“Let Slip the Dogs of War”

Yesterday, Paladin Planet featured an article commemorating the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Today, we'd like to share another World War II story that will surprise most people. It comes to us courtesy of a Paladin author who prefers to remain anonymous on the Internet, a sentiment we understand completely.

William Shakespeare was more a student of the human condition than historian, although he commonly used historical characters and contexts. When Mark Anthony stands over the corpse of Julius Caesar and vengefully calls to “Cry havoc! And let slip the dogs of war,” the allegorical plea was to remove all restraints from any troops who would avenge Caesar’s death. We have never found a reference to dogs used in war as massed combatants per se.

That oversight would change [not] early in World War II war when a wildly eccentric but well-spoken Swiss immigrant by the name of William Prestre of Santa Fe, New Mexixo, found sympathetic ears in the U.S. War Department.

During World War II, Cat Island, Mississippi, became home for the Cat Island War Dog Reception and Training Center, another site where donated family dogs were trained for military use. There is probably some sort of natural law that states, if you’re going to spend millions of desperate war bucks on a war-dog program as messed up as we describe here, you’ll do it at a place called Cat Island, named by exploring Spaniards, who found it crawling with raccoons, which they thought were cats.

In meetings with Army brass in June 1942, Prestre convinced them he could produce up to 30,000 dogs to form assault brigades to take Japanese-held jungle islands, by training dogs to selectively kill Japanese on sight, without handlers.

His scheme was to have greyhounds [of course] blitzkrieg across the beaches and go for machine gun crews. Hot on their tails [heh, heh] would be packs of Great Dane and wolfhound grunts who would then mop up the Japanese troops. The army hoped to train as many as two million dogs. Even without a Power-Point presentation, the brass could envision landing craft releasing thousands of dogs against the Japanese. When the defenders scattered in confusion, amphibious troops would land undeterred and stack the bodies. The problem became, where do we find Japanese troops for training bait? Very few Japanese soldiers were being captured.

In October 1942, a group of 25 soldiers from Company B of the 100th Infantry Battalion Separate, Nisei Hawaiian National Guardsmen, were selected at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, and moved to Ship Island, Mississippi.

The training pretty much consisted of putting on a protective suit and abusing the animals in an attempt to get them to hate “Japanese.” Smarter than many people of the day, the dogs never saw any racial difference between troops of Japanese ancestry and anybody else.

In subsequent investigations, testimony by one Army dog handler noted that Prestre "did not know dogs or how to handle them." For instance, Prestre specified French horns to urge the dogs to assault the beaches, but these only served to confuse them—and most dogs that did make the beach were terrified by shellfire and became totally uncontrollable.

On February 2, 1943, after two disappointing exhibitions in front of the brass and millions of much-needed dollars misspent, Prestre was sent packing and his involvement in the war effort ended, but it was not an amicable divorce.

In the aftermath, one observation of the intelligence investigation into “where did we go wrong?” noted, “Prior to his departure Mr. Prestre made several threats, the gist of which were that unless the project is continued, he would make plenty of trouble for any and all who opposed him, up to and including the president . . . it is believed advisable to acquaint the FBI with his actions and attitude, and request that he be placed under surveillance if deemed necessary.”

We love the First Amendment, but mouthing veiled threats against the president in wartime really pushes the envelope.