In the summer of 1944, a Japanese military manual that still held final tactical authority sent men into a situation that did not exist when it went to press. The doctrine was built on a brutal premise: a Japanese company would approach an enemy position under the cover of darkness, close to within 200 or 300 meters while the enemy slept, and then cover the final stretch in a silent rush, getting down into the foxholes before anyone could sit up. The manuals, the Field Service Regulations of 1938 and the Infantry Manual of 1940, had proven effective against the British and Americans in the first year of the Pacific War, but they were the last tactical manuals the Japanese Army ever issued. On the American side, the defense against this specific threat had been developed into a system by 1943, built around a novel solution: dogs.
The Marines had initially rejected the idea of a dog corps, reasoning that they wanted only units that killed the enemy or saved Marines, but by November 1942 they had relented, and a training school was stood up at New River, North Carolina. The first arrivals were a couple of dozen Marines and some borrowed animals from army centers. These were not the highly specialized scout dogs of later memory; they were Doberman Pinschers, German Shepherds, and a scattering of whatever families back home had offered up. They were trained to alert on movement out to about 500 yards, a compromise made necessary because the Marines did not know how to train a scent alert in 1943.
The dogs were given serial numbers, put through 14 weeks of instruction, and assigned to combat units. One black Labrador named Skipper, owned by Private First Class Dale Fetzer, was on the line with Company C on Mount Tenjo when the Japanese made their final, desperate banzai charge in the predawn darkness of July 25, 1944. Skipper, a canvas leash running from his collar to Fetzer’s hand, came up into a low crouch, hackles standing, teeth showing, and made a sound at the lower edge of hearing. Fetzer praised the dog in a whisper, sent him to the bottom of the hole, and told him to stay.
The Japanese came down off Tenjo about fifteen minutes later, moving into a gap between two American regiments, and found the gap awake. The dogs were the one element in the American line that never appeared in a silhouette chart, never turned up in a captured document, and never made a sound a Japanese soldier could have carried home and reported. The Japanese had no equivalent, and no explanation for the failure of their night tactics that ever accounted for the dogs. Lieutenant Colonel Hideayyuki Taeda, who commanded the Japanese holdouts in the north and surrendered in September 1945, wrote his own account of why the jungle campaign failed, a competent summary by a competent officer that does not mention a single animal.
Ten years later, a group of former Imperial Army officers was assembled to write a formal study of Japanese night combat for the American occupation’s history section; they concluded that the fighting had been lost for reasons of logistics and American firepower, and they, too, omitted any reference to the dogs. The thing that had been sitting on the lip of the foxhole was somebody’s house pet from Ohio or Pennsylvania, signed over to the government by a family in 1943, issued a serial number, and given 14 weeks of instruction. By the end of the campaign, the dogs had become so valuable that Marines who had laughed at the whole idea in 1942 began digging holes for the handlers in the evening, unasked, so that a team would settle into their stretch of the line. After organized resistance ended, the problem changed shape.
Between 8,000 and 9,000 Japanese were still alive in the north, and they had lost their headquarters, most of their weapons, and all of their supply. They were reorganized under Lieutenant Colonel Takida in the north and Major Sato in the south, and they lay up in caves by day, moving after dark toward water, toward taro patches, and toward the smell of an American ration dump. The American lines were thin, and the only thing that could close the gaps at night was a network of patrols and listening posts that depended entirely on the dogs to give the first warning. The dogs were the only instrument on the island that could tell a man from a shadow in the dark, and the Japanese had no counter for them.
On the night of August 12, a Japanese soldier fleeing into a palm grove drank the milk of five coconuts and ate the meat of three palm tips; three days later, he was sick all evening. By the 23rd, he was eating taro found along his way, writing that it took a brave man to go looking for food because all around him were enemies. By the middle of October, there was no food at all. The Japanese command structure had collapsed, and the surviving soldiers were reduced to stealing food from each other, with the dogs and their handlers serving as the primary reason why the American line held.
The dogs had become the single most effective weapon in the American arsenal, a fact that was never officially acknowledged because there was no category for it. The Marines who were there knew it, and the Japanese who survived knew it, but neither side ever put it in a report. The dogs were the one thing that could not be explained away by tactics or logistics, and so they were simply left out of the official record. The manual said that a night attack was the only way to deal with an enemy that had the firepower to stop a daylight advance, and the dogs were the only reason that manual failed.
The Americans had invented a system that the Japanese had no way to understand, and they had done it in twenty months, from a standing start in North Carolina to the jungles of Guam. The dogs were the last thing a Japanese soldier ever saw, and the first thing he ever heard, and he had no name for it.