The most famous animals in war include Cher Ami, the pigeon who carried the Lost Battalion's plea to stop a friendly barrage in 1918; Sergeant Stubby, a regimental dog of the First World War; G.I. Joe, a pigeon credited with saving at least 100 soldiers in 1943; Wojtek, the bear who served with the Polish army; Reckless, a Korean War ammunition horse; and Simon, the ship's cat of HMS Amethyst. Millions of horses, mules, dogs and pigeons served beside them, and London's Animals in War memorial, unveiled in 2004, honours them all.
Animals have gone to war for as long as people have: horses and elephants on ancient battlefields, mules and camels hauling supplies, dogs on guard, pigeons carrying messages when every other link had failed. The ones below are remembered by name, usually because the soldiers who served beside them wrote down what they did.
Some of these stories are as solid as an official citation; others grew in the retelling, and we say which parts are which. That matters, because the plain record is remarkable enough.
1. Cher Ami: the last pigeon of the Lost Battalion
In early October 1918, during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, about 550 men of the US 77th Division under Major Charles Whittlesey pushed too far into the Argonne Forest and were cut off on a hillside. Radio could not reach them; their only link with their own lines was carrier pigeons, and German gunners shot down bird after bird. On 4 October American artillery began shelling their position by mistake. Whittlesey released his last pigeon, Cher Ami, with a note: "We are along the road parallel to 276.4. Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven's sake, stop it.1"
Cher Ami was hit in the chest soon after take-off but kept flying, covering about 25 miles in roughly half an hour1. Army medics saved the bird, though one leg hung by a thread and it was blind in one eye. As the story is usually told, the barrage was lifted; when the battalion was relieved on 8 October, 194 of its men walked out1. France awarded Cher Ami the Croix de Guerre, and the bird's preserved body is in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
2. Sergeant Stubby: the stray of the Yankee Division
In the summer of 1917 a stray dog with a stump of a tail wandered into the camp of the 102nd Infantry, 26th (Yankee) Division, while it trained in New Haven, Connecticut. A young soldier, James Robert Conroy, took to him, named him Stubby and hid him aboard the troopship to France.
According to the Smithsonian, Stubby was a veteran of 17 battles2, was wounded by shrapnel and mustard gas, warned his comrades of gas attacks, located wounded men and even helped catch an enemy spy. Some of these feats rest on the regiment's own stories and the newspapers of the 1920s, and his famous rank of sergeant was given by his unit rather than won on any official list. What is beyond doubt is how the men felt about him: Stubby came home a celebrity; in 1921 General John J. Pershing himself presented him with a medal, and he died in 1926.
3. The war horses, mules and donkeys
No animals served in greater numbers or suffered more than horses. In the First World War some carried cavalry, but far more hauled guns, ammunition and supply wagons through mud that defeated lorries. The figure usually given is eight million horses dead3 in that war, along with countless mules and donkeys; estimates vary, since no complete count was kept across all armies. Most died not in charges but of exhaustion, disease, cold and shellfire on the roads to the front.
The horse's long career as a weapon is told in the greatest cavalry charges in history; its humbler work as a beast of burden went on longer still. Mules served in both world wars, from the freezing mud of the Western Front to Monte Cassino and the heat of Burma3.
4. G.I. Joe: twenty miles in twenty minutes
On 18 October 1943 British troops took the Italian village of Calvi Vecchia far sooner than expected. An Allied air attack had been scheduled on the German positions there, and now the bombers were about to strike their own men. G.I. Joe, a pigeon of the US Army Pigeon Service, was released with a message to call off the raid. He flew 20 miles in 20 minutes and reached the Allied base as the aircraft were preparing to take off.
His Dickin Medal citation credits him with saving the lives of at least 100 Allied soldiers4; popular retellings often say 1,000, which the citation does not support. In 1946 he became the first non-British animal to receive the medal, presented at the Tower of London, and he lived to the age of 18.
5. Rob and the war dogs
Dogs did more jobs than any other war animal. They ran messages, laid telegraph wires, detected mines, dug bomb victims out of rubble3 and stood guard with sentries. Rob, a collie from a Shropshire farm, served with an infantry unit in North Africa and then with the Special Air Service in Italy. His Dickin Medal citation says his presence saved small parties lying up in enemy territory from discovery, and that Rob made over 20 parachute descents4.
His story was later challenged: a former SAS officer, Quentin Hughes, wrote in his memoir that Rob's exploits had been invented by soldiers who wanted to keep the dog when his owners asked for him back. The PDSA checked its records and confirmed that the medal had been awarded, but whether Rob really made those jumps remains disputed.
6. Wojtek: the bear who joined the Polish army
In 1942 soldiers of Anders' Army, leaving the Soviet Union through Iran, acquired a bear cub near Hamadan; accounts differ on how. They called him Wojtek. To take him on to Italy with the 2nd Polish Corps, the 22nd Artillery Supply Company listed him as a private, with a paybook and a number, and he was later made a corporal.
At Monte Cassino in 1944, according to his comrades, he copied the men unloading ammunition and carried heavy crates himself; a bear carrying a shell became the company's emblem. After the war he went with his unit to Scotland and lived out his life at Edinburgh Zoo until 1963. His full story is told in Wojtek, the soldier bear.
7. Reckless: the Marines' ammunition horse
Reckless was a small Korean mare bought by the US Marine Corps in 1952 and trained to carry shells for a recoilless rifle platoon of the 5th Marines across steep hills. In March 1953, during the fighting for Outpost Vegas, she made 51 trips in a single day5 from the supply point to the firing positions and carried wounded men back down. She was wounded twice.
The Marines made her a sergeant and later a staff sergeant, and in 2016 she was awarded a posthumous Dickin Medal.
8. Simon: the ship's cat of HMS Amethyst
In April 1949, during the Chinese Civil War, the British frigate HMS Amethyst was shelled by Communist batteries on the Yangtze and trapped on the river. The captain was killed, and the ship's cat, Simon, was wounded by the shell blast. For the 101 days that Amethyst was held4 on the river, he went on killing the rats that threatened the crew's dwindling rations and kept company with the injured.
Simon was awarded the Dickin Medal in August 1949, but he died in quarantine in England on 28 November 1949, before it could be presented to him. He is still the only cat ever to receive it.
9. Camels, elephants and the rest
The list goes on. Elephants, camels, oxen and bullocks hauled and carried for armies in the twentieth century; even canaries and glow worms were used. Elephants moved timber and supplies in the Burma campaign of the Second World War, and in the First World War the Imperial Camel Corps fought in the deserts6 of the Middle East. Most of these animals left no names, only numbers in quartermasters' books.
The Dickin Medal and the Animals in War memorial
The Dickin Medal, often called the animals' Victoria Cross, was instituted in 1943 by Maria Dickin7, founder of the veterinary charity PDSA. The bronze medal bears the words "For Gallantry" and "We Also Serve". It has been awarded more than 70 times, mostly to dogs and pigeons, with a handful of horses and one cat.
On 24 November 2004 the Princess Royal unveiled the Animals in War memorial at Brook Gate on Park Lane, London. Two bronze mules laden with equipment struggle towards a gap in a curved stone wall; beyond it a horse and a dog look out into the park. One inscription dedicates it to all the animals that served and died alongside British and Allied forces. The second is shorter: "They had no choice."8
Why these stories still matter
War animals did not volunteer, did not understand the causes they served and could not be told why. That is precisely why soldiers remembered them: a dog that stayed, a horse that kept walking, a bird that flew on with a broken body were loyalty without politics. Their stories are told best when told straight, with the legends labelled and the numbers honest, because the truth already asks enough of anyone who reads it.