Only one animal ever achieved the dubious accolade of being made an official prisoner of war of the Japanese in World War Two. It was a dog. She was a beautiful and regal-looking English pointer and perhaps one of the most extraordinary of our canine companions ever to grace this earth.
In September 1942 she was given Japanese prisoner-of-war number 81A-Medan.
Her real name was Judy, or Judy of Sussex as her shipmates came to call her, for she spent most of her service life as the mascot of the Royal Navy gunboats the Gnat and the Grasshopper. But Judy of Sussex was much, much more than just a ship’s dog. The way in which I came across her story drew me to it inexorably, convincing me that this was a tale that absolutely had to be told.
In the spring of 2013 I wrote a book called War Dog (although I prefer the title my American publishers gave it, The Dog Who Could Fly). It tells the story of Ant, the extraordinary German shepherd puppy rescued from no-man’s-land who went on to fly numerous sorties with the RAF in the Second World War. In recognition of his heroic wartime exploits Ant—or Antis as he was renamed—was awarded the Dickin Medal, more commonly known as the Animal VC.
Ant’s master was the Czech—later British—airman Robert Bozdech, with whom he flew into battle with RAF Bomber Command, was wounded, crash-landed, and faced death countless times. In among the photos of the postwar Dickin Medal ceremonies, I found one that appeared to show Antis receiving his medal along with two other dogs. The animal to the right of the photo was a striking-looking liver-and-white English pointer.
There was something compelling about that image and the animal it portrayed—a sense somehow of the dog’s extraordinary courage and spirit that spoke across the decades. When next I met the Bozdech family—Robert Bozdech’s surviving children—I showed them the photo and asked who the mystery dog might be. We were at Pip’s—the eldest daughter’s—lovely Devon farmhouse, having a family get-together to celebrate the publication of the book telling their father and Antis’s story.
Pip took a look at the photo. “I think that must be Judy. Yes, it’s got to be her. Isn’t she lovely? She’s another Dickin Medal winner, and she has the most wonderful story . . .”
Pip told me the little she knew of Judy’s wartime exploits. Indeed, it did sound quite remarkable. My curiosity piqued, I made a promise to myself to try to find out more about the dog—but I was working on another book at the time, and any thoughts of looking into Judy’s history fell by the wayside. That was until a second chance happening.
Some months later I was giving a talk at the fantastic Mere Literary Festival in green and leafy Wiltshire, in the south of England. At some stage after the talk I happened to mention to the festival organizer, the delightful Adrienne Howell, my interest in the story of the only animal ever to become a prisoner of war of the Japanese. She threw me a shrewd look, as if trying to assess just how much she should reveal to me.
“Well, you know, Mere has a long history associated with the prisoners of the Japanese in the Far East,” she remarked. Adrienne paused for moment and then went on: “In fact, my uncle was one . . . And there are any number of other POW families in the area. But the man you should really speak to is Phillip Wearne. His father, the Reverend Wearne, was a prisoner along with my uncle. He buried my uncle and brought the news of his death back to my grandparents.”
Adrienne very kindly offered to put me in touch with Philip Wearne, who she explained was very active in the FEPOW (Far East Prisoner of War) community.
“Of course,” she added, “we’ve all heard of Judy’s story. She was simply a wonderful dog. Extraordinary. What she did on the ships and in the POW camps—well, there’s nothing quite like it.”
Two chance conversations; two people telling me the same thing—this dog was absolutely out of the ordinary. My appetite for the story quickened. As Adrienne had predicted, Phillip Wearne was most forthcoming and helpful. He advised me that among others, I really needed to talk to one Lizzie Oliver. Her grandfather, Stanley Russell, was in the same camp as Judy, one of her many POW companions. And although it almost beggars belief, he’d somehow managed to keep a secret diary of his time in the camps, which, had it been discovered, could well have cost him his life at the hands of the Japanese and Korean guards.
