Judy: The Unforgettable Story of the Dog Who Went to War and Became a True Hero Read Free

Burns
    “And the pigeon said . . . I’ll carry their sad messages. I am their family and they are mine.” —Alice Renshaw
    But there was no story to rival Judy’s, Meg added. She was truly a dog in a million. Meg, like Lizzie, advised me that the one person I really did need to meet was Rouse Voisey. In due course I drove up to rural Norfolk to meet the man himself. My GPS took me to a pretty bungalow that looks out over wild woods and rolling fields lying to one side of the neat row of houses in which he has his home.
    Rouse had clearly been awaiting my arrival. He greeted me on the garden steps—an incredibly sprightly and sharp-looking ninety-two-year-old. We shook hands. He scrutinized me with a quick, piercing look, as if trying to appraise the caliber of the “young man” who had driven such a long way to speak to him about events that lay some seven decades in the past.
    He glanced at the scenery, which was lit by a bleak winter’s midday sun. “You know, on some days the birdsong is so loud that I can’t hear myself greet my neighbors across the fence.” He smiled. “I love it here. You’re very welcome.” He gestured to his half-open door. “Please, come in, come in.”
    Rouse was a remarkable man, to put it mildly. Not only was he a survivor of Sumatra’s railway hell, he’d lived through what by his own admission was a “worse” slave-labor project under the Japanese. He was among a group of Allied POWs who were forced to clear the coral island of Haruku of its jungle in order to hack out a landing strip from the bare rock—in preparation for Imperial Japan’s planned invasion of Australia, something that of course never happened. Haruku is an island in the Moluccas—the so-called SpiceIslands—but under the blistering sun and in the scorching heat and dust, building that runway had all but killed Rouse and so many of his fellows had died.
    If that wasn’t enough, he had then been loaded aboard one of Imperial Japan’s so-called hell ships—rusting death traps used to transport POWs like slaves of old from one forced labor project to another—for a journey that he feared would be his last. So ill was he that he could remember little of the voyage prior to the sinking of the ship, the Junyo Maru , by a British submarine. It was, at the time, the worst maritime disaster in history in terms of confirmed loss of life: some 5,600 Allied prisoners of war plus local slave laborers perished at sea.
    Somehow Rouse survived the shipwreck. In doing so he made it to Sumatra to join the many hundreds of POWs slaving in that living hell. It was then that he first heard about Judy, the de facto mascot of the trans-Sumatran railway. As with all those who’d spoken before him, Rouse was unable to mention Judy’s name or recall her memory without a warm smile. He glanced at a photo of his own dog—now deceased—hanging on the living room wall.
    “That was my dog, Shona. She was a tricolor English setter. She was the most loving, wonderful companion you could ever wish for. I used to take her to the office where I worked—she’d sleep under my desk. She had the most lovely nature. I put the leg of my chair on her ear once by accident. She didn’t snarl or bark at me. She just rolled her eyes and whined, as if to say, Hey, that really hurts, you know . I never got another dog after Shona. I couldn’t—not after her. And Judy—she was exactly that kind of a dog. There wasn’t another like her.”
    Rouse went on to share with me stories from his time in the prison camps, with his fellows and their camp dog—ones that perhaps he’d never discussed with anyone before, not even his recently deceased wife. He ended our chat with this:
    “I was amazed that a dog could survive it all. That Judy outlived the hell of that place—it was incredible. The Korean camp guards in particular—they used to eat dogs. And they had the power oflife or death over us all. It makes you wonder how anyone got away