Judy: The Unforgettable Story of the Dog Who Went to War and Became a True Hero (11 page)

There was a deep and instinctive connection between Les Searle the wounded seaman and Judy the ship's mascot. Theirs would
prove to be a long-lived and life-affirming friendship in the bloody months and years that lay ahead.

It was February 11, 1942, when the fleet of little ships remaining in Singapore was finally given permission to evacuate. Over the preceding eight weeks the island fortress had been pounded into near ruin from the air. The port's huge oil storage tanks were burning fiercely, casting a thick pall of choking, toxic smoke across the harbor, which mingled with that from the fires burning all across the city.

Hoping for another Miracle of Dunkirk, many believed the flotilla would somehow evacuate all to safety—disregarding the nearly total Japanese superiority in the air and at sea. The gunboat HMS
Scorpion
, already badly damaged by Japanese bombing, was one of the first of the little ships to leave. Packed with civilians fleeing the besieged island, she reached as far as the Berhala Strait, some 300 kilometers south of Singapore, before running into the vanguard of the Japanese invasion fleet—the light cruiser
Yura
and the two destroyer escorts
Fubuki
and
Asagiri
.

Though her guns barked defiance, the diminutive gunboat stood little chance. As it was blazing from stem to stern and out of control, there were only twenty survivors by the time the ship went down, all of whom were picked up by the Japanese. One of those who perished was Chief Petty Officer Charles Goodyear, whose marriage to the Russian barmaid had been so ominously received by the Chinese soothsayer back in Shanghai. Many more of Judy's treasured friends would lose their lives before the week was out.

On February 13 the final evacuation of Singapore got under way, with some fifty little ships preparing to evacuate the besieged island city. Priority was given to women and children. As the crew of the
Grasshopper
carried frightened infants aboard and comforted bewildered mothers, they were trying to work out how on earth they were going to accommodate the hordes of extra passengers.

Judy of Sussex didn't have to worry herself with such niceties: she was everywhere that day, dashing from one new arrival to the
next, tail wagging ceaselessly and nose nuzzling into the hands of those who were the most tearful and distressed. She seemed to sense somehow the gravity of the situation and to know how the presence of a dog, a symbol of normality and of home, would comfort the evacuees, many of whom had been forced to leave behind their own much-loved pets.

She was especially fantastic with the children. Judy led them around the ship, showed them the finest hiding places, and played her favorite games with those who still possessed the spirit to play. But there was precious little room for any fun, for the
Grasshopper
was becoming a very crowded ship indeed. Her normal complement of 75 had been swollen fourfold as some 200 extra bodies crowded her decks.

Petty Officer White—recently the victim of Mickey the monkey's assault—was coxswain of the ship, which meant it was his job to see to the chief needs of all evacuees. Somehow, in war-ravaged Singapore he had to find enough water and food for 200 extra souls and satisfy all their special needs, such as baby milk, soap, toilet paper, and the odd piece of chocolate for the children, if such could be found.

Since the previous September the
Grasshopper
had had a new captain. Together with his senior officers Commander Jack Hoffman was busy on the bridge studying possible escape routes, though none seemed to offer them much of a chance of making a getaway. News had just reached him that three of the little ships crammed with escapees—local vessels the
Redang, Siang Wo,
and
Giang Bee
—had been intercepted and sunk that very day.

At nine o'clock that night the
Grasshopper
threw off her moorings and headed for the open sea. She was in the company of her sister ship, the
Dragonfly
, plus a dockyard tugboat and two double-decker pleasure steamers. All five vessels were packed from stem to stern with evacuees. To the rear of the crowded
Grasshopper
Judy had found her special place. She was curled up with those who were most in need—the children who were being evacuated from the besieged island, which was being pounded into fiery oblivion even as they steamed out of Keppel Harbor.

As the
Grasshopper
headed for the comparative safety of the darkened seas, the banshee howl of diving Japanese warplanes rent the air. The spine-chilling sound was punctuated by the scream of falling bombs and the earthshaking roar as they exploded among the port facilities. The occasional searchlight punched through the smoke-laden darkness as the defenders sought to nail a Japanese bomber in its light and put up some answering fire. But to those sailing away from Singapore the fate of the island fortress was plain to see.

