uphill and brought wounded Marines back down. Most of the time, nobody led her.

By day's end, Reckless had covered more than 35 miles and delivered over 9,000 pounds of ammunition. She was wounded twice during her military service but kept working.

Retired Marine Sgt. Harold Wadley, who served alongside Reckless, remembered her during the 2013 dedication of a statue honoring the horse at the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

"She knew where her Marines were and she was locked in to deliver that ammunition to each of those guns," Wadley said.

The Marines eventually promoted Reckless to staff sergeant and awarded her two Purple Hearts. She spent her retirement at Camp Pendleton, Calif., where she died in 1968 and was buried with military honors.

For much of military history, horses doing hard, dangerous work were nothing unusual. Reckless happened to do hers on a day when somebody kept count.

Before engines, armies relied on animals

Animals have accompanied armies for thousands of years. Ancient civilizations used horses to pull chariots and carry warriors into battle. Dogs guarded camps and warned of approaching enemies. Elephants became weapons themselves, capable of breaking through enemy formations.

In 218 B.C., the Carthaginian general Hannibal famously led war elephants across the Alps during his campaign against Rome. The animals were difficult to feed and control, but their size and strength made them useful weapons against troops who had never encountered them.

Horses, mules, and oxen became essential to military transportation, moving food, weapons, artillery, and wounded soldiers long before trucks or ambulances existed.

The American military depended on them from its earliest days.

During the Civil War, an estimated 3 million horses and mules served Union and Confederate forces. According to the National Park Service, approximately half died, most from disease and overwork rather than enemy fire.

The losses were staggering here in Middle Tennessee.

Nearly 32,000 horses and mules accompanied the armies at the Battle of Stones River, fought near Murfreesboro from Dec. 31, 1862, through Jan. 2, 1863. Almost 3,000 were killed, disabled, or captured during the fighting.

Keeping the animals alive was a logistical challenge of its own. A Union cavalry horse needed 10 pounds of hay and 14 pounds of grain daily. A soldier's food ration weighed a little more than four pounds.

Horses pulled the cannons, moved supply wagons, carried cavalrymen, and helped evacuate the wounded. Without them, armies could scarcely move.

Soldiers understood what those animals endured.

Confederate artilleryman William A. Brown described a shell nearly tearing off his horse's hind leg during a battle. Despite the injury, the horse carried Brown out of danger. He later recalled leaving the suffering animal behind, admitting, "I could not prevent the unmanly moisture in my eyes."

The Army also tried something a little less conventional.

In 1855, Congress approved $30,000 to test camels as pack animals in the American Southwest. The experiment worked better than many expected. Camels could carry heavy loads across rugged desert terrain and travel long distances with comparatively little water.

The Civil War interrupted the program, and the Army eventually abandoned it.

Horses and mules remained essential to military operations well into the 20th century.

A pigeon could get through when nobody else could

World War I brought machine guns, tanks, aircraft, and poison gas to the battlefield. It also created an enormous need for reliable communication. Telephone wires were routinely cut by artillery. Runners carrying messages risked being shot. Radios were still limited in their battlefield applications.

Homing pigeons helped fill the gap.

The U.S. Army established its Signal Corps Pigeon Service in 1917. Soldiers carried the birds to forward positions, attached messages to their legs, and released them. The pigeons' instinct to return to their home lofts allowed information to reach commanders miles away.

One became a national celebrity. Cher Ami, a pigeon serving American forces in France, delivered 12 important messages during the war. On a final mission in October 1918, the bird returned with a severe wound through its chest and a nearly severed leg. The message tube was still attached.

Cher Ami is often credited with carrying a message from the Lost Battalion, a group of American soldiers trapped behind German lines in the Argonne Forest. The message attributed to Cher Ami identified the soldiers' position during efforts to bring them to safety.

There is some dispute about that particular mission. The Smithsonian Institution, which preserves Cher Ami's remains, says surviving military records do not conclusively establish which pigeon carried the Lost Battalion's crucial message. Cher Ami's documented service, including that badly wounded final flight, is not in question.

The bird survived the war but died from its injuries in June 1919.

Pigeons weren't the only unlikely messengers. Dogs carried dispatches through the trenches, located wounded soldiers, and warned of enemy movement. Their hearing and sense of smell made them particularly useful in a war where so much depended on detecting danger before it arrived.

Stubby finds his place in the Army

Stubby was a stray terrier mix when he wandered onto the training grounds of the 102nd Infantry Regiment in Connecticut in 1917.

Pvt. J. Robert Conroy took a liking to him, and the dog soon became the unit's unofficial mascot. Stubby learned to respond to bugle calls and military drills. He even figured out how to raise a paw in something resembling a salute.

When the regiment shipped out for France, Conroy smuggled Stubby aboard the transport ship. The dog was eventually discovered, but his salute reportedly charmed the commanding officer enough to let him stay.

It turned out to be a good decision.

Stubby survived an early poison gas attack and became especially sensitive to the chemical's presence. During a later attack, he detected gas while soldiers slept and raced through the trenches barking and waking the men.

He also learned to find wounded soldiers caught between opposing lines, barking until medics arrived or leading the injured toward safety.

During the Battle of Seicheprey in April 1918, shrapnel struck Stubby in the chest and leg. He survived, recovered in a military hospital, and spent some of that time visiting wounded soldiers.

Later in the war, he caught a German soldier near the American trenches, biting the man and holding him until troops arrived.

Stubby served in 17 battles and earned an unofficial promotion to sergeant.

After returning to America, he became a celebrity, met presidents, and received a medal presented by Gen. John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces.

