The dogs entered the picture right before UN forces retook Seoul. Most of the UN forces were American, and their commander-in-chief was Douglas MacArthur, the same man who, as the supreme commander of the Allied Forces, had headed GHQ in Japan. The dogs came under MacArthur’s command as part of what was known as Operation Chromite, in the Battle of Inchon.
The surprise attack was a success. Seoul was returned to Korea, whose capital it became. But things didn’t end there. The Americans got greedy. All of a sudden, they changed their strategy, decided that now they were going to pursue the military reunification of the peninsula—the same “reunification of the homeland” that the north had wanted, only under a liberalistic government. UN forces crossed the 38th parallel, invading North Korea, and immediately took Pyongyang, its capital. Indeed, they kept going north, rapidly approaching the border with China.
But here they made a miscalculation. In October 1950, the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army joined the fight in support of North Korea with 180,000 troops. Their slogan was Kang Mei Yuan Chao: “Resist the US, Aid Korea!”
The People’s Republic of China, popularly known as China, had come into being just one year earlier. It hadn’t simply sprouted up overnight in the wake of Japan’s defeat in 1945. The nationalist Kuomintang and the Communist Party, led by Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong respectively, had fought together during the Second Sino-Japanese War, but the moment they achieved their goal the alliance collapsed. In July 1946, after a year of sporadic fighting during which each side struggled frantically to secure the support of the Americans and the Russians, they plunged into an all-out civil war. In three years, three million people died. Early on, America lent its full support to the Kuomintang, and yet its army still found itself losing. Then, in 1949, the Nationalists finally retreated to Taiwan. Taiwan, by the way, had been a Japanese colony from 1895 until 1943, when the United Kingdom, the United States, and China decided at the so-called Cairo Conference that it would be returned to China. Chiang Kai-shek had participated in the Cairo Conference as China’s representative.
In October 1949, Mao Zedong announced the birth of the People’s Republic of China.
The communist countries immediately recognized it as a state.
America declined to have diplomatic relations with China. Instead, it continued to recognize the Kuomintang government Chiang Kai-shek had reestablished in Taiwan.
In February 1950, Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin signed the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance.
Four months later, the Korean War broke out. Another four months and China joined the fray. Five years after the conclusion of World War II, along the western edge of the Pacific Ocean, the tug-of-war continued. And everything that was happening had its roots in a single dynamic: the tension between the US and the USSR. Harry S. Truman, who was in favor of combating the communist menace with force, was president at the time. Truman detested Stalin. Stalin detested Truman. Who knows, perhaps ultimately the intense personal dislike these two men had for each other was wreaking havoc with…
The Pacific Ocean.
History.
And the dogs.
Yes, even the dogs.
Seventeen dogs with no sense of how they were being used. Their fates might intersect in the most mysterious ways, there on the Korean Peninsula, on the site of a proxy war between East and West, part of the broader Cold War, but they would never know. It was the season for war. The twentieth century, a century of war dogs. The dogs were played with, toyed with, exploited. As the fighting intensified, dragged on, devolved into a quagmire, UN forces began procuring dogs from closer by. In January 1952, America’s Far East Air Force purchased its first dogs from Japan: sixty German shepherds. They had been selected from a group of more than two hundred dogs brought to Ueno Park from throughout the Kantō region. More than a third had passed the first battery of inspections and tests, which included height and overall physical condition, the ability to remain calm in the presence of close-range gunfire, the willingness to attack people clad in protective gear, and the absence of filariasis. Both the commissioned officer in charge of the Far East Air Force’s dogs and the veterinarian were surprised that so many animals passed the test, but given their ancestry it shouldn’t have been a surprise. These were the descendants of war dogs that had not only lived during but also through the Fifteen Years’ War, which included both the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War. And, of course, they were purebred German shepherds. Purebred Japanese German shepherds.
There were no dogs left in Tokyo in the immediate wake of the defeat. There were no dogs in Osaka either. Or in Hakata, Nagoya, Kanazawa—zero. In the two years leading up to the surrender, dogs had disappeared from Japan’s cities. There was nothing to feed them. With the food situation as dire as it was for humans, fretting over dogs was out of the picture. War dogs were the only exception—they had rations. But they were destined for the battlefield. And then, toward the end of the war, citizens were ordered to turn in their dogs. These weren’t war dogs, just ordinary pets. They weren’t deployed as reinforcements. They were procured as military supplies. They were valued, now, for their fur. Dogs from all across Japan were offered up for the Japanese military to kill and skin. Between ten and twenty percent of Japan’s civilian dogs survived. These lucky dogs lived in rural areas where their owners could feed them.
As for the war dogs, only those strong enough, fierce enough, lucky enough to escape death on the battlefield, not just once but time after time, survived.
By and large, the dogs that gathered in Ueno Park in January 1952 were descended from the second of these two groups.
Something rather amazing happened as a result. American dogs ended up fighting on the front lines and living in the camps with these formerly Japanese dogs, newly incorporated into the UN forces. And among the Japanese dogs were some that, if you traced their lineage, had as their great-great-grandfather the same German shepherd who had sired Katsu. Katsu, the dog that had served in the army garrison manning the Kiska/Narukami antiaircraft battery. The same German shepherd that had kept his distance from the three other dogs left behind on the island, that had ultimately sacrificed himself in a banzai attack, leading the American soldiers into a minefield. And that wasn’t all. There were, in addition, a few dogs descended on their mother’s side from Masao. Yes, that same Masao—Bad News’s father, the grandfather of those seventeen dogs sent into South Korea. But so what? Brought together in this unexpected place by the purest of coincidences, the dogs themselves remained oblivious.
The dogs’ owners kept breed registries, but the dogs didn’t. They knew nothing about their pedigrees, their history.