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Untold War Stories

May 23 • 5 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X

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There is a cemetery on the island of Guam where 24 Marine war dogs are buried.

They were Doberman Pinschers and German Shepherds who fought alongside the Marines in the Pacific.

This is the story of the Marine Devil Dogs..🧵1/5

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By early 1942 the United States Marine Corps had a problem in the Pacific.

The Japanese were dug into the dense jungles of every island the Marines tried to take. They were masters of concealment. They moved silently through the undergrowth. They set ambushes at night. They infiltrated American positions while the Marines slept. Marine patrols were being cut to pieces by an enemy they could not see, hear, or smell.

The Marines needed an answer. They found one in a civilian organization called Dogs for Defense.

In late 1942 the Marine Corps established its first War Dog Platoon at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. American families donated their family pets. Breeders donated trained working dogs. The most common donations were Doberman Pinschers and German Shepherds.

The Marines wanted dogs that were 25 inches tall at the shoulder and weighed about 60 pounds. Big enough to be intimidating. Small enough that a Marine could carry one out of combat if it was wounded.

The training course ran 14 weeks. The dogs learned to obey hand signals so handlers could direct them silently in combat. They learned to alert without barking when they detected the enemy. They learned to crawl, swim, climb cargo nets, ride in landing craft, and ignore the sound of gunfire and explosions. They learned to track a man by scent through dense jungle.

They were assigned roles. Scout dogs walked at the head of patrols and alerted to enemy positions ahead. Messenger dogs ran communications between units across battlefields where radios had failed. Sentry dogs guarded camps at night.

Over 1,000 dogs completed the Marine training program during the war. The Marines called them Devil Dogs, borrowing the famous Marine Corps nickname from the First World War.

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November 1 1943. Bougainville. Solomon Islands.

The first Marine War Dog Platoon went into combat. 24 dogs and 55 handlers attached to the 2nd Marine Raider Regiment. 21 Dobermans and 3 German Shepherds. They were lowered from the deck of the attack transport USS George Clymer in cargo nets and improvised harnesses. They climbed into Higgins boats with their handlers and went ashore under heavy Japanese fire.

Two dogs entered the history books that morning.

Andy was a Doberman scout dog handled by PFCs Robert Lansley and John Mahoney. He walked at the head of the Raider patrols. On day two of the invasion he alerted to a Japanese machine gun nest hidden in the jungle 100 yards ahead. The Marines took cover. The machine gun opened up. Not one of them was hit.

Caesar was a large German Shepherd messenger dog handled by PFC Rufus Mayo. On the first night ashore Caesar was sleeping in a foxhole beside Mayo when he suddenly leaped out and attacked a Japanese soldier creeping up on the position in the dark. The Japanese soldier shot Caesar at point blank range and ran. Caesar survived. Mayo had survived too because the dog had not waited to be told.

On day three Caesar carried a message from Company M to the regimental command post when American telephone lines had been cut by Japanese mortars. He was the only means of communication between the two units. He was wounded again. Marines carried him back to safety on a stretcher.

Of the 24 dogs and 55 handlers who went ashore at Bougainville, only 2 dogs and 2 handlers did not come home.

Handlers later claimed no Marine patrol guarded by war dogs was successfully surprised during the Bougainville campaign.

After Bougainville every Marine division in the Pacific was assigned its own War Dog Platoon.

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July 21 1944. The Marines landed on Guam.

The 2nd and 3rd War Dog Platoons came ashore with the Marine infantry. They would run more than 450 combat patrols on the island over the next three weeks. They cleared caves. They detected land mines. They found booby traps. They guarded sleeping Marines at night.

A Doberman named Kurt walked at the head of a Marine patrol through the jungle north of the landing beaches on July 22 1944. Kurt was handled by PFC Allen Jacobson. The dog suddenly stopped and alerted. There was a Japanese force directly ahead. The patrol took cover.

The patrol was 250 Marines strong. The Japanese force was estimated at several thousand soldiers preparing an ambush. Kurt had detected them before they had detected the Marines.

In the firefight that followed Kurt was hit by shrapnel from a Japanese mortar shell. His spine was severely damaged. The dogs' veterinarian Captain William Putney later wrote about treating him:

"I hastily hooked up an IV bottle and inserted the end of the tube into the vein of Kurt's right foreleg. I put a half-grain of morphine into the tube. He let out a big sigh, closed his eyes, and went to sleep."

Kurt did not wake up. He was the first American war dog killed in action on Guam.

PFC Jacobson refused medical treatment for his own wounds until Kurt had been carried off the battlefield. When the dog was finally evacuated Jacobson buried him in a shallow grave with a wooden cross.

