Dogs of war

The Japanese military on the Asian continent relied heavily on animal-based logistics—horses for transportation, pigeons for long-range communications and dogs for short-range communications and sentry duties.

There were some 10,000 dogs in service with the Imperial Army as messengers, sentries, trackers and sled teams at time and, as Japan marched across Manchuria and later China, the military recognized the need to ensure a steady supply of animals. It asked the citizens of the empire to donate their pets to the military for use in Manchuria, which officials described as a “working dog’s heaven.”

How do you convince families to give up their household pets to serve on the front lines? Through propaganda—particularly aimed at children. It was in this fashion that Itakura’s story became a popular tale, one taught to children as a prime example of “acts of loyalty, bravery and martial passion,” to borrow a wartime government phrasing.

The following account blends the dramatized account contained in Genichi Kume’s 1932 propaganda book Major Itakura and his Loyal Dogs with added details from Japanese blogger Benigara’s investigation of the memorial at Enmei Temple.

A well-known researcher of military dogs, Itakura arrived in Manchuria from the Japanese home islands in March 1931, having been transferred from the Army Infantry School in Chiba, where he served as chief of the War Dog Training Center.

Itakura—then still a captain—lived in an area of Mukden known as Inaba, where he looked after his unit’s dogs. Of all the hounds he housed, his favorites were the German Shepherds Meri, Nachi and Kongo. Itakura trained them to deliver messages and patrol with their handlers at night.

As artillery thundered on Peitaying Barracks on the night of Sept. 18, Meri, Nachi and Kongo put their skills to work.

From 11 p.m. to 4 a.m., the handlers dispatched the dogs to and from battalion headquarters carrying messages from 1st Company out in the field. Despite being outnumbered, the Japanese soldiers quickly seized the upper hand, because the Chinese soldiers were under orders not to retaliate. But under relentless artillery fire, the Chinese soldiers couldn’t help but try to protect themselves.

According to Kume, Meri was with his handler Pvt. Ueno as he joined the assault on the barracks. As Ueno’s squad closed on one of the buildings, a hand grenade exploded and Chinese soldiers leaped up, forcing the Japanese into close-quarters combat.

Shrapnel gashed Ueno’s leg. Through the pain, he desperately tried to hold onto Meri, but the dog slipped away and dashed inside the barracks. Ueno attempted to run after him but Meri vanished into the smoke and dust. Elsewhere, Kongo and Nachi had also been cut off from their handlers and were also missing.

The Chinese retreated in the morning. Peitaying Barracks was in Japanese hands, but the three dogs were nowhere to be found. Even when Itakura went out whistling for them to come back, they did not return.

Three days later the bodies of siblings Nachi and Kongo were found covered in wounds and lying in blood-stained snow. According to Kume, the pups had been forced into the snowy wastes outside. There they had made an impassioned last stand—evident from the bitten-off scraps of enemy uniforms still clenched between their teeth and the nearby mauled bodies of Chinese soldiers.

The propagandist Kume described a likely fictional exchange between Itakura and his eight-year-old daughter Atsuko, upon the officer’s return home following the battle.

Itakura watched his daughter’s eyes turn wide and brim with tears as he told her of Kongo and Nachi’s fates. He tried to console her. “They worked very hard. Even with all the fighting, they made sure our messages made it all the way to headquarters. They were on their way back to me when they were shot by Chinese soldiers.”

“What about Meri? Was Meri shot, too?”

“We don’t know where Meri went or what happened to him. That’s why I came home—I thought maybe he had come back here but … ” Itakura’s voice trailed off.

Atsuko’s large eyes filled with tears.

Outside the house’s gate, a cart trundled up, its contents concealed under a white sheet. Itakura steeled himself and peered under the cover to see Nachi’s corpse.

“Where was she?” Itakura asked the private pulling the cart.

“At the north end of the parade ground, sir. She died from a shot to the chest. I brought her over with Kongo.”

“Thank you. Still nothing about Meri?”

“No, sir. The others have split up to search for him, but there is still no word.”

As her father listened to his subordinate’s report, Atsuko begged to be allowed to see under the sheet. Itakura refused to let her see the bloodied canine corpses and ordered the private to take the cart to the rear of the house.

Before long, the private had whittled down a plain piece of wood into a suitable grave marker. Itakura took a brush and wrote upon it, “Here lie the devoted Japanese dogs Kongo and Nachi.”

Sentry dog training at the Imperial Army Infantry School in Chiba in 1930. Benigara scan

Japanese pride

The account above is based on Kume’s popular story, published in 1932. It’s not the original account as written by Itakura himself. It’s an embellished dramatization—and the seed of a wider propaganda effort surrounding the dead dogs.

One florid account from 1932’s Conversation With an Anonymous Soldier From the Mukden Independent Garrison describes five dogs at work that night and three bodies being found—their blood staining the white snow around them.

Hirotoshi Asano, the man who gave Kongo and Nachi to Itakura, took these dramatizations to task in his own account, Remembering the War Dogs Kongo and Nachi. “To say that there would be white snow in Manchuria on Sept. 18 is going a little far.” Yet the imagery is found in many of the popular retellings.

The story goes that Nachi and Kongo’s bodies were buried in the grave at Peitaying, but an original account written by Itakura himself states that the bodies of Nachi and Meri, not Kongo, were recovered that day.

