In nineteen forty three a woman named Maria Dickin created a medal.
She had founded an organisation providing free veterinary treatment for the animals of people who could not afford a vet, and she had spent thirty years watching animals do work that nobody recorded. So she instituted an award for animals showing conspicuous gallantry while serving with the armed forces or civil defence.
It is a bronze medal on a striped ribbon, and around the edge it says: For Gallantry. We Also Serve.
Fifty-four of them were awarded for actions in this war. Thirty-two went to pigeons, eighteen to dogs, three to horses and one to a cat, which is a distribution that surprises everybody and needs some explaining.
A radio can be jammed, listened to, or direction-found. A pigeon cannot.
So about a quarter of a million pigeons were used by British forces during the war, most of them lent by ordinary pigeon fanciers who handed over their best birds. Bombers carried two in a watertight basket. Agents parachuted into occupied Europe were dropped with one in a padded container, along with a message form and a tiny pencil.
Winkie was a blue chequered hen belonging to a man in Dundee. In February nineteen forty two she was aboard a Beaufort bomber that came down in the North Sea, more than a hundred miles out.
The crew got into their dinghy and released her. She was soaked and covered in oil, which for a pigeon is close to a death sentence, and she flew home anyway, and arrived at her loft in Broughty Ferry.
Her owner telephoned the air base. There was no message on her, because the crew had had no time to write one, so what the station did next was work backwards. Knowing when the aircraft had ditched, and how far a bird could fly, and how much slower an oiled bird would be, they calculated a search area.
The crew were found within about fifteen minutes of a search beginning. They later held a dinner in Winkie's honour, and she attended it.
The other famous bird is an American one called G.I. Joe, and his story is about being on time.
In October nineteen forty three, in Italy, a British brigade was ordered to attack the village of Calvi Vecchia. Because the assault was expected to be difficult, an air raid was scheduled to bomb the village first.
The village then surrendered without a fight, and the British walked in early.
Which left a small problem: in about half an hour, a large number of bombers were going to arrive over a village now full of British soldiers, and the radios were not getting through.
G.I. Joe was released with a message. He flew twenty miles in twenty minutes and landed at the airfield as the aircraft were warming up on the runway. The raid was cancelled.
The estimate afterwards was that he had saved something between a hundred and a thousand lives, depending on who was doing the estimating, and the wide range is because nobody wanted to think about it too precisely.
Judy was an English pointer who had been the ship's dog on a Royal Navy gunboat in the Far East. She could hear approaching aircraft before the crew could and would point at them, which was useful enough that the crew took her seriously.
In February nineteen forty two her ship was bombed and sunk. The survivors got onto a small island with no fresh water, and after a couple of days Judy was seen digging at the sand near the shoreline at low tide, and found a freshwater spring.
They eventually reached Sumatra, and were captured.
In the prison camp she was adopted by an airman named Frank Williams, who shared his own rice with her. She learned to make herself scarce when guards were in a bad mood, and she made a habit of putting herself between prisoners and guards during beatings, which is a very good way for a dog to be shot.
So Williams did something clever. He got the camp commandant drunk and persuaded him, in that state, to register the dog officially as a prisoner of war. She became prisoner 81A Medan, and having a number meant she could not simply be disposed of.
When the prisoners were moved by ship and the ship was torpedoed, Williams pushed her out of a porthole. They were separated for weeks and found each other again in another camp. Both survived the war. Judy received the Dickin Medal in nineteen forty six and Williams was still talking about her forty years later.
And then there is Wojtek, who is not like anything else in this series.
In nineteen forty two, a column of Polish soldiers was travelling through Iran. These were men who had been deported to the Soviet Union in nineteen thirty nine, released after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and were now making an enormous journey south to join the Allied armies in the Middle East.
A local boy was carrying a bear cub in a sack. They bought it, reportedly for some tinned food, a penknife and a bar of chocolate.
They named him Wojtek, fed him condensed milk from a bottle, and he grew up in an artillery supply company. He grew to about six feet and five hundred pounds. He wrestled the soldiers, drank beer, ate cigarettes rather than smoking them, and learned to salute.
In nineteen forty four the unit was posted to Italy, and the ship would not carry animals. So the company enlisted him. He was given a name, a rank, a serial number and a paybook, and became Private Wojtek of the twenty-second Artillery Supply Company, and travelled as a soldier.
At Monte Cassino, one of the hardest battles of the Italian campaign, he carried crates of artillery shells from the lorries to the guns. This is documented by multiple witnesses and it is not a legend, though the details have certainly grown. He copied what he saw the men doing and did it, all day, and reportedly never dropped one.
The company adopted a badge showing a bear carrying a shell, and it became the official insignia.
After the war the Polish units in Britain were demobilised, and most of the men could not go home, because home was now under a government that regarded them as suspect.
Wojtek went to Edinburgh Zoo in nineteen forty seven and lived there until nineteen sixty three. Polish veterans came to visit him. Several of them reported that he responded to Polish, and one or two of the zookeepers said that visitors had a habit of throwing him cigarettes, which he ate.
There is a statue of him in Edinburgh now, and another in Krakow.
Rip, meanwhile, was a stray who attached himself to an air raid warden in Poplar in London during the Blitz. Nobody trained him. He simply started finding people under collapsed buildings, and is credited with more than a hundred. His success is the reason the authorities began deliberately training search dogs, which is a discipline that has been saving people in earthquakes ever since.
And the one cat, Simon of the frigate Amethyst, was awarded his medal in nineteen forty nine, after being wounded by a shell and continuing to keep the ship's rat population down through a three-month siege on a Chinese river. He is the only cat to have received it.
The Dickin Medal is still awarded. Recent recipients have mostly been dogs working in Iraq and Afghanistan, and one was awarded in twenty twenty three to a dog serving in Ukraine.
There is one story here with an unsatisfying ending. Chips, an American army dog who had been a family pet in New York, broke out of cover in Sicily and attacked a machine gun position that had pinned down his unit. He was awarded a Silver Star and a Purple Heart, and both were then revoked, because a policy was invoked that official decorations were for people. The army sent his family a letter of commendation instead.
It is worth being honest about what these stories are. Animals do not choose to be brave. Wojtek carried shells because he had seen soldiers do it and he liked being part of things. Judy protected prisoners because they were her people. What the medal actually records is a relationship, usually between an animal and one person who fed it.
Here is something to think about tonight. Almost every animal in this episode was somebody's pet first, or somebody's hobby, handed over to a war that had nothing to do with them. Why do you think people found it so important to give them medals afterwards?