Over the next three weeks 24 more Devil Dogs were killed in action on Guam. Yonnie. Koko. Bunkie. Skipper. Poncho. Tubby. Hobo. Nig. Prince. Fritz. Emmy. Missy. Cappy. Duke. Max. Blitz. Arno. Silver. Brockie. Bursch. Pepper. Ludwig. Rickey. Tam was buried at sea off Asan Point.

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The Devil Dogs fought on. They served at Iwo Jima. They served at Peleliu. They served at Okinawa. They served on every Pacific island the Marines took back from the Japanese in the final two years of the war.

Caesar the German Shepherd who had saved Rufus Mayo's life on Bougainville was killed in action on northern Okinawa on April 17 1945. His handler Bob Forsyth said of him afterward:

"Andy and Caesar were good Marines."

The men who handled the Devil Dogs never forgot them. After the war Captain William Putney, the Marine veterinarian who had cared for Kurt on Guam, spent the rest of his life pushing for proper recognition of the war dogs. In 2001 he published a memoir called Always Faithful, the first detailed account of the Marine War Dog Platoons in the Pacific.

In June 1994 a bronze statue of Kurt the Doberman was unveiled at the Pentagon. It was sculpted by an artist named Susan Bahary. The statue was then shipped to Guam and installed at a new cemetery on the Naval Base. The remains of the 24 Devil Dogs who had been killed liberating Guam were moved to the new ground beneath the statue. The cemetery was dedicated on July 21 1994, exactly 50 years after the invasion.

The bronze Kurt stands watch over his fallen brothers to this day. The inscription on the base honors the 25 Marine war dogs who gave their lives liberating Guam in 1944. It records that they served as sentries, messengers, and scouts. That they explored caves, detected mines and booby traps.

It ends with two words.

Semper Fidelis.

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Jun 13

In March 2025, the last surviving pilot of the Battle of Britain died at the age of 105.

He had been shot down four times. He survived a burning cockpit, the sea, a parachute that snagged in a tree, and a fall behind enemy lines.

When he died, the last of Churchill's "Few" was gone forever.

This is the story of Paddy Hemingway..🧵1/6

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John Allman Hemingway was born in Dublin in 1919. Everyone knew him as Paddy. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1938, and by the time the Second World War broke out he was a fighter pilot with No. 85 Squadron, flying the Hawker Hurricane.

His war began before the Battle of Britain. In May 1940, as the German army smashed through France and the Low Countries, Hemingway flew over the retreating British army as it fell back toward the beaches of Dunkirk. He shot down a German bomber and shared in destroying another, before his own Hurricane was hit by anti-aircraft fire and he was forced down near Maastricht.

His squadron was mauled in the fighting over France. They came home to Britain with only a handful of working aircraft and many of their pilots dead, wounded, or missing.

There was no time to rest. The Germans were already turning their attention across the Channel. Hitler intended to destroy the RAF, win control of the skies, and then invade Britain.

The only thing standing in his way was a few hundred young fighter pilots. Paddy Hemingway was one of them.

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The Battle of Britain began in July 1940. Day after day, German bombers and fighters came across the Channel, and the outnumbered pilots of RAF Fighter Command rose to meet them.

Hemingway's orders were to go for the bombers. His Hurricane carried only about 14 seconds of ammunition in total, so he learned to hold his fire and shoot in short, precise bursts to make every round count.

In a single eight-day stretch in August 1940, he was shot down twice.

On August 18, a day of fighting so intense it became known as The Hardest Day, his Hurricane was hit by return fire from a German bomber he was attacking. He bailed out over the Thames Estuary and came down in the sea, where he was pulled from the water by the crew of a lightship.

Eight days later, on August 26, he was shot down again by a German fighter and bailed out over the marshes of Essex, landing unhurt.

He simply climbed into another Hurricane and kept fighting. That was what the Few did. There was no one else to do it.

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Jun 11

He named nearly every fighter he ever flew "Old Crow."

In it he flew 116 missions over Germany, shot down more than 16 enemy aircraft, and was never hit by enemy aircraft fire, while half the men he flew with were killed or captured.

Eighty years later, two P-51 Mustangs bearing that same name flew over his grave.

This is the story of Bud Anderson..🧵1/6

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Clarence Emil Anderson was born in 1922 and grew up on a farm near Sacramento, California. Everyone called him Bud.

As a boy he watched aircraft fly over his father's fields and fell in love with flying. He earned his pilot's license while he was still a teenager. Then, just after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he joined the Army Air Corps as an aviation cadet and won his wings before the end of 1942.

