Smoky

She was found in a foxhole in the New Guinea jungle in February 1944, an adult Yorkshire terrier weighing four pounds and standing seven inches high, with no explanation of how she got there — she understood neither English nor Japanese. Corporal William Wynne bought her from another soldier for two Australian pounds, and she lived in his pack for the next two years. She flew twelve combat missions, sat out a hundred and fifty air raids, survived a typhoon at Okinawa, and was never given the rations or the veterinary care that army dogs got, because officially she did not exist. At Lingayen airfield on Luzon the engineers needed a telegraph line run through a seventy-foot drainage pipe eight inches across, blocked in places by sand. Digging it up meant three days' work under fire with the airfield's aircraft exposed. Smoky took a string tied to her collar and went in; forty feet down she stopped where the light went, then came on when Wynne called her, and came out the other end in about two minutes. Forty aircraft and two hundred and fifty men stayed out of the open. Wynne taught her tricks in hospital while he was ill with dengue, and the nurses began walking her through the wards. She kept it up for twelve years after the war, in veterans' hospitals across the country — which is why she is usually called the first therapy dog. She died in 1957 and is buried under a bronze memorial in Lakewood, Ohio.

Loved by · William A. Wynne

Honours

• 1945Ran a telegraph line through a 70-foot pipe at Lingayen, sparing three days' digging under fire
• 1944Twelve combat missions and 150 air raids in the South Pacific
• 1944Began the hospital visits that make her the first recorded therapy dog
• 2005Bronze memorial unveiled over her grave in Lakewood, Ohio

Their kind

Bred by Yorkshire mill workers to go down into machinery and drains after rats — a working terrier's nerve in under three kilos.

A life in seasons