Cry havoc

If you love dogs and or live with one — I declare an interest on both counts — there is enough here about what the authors too often call ‘doggies’ to keep you interested. But what I liked about this book, despite its trickle of cute language, is that the title exactly tells the story. The dogs indeed went to war, and they were trained to do unpleasant things, including committing suicide by charging into German strongholds carrying bombs, seeking out and identifying landmines, finding bodies under rubble, and guarding bases. But according to Clare and Christy Campbell, war dogs’ effectiveness, despite much heroic, sometimes false, publicity, is doubtful. Another lie, intended to enrage British dog-lovers, was that in Germany ‘three million dogs were compulsorily destroyed.’

Doubts exist right down to whether a dog’s famous sense of smell was useful in detecting either landmines or enemy soldiers; experiments by a physiologist on this ability, including severing their scent organs, seemed to show that with or without their smellers intact, dogs were equally good, or not so good, at detection.