Country Before Dog

In a letter to a local recruiting office, Bobby Britton of Morgan Hill, California, volunteered his dog for the war. “I am eight years old and live on a farm. I have a large Australian Shepherd … that is a very good hunter and I think he would be good hunting Japs. He sure likes to kill skunks … If you need a real good dog, I will loan you mine until the war is over.”¹

Bobby Britton was not alone. During World War II, thousands of American children believed their patriotic duties as citizens outweighed their emotional attachments to their dogs.² They donated pets and money to an organization called Dogs for Defense, and they read children’s literature that helped them understand the need for dogs in combat. For many American children, the Dogs for Defense campaign empowered them to contribute to the war effort in a tangible way.

Dogs for Defense was founded by Arlene Erlanger in January 1942, a month after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The organization’s purpose was to encourage Americans to give up their dogs for military service. The Army only possessed around 100 dogs at the beginning of the war, mostly sled dogs in Alaska, and the Army needed many thousands more to deliver messages, help find wounded soldiers, and above all serve as sentries. The Army soon contracted with Dogs for Defense to procure dogs, who were enlisted into Wags and later the K-9 Corps. (The name Wags was deemed too similar to WACs, the common term for members of the Women’s Army Corps.) Ultimately 25,000 dogs were donated by their owners.³

Not all dogs were selected for military service; small breeds and puppies were classified as 4F and ineligible to serve on the frontlines. Accordingly, the War Dog Fund was established “so that those dogs which cannot go to War can assist in procuring their canine brothers for the front.”⁴ Owners who could not donate their dogs could instead donate money to the War Dog Fund, and in return their dogs received a complimentary rank in the Navy or Army along with dog tags and stickers indicating their service.

Journal-Herald (Dayton, OH), May 22, 1943.

Young children wrote to Dogs for Defense with allowance money requesting that their dog become a member of the War Dog Fund. A six-year-old boy from New Jersey donated $1 to secure his Airedale puppy, Chips, the rank of seaman. Marilyn Clark was only four years old when she enlisted her Llewellin Setter puppy, Blue Smoke Alice, earning the dog the rank of a WAVES third-class petty officer. Donating to the War Dog Fund gave “the owner of a dog the deep feeling of satisfaction that his dog is doing something to help the war effort.”⁵ Children who donated their dogs, whether physically or through the War Dog Fund, were rewarded with a sense of pride and the knowledge that their donation was helping America win the war.

There were many books published during the war which taught children the importance of donating their pet dogs to the military. They had titles like Private Pepper of Dogs for Defense, Jeeps: A Dog for Defense, and Tommy and His Dogs, Hurry. In the last of these books (by Helen Josephine Ferris), the eponymous dog is trained to salute the American flag. After an incident with a classmate, Tommy struggles with the notion of donating Hurry to Wags. “Ted said it was my patriotic duty to send him,” Tommy says to his mother, still visibly upset.⁶

Tommy’s raw display of emotion went against the wartime expectations for children, who were supposed to act like “little soldiers” in the face of a departing parent (or, in this case, a pet) because the war “demanded dignity from every man, woman and child.”⁷ Children’s emotions were often ignored and dismissed, forcing the child to shoulder their grief themselves. In Ferris’s story, however, Tommy’s mother attempts to comfort him: “No one else can tell you what your patriotic duty is, son. That is something you decide for yourself. What you should do about Hurry, if he can be enlisted in the Wags, is what will make you feel right inside. That’s all.”⁸ In the end, Tommy donates Hurry to Dogs for Defense, knowing that Hurry will make a fine war dog—but the decision to donate Hurry is Tommy’s and his alone. And as a reward, Tommy receives a collie pup from an Air Force colonel.

In a chapter of Mabel K. Harmer’s book Famous Mascots and K-9s, two children hear a call over the radio asking for German Shepherds. The children grapple with the prospect that their German Shepherd, Sailor, could help soldiers return from the war sooner. “Do you think if we let him go,” asks young Ann, “he could help bring Uncle Don and Uncle Andrew home sooner?” Presumably Ann does not want to donate Sailor, but she speculates that the donation could bring two people home whom she loves. Her younger brother Bob has a different response: “But Bob only nodded and then buried his face in Sailor’s coat. It was hard to be patriotic when one was only five, and loved a dog, very, very much.”⁹

Though American children could not serve in the war themselves, they could vicariously serve through their dogs. Throughout World War II, children donated their pets and mailed their allowance money to Dogs for Defense, and they read books which presented Dogs for Defense as a new avenue for patriotism. Love of country, their actions suggested, outweighed any emotional attachment for their pets. “And if you have any idea that somebody who gives a dog for war isn’t sacrificing anything,” wrote the humorist Franklin P. Adams in 1944, “you have never had a dog that was a member of your family. You have never had a little girl or little boy whose affection was given to a dog.”¹⁰

1. Clayton G. Going, Dogs at War (New York: Macmillan, 1944), 9.
2. “Owners Expect Army Dogs To Make Marks—With Teeth,” St. Louis Star-Times, April 29, 1943, p. 18.
3. Fairfax Downey, Dogs for Defense: American Dogs in the Second World War, 1941–1945 (New York: Trustees of Dogs for Defense, 1955), 16–21; Anna M. Waller, Dogs and National Defense (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, Office of the Quartermaster General, 1958), 2–3.
4. Folder 6, Box 11, Fort Robinson Collection, Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln, Nebraska.
5. “Volunteers for the War Effort: Youngster’s Airdale Works for Victory On Home Front,” The Record (Hackensack, NJ), Oct. 14, 1943, p. 3; “K-9 Corps Dogs for Defense,” Journal-Herald (Dayton, OH), May 22, 1943, p. 39; Folder 6, Box 11, Fort Robinson Collection, Nebraska State Historical Society (quotation).
6. Frances Cavanah and Ruth Cromer Weir, Private Pepper of Dogs for Defense (Chicago: A. Whitman & Co., 1943); Sylvestre C. Watkins, Jeeps: A Dog for Defense (Chicago: Wilcox & Follett, 1944); Helen Josephine Ferris, Tommy and His Dog, Hurry (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1944), 54.
7. Lisa L. Ossis, The Forgotten Generation: American Children and World War II (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011), 117–18.
8. Ferris, Tommy and His Dog, Hurry, 54.
9. Mabel K. Harmer, Famous Mascots and K-9s (n.p., n.d.), 25. Also see Lisa S. Ossin’s discussion of how World War II–era children feared not only for their parents and older siblings, but also for their extended family members; Forgotten Generation, 122.
10. Franklin P. Adams, foreword in Thomas Young, Dogs for Democracy: The Story of America’s Canine Heroes in the Global War (New York: B. Ackerman, Inc., 1944), 5.