1944–1947
Dogs, dogs, where are you now?
For the first forty days of 1944, they remained on Kiska. There were only seven of them now. On January 2, one dog died. Explosion. This female German shepherd had been too weak, after the surgically aided birth she had undergone, to survive the brutal Aleutian winter. During the first six or seven weeks, while the five puppies born alive were still suckling, she tried her best to raise them. But when the time came to wean them, she lost strength. Finally, shortly before dawn on the second day of the new year, she died.
The Americans had already figured out who she was. The previous year, when the Japanese military launched the second stage of its Ke-gō Operation, evacuating its forces en masse from Kiska/Narukami, it had blown up the factories, garages, ammunition, and other munitions that had to be left on the island. But they hadn’t gotten everything. They ran out of time. More than fifty-two hundred members of the island’s garrison had to be loaded into the rescue fleet’s ships in just fifty-five minutes. The troops could take only the most essential personal belongings, so any number of notebooks, diaries, and other papers remained in the camps. Important classified documents were burned, of course, but they couldn’t dispose of the rest.
As soon as the Americans had retaken the island, they had the landing force’s intelligence officers translate what they found. Several documents indicated that Explosion had originally been an American military dog until she was captured by the Japanese on Kiska. “We seized a dog from a US Navy private (a prisoner) at the wireless station,” one reference explained. “Her name is Explosion.” The Alaska Defense Command conducted an inquiry into her provenance under the jurisdiction of the Navy Flotilla 13.
And so, once again, Explosion was an American.
What about the others? They all belonged to the Americans, of course. They were fed by the Americans, cared for by the Americans. But in the end, they hadn’t actually become American military dogs. The five puppies were treated as pets by the garrisoned forces, not as fighters, and since the two adults—the German shepherd Masao and the Hokkaido Kita—were military dogs, the Americans considered them Japanese, and prisoners.
Not that this was a bad thing.
The dogs weren’t overly concerned with the instructions war minister Tōjō Hideki had laid down in the Field Army Service Code: “Do not live to endure the prisoner’s humiliation.” Neither Masao nor Kita felt particularly humiliated. They saw how Explosion responded to commands in English, and within a week or two they had learned to answer the commands the American troops garrisoned on Kiska issued. They were almost perfect. The soldiers adored them. The two dogs weren’t humiliated, they were treated like kings.
February 10, 1944. Seven dogs. Having been stationed for approximately six months on the island, the troops were ordered on to their next field of battle. As they boarded the transport ships that had pulled into Kiska Harbor, the seven dogs went with them.
The twentieth century: a century of war, a century of war dogs. These dogs did more than simply die on the battlefields. They took prisoners and were taken. It happened all the time on the front lines. Dogs were captured. Trained in battle, bred in all sorts of ways, developed, perfected, the dogs were crucial, secret weapons. In the second decade of the twentieth century, Germany seized mastiffs from all over Belgium, which it had conquered, and inducted them into their military, where they were used to pull guns and carts—tasks German dogs were unable to perform. All along the Eastern and Western Fronts, Europe’s great powers busied themselves snatching whatever types of dogs their own armies lacked. The situation was the same during the Second World War. Germany, for instance, still the most advanced nation in terms of its dogs, had compelled almost every dog in the French military to turn on its homeland by the time Germany conquered France.
The seven dogs on Kiska would be sent to the mainland. Two as “prisoners” captured on the front lines, the remaining five to be trained as “candidate military dogs.” The dog-training unit of the Marine Corps was especially interested in the puppies. They couldn’t wait to see how good these animals would be—a new generation born of two purebred German shepherds, the first (Explosion) American and the second (Masao) a sample of the sort of dog that Japan, with its admittedly greater experience in this area, was sending into the field. The order had been issued for the dogs to be shipped to the mainland precisely for this reason.
If things went well, all seven dogs would be retrained at a Marine Corps camp and emerge from the experience as American military dogs.
Not prisoners, not candidates. Full-fledged military dogs.
The seven dogs had been brought onto one of the transport ships, but no kennels or beds had been prepared. For the time being, they were simply chained to the bridge. The puppies, less than four months old, were terrified. Not that this mattered, of course; the fleet departed anyway. The ship’s first stop would be Dutch Harbor, on Unalaska Island, over four hundred miles away.
Three miles brought it outside Kiska Harbor.
The seven dogs would never return.
And they were seasick.