He was assigned to a brand new unit, the 357th Fighter Group, which would become known as the Yoxford Boys. They were the first group in the Eighth Air Force to fly the new P-51 Mustang, and their job was one of the most dangerous in the air war. They escorted American bombers deep into Germany and back, fighting the Luftwaffe the entire way.

Anderson named his Mustang Old Crow. He liked to say it was partly after the bourbon, and partly because the crow is one of the smartest birds in the sky.

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Anderson turned out to be a natural fighter pilot.

He flew his first combat missions in early 1944. By the end of May he was an ace, with five enemy aircraft shot down. In a single mission over Germany in June 1944 he shot down three German fighters. By the time he was done he had been credited with 16 and a quarter aerial victories, most of them Focke-Wulf 190s, making him one of the top aces in his group and a triple ace.

He always said his real secret was his eyesight. He could spot enemy aircraft far away, before they spotted him, which let him decide when and how the fight would happen.

He flew two full combat tours. 116 missions. Around 480 hours of combat flying. Through all of it, across battles that sometimes involved hundreds of aircraft twisting through the sky at once, Old Crow was never once hit by fire from an enemy plane, and Anderson never turned back early from a single mission.

That kind of survival was almost unheard of. In his own squadron, half of the original pilots were killed or taken prisoner. Some of them were his closest friends.

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Jun 9

In 1942 a Black mess attendant saved 15 shipmates by towing them through shark-infested water for eight hours.

The Navy gave him a letter, and the country forgot him.

He died at 37, worn down by a war that never let go of him.

Eighty years later, the Navy named a warship after him.

This is the story of Charles Jackson French..🧵1/6

🧵 2/6

Charles Jackson French was born in 1919 in Foreman, Arkansas. His parents died when he was young, and he was raised by his older sister Viola in Omaha, Nebraska.

As a boy in the segregated South, he was barred from the whites-only swimming pools. So he learned to swim in the Red River. It was a skill that would one day save 15 lives.

At 18 he enlisted in the United States Navy. It was 1937, and the Navy, like almost everything else in America at the time, was segregated. At the time, the Navy severely restricted Black sailors to the Steward's Branch and related service roles. French served as a mess attendant, cooking, cleaning, and serving meals to white officers.

He finished his first enlistment and left the Navy in late 1941. Then, just days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Charles French walked into a recruiting office and signed up again.

He was sent to the Pacific.

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In the early hours of September 5 1942, French was aboard the USS Gregory, a lightly armed high-speed transport, patrolling the black water between Savo Island and Guadalcanal.

In the darkness a US aircraft accidentally dropped a flare that lit up the Gregory and her sister ship like targets on a stage. Three Japanese destroyers opened fire. The Gregory was hit again and again and sank within minutes.

The survivors were thrown into the open ocean. Many were badly wounded. Sharks moved through the water around them, and a Japanese-held island lay nearby where capture would likely mean death.

French was one of the few men who was uninjured. He helped gather 15 wounded shipmates onto a raft. But the current was slowly dragging them toward the enemy shore.

So French made a decision that should have been impossible.

He tied a rope from the raft around his own waist, slipped into the shark-infested water, and began to swim, pulling all 15 men behind him.

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Untold War Stories

@UntoldWarFacts

Jun 6

He died in 2016 at the age of 100, the last surviving Midway dive-bomber pilot.

Seventy-four years earlier he had done something no other American pilot at Midway managed. He scored direct hits on three enemy ships over three days, and all three sank.

He never wanted the credit. The title of his memoir was a plea. Never Call Me a Hero.

This is the story of Dusty Kleiss..🧵1/7

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Norman Jack Kleiss was born in 1916 in Coffeyville, Kansas, and grew up through the Great Depression. Everyone called him Dusty. He worked with tools as a boy, joined the Naval Academy, and graduated in 1938. He earned his wings as a naval aviator and was assigned to Scouting Squadron Six aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise.

His aircraft was the Douglas SBD Dauntless, a two-man dive bomber. The pilot flew and aimed the aircraft. A gunner sat behind him facing backward, defending the tail.

The way a Dauntless attacked a ship was terrifying. The pilot would roll the aircraft over at high altitude and drop into a near-vertical dive, plunging straight down toward the target through anti-aircraft fire, holding the dive until the last possible second before releasing the bomb and hauling back on the controls to pull out.

By the spring of 1942 the United States had been losing to Japan for six months. Pearl Harbor. The Philippines. Wake Island. The Japanese Navy had not lost a major battle.

That was about to change at a tiny atoll called Midway.

🧵 3/7

On the morning of June 4 1942, the Enterprise launched her dive bombers to find the Japanese carrier fleet.

