Hubby sent this article to me… I’ve written about of few of these heroes previously, but the list is impressive here so I’m sharing. Hubby’s favorite is Sgt. Stubby.
12 animals who risked their lives on the battlefield
Joe would die in 1961 at the Detroit Zoological Gardens at the age of 18. His body was mounted and displayed at Fort Monmouth until its closing in 2011.
“We decided to give the patient chloroform and dress his wounds. If he died under the anesthetic perhaps that would be the best thing. ‘As I had never given anaesthetic to such a patient before, I thought it would be the most likely result. However, he lapped up the chloroform as if it had been whisky and was well under in remarkably short time. It was a simple matter to amputate the leg and dress the wounds as well as I could.”
Eventually, Jackie was officially discharged at the Maitland Dispersal Camp, Cape Town, South Africa, while wearing on his arm a gold wound stripe and three blue service chevrons indicating three years of frontline service. He was also given a parchment discharge paper, a military pension and a Civil Employment Form for discharged soldiers.
He would pass away in 1921.
He was posthumously awarded the Dicken Medal in 2016.
Used to carry ammunition, her military epoch concerned her service during the five-day Battle of Outpost Vega in March of 1953. She made an incredible (mostly unaccompanied) 51 trips to the frontline in just one day, carrying over 9,000 pounds of ammunition and getting wounded twice.
For her service, she was promoted to Staff Staff Sergeant and awarded 2 Purple Hearts.
After the Korean War, she was shipped to San Francisco to attend the Marine Corps Birthday Ball (where she promptly ate both the commemorative cake and all the flowers). Such was her appetite, that she even ate the commemorative jacket awarded to her for her promotions!
She would pass away at Camp Pendleton in 1968, aged 20.
He passed away in 1926 and is preserved at the Smithsonian Insitute.
He was buried with full naval honours.
“For courageous action and wounds received on Tarawa, in the Gilbert Islands, November 1943. With utter disregard for his own personal safety, Siwash, upon reaching the beach, without hesitation engaged the enemy in fierce combat, namely, one rooster of Japanese ancestry, and though wounded on the head by repeated pecks, he soon routed the opposition. He refused medical aid until all wounded members of his section had been care of.”
Previously thought to be a male, Siwash would be outed as female upon her retirement to Lincoln Park Zoo. She would pass away in 1954 due to a ‘liver ailment’. Her obituary amusingly notes that the condition was apparently unassociated with her “fondness for beer”
Timothy died in 2004, aged an incredible 160. Not only did it make her the UK’s oldest resident for a time but also the last survivor of the Crimean War.
His head can be seen mounted at the Imperial War Museum in London and his trotters were made into handles for a carving set that travelled with the HMS Glasgow in WWII. So, bizarrely, it can be said that Tirpitz the pig was aboard the ship for both world wars despite not surviving the first one!
being trapped under the burning beams of his stables.The book, stage play and film “War Horse’ are based upon Warrior’s exploits.
He returned home to the Isle of Wight with the Seeley family where he passed away aged 33.
Wojtek, which means ‘smiling warrior’, was housed in the Edinburgh Zoo until his death in 1963.