Violently seasick. Tracing the arc of the Aleutian Islands, the boat pushed relentlessly eastward through the North Pacific Ocean. The body of the boat itself, however, rocked in all directions: not just east but west, south, and north. The Aleutians’ unique climate played with it, preyed upon it. Clouds hung a mere ten meters or so above the waves; fierce gusts of wind dashed snow across the deck. And the weather kept changing suddenly, then suddenly changing again. First the puppies felt it. They vomited, shivered; their eyes were blank. What terrible punishment was this? Incapable of comprehending what was happening, what it meant to be seasick, the five puppies succumbed. Kita, the Hokkaido, was the next to go. He was the only non–German shepherd, and his symptoms were even worse. Masao, meanwhile, was fine. He remembered having made this crossing to the Aleutians once before. Boarding a similar ship, a transport ship or a destroyer or whatever it was, part of the Northern Command’s Hokkai Task Force—he remembered that experience, the long passage from Mutsu Bay. That knowledge kept him from getting sick. Kita remembered too, of course, but it didn’t help him.
Kita’s nerves were shot.
The men on the bridge assumed, as they made for Unalaska, that he had succumbed to the depression that sometimes comes over dogs in harsh environments.
Depression. Once it hits, a dog loses all will to live.
Still, at root it was just a different form of seasickness. So the humans told themselves. And why shouldn’t they? After all, several of the soldiers on board, some among the troops heading home and some being transferred, were vomiting, groaning, lying spattered by their own puke, and by that of their comrades. But their diagnosis was wrong. Yes, Kita was seasick. But this was more than ordinary seasickness. The true cause was the rabies vaccine he had been given before they left Kiska. The vaccination had become obligatory as soon as their relocation to the mainland was decided upon. The Army Air Corps supply unit delivered the vaccinations in the course of their usual duties. There was nothing wrong with the vaccine itself. The problem was that this was Kita’s third vaccination, and not enough time had elapsed since his previous shot when he first shipped off with the navy for Kiska/Narukami.
Kita was having a reaction. He had absorbed too much of the vaccine. He grew feverish, lethargic, incapable of controlling his appetite—he was in agony. And so he became depressed, and they misunderstood.
When the ship arrived at Unalaska, Kita was unloaded with the other six dogs, but unlike them he wasn’t passed on to the Aleutians’ permanent garrison.
“This one’s no good,” someone said, “don’t bother with him.”
And so he was separated from the rest.
He remained on Unalaska Island, unable even to watch when, after spending a few days at the Dutch Harbor Naval Operations Facility, the other six dogs were sent off to Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina.
Left behind.
Kita, all alone, on the Aleutian archipelago.
He didn’t recover. People still interpreted his symptoms as signs of depression. He showed no desire to live. But they didn’t put him to sleep. He was just a dog, so why bother killing him? They tied him up like a guard dog outside a warehouse on a wharf the military used.
Kita, Kita, what are you feeling?
He was a military dog from a lineage of acknowledged superiority. He was strong. A dog among dogs, selected with the utmost care from among his peers. He had been trained to carry out an array of tasks: to be a watchdog, to attack, to search out and rescue wounded soldiers. And then he had been sent to the battlefield. But once he was there, what job was he assigned? On Kiska/Narukami, he had been made to work as a taster, demonstrating to his masters that the island’s plants weren’t poisonous. He would eat them, show them with his body that they weren’t poisonous. That was all. Naturally, it was a very important job. It was only because he served that role that the forces on Kiska/Narukami managed to remain free from scurvy when even basic food supplies were not reliably available in these far-flung occupied areas. But how much did people appreciate his work? His masters, the men to whom he remained so loyal, had left him behind during the Ke-gō Operation. They abandoned him and the other three dogs. And then there were those days spent in the company of others of his kind. Days of freedom on a nameless, uninhabited island. Timeless days. And then his new masters had appeared. They brought food, and when Kita learned English commands, they adored him. Kita trusted them.
Kita was a dog.
So he trusted them.
And now he was sick, and here he was. And once again his masters were gone. Not a single man he recognized. They had shunned him again. Abandoned him again. And the other dogs, from the island…he had been separated from them too. WHY? he keened. Shivering from the chills that wracked his body, he keened as though he had contracted a case of pseudo-rabies. WHY MUST I SUFFER LIKE THIS? Masters appeared, disappeared. They taught him loyalty, then heartlessly cast him aside. What had been the point of all that training? He had been the cream of the crop, an elite among military dogs. There was no point. No value. And now he was sick and depressed.