Today, Stubby is preserved at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

America's first organized war dog program

Dogs had accompanied American soldiers for generations, but World War II brought the first large-scale effort to recruit and train them for military duty.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the American Kennel Club and a civilian organization called Dogs for Defense encouraged families to donate their dogs to the military.

On March 13, 1942, the Army established its War Dog Program, commonly called the K-9 Corps.

Thousands of American families sent their dogs off to war, knowing they might never see them again.

The Army trained 10,425 dogs during the war, according to the U.S. Army Quartermaster Museum. Most served as sentries, guarding airfields, ammunition depots, coastal defenses, and military installations.

Others accompanied infantry patrols, where their senses gave soldiers an early warning of hidden enemy positions. In the thick jungles of the Pacific, a dog could detect an ambush long before the men saw anything.

One of the better-known dogs was Chips, a mixed-breed shepherd, collie, and husky who served with the 3rd Infantry Division.

During fighting in Sicily in 1943, Chips broke away from his handler and charged an enemy machine gun position, helping force its crew to surrender.

Chips was recognized with military decorations, including the Silver Star and Purple Heart, but the Army later revoked them because regulations prohibited awarding such honors to animals.

Following the war, the Army retrained surviving dogs for civilian life and returned them to their original owners or placed them in new homes.

Military dogs continued serving through Korea, where they patrolled dangerous ground and guarded American positions. By Vietnam, their role had expanded considerably.

Nemo refuses to leave his handler

One of the best-known military dogs of the Vietnam War was Nemo, an 85-pound German shepherd assigned to Tan Son Nhut Air Base near Saigon.

In December 1966, enemy fighters infiltrated the installation. Nemo and his handler, Airman 1st Class Robert Throneburg, were searching for enemy troops who remained hidden on the base when the dog detected their position.

Throneburg released Nemo to attack. During the firefight, Throneburg was shot in the shoulder. Nemo took a bullet through his snout, suffering a terrible injury that would eventually cost him an eye.

The dog stayed with Throneburg until the fighting ended. Both survived, and the Air Force credited Nemo with saving his handler's life.

Nemo returned to the United States in 1967 and spent much of his retirement at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. He died in 1972, and his kennel later became a memorial.

Thousands of other Vietnam-era military dogs never came home. Most were left overseas when their assignments ended, often because the military classified them as equipment rather than allowing them to retire with their handlers.

It was a bitter experience for the men who had depended on those dogs to keep them alive. Some spent years advocating for changes in the military's treatment of its working animals.

Their efforts eventually helped change federal policy. Legislation passed in 2000 allowed retired military working dogs to be adopted, and subsequent changes provided for dogs retiring overseas to return to the United States.

Two weeks on a kennel floor

During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, military working dogs took on some of the most dangerous assignments of modern combat. They searched for explosives, identified hidden weapons, patrolled dangerous roads, and protected troops from ambushes.

Army Staff Sgt. John Mariana served in Afghanistan with Bronco, a Belgian Malinois trained to detect explosives.

In June 2011, an enemy fighter raised an AK-47 toward Mariana during a patrol. Mariana ordered Bronco to attack, and the dog lunged at the gunman. The man fired, striking Bronco in the muzzle and causing severe injuries.

Mariana followed the blood trail, found his wounded dog, and began administering first aid. The pair were evacuated to Kandahar Airfield, where Bronco underwent emergency surgery.

The dog's injuries made breathing difficult. During his recovery, Mariana slept on the concrete floor of Bronco's kennel for two weeks, holding the dog's mouth open at night so he could breathe.

Bronco survived, though the injury permanently damaged his sense of smell. He could no longer reliably detect explosives and was medically retired.

Mariana adopted him. "He saved my life that night without a doubt," Mariana told an Army reporter in 2012. "He saved a lot of lives."

Bronco had once located an explosive device buried four feet underground. After the shooting, he struggled to find objects barely covered by dirt. He could no longer do the job he had been trained to do, but Mariana wasn't about to leave him behind.

Still serving, in ways technology can't replace

Drones, satellites, and sophisticated sensors have changed warfare, but military working dogs still have plenty to do.

Today's military working dogs continue detecting explosives, searching dangerous areas, and protecting American personnel. They serve in every branch of the armed forces.

The Navy has also found some unusual partners beneath the water. Since 1959, the service has developed a marine mammal program using bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions to detect underwater threats, locate equipment, and help protect naval facilities.

Dolphins use echolocation to identify underwater objects. Sea lions rely on their hearing and underwater vision to locate equipment that divers may have difficulty finding.

The military trains animals to perform work they are naturally equipped to do, often in places where people face considerable danger.

A place in the history of service

In his first Veterans Day proclamation in October 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower called on Americans to "solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly."

Veterans Day honors the men and women who have served in America's armed forces. The animals alongside them never had that choice. They were trained, transported, and put to work, sometimes under conditions that cost them their lives.

An estimated 1.5 million horses and mules died during the Civil War alone. Thousands of military dogs served in Vietnam, and most never returned to the United States. Others survived combat with injuries that ended their working lives.

Their service is part of the country's military history, even if their names don't appear on the monuments where Americans gather each November.

There is a reason the stories of Reckless, Stubby, Nemo, and Bronco have endured. Ask the veterans who depended on them, and the accounts are seldom about an animal's cleverness or training. They're about ammunition reaching a position, a warning arriving in time, or a wounded soldier surviving long enough to get home.

Reckless spent her final years at Camp Pendleton, far from the Korean hillside where she had made those 51 trips. When she died, the Marines buried her with military honors.

Fifteen years had passed since Outpost Vegas. ... The Marines hadn't forgotten their horse.