Lizzie and I duly met at the Frontline Club, a London venue for those who write about, report on, or otherwise deal with the field of the front line and war. In the refined quiet of the wood-paneled club room, Lizzie explained to me that she was in the final stages of completing her Ph.D. on the Far East POW camps, much of which was inspired by her grandfather’s diaries.
Her next comment to me was this: “Whenever you mention the Sumatran railway or the camps, everyone says: ‘Oh, you mean the railway with the dog? Judy, wasn’t it?’ It’s amazing: absolutely everyone you talk to remembers her with such affection.” She laughs. “There were people suffering there also, as well as a dog, but she seems more famous than the railway or the camps! That gives you a sense of just how much she was loved by all who came across her.”
Lizzie had a point. After serving for several wild, war-torn years as a ship’s dog on the Royal Navy’s Yangtze River gunboats, Judy had been bombed and shipwrecked repeatedly before ending up in the POW camps of north Sumatra, part of modern-day Indonesia. She and her fellow POWs had been forced to work on the so-called hell railway, driving a single-track railway through impossible jungle and knife-cut mountains in the center of what was then a land of utter wilderness, a veritable world lost in time.
This wasn’t the Thai–Burma Death Railway, which is relatively well known today—the one immortalized in the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai and more recently in the movie The Railway Man, starring Colin Firth. This was the other death railway—one built over 2,000 kilometers away, in Sumatra, by the Japanese, using Allied POWs and locals as slave labor.
If anything its story is even darker. Today, few if any have heard of Sumatra’s hell railway or the terrible horrors endured there. But people might just have heard of the camp’s dog—Judy!
With some reverence, Lizzie produced from her bag a large and heavy bound book—her grandfather’s diary. “There’s something I want to show you.” She opened the diary at a place that she’d bookmarked. “There.” She pointed at the page proudly. “Recognize it? So, who d’you think that is? It’s unmistakably Judy. What other dog would ever look like that?”
Taking up half of one page was a hand-drawn sketch of a beautiful liver-and-white English pointer. She was snuffling about in the tropical undergrowth, seemingly searching for a rat to catch among the bamboo huts in which the prisoners were forced to live, packed in there like sardines.
“It’s something that’s almost never been written about,” Lizzie explained. “There’s so much told about the horrors of the camps: the brutality, the unspeakable things that were done to the POWs. But those are the things they were forced to suffer. They had no choice, of course. That wasn’t how they survived. In part they survived by the choices they made—and keeping a dog or another pet was something that helped keep them going. It was a thread that pulled them back to a little piece of normality. It was something extra to keep alive for during a hard day’s labor and to come back to at the end of the day. It offered a hint of home life, of family, of domesticated pets in the home.”
Lizzie told me I really had to go and see Rouse Voisey, a ninety-two-year-old veteran of the Japanese prison camps. As far as she knew, he was the last living British survivor of the Sumatran railway, and no one would be better qualified to add layers of richness and texture to the story of the forgotten death railway and its celebrated dog. But before doing so I should meet Meg Parkes, she said. Meg’s father had been a Japanese POW, and again, in a way that almost stretches credulity, he had managed to keep incredibly detailed diaries of his time in the camps.
The way in which a handful of POWs managed to keep these diaries is a gripping story in itself. More often than not they used scraps of paper scribbled on in the dead of night and then secreted in old jars or cans, which they buried in the camp graveyard. The two things the Japanese guards seemed utterly fearful of were insanity and death. Those POWs who had lost their minds were shunned by the Japanese, and anything to do with death was also to be avoided. It was their extreme necrophobia—their fear of death and dead bodies—that made the graveyard such a perfect hiding place for the illicit diaries.
In due course I did meet with Meg, and she very kindly gave me a copy of her father’s diaries, writings that spoke of the extraordinary relationship he had with a pet cat in the camps, among other animals. Meg echoed Lizzie’s sentiments—that the whole history of how the POWs relied upon animals to help get them through their hellish ordeal had never really been written about. There were even camps wherein the POWs tamed and then trained pigeons to carry messages to and from the outside world either to secure news or to let the world know they were still alive.