WHAT SENSE IS THERE IN LIVING?
Utter, irresistible apathy. There by the harbor, Kita acknowledged hardly anything. He was living in a nightmare. Reality itself was a dream.
But he had food. He wouldn’t be allowed to starve.
Though Kita didn’t realize it, there was a young man taking care of him. He was twenty-two, a land-based member of the air corps. He had been conscripted in 1942. He loved dogs, so he looked after Kita. He was fascinated by Kita—by his appearance. He had never seen a dog like this back home. It was totally unlike other northern breeds he was familiar with, like Samoyeds or malamutes. This was only to be expected, since the young man had never seen a Japanese dog—or rather, a dog of Japanese origins. The Hokkaido is like a Spitz, with upright ears and a tail that curves up over its back, so courageous and ferocious that it was long used to hunt brown bears. There is an unmistakable aura of wildness in its appearance. What kind of dog is this? the young man wondered.
His curiosity piqued, he made a practice of visiting Kita twice every day.
Kita wouldn’t die.
He got his strength back, but still he continued to wander in a dream world, as if his spirit had yet to heal. His consciousness was trapped in its nightmare state.
One day in April 1944, two men came and stood before Kita. One was the young man, the other was a mail pilot. The pilot was thirty years old. “Incredible,” he muttered. “I’ve never seen anything like him either.” He checked the dog over.
The young man stood off to one side. “I felt bad for him, you know?” he said. “They just sorta left him here, no doghouse or anything, like those two blankets were enough. This is the Aleutians, for Chrissake.”
Then: “You can really take him?”
The pilot glanced up. “Sure I can.”
“You like him?”
“Absolutely. I’ll put him in the post office kennel. It’s sort of a hobby—I’ve got all kinds of dogs. A rare animal like him will give me bragging rights, that’s for sure.”
“Good news, huh?” the young man said to Kita. “You’ll have friends. Mail dogs.”
Three days later, the pilot was back. He had taken care of the minimal paperwork necessary for him to take charge of Kita, over at the facility’s central office. It was a matter of signing a form, that was all. And then Kita was on a plane. Loaded into the space where the mail had been before it was delivered. Now Kita was an airborne dog.
The weight of a Hokkaido dog on a plane, in place of a few hundred items of mail.
Still Kita hadn’t returned from dreamland. He had no idea what was happening—that now, two months after being sick on that boat, he was flying along the eastern tip of the Aleutian arc. He felt only an unfamiliar pull on his body, an unmistakably mechanical shaking.
The nose of the airplane pointed toward Alaska. Toward Anchorage.
In 1944, Alaska wasn’t yet a state of the United States. It was no more than a peripheral territory. A territory that nonetheless occupied fully a fifth the area of the United States. In the summer, the sun rose in the north northeast and sank in the north northwest; in the winter it rose in the south southeast and sank in the south southwest.
At first, the pilot kept Kita in the post office kennel. There was a lot going on there. The same pen held a setter, a borzoi, a malamute, a Siberian husky, a Greenland dog, and a bull mastiff. Other dogs were constantly threatening him, sniffing him. Little by little, Kita began to notice the world. Still, during the next three months he didn’t make much progress.
On July 22, in Fairbanks, the pilot was shot dead by a robber.
The night before he was shot, the pilot had been at a bar with an old friend, urging him to come see his dogs. “You gotta come and see these boys,” he said. “C’mon, make a trip up to Anchorage! You’d understand what they’re worth.” The friend’s father was a legend in Alaskan mail circles, a pioneer in dog-sled mail delivery. For forty years, ever since the gold rush had turned this land into a madhouse, he had been carrying mail to isolated villages scattered in the interior, so remote that neither trains nor any other motored vehicle could possibly reach them. The pilot had gone to pay his respects to this living legend several times and got to know his son, who was about the same age he was. The son had grown up watching his father ride off with his dogs, he had played on sleds and cuddled up with the dogs in their kennel—he knew dogs. It seemed only natural that he become a musher himself when he got older, and he had taken first prize in a few local races. He lived off prize money and by trapping.
A week after the pilot’s death, this musher friend came to Anchorage as he had promised. He visited the post office kennel. The pilot’s prize collection was, truth be told, more than his colleagues could handle. Two or three dogs were all they could use, either at work or as pets. That was how things stood when this close friend of the deceased, a musher, turned up. They asked for his help.
“Sure thing,” he told them. “I’ll take any dogs that can pull a sled.”