Come sunrise the flotilla was heading for the Berhala Strait.
Dragonfly
, under the captaincy of Commander Alfred Sprott, was leading. The sea was flat calm and the sky a cloudless blue, offering zero cover to hide from Japanese warplanes. To the south and east lay a myriad of tropical islands, and the ships' commanders were hoping to find some respite from the Japanese naval forces by hiding among them.

But the first developments that day proved darkly ominous. At around 0900 hours the distinctive form of a Japanese four-engine flying boat—a Kawanishi H8K, Allied code name Emily—appeared seemingly from out of nowhere. Powering along at her top speed of 465 kilometers per hour, the otherwise graceful warplane dived to attack the lead ship. Two bombs were dropped on
Dragonfly
, but both fell wide of the mark, after which the flying boat was driven off by machine-gun fire.

Chiefly a maritime patrol aircraft, the H8K could carry around 1,000 kilograms of bombs, so it was good to have gotten rid of it. But no one doubted what this signified.

They had to presume that their exact coordinates had been radioed through to the nearest Japanese forces, whether warships or warplanes.

Chapter Eight

Barely minutes after the flying boat had disappeared a series of deep explosions echoed across the seas as the first vessels to be attacked that morning were hit. Three little ships—
Kuala, Kung Wo,
and
Tien Kwang
—had come under attack.

A group of small islands lay between their location and that of the
Dragonfly
and
Grasshopper
, and so no one aboard the British gunboats could see exactly what was happening. But they could hear that vessels were being set upon by Japanese warplanes and that they were being bombed and strafed from the air.

Earlier that morning
Kuala, Kung Wo,
and
Tien Kwang
had pulled into the cover of the nearby Pompong Island, so luckily some of the crew had gone ashore, searching for material with which to camouflage their vessels. They at least would survive the bombing and sinking of the three ships. One of those survivors was a young Royal Air Force technician called Frank Williams. Unknown to him, his fate was tied up inextricably with a very special crew member aboard the
Grasshopper
—a ship's dog that was even now comforting the children as the terrifying sound of explosions and gunfire echoed across the early morning seas.

The
Grasshopper
and her sister ships were following a “safe channel” leading south, one that was supposed to have been swept clear of mines. That channel extended through the Berhala and Bangka straits, leading into the more open waters of the Java Sea beyond. Unfortunately, it was exactly via this route that the
Japanese invasion fleet had chosen to approach the doomed island of Singapore.

Ahead of the
Grasshopper
and
Dragonfly,
the first vessel to encounter the oncoming armada was the tiny gunboat HMS
Li Wo
, commanded by Royal Navy Lieutenant Wilkinson. The
Li Wo
found herself sandwiched between two rows of a massive Japanese naval force, each consisting of transport vessels, led by a cruiser and tailed by a destroyer.

Undaunted, the captain ordered his ship to close to within 2,000 yards of the nearest enemy transport ship and open fire. The third salvo from the
Li Wo
's single 4-inch gun hit just below the bridge and set the enemy vessel on fire, but by now the Japanese had very much woken up to the attack.

With the damaged ship now very close at hand, Lieutenant Wilkinson ordered his vessel to ram her. This she did, hitting at top speed amidships, and the two craft became locked in their death throes. Battle commenced at close quarters. It was brutal and ferocious as each crew raked the other's vessel with machine-gun fire. The British gunners finally silenced their rivals, forcing the Japanese to abandon their ship, which was burning fiercely.

The
Li Wo
backed out of the hole she'd torn in the side of the vessel, but by now she had a Japanese cruiser in hot pursuit. Facing a barrage of fire from her 6-inch guns, the
Li Wo
kept zigzagging to avoid being hit. But after the ninth salvo had raked her with shrapnel the order was given to abandon ship. Shortly thereafter the aft magazine must have been hit, causing a cataclysmic explosion.

The
Li Wo
went down with the captain, Lieutenant Wilkinson, still on the bridge, and there would be few if any survivors. For his heroic actions in command of his tiny vessel—outnumbered and outgunned but defiant to the last—Lieutenant Wilkinson would be posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.

Less than a mile away another of the little ships, the
Vyner Brooke
, commanded by Royal Navy Lieutenant Burton, was the next to be attacked. After two direct hits she too was sent beneath the waves. Scores of survivors, including several dozen Australian
nurses, managed to reach the safety of nearby Bangka Island, only to be captured by a Japanese shore patrol. The men were marched out of sight of the nurses and bayoneted to death or beheaded in the jungle. The women were very likely raped before being driven into the sea and machine-gunned in the water.