It very nearly went wrong. The aircraft spent hours searching and almost ran out of fuel. Then they found them. Four Japanese aircraft carriers, the same ships that had attacked Pearl Harbor, turning into the wind below them.

Dusty Kleiss rolled his Dauntless over and dove on the carrier Kaga.

He did something most pilots would not. Instead of releasing his bombs at the standard altitude, he held his dive lower, dangerously low, to make absolutely certain he could not miss. He released and pulled out so hard his body was crushed into the seat.

His bombs struck the Kaga. As he leveled off just above the water and looked back, the carrier was a wall of flame a hundred feet high. Kaga was finished. She would sink that day.

Three other Japanese carriers were hit that same morning by American dive bombers. In the space of a few minutes the balance of the entire Pacific war had begun to turn.

But for Kleiss the day was not over, and it was about to bring him terrible news.

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Untold War Stories

@UntoldWarFacts

Jun 5

They refused to bathe. They refused to salute. They poached deer from an English lord's estate and used their washing water ration to cook it.

The night before D-Day they shaved mohawks and painted their faces like warriors.

Then they jumped into Normandy on one of the deadliest missions of the invasion.

This is the story of the Filthy Thirteen..🧵1/7

🧵 2/7

Officially they were the 1st Demolition Section of the Regimental Headquarters Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division.

Nobody called them that.

They earned the name the Filthy Thirteen while stationed in England before the invasion. The story goes that they refused to waste their weekly water ration on bathing or shaving. Instead they used it to cook the game they poached from the land around their base, including deer taken from a nearby estate. They went around filthy, unshaven, and unbothered by what anyone thought of them.

They drank hard. They fought. They went absent without leave. They ignored almost every rule the Army had except the ones that kept them alive in combat. Their officers were driven to despair trying to discipline them.

But there was a reason the Army put up with them. When it came to the actual job of blowing things up and fighting behind enemy lines, there was no better squad in the regiment.

🧵 3/7

At the center of them was a sergeant from Oklahoma named Jake McNiece.

McNiece was the son of an Irish father and a Choctaw mother. He was the one who could not be broken or tamed by Army discipline. He was promoted and busted back down so many times that despite being one of the most capable soldiers in the division, he barely held a rank for long. His own men nicknamed him McNasty.

On the night before D-Day, McNiece had an idea drawn from his Choctaw heritage. To psych the squad up for their first combat jump, he had them shave their heads into mohawks and paint each other's faces like warriors going to battle.

An Army Signal Corps photographer captured the moment. In the most famous frame, a paratrooper named Clarence Ware is carefully painting the face of another named Charles Plaudo.

The photograph ran in Stars and Stripes and helped create one of the most enduring images of American airborne culture.

A few hours after it was taken, the men in it jumped into the dark over Normandy.

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Untold War Stories

@UntoldWarFacts

Jun 4

They took a B-17 that had been left for scrap, rebuilt it by hand, and bolted on so many extra machine guns it became one of the most heavily armed bombers in the Pacific.

Then they volunteered for a solo mission over enemy territory that few crews wanted.

Its tail number was 666.

This is the story of the Eager Beavers..🧵1/7

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The pilot was a young officer named Jay Zeamer.

By early 1943 the Army Air Forces had more or less given up on him as a pilot. He had never managed to qualify to command his own bomber. He was bounced between units, used as a fill-in copilot, the odd man out who could not seem to get checked out as a first pilot. On paper he looked like a washout.

But Zeamer wanted to fly combat more than anything. So he did something unusual. He started gathering other men who had been passed over, rejected, or labelled as difficult. Misfits no other crew wanted.

Among them was an old friend, a bombardier named Joe Sarnoski.

Together they became known around the airfield as the Eager Beavers, because they volunteered for the missions nobody else would touch.

There was just one problem. A crew needs an aircraft. And nobody was going to give the rejects a good one.

🧵 3/7

So they found their own.

Sitting at the edge of the field was a worn-out B-17E Flying Fortress, tail number 41-2666. It had been knocked around, used hard, and was largely being kept around for spare parts. Everyone called it Old 666.

The Eager Beavers adopted it and went to work. They rebuilt the tired bomber by hand. Then they did something that set it apart from every other B-17 in the theater. They up-armed it.

A standard B-17 carried around a dozen machine guns. The Eager Beavers crammed in extra ones, including a fixed forward-firing gun that Zeamer could aim and fire himself from the cockpit, something a bomber pilot almost never had. By some accounts they pushed the total as high as 19 guns, with spare weapons kept aboard in case any jammed in combat.

They had turned a junked bomber into one of the most heavily armed aircraft in the Pacific.

Now they just needed a mission worthy of it.

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