In August, Kita was taken, as part of the pilot’s “estate,” to a place far from any other human habitation, a few dozen miles northwest of Fairbanks.
Six months had passed since Kita left Kiska. The latitude here was even higher. The Arctic Circle was near. Kita, Kita, what are you feeling? You’re living in the north now, in the real north, as though your name marked your destiny. Kita. North. The musher trained you. Taught you how a sled dog was supposed to run, how to pull the flat practice sled known as a pulk. THIS IS TRAINING—I HAVEN’T DONE THIS IN A WHILE, you thought. I’M BEING TAUGHT, I’M LEARNING TO DO MY DUTY. Somewhere inside you, a switch was flipped. The mail dogs your master had brought back couldn’t keep up, but you didn’t stop. You felt no pain. No, not you. The strictness of this training agreed with you.
And then it happened. Winter came. You were harnessed and you ran. Before your master’s sled, perfectly in sync with the other dogs, your stride the same as theirs…you ran. You had gone from being a sled dog in training to a real, bona fide sled dog. You grasped the hierarchy that structured the team, followed the lead dog, ran. This, this was your duty. You felt it.
The musher had his sights set on first place in the next race. There was a war on, but the government wasn’t dumb enough to cancel an event with such a long tradition in Alaska. It wasn’t going to risk alienating the populace. If the musher was going to win, he had to practice like it was the real thing. He never took a day off. And so neither did his dogs. He was running them as hard as he could by February 1945. The master and his dogs were hardly ever at home. They must have covered half of Alaska—half a universe of white. Kita was on the move. He devoured the colorless scenery. The spruce trees, his own white breath and that of the other dogs, the great rivers now frozen solid—everything was perfect. An ideal sled route.
On February 17 there was an incident. The whole area was buried in snow. Suddenly the sled capsized. The dogs were baying. Something had scared them out of their wits. A moose. It hadn’t eaten in ages because of the snow. It had lunged wildly at the dogs. From their flank. The dogs were harnessed, of course. The moose was a female; she weighed more than seventeen hundred pounds. She was a beast, starved to the limit, aggressive. The lead dog was killed, then another two. All of a sudden, somewhere inside Kita, another switch was flipped. Just like that. While the other dogs darted back and forth in terror, Kita awoke.
Attack!
His instincts called to him. Now, now, he remembered the lessons that had been beaten into him when he belonged to the military—he remembered how to attack. THIS IS IT, he realized in this midst of his extreme agitation. THIS IS WHAT I WAS SUPPOSED TO DO ON THAT ISLAND, THIS IS MY DUTY! Kita tensed, then barked. NOW IS THE TIME. I’LL LIVE. YES, I’M LIVING!
Finally snapping back into reality, Kita sprang into action. His harness was loose, almost falling off. He leapt. He wasn’t intimidated by the enemy, despite the tremendous difference in their weight. The fight was on. Slipping through the moose’s hooves, he sank his teeth into its windpipe. The moose bled. The moose bellowed. The struggle continued for thirty minutes, until at last Kita emerged victorious, practically unscathed.
The team had lost three dogs. Six more were wounded. One had tried to flee. The sled was halfway destroyed.
Then a blizzard blew up. The musher was almost dead, and Kita warmed his body with his own. Gave his master his own warmth to keep him from freezing. The surviving dogs gathered around him.
Dogs, you other dogs from Kiska, where are you now?
By the end of the war, Kita had won himself a position as a sled dog on the snowfields of Alaska. But what happened to the dogs that had parted with Kita at Dutch Harbor? They continued to serve as military dogs. During the war, of course, and even after it. Except that only one of them was still alive when it ended. The others fell in action, here and there, across the Pacific. On the Marianas, in the Philippines, on Iwo Jima, on Okinawa.
From February 1944, the six dogs who had been sent to the American mainland via Dutch Harbor—Masao as a “prisoner” dog and the five four-month-old purebred German shepherds as “candidate” military dogs—were housed in the spacious training center at Camp Lejeune. All six went on to become American military dogs—following, as it were, the script that had been written for them. Explosion’s unplanned union with a Japanese dog (Masao) had, as it happened, yielded an outstanding litter. It was hardly a surprise that the pups exhibited all the usual traits of the breed and were free from imperfections. Indeed, the superiority of their bloodline had come to an even fuller fruition in them. They seemed to have inherited only the best aspects of the latest breeding as it was practiced by the Japanese and American militaries. Having been tested in any number of areas, all five placed in the A class. Masao, too, exceeded expectations. The pups’ father adapted immediately to the commands his new American masters taught him. He made it abundantly clear how much he could do, almost as though he knew that this was an inspection, to see if he was fit to be admitted as an immigrant, to become an American. Within two months, the father and his pups were reunited, allowed to live together.