Several dozen miles to the north of Bangka Island, the
Grasshopper
and the
Dragonfly
were heading toward this bloody, tortured patch of ocean, along with three little ships packed with civilian evacuees—the two pleasure steamers and the tugboat. And it would be Judy who would first realize that the enemy was all but upon them.

The first hint of the approaching danger came via the
Grasshopper
's informal early-warning system. All of a sudden Judy sat bolt upright. One moment she had been playing with the children, the next her ears were pricked forward and she was frozen as only a pointer can be—limbs tense, eyes glued to the distant horizon, mind totally focused on her sense of hearing.

Seconds later she had abandoned her position and was making a mad dash for the ship's bridge. She was barking out a warning even as she flew up the iron steps, arriving at the feet of the ship's captain, Commander Hoffman, breathless and panting. The captain was about to order her below again, but he and Petty Officer White—Mickey the monkey's erstwhile nemesis—watched with a growing sense of alarm as Judy's all too familiar actions began to unfold.

She set her sleek muzzle to skies to the north and let out a long series of fierce barks, and there was zero sign of her stopping. Knowing what this must signify, the captain ordered his men to battle stations. Sure enough, as Judy's barking rose to a frenzied and staccato
ruff-ruff-ruff-ruff-ruff
, the first tiny speck appeared on the distant burning blue. It was still inaudible to the human ear; it was only the sunlight glinting off distant wings that revealed it to be not a seabird but a warplane.

This was no lone flying-boat reconnaissance aircraft. As the air armada bore down on them, those on the
Grasshopper
's bridge counted well over 100 bombers flying in five separate formations.
During the long weeks spent under bombardment first on the Yangtze and more recently in Singapore, the ship's crew had grown used to the sight of mass waves of enemy aircraft roaring through the skies. But to encounter them here in the open ocean, and with hundreds of civilian passengers under their protection, was an entirely more daunting proposition.

The Japanese warplanes were sleek twin-engine Mitsubishi Ki-21 heavy bombers, each carrying over 1,000 kilograms of bombs. It was approaching midday on February 14, 1942, when the first of those aircraft thundered in across the ocean to attack.

The lead bombers swooped onto the flotilla's flagship, HMS
Dragonfly
. As her machine guns and cannon sparked fiery defiance, the first of the bombs fell all around her like rain. The captain had his vessel going at full speed and circling in an avoiding action as his guns unleashed hell, and for long moments the warplanes seemed unable to hit her. But though the
Grasshopper
likewise had all guns blazing, she wasn't to be so lucky.

The first direct hit on the
Grasshopper
sent shrapnel pinging off her thick armored plating and ricocheting all around her superstructure, the explosion raking the bridge with burning hot shards of steel. Commander Hoffman was himself injured in the blast, suffering a deep gouge to his leg, and Petty Officer White's right arm and hand were peppered with flying splinters of blasted metal.

A fire had been sparked by the bomb, but the ship's crew soon managed to get it under control. Yet even as they were doing so more Ki-21s howled in, their bombs plummeting toward the ship with banshee wails that sent a shiver up the spine. Towering gouts of white were thrown up all around the
Grasshopper
as she plowed onward through the firestorm. At times the vessel was all but invisible as a result of the wall of water churned up by the explosions.

Grasshopper
's guns continued to spit defiance even though the gunners were half blinded by the plumes of spray. The tugboat and the two double-decker pleasure steamers were entirely defenseless—apart from the fire put up by the gunboats. Within minutes both pleasure steamers had come to a stop and were
burning fiercely. The tugboat, which had taken a direct hit, had disappeared completely.

For several minutes the
Dragonfly
seemed to lead a charmed life as none of the bombers appeared able to score a direct hit. Then a bomb must have exploded in her aft magazine—the ammunition store, set just to the rear of the bridge—or on the depth charges stored on deck. Even from over a half a mile away, which was the distance now separating the
Dragonfly
and the
Grasshopper
, the explosion seemed devastating.

There was the blinding flash of the blast, and a roar like thunder rolled across the sea toward the
Grasshopper
. A massive plume of smoke and debris punched above the
Dragonfly
aft of the bridge. When visibility finally cleared, all that remained of the back half of the British warship was a mass of twisted and scorched metal. Any evacuees who'd been sheltering in the rear half of the vessel would have been killed instantly. The stern of the
Dragonfly
seemed to have been torn clean away, the engines had stopped, and the ship looked doomed.

