Cinematic Canines: Dogs and Their Work in the Fiction Film

Chapter 5: Dogs at War: Military Dogs in Film

123 5 Dogs at War Military Dogs in Film AARON SKABELUND The practical and symbolic deployment of dogs during World War II was unprecedented and has not been replicated since. Although the conflict was heavily mechanized, armies on all sides used canines in numbers and in ways as never before; one analyst estimates that the Allied and Axis militaries employed more than 250,000 canines for a variety of tasks, including as messengers , sentries, draft animals, trackers, and patrol auxiliaries (Kelch 1982, 2). As I have detailed elsewhere, dogs—both real and imagined—were rhetorically deployed through a variety of media forms to mobilize people for war (Skabelund 2011). Armies first used dogs extensively during World War I, but that conflict inspired little figurative mobilization of canines and almost no films featuring military dogs.1 Ironically, one of the most famous canine actors of the twentieth century, Rin Tin Tin, who was according to publicity stories found as a newborn German Shepherd in the ruins of a bombed-out military dog kennel in 1918, never played a military dog in any of the numerous films in which he—and later Rin Tin Tins—starred. Instead, he and his progeny played police dogs on interwar movie screens and the reliable ally of white settlers fighting off “savage” American Indians and low-class bandits on television in the 1950s. Total mobilization of canines for practical and symbolic ends did not take place until the next global conflagration that occurred after “the war to end all wars.” 124 • Cinematic Canines During World War II, militaries in all combatant nations relied on their civilian populations to supply them with dogs, and this process became a subtle but powerful tool to mobilize people, and especially children, for war. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century dogs were by far the most widespread household pet, increasingly regarded as “members of the family” and assumed to have an intimate connection to children. Dogs therefore linked, in both real and figurative ways, the home front to the battlefront, families with military organizations, and children with soldiers. The donation of the “family dog” to the military produced a sense of one’s personally participating in the war effort. Official and private voices sought through national education and media to rally people for war by using dogs as symbols, and, as a result, the metaphorical mobilization of canines surpassed that of any other nonhuman animal. Canine actors playing military dogs have frequently appeared in narrative films about World War II. Focusing on Japanese and American films made both during and after the conflict, this essay analyzes such movies and the ways that cinematic military canines shaped and reflected their respective country’s wartime mobilization and memories of the war. Studios in Japan and the United States produced most of the movies about military dogs, in part simply because their film industries made more films during the war than did their counterparts in Europe and China. The major European countries at war—Britain, France, Germany, and the Soviet Union—had less leeway to devote to making movies, and in the ones they did make they paid little attention to military dogs. Additional factors were at play. Almost immediately after the Nazis came to power in 1933, the German parliament passed a series of progressive animal protection laws that included a ban on the use of animals in film (Arluke and Sanders 1996). Soviet and Chinese communist leaders, in accordance with Marxist criticisms of bourgeois practices, were generally dismissive of pet-keeping. And France, which had a vibrant prewar film industry and pet-keeping culture, was quickly occupied. In contrast, Japan and the United States, especially, were far from the front and had the resources to make many films, including a number about military dogs. For Japan World War II began with the Manchurian Incident in 1931, but until the early 1940s the country’s movie studios were insulated from the fighting. This, too, was of course true for the American film industry once the United States joined the conflict in December 1941. Films about military dogs became a distinctive though small subgenre in both countries during the war. Given the metaphorical mobilization of military dogs in film during the war, it should not be surprising that a number of postwar films also used them to deal with and remember certain aspects of the conflict. Few films that feature military dogs have been set in earlier military conflicts or in other...