In order to be recognized as a full-fledged military dog, a pup must have reached a certain age. Military dogs can’t be too young. So it wasn’t until the fall, when the five pups were about a year old, that they were finally shipped off to the front lines. By then they had been thoroughly trained. They had learned how to carry out various tasks: guarding, reconnaissance, attacking, transport. They were sent onto mock battlefields where they were inured to bomb blasts, smoke, flames. They learned to crawl under barbed wire. All five were certified as A-class dogs and sent to various islands in the Pacific. Masao had gone off to war months earlier. He no longer felt any compunction about attacking the Japanese.
During the latter half of 1943, American forces were engaged in a vast campaign across the Pacific Ocean. On November 1, troops landed on Bougainville Island, at the northern edge of the Solomon Islands; shortly thereafter they took Rabaul on New Britain, the site of a Japanese naval and air base, and the fighting shifted north of the equator. February 1944 saw the inauguration of a fierce campaign against the Marshall and the Chuuk island group; on June 15, the Americans landed on Saipan; two months later they had captured the Marianas. And then they advanced on the Philippines. The Japanese sustained a disastrous defeat in a land battle on Leyte. A war of attrition was being fought on Luzon. And then it was 1945. A land battle of incredible scale broke out on Iwo Jima, and the fighting moved to Okinawa.
How many people died in all?
And how many dogs?
Tens of thousands. Literally tens of thousands, all across the Pacific. And those dogs were among the casualties. One after another, they were killed in battle. Only one of their number was still alive when, in August 1945, two atom bombs—one made of uranium that was called Little Boy, one made of plutonium that was called Fat Man—flashed within the space of a few days over the Japanese islands of Honshū and Kyūshū.
That dog wasn’t Masao. It was one of Masao’s children. Four puppies in that litter of nine, four of the little ones that had come into this world alive after Masao and Explosion mated, were dead now. Only one returned unscathed.
Returned to the American mainland. From the west side of the Pacific to the east. A German shepherd named Bad News. A male.
America, having emerged victorious, continued to expand its military dog population. The kennels were maintained. Because the dogs remained useful. Their numbers had to be increased in preparation for the next war. Stronger dogs, better dogs. Some of the active dogs were selected for breeding. Bad News, an A-class male, was given the right to mate.
The right to straddle beautiful female dogs.
And then there was Kita, in Alaska.
In 1945, Kita became a lead dog. His authority in the team could not be challenged. The musher who was his master treated him as his best friend, trusted him implicitly. After all, Kita had saved his life. They were bound now by a powerful tie; each understood what the other was thinking. Kita’s master had always been a talented and energetic musher, but now that he had Kita as his lead dog he began winning even more races. Kita wasn’t a standard breed for a sled dog, of course. But he was strong. Four times a day, before and after practice, his master rubbed his body down with alcohol; his energy was never exhausted, and he poured it all into doing his duty. That winter, and the next, Kita led his team to more than one record-breaking victory. His master was a star, and Kita came to be known as the dog, not only in Alaska but across the entire Arctic. Kita was the most famous sled dog there was.
Naturally, his master encouraged him to sire as many children as he could. The pups in his bloodline, inheriting his traits, became a sought-after breed of their own. The bitches all came from fine stock too. Only they weren’t the same breed as Kita. They were Siberian huskies, malamutes. Mushers had been selectively breeding sled dogs for some time, and they knew the power of guided mongrelization. Eventually, Alaska would produce its own breed of Alaskan husky, bred specially for racing. It was only natural that Kita became a breeding dog.
Puppies from famous dogs weren’t cheap. Sewing his seed, Kita earned his master a living. And the other dogs too. He became their benefactor.
Sled racing continued to develop as a sport in Alaska in the wake of the Second World War. The establishment in 1948 of the Alaska Dog Mushers Association was followed in 1949 by the creation of the Alaska Sled Dog and Racing Association, and races began to be held on an unprecedented scale. The number of applicants increased and with it the demand for pedigree sled dogs.
Already by 1949, Kita had sired 124 puppies.
And the other dog?
By the same year, Bad News had fathered 277 puppies. He had long since retired from life as an active military dog, but he went on planting his seed.