In The Desolate and Mournful Wind of the Raoyanghe from 1931—one of the earliest popularizations of the incident—this key fact has not yet changed. But accounts from 1932 onward resemble the story presented above, with Kongo found in Meri’s place.

Why didn’t Meri make the cut?

The names Kongo and Nachi carry a lot of weight. They originally come from exceptionally old Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples in the western Japanese mountains.

Mt. Nachi also lent its name to a Japanese navy Myoko-class cruiser that sank off Manila in November 1944. Three war vessels have taken their name from Mt. Kongo—an iron-clad that served in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894, a battleship that sank in the Formosa Strait in 1944 plus a modern missile destroyer.

By contrast, Meri’s name is a transliteration of the English name Mary. As was common in those days, Meri was also a male name. It’s possible the propagandists changed Meri to Kongo to honor the grand Shinto heritage.

While Meri’s Western name might have been unacceptable, the fact that he was a European breed would have had little bearing on his place in history. All three of the Sept. 18 war dogs were German Shepherds, just like 90 percent of serving Imperial Army canines at the time. And the Japanese military loved German Shepherds.

As government bureaucrat Kikuyoshi Miyagawa wrote in the teachers’ manual of a 1935 textbook recounting the Peitaying story, German Shepherds were the “essential expression of the Yamato spirit, the exemplars of repaying accumulated debt, the incarnation of dauntless courage whose loyalty and bravery rank with the imperial soldier, and which would even make a fierce god weep.”

According to Miyagawa, the dramatized popular accounts emphasized to school-aged children that the dogs had “died a death that is heroic beyond comparison” so that “a tough and courageous spirit may be cultivated through which the greatness of the Japanese nation (kokutai) will become visible.”

One school textbook from 1935 describes Kongo and Nachi’s deaths as follows:

At last they were found. However, they lay among a pile of dead enemies’ remains. The two dogs had taken several bullets each, and their death had been a bloody one. Looking closely, it turned out they were clenching shreds of enemy clothing between their teeth. The soldier who saw them immediately broke into tears.

According to Itakura’s original telling, there were no dead bodies around the dogs’ corpses, no clothes between their teeth and no heroic deaths. Meri was killed by a bullet to the abdomen, Nachi by a bullet to the chest—and they were both found together.

Kongo, whose body was lost, was presumed killed in action. Itakura noted that they bravely performed their duties under a hail of bullets and that their deaths would further the army’s commitment to the use of military dogs.

“Brave soldiers honorably killed in battle by enemy bullets, their deaths were not in vain—they have secured the future of working dogs in the army,” he wrote. “I am confident their meritorious service will aid the development of younger working dogs.”

Itakura was absolutely right. The military dog program would continue in large part thanks to Kongo, Nachi and all the other subsequent stories in the press, cinema and literature of dogs fighting for the emperor.

Itaru Itakura, far left, with his colleagues at the Military Dog Research Group in 1930. Imperial Army photo

The compassionate handler

The story of “speechless warriors” dying with honor on the battlefield would probably have been compelling enough for a propaganda piece, but what gave the story legs was Itakura’s subsequent death on Nov. 27, two months after the Mukden Incident.

The 33-year old Itakura was a military academy graduate from Sanbu District, Chiba. Entering the army in 1921, he initially served with the 28th Infantry Regiment. He moved to the Army Infantry School in 1927 as a light-machine gunner cadet, after which he was promoted to first lieutenant.

The Infantry School at Tendai in Chiba split from the Tokyo-based Army Toyama School in 1912. It existed to research and propagate infantry tactics and education throughout the Imperial Army.

One subject that greatly interested army leadership was the Germans’ extensive use of military working dogs and carrier pigeons. On the orders of its commandant in 1913, the school began research into military dogs—and received its first actual canines in 1919.

All of the German Shepherds at the school descended from 11 German colonial police dogs confiscated in Qingdao, China, which was occupied by the Japanese during their limited engagement in World War I. Until the arrival of the Japanese, Qingdao had been a de facto German colony.

Itakura became the chief of the War Dog Training Center in February 1930, but was called to Mukden a year later by Lt. Col. Sadao Yoshida, the founder of the Mukden Garrison’s War Dogs Section.

Itakura took the dog Meri with him from the Infantry School. Meri, a male German Shepherd, had been donated to the Army by the National Shepherd Club, of which Itakura was also a member.

Nachi was donated to Itakura directly by Hirotoshi Asano, another National Shepherd Club member. Asano had considered Nachi particularly suited for service after taking her and her litter-mates for a walk. The puppies scattered in panic when a motorbike backfired.

Asano searched and searched for Nachi as he collected the puppies, and was sure she was gone for good as he walked her litter-mates home. He found Nachi was waiting for him back at home. This intelligence and homing instinct was rare among his dogs, and this encouraged Asano to supply Nachi to the army.

Kongo was Nachi’s brother, and his donation to the military was entirely accidental. As Asano’s wife prepared to crate and send Nachi to Itakura in Mukden, she worried that the pup would be lonely on her long journey. Searching for a companion for poor Nachi, Asano selected Kongo due to his similar character.

The pair arrived in Dalian and from there joined Itakura and his wife on their trip to their new home in Mukden.

Itakura had one other dog he wanted to take with him—Hopu (“hope”), donated to the army by Qingdao resident Kakusaburo Suzuki. But the army understood the need for good public relations to maintain a steady supply of donated working dogs, so it rejected Itakura’s request and sent Hopu back to Japan to do publicity work.