Simply extraordinary.
Meg was involved in a fantastic school project with Pensby High School for Girls, in Wirral, in the northeast of England. Tom Boardman, then a ninety-two-year-old survivor of the POW camps, had come to the school to talk about his experiences. The eleven- and twelve-year-olds were asked to write short poems, imagining themselves to be an animal—any animal—in the camps. Meg gave me a copy of the booklet they’d produced with snippets of their poems. They were incredibly poignant.
“And the cat said . . . the prisoners stroke me and think of home. I like it, but I am afraid of the hunger in their eyes.” —Elena Davies
“And the dog barked . . . why are we here? And why do some of us disappear?” —Sophie Burns
“And the pigeon said . . . I’ll carry their sad messages. I am their family and they are mine.” —Alice Renshaw
But there was no story to rival Judy’s, Meg added. She was truly a dog in a million. Meg, like Lizzie, advised me that the one person I really did need to meet was Rouse Voisey. In due course I drove up to rural Norfolk to meet the man himself. My GPS took me to a pretty bungalow that looks out over wild woods and rolling fields lying to one side of the neat row of houses in which he has his home.
Rouse had clearly been awaiting my arrival. He greeted me on the garden steps—an incredibly sprightly and sharp-looking ninety-two-year-old. We shook hands. He scrutinized me with a quick, piercing look, as if trying to appraise the caliber of the “young man” who had driven such a long way to speak to him about events that lay some seven decades in the past.
He glanced at the scenery, which was lit by a bleak winter’s midday sun. “You know, on some days the birdsong is so loud that I can’t hear myself greet my neighbors across the fence.” He smiled. “I love it here. You’re very welcome.” He gestured to his half-open door. “Please, come in, come in.”
Rouse was a remarkable man, to put it mildly. Not only was he a survivor of Sumatra’s railway hell, he’d lived through what by his own admission was a “worse” slave-labor project under the Japanese. He was among a group of Allied POWs who were forced to clear the coral island of Haruku of its jungle in order to hack out a landing strip from the bare rock—in preparation for Imperial Japan’s planned invasion of Australia, something that of course never happened. Haruku is an island in the Moluccas—the so-called Spice Islands—but under the blistering sun and in the scorching heat and dust, building that runway had all but killed Rouse and so many of his fellows had died.
If that wasn’t enough, he had then been loaded aboard one of Imperial Japan’s so-called hell ships—rusting death traps used to transport POWs like slaves of old from one forced labor project to another—for a journey that he feared would be his last. So ill was he that he could remember little of the voyage prior to the sinking of the ship, the Junyo Maru, by a British submarine. It was, at the time, the worst maritime disaster in history in terms of confirmed loss of life: some 5,600 Allied prisoners of war plus local slave laborers perished at sea.
Somehow Rouse survived the shipwreck. In doing so he made it to Sumatra to join the many hundreds of POWs slaving in that living hell. It was then that he first heard about Judy, the de facto mascot of the trans-Sumatran railway. As with all those who’d spoken before him, Rouse was unable to mention Judy’s name or recall her memory without a warm smile. He glanced at a photo of his own dog—now deceased—hanging on the living room wall.
“That was my dog, Shona. She was a tricolor English setter. She was the most loving, wonderful companion you could ever wish for. I used to take her to the office where I worked—she’d sleep under my desk. She had the most lovely nature. I put the leg of my chair on her ear once by accident. She didn’t snarl or bark at me. She just rolled her eyes and whined, as if to say, Hey, that really hurts, you know. I never got another dog after Shona. I couldn’t—not after her. And Judy—she was exactly that kind of a dog. There wasn’t another like her.”
