Judy: The Unforgettable Story of the Dog Who Went to War and Became a True Hero Read Online Free PDF

it was that on an early November afternoon in 1943 a delegation of junior officers left the Gnat to pay a visit to the Shanghai Dog Kennels.
    Like most gundogs, English pointers are blessed—or cursed—with a surfeit of energy. They have been bred to be powerful, alert, and absolutely tireless no matter what extent of terrain they are tasked to cover. Such are the qualities required of a dog whose purpose is to locate, chase after, flush out, and—very often—retrieve game. Essentially a hunting dog, a pointer should be always at the ready to let fly.
    Judy had certainly proved herself ready to let fly when she’d squirmed under the kennel wire and run away. Even for an extremely high-energy breed like pointers, she’d shown herself to have an extraordinary abundance of get-up-and-go. On first consideration, these weren’t perhaps the ideal qualities for a ship’s mascot—one that was going to be constrained to the confines of a vessel that measured 237 feet from stem to stern and 36 feet across. But as soon as they’d spotted her, the junior officers of the Gnat seemed oddly convinced that Judy was the one for them.
    By now she was approaching six months old and had fully recovered from her stint as a Shanghai street dog. She was striking-looking, holding herself with a poise that seemed to mark her out as a true aristocrat of the breed. She carried her head high on a graceful but powerful neck, and her dark eyes—like glistening coals—were set well back from her long, sweeping muzzle. She gazed at these strange men in their smart uniforms who had come to inspect her, displaying the shy reserve natural to a female of the breed.
    To the delegation from the Gnat , blissfully unaware of Judy’s epic escape and long sojourn in the back alleyways of Shanghai, she seemed like the perfect lady. As an added bonus she was a gundog, which would mean that any shooting parties sent ashore to secure meat for the galley would have a dog to root out and retrieve game. Though not specifically bred as retrievers, pointers can be trained to chase down and gather anything that has been shot—or at least that’s the theory.
    Back at the Gnat the last of the ship’s stores and ammunition was being stowed away belowdecks in preparation for pending departure—including supplies of bread, beef, and fuel (gas and kerosene), plus coal. The last licks of paint were being applied to cover the odd patches of rust on the superstructure. The Chinese mess boys—locals employed to help cook and make tea in the galley—had returned from their shore leave, and they were preparing the first brews back aboard ship.
    A gaggle of seamen were milling about on the mess deck, situated in the ship’s bows, preparing to change into fresh white uniforms for one of their final nights ashore. It was then that the head of the coxswain—the officer in charge both of steering the vessel and of managing the ship’s crew—appeared through the open hatch from the main deck above and made an announcement.
    “All hands on deck in ten minutes!”
    As the sailors pulled on their uniforms, they wondered what on earth might be up. Surely not something that would prevent them from having one of their last nights ashore? In keeping with its wild and exotic reputation Shanghai was a party town par excellence, and no one wanted to be kept from the bars where the beer flowed freely—as opposed to the dwindling supplies aboard the Gnat .
    The men gathered anxiously on the foredeck, forming two ranks beneath the long canvas awning that stretched practically from one end of the ship to the other. It lent the vessel a somewhat odd appearance, the lengthy covering resembling almost a roof and making the Gnat seem from a distance like an elongated streetcarat sea. But the awning had proved hugely useful during long patrols up the Yangtze, providing shade to the main deck and shelter from the monsoon rains that would sweep the length of the great