Animal Heroes by David Long

Author:David Long
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409052074
Publisher: Random House

Chapter 8

SAS: Special Animal Service

FOR A NATION so famously fond of its pets and animals generally, it took until 2004 for the British formally to acknowledge the immense contribution to the war effort of literally millions of feathered and four-legged creatures. Various private and family memorials had been erected to individual animals who served, suffered and sometimes died alongside home, Commonwealth and Allied forces in the last hundred years and more, but nothing official existed until November of that year.

Unveiled by HRH the Princess Royal on a prominent site towards the top of Park Lane in London, the large Portland stone and bronze Animals In War Memorial marked the successful conclusion of a £2 million appeal. The work of sculptor David Backhouse, the striking monument depicts two heavily laden pack mules approaching a narrow gap in an otherwise inpenetrable 60-foot-long wall. On one side of this a bas-relief features images of the many different animals that served alongside British servicemen and -women and their allies; on the reverse a line of shadowy silhouettes represents the millions of them who gave their lives, while cast in bronze a heavy horse and dog walk on. The dog is glancing back towards his dead comrades, but the pair, it is to be hoped, are seen walking into a brighter future.

The inscriptions on the wall identify the theatres of war, giving an estimate of the numbers of animals lost and observing that ‘They had no choice.’ Deliberately no attempt has been made to identify individual animals or particular actions, however, as the appeal was expressly conceived to provide a memorial to all rather than to the relatively tiny proportion of heroes whose stories have become more widely known. In particular, it might be said to provide a memorial for the vast majority of animals whose service was anonymous and whose actions remain largely unknown.

Of course the reality is that during any conflict this includes most service animals, the majority of them almost anonymous participants and now even more so as the passing of each generation of service veterans robs us of another tranche of personal recollections.

Inevitably the lack of recognition was more pronounced for some than for others, especially when the animals in question were engaged in covert activities or posted far from home. Then as now a good story needed to be accompanied by an engaging image – and very often it really is that simple – so that the lack of an opportunity or a camera to take a photograph was often enough to prevent the public even hearing of a particular animal’s courage, its intelligence or quite extraordinary fortitude.

The irony of this is that today we hear fewer real stories about real animals than we do the details of one or other of sometimes bizarre schemes which emerged periodically from the Special Operations Executive HQ at 64 Baker Street in London or its top-secret laboratory at 35 Portland Place. Many of these failed from the outset, but the fact that they

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