Rouse went on to share with me stories from his time in the prison camps, with his fellows and their camp dog—ones that perhaps he’d never discussed with anyone before, not even his recently deceased wife. He ended our chat with this:
“I was amazed that a dog could survive it all. That Judy outlived the hell of that place—it was incredible. The Korean camp guards in particular—they used to eat dogs. And they had the power of life or death over us all. It makes you wonder how anyone got away with it—keeping a dog like Judy. It’s all part of the wonder of her story.”
I left Rouse’s little bungalow with a box heaped full of yellowing newspaper articles, dog-eared books, photos, and reports from the POW camp survivors—much of the “library” that Rouse had built up over the years.
“Yes, yes—take it all,” he reassured me as I asked again if he really was happy with me borrowing his library for a while. “I’ve got little use for it at my age. And if you need to come talk to me again, please do. I’m here on my own with nothing much to do other than watch the box—and there’s never anything on but repeats these days!”
I loaded the precious container onto the backseat of my car, but as I went to say a last good-bye, Rouse held out a hand to restrain me. “You know, there’s one question you never asked that people always tend to: After what happened, do you hate the Japanese? I rather like it that you felt you didn’t need to ask that of me.”
Rouse shook his head, his eyes lost in memories of the past. “No, no—I don’t hate the Japanese. How can you hate an entire people? I hate the guards who did those unspeakable things to us. But I could never hate an entire people. I think the hate would eat you up. It would consume you.” He laughed. “So that’s probably how I’ve lived to such a ripe old age!”
After visiting Rouse I spent time with other survivors of the POW camps and their relatives and families, learning more about the story that was beginning to captivate me. Fergus Anckorn, the irrepressibly youthful ninety-five-year-old who survived the POW camps through his use of magic—he was once the youngest and is now the oldest member of the legendary magic circle—told me about his own incredible relationships with pets in the POW camps, including a dog, monkeys, and even a chameleon! The chameleon would lie on his chest at night while he was sleeping and flick out its tongue to catch mosquitoes. It was his de facto mosquito net!
“Those pets—they kept us sane, you know. They were a little tiny slice of the familiar, of what we knew—of home. And somehow, you knew you had to stay alive and return at the end of a day’s hard labor to look after your dog or monkey or whatever was waiting faithfully for you! You had to stay alive for them.”
Fergus told me about the value of those pets in sustaining the prisoners’ morale—or, more accurately, their will to live. In many cases, individuals opted to share some of their meager ration with their pet animal rather than allowing another living being to starve to death. Fergus loved dogs. He had a relationship with them that went very deep and was incredibly enduring. He was a cat lover too.
“Once I spotted a tiny bird like a sparrow on a bush,” he told me, a rare sadness creeping into his mischievous, fun-filled eyes. “I stalked up to that bird on hands and knees. On the other side of the bush was an emaciated cat. It was a race between the two of us. I saw the cat spring, the bird took off to escape, and—pow!—I caught the tiny bundle of feathers in midair. I cooked that little bird and ate it that very evening. But when I looked at the pile of bones afterward, I felt so guilty that I’d left the cat to starve. I never could forget it or forgive myself.”
Like Rouse, Fergus believed that those POWs who hated the Japanese were eventually consumed by their hatred. Those who forgave lived longer and happier lives. And Fergus was one of many who’d go on to explain to me the vital role that pets played as the unsung heroes of the prison camps. It was a story that few had told and one that Judy epitomized more than any other animal that had made it through the hell of the prison camp years.
This, then, is Judy’s tale. It opens in Shanghai several years before the start of the war, when British gunboats still cruised the mighty Yangtze River, guarding British interest far into the heart of China. It commences with a tiny bundle of curiosity that ran away from home and ended up serving as the mascot of the doughty Royal Navy gunboat the Gnat. It follows Judy and her fellows’ extraordinary adventures over the years—from the Yangtze River to the Sumatran hell railway and everything in between.
People often say that truth is stranger than fiction. Undoubtedly, Judy of Sussex’s story is one that anyone would find distinctly challenging to make up.
It is certainly one that I feel privileged to have been able to tell.
Damien Lewis,
Cork, Ireland, December 2013