Free Judy: The Unforgettable Story of the Dog Who Went to War and Became a True Hero by Damien Lewis Page A

cause of her distress became clear. All of a sudden a Japanese warplane swooped out of the seemingly empty heavens and dived toward the British warships. It swooped low over the Gnat , flew across the Bee at little more than mast height, then pulled up into a steep climb and was gone.
    No Japanese warplane had yet engaged a British or Allied ship on the Yangtze, but the meaning of the buzzing was all too clear. Had they wanted to, the Japanese air crew could have bombed or strafed the British gunboat pretty much at will. Japan had more or less total air superiority in the skies above China. The Chinese Air Force was pitifully ill equipped and manned, and no Allied aircraft were able to patrol this far into her territory.
    Judy ceased her barking only once the Japanese plane had dwindled into an invisible speck on the horizon. Next, she did a very odd thing. She started to whirl around on the spot as if madly chasing her own tail, and once she was certain she’d completely monopolized the rear admiral’s attention, she proceeded to curl up on the floor at his feet.
    The rear admiral stared at her for several seconds. She was wrapped comfortably around his gleaming toe caps, seemingly sound asleep after all the barking and whirling. He glanced at the rigid face of Captain Waldegrave and raised one bristly eyebrow.
    “Remarkable ship’s dog you have here. Sound vibrations, presumably. That’s how she did it.” A weighty pause. “But the time is coming, I fear, when we all may need a dog like this stationed on the ship’s bridge.”
    The rear admiral must have realized that he had nothing in his repertoire to compete with Judy’s early-warning demonstration, and the Admiralty inspection was promptly declared over. The officers and crew of the Gnat had passed with flying colors—all ofthem, including one very remarkable ship’s dog seemingly gifted with a miraculous form of canine radar.
    Dogs possess eighteen separate muscles with which to raise, lower, or swivel their ears, ensuring they can pin down exactly which direction a sound is coming from. In detecting that Japanese warplane, Judy had demonstrated just how effectively those muscle-driven ears can be used to track distant sounds. But Judy’s ability to detect that aircraft—and the threat it embodied—went far deeper than purely physical attributes.
    Somehow, Judy had also sensed that this thunderous noise in the sky equated to danger, and since she’d yet to suffer any air attacks, there was no obvious reason for her to do so. As with the pirate ships, she seemed able to sense danger itself —and it was that which had so impressed itself upon the rear admiral . . . not to mention all of her fellow crewmates.
    A few days after she’d passed her Admiralty inspection the Gnat steamed into Hankow harbor, with no more pirates, or Japanese warplanes—or even cess ships!—having menaced her onward passage up the Yangtze. Here she joined the many other British, American, French, and Japanese gunboats floating at their moorings, plus the odd Italian and German ship that also patrolled these waters.
    At Hankow the captain’s orders were simple. He was to show a presence and fly the flag, looking efficient and warlike to deter any trouble in this vitally important riverside city. Over the eight decades that the Yangtze had been patrolled by the foreign powers, Hankow had grown into the key treaty port and gunboat hub, largely because of its strategic location in the center of the navigable stretch of the great river. As a result, the city offered all the luxuries lacking aboard a ship like the Gnat .
    The officers’ mess on an Insect class boat was fairly well appointed for a vessel her size. The Gnat even had a wardroom, set in the forward part of the hull, squeezed between the captain’s quarters and the oil fuel tanks. The wardroom was designed to resemble a miniature version of an English gentleman’s club, complete withcomfortable armchairs draped in