Hideo Furukawa - Belka, Why Don't You Bark?

Suddenly the globe was split in two, top and bottom. He lifted the metal lid from its base. A skull sat inside it. An animal skull. The skull of a medium-sized dog. It was charred, but here and there patches of skin remained. The interior of the globe had been fitted out with protective supports and foam. The globe was a case. The old man gazed tenderly at the skull.

He said he had a friend back in the car. Guess I need to take care of him too.

“It is true, I admit it,” he announced, evidently to the dog’s skull. “I have lost my mind. I want to set them loose. More than anything. All the old powers, before I die. Before my… before our old world disappears forever.”

Is that not right, my darling?

You, you great Soviet hero, the greatest dog ever to live, the only one who deserves this globe.

By then the old man was no longer talking aloud.

Already it had begun.

It was forgotten.

People forgot, for instance, that a foreign power had, in fact, seized American territory during the course of the twentieth century. In an entire century, it happened only once. In the North Pacific, Japanese forces occupied two of the Aleutian Islands. The first was Attu, at the westernmost tip of the archipelago; the second was Kiska, farther to the east. The Japanese army raised the Rising Sun over the islands in June 1942 and gave each a new Japanese name. Henceforth Attu would be called Atsuta; Kiska would be known as Narukami.

The occupation of the two islands was part of a broader strategy to divert American attention from the Japanese offensive on Midway Atoll, in the Central Pacific. On June 4, air attacks were launched against Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island, in the heart of the Aleutians; the Battle of Midway began the next day. Japanese forces conducted surprise landings on Attu and Kiska from the night of June 7 to the morning of June 8.

The islands fell easily. America lost land to the enemy.

The Japanese had no intention of holding the islands indefinitely, however. The Aleutian campaign had originally been devised as a diversion, and it was far from clear that the islands offered any strategic value. The military planned to hold them for the short term, until winter, then consider how to proceed. This plan was revised when surveys conducted in the wake of the occupation revealed that the islands would remain habitable through the winter; toward the end of June, it was decided to hold them for the long term.

Habitable the islands were, but the climate was extraordinarily harsh. The Aleutian chain as a whole was often said to have the worst weather in the world. The frigid waters of the Bering Sea ran up against the warmer waters of the Pacific along the archipelago’s length, leaving its islands shrouded in fog that never lifted. Only rarely did the sun peek out. Ferocious winds whipped the rocks; torrential rains battered the earth. And then, of course, there was the snow.

Soon the bitter winter set in.

Things were bad on the islands in 1942, but true disaster had yet to strike. The Japanese lost air superiority, enabling the Americans to pound the islands from the skies, and there were delays in establishing ground defenses. And the worst was still to come. The full-blown tragedy would not occur until the following year.

May 1943. The garrison on Atsuta/Attu was wiped out.

As eleven thousand American soldiers rushed ashore under cover of naval bombardment, the twenty-five hundred Japanese troops stationed on the island charged into a hopeless battle, ready to meet their deaths. It was a so-called banzai attack. Not a single soldier was taken. Every last man among their number died for the Emperor.

Kiska Island.

Or now that it was Japanese territory, Narukami.

Kiska/Narukami was occupied by a force twice as large as the force on Attu/Atsuta. Some way had to be found to avoid a second tragedy. And so, though the Japanese had effectively already lost naval superiority, it was suggested that the entire force be evacuated in a plan called the “Ke-gō Operation.” The first stage, involving the evacuation by submarine of sick and injured soldiers and civilian contractors, concluded in June. The second stage, in which a naval fleet was dispatched to collect the remaining units, was carried out in July, on “Zero day.” Z-Day had first been set for July 11 but had to be postponed repeatedly owing to inclement weather. Then at last, on July 29, a rescue fleet consisting of two light cruisers and nine destroyers sailed into Kiska/Narukami Harbor and safely evacuated the island’s entire fifty-two-hundred-man garrison.

The Ke-gō Operation was a success. A heavy fog kept the Americans from noticing what they were doing.

Everyone on the island escaped. Or rather: every human .

The Japanese army abandoned the rest.

They left the military dogs. Four dogs in all. Each came from a different line. One was a Hokkaido dog—or an Ainu dog, as they were once called—a breed known for its musculature and its ability to withstand the cold. His name was Kita, and he belonged to the navy. His job was to show which of the wild plants on the island were edible: he was a taster. The second and third dogs, both German shepherds, belonged to the army. One was named Masao, the other Katsu. The fourth, also a German shepherd, was neither a navy nor an army dog; she was a bitch and had been taken from an American prisoner. Her name was Explosion.

Prior to the invasion the previous year, ten men had been operating a wireless telegraph and aerological station on the island under the aegis of the US Navy. When the Japanese military landed, eight of these soldiers escaped; the other two were taken prisoner. Explosion had been captured along with them.

The United States was deploying vast numbers of highly trained military dogs all around the world in those days, dispatching them to the front lines. It had established its first training center in 1935 at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, the Marine Corps main base, and the next decade saw the creation of an additional five centers. By the end of World War II, some forty thousand dogs had been raised in these facilities. Explosion was one of these. After June 1942, however, she was no longer an American. Now she belonged to the Japanese.

Japan, as it happened, had a three-decade lead on America in military dog combat. The first time Japanese dogs ever took to the field of battle was in 1904, during the Russo-Japanese War. Japanese breeds were used, but they were trained in Germany. Eventually the military began importing German shepherds, and a research institute at an infantry school in Chiba launched Japan’s first serious effort to breed military dogs. Following the Manchurian Incident in 1931, the army ministry helped oversee the creation of a civilian-run Imperial Military Dog Society, and the Independent Garrison Unit’s War Dog Platoon began conducting experimental canine maneuvers in Manchukuo.

Not surprisingly, Germany had led the way in world military dog history. Systematic efforts to train German shepherds commenced in 1899 with the establishment of the German Shepherd Society. As early as the Great War (otherwise known as World War I), Germany was already deploying large numbers of modern military dogs. Indeed, the figure had climbed as high as twenty thousand by the time hostilities ended. And the dogs had performed incredibly well.

Germany’s success was a revelation to other nations. We can let dogs fight our wars!

Two catastrophic wars were fought during the twentieth century. The twentieth century was, it is often said, a century of war. It was also the century of military dogs.

Hundreds of thousands of dogs were sent into battle.