The Pittsburgh Press (March 4, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. – The idea behind using sentry dogs for the Army is this: Supposing an Army camp has a huge warehouse, full of vital supplies. A saboteur naturally wouldn’t walk right past a guard to get in. He’d get in unseen, and hide until the time came to do his damage.
All right, the sentries might patrol their posts forever and not know this man was hiding in the building. But a dog would know it, for he doesn’t have to see, he smells.
These newly-trained Army dogs walk their posts alongside the regular sentry. Every now and then the sentry tells the dog to make a search bf the warehouse or grounds, or whatever they’re guarding. The dog does it, then comes back to walk his post.
But supposing he does find somebody? He barks a warning to the guard, and then goes after the intruder.
As long as the intruder stands perfectly still, the dog never lays a tooth into him. He just stands and polices him. But let that intruder start to run, or move a hand toward his picket, or come out with a gun – and the dog is on him in a flash.
He always goes for the arm (he’s trained to attack nowhere else), and if the enemy has a gun in either hand, he goes for that arm. He doesn’t tear the man up, he just holds him until help comes. A dozen men couldn’t tear him loose from that arm until his “owner” – the sentry – tells him to let go. Then he turns loose like a lamb.
Training takes 2½ months
Now, how is all this trained into a dog? It’s a tedious process, and takes two and a half months. Only a fourth of all dogs submitted are good enough to finish the course.
Every dog submitted goes thru a preliminary test, to show what his nerves and intelligence are. One of the tests is throwing a firecracker at him. Practically any dog will jump or cower if you do that. But a dog with steady nerves will be over it within five minutes. The nervous or cowardly dog will still be cowering 20 minutes later. That’s the dog they don’t want.
At Carl Spitz’s school – it’s called the Hollywood Dog Training School – the Army dogs are trained from 4 till 7 p.m. The school devotes the rest of the day to its regular private dog training.
First the rookie soldier dog is chained to a wall. On the chain is a heavy spring, so the dog won’t be hurt by charging against the chain.
Now starts the long process of making a gentle dog a warlike dog – but always under control. Controlled savagery, you might call it. For at the end, except for the one thing he’s trained to be tough about, the dog is as lovable and playful as at the beginning.
Now the trainer stands just out of the dog’s reach, holding a sack full of straw. He beats on this sack with a stick. He keeps sticking it toward the dog, beating it, getting the dog worked up, getting him angry, getting him “hot,” as the trainers say.
Finally he gets close enough for the dog to lunge and grab the sack. He is trained merely to grab and hold on hard, not to nip and chew at it. It takes vast patience.
Finally he is let off the chain, and the whole thing is repeated. Then the sack, in smaller form, is transferred to the trainer’s arm. The whole process is gone over again.
Limited to attacks on arms
First one arm, then the other. If the dog attacks anywhere except the arm, he is reprimanded firmly and quickly. There is no cruelty in this dog raining (I believe Spitz would kill a man who struck a dog), but there is unremitting firmness.
Finally the dog gets to the point of attacking the arm of a moving man without a sack on it. Then he is trained to watch for a gun, and attack that arm, even while the gun is being fired.
Slow, patient weeks have gone past by now. The dog is almost finished. Now it is transferred to the big front pasture of Spitz’s place. The dog walks up and down with his trainer, as though he were on sentry duty. Another trainer hides behind a bush. The dog is sent to scour the pasture for any intruder. He turns up the other trainer, and attacks him – if he moves.
At last, the dog is finished and Spitz delivers him to the Army. When he delivered the first three, he spent eight days at the post, training the soldiers. Spitz went in and said:
“Look, Pvt. Murphy, this is your dog. He doesn’t belong to the Army, he belongs to you. You are his master and he is your servant from now on. He belongs to nobody but you.”
And that’s the way it works in the Army. Each dog has one master, and one alternate master. Nobody else bothers him. Not even the commanding general is allowed to come within his sight in civilian clothes. He sees only Army uniforms from then on. He will not attack a man in uniform.
Every day, when the dog is taken from his kennel to go on duty, the sentry has a little secret ritual of commands he must go through with the dog. The dog will not go without it.
Further, the guards have secret words by which the dogs are given their various working commands. Only Spitz and the Army sentries and the dogs themselves know these words. And once a week the guards must repeat the dog’s whole course of training, from beginning to end.