As those in the
Grasshopper
watched aghast the
Dragonfly
began to sink stern first. Within a matter of minutes she was half submerged. The survivors launched a whaler, plus some circular Carley survival rafts, and the injured who could be rescued were hauled aboard. It was then that Commander Sprott gave the final order to abandon ship, and all those who were able to dived overboard and swam away from the fast-sinking vessel.

Just as she was going under, two tiny figures jumped from the bridge, ran along her side, and slid down the ship's bottom and into the sea. Commander Sprott and his first lieutenant had made it off the
Dragonfly
in the nick of time. Within seconds she was all but gone, just a few feet of her prow remaining above the waves. It was no more than five minutes since the cataclysmic explosion had torn her apart—and HMS
Dragonfly
was no more.

The few dozen survivors were clinging to Carley floats or were packed into the lone lifeboat. They were a dozen miles or more from the nearest land and crammed into hopelessly overcrowded vessels.
On the bridge of the
Grasshopper
, Commander Hoffman made the only decision that he could. He turned his vessel toward the point where the
Dragonfly
had gone down, and with the engines at full throttle he set a course for rescue. If he could also go to the aid of the survivors from the two pleasure steamers, so much the better.

But the circling warplanes were far from finished yet. As Judy pranced about barking maniacally at the thundering skies, some sixty-odd enemy aircraft turned in formation and began to bear down on the lone surviving gunboat. They separated into flights of six aircraft each and dropped down to 2,000 feet, wave after wave lining up for a low-level attack designed to finish the stubborn British gunboat once and for all.

For the umpteenth time that morning Commander Hoffman ordered his gunners to open fire, and
Grasshopper
's six .303-inch machine guns spit defiance into the face of the attacking bombers. By now Judy had gotten used to the sound of the ship's guns. She clearly didn't like it, but as her hackles rose and she bared her fangs at the skies above the ship, it was clear that she knew from where the real danger emanated.

From the
Grasshopper
's bridge the scene appeared almost unreal. Judy's barking mingled with the cries of the women and children crowded onto the decks, the distant jungle-clad “paradise” islands adding a surreal edge to the scene. If anything, the first few minutes of the onslaught proved even more surreal: repeated waves of Ki-21s screamed overhead as the
Grasshopper
charged onward at seventeen knots, churning up the seas in a series of tight circles, yet each time their bombs somehow seemed to miss her.

With each revolution that his ship cut through the water, Commander Hoffman was bringing her ever closer to the nearest landfall. If she was hit, as he feared she was going to be, he wanted to be close to land to have a chance of saving his crew and those civilians who were crouched in terror on his decks.

It was then that one of the Japanese warplanes must have gotten lucky. A sleek black object seemed to plummet in slow motion directly toward the bridge. At the last moment it overshot and
slammed into the rear mess deck, just aft of the ship's superstructure. It exploded in the bowels of the vessel, wreaking havoc in the after mess deck, the blast shaking the ship like a dog with a bone.

The
Grasshopper
shuddered from stem to stern, but so far the damage didn't appear terminal. It was only when angry gouts of flame burst forth from the ship's hold adjacent to the rear magazine—the ship's ammunition store—that Commander Hoffman knew they were in trouble. With the fire burning furiously, the crew struggled to flood the magazine with seawater to prevent it from exploding, but it proved impossible. Word was sent to the bridge that nothing could be done to stop the flames from reaching the ammunition, which could blow at any time.

Commander Hoffman knew now that he had to get everyone off his ship and fast. If the fire reached the ammunition store, they would suffer a similar fate to that of the
Dragonfly
—the rear of their vessel would be blasted asunder. Injured though he was, Captain Hoffman was still very much in charge of his ship. With her bows pointed directly at the pristine white sands of the nearby tropical island, he demanded one final burst of power from her twin engines.

Her bow cleaving the water like a knife,
Grasshopper
made her final, desperate run. There was little time for any finesse here: with further waves of Japanese warplanes thundering in to attack, Commander Hoffman planned to ram his ship into the shallows and beach her. As the engine room began to flood, the stokers coaxed the last remaining power from her boilers. Turbines throbbed, the deck thrummed, and
Grasshopper
's twin propellers thrashed the seas as a long plume of oily smoke streamed out into the skies behind her, acting like a marker signal to the approaching Ki-21 warplanes.