The Dog Who Could Fly (6 page)

As they played with Robert’s puppy dog the memories he evoked of family life reminded them of their loathing for the enemy that had driven them from their homeland. In no time each of the airmen had taken the little dog to his heart. No animal could have had more devoted protectors. The seven truly had become eight.

They would need a name for their new member, though. They debated long and hard. Such an obvious aristocrat of the breed deserved a noble moniker, they reasoned. Lord? Duke? Rex? All seemed a bit grand for a puppy that had yet to be house-trained. Karel lost the plot and suggested Emigrant; he was hit by a barrage of flying boots and books for his trouble. Then Joska, a handsome dark-skinned lad with a fine head of curls, had a brainstorm.

“I know,” he said. “Remember that grand old plane we used to flog around the skies back home?”

“The ANT!” they shouted in unison, recalling the Russian Pe-2 dive-bomber they had all loved to fly. It had been designated the ANT by the Czech Air Force, and it was one of the best ground-attack aircraft then in service.

“That’s it!” Robert exclaimed. “Joska, you’ve got it! We’ll call him Ant in honor of our aircraft. Let’s drink to it.”

So it was that Ant was christened with all the exuberance of a baby in peacetime, except that he was toasted in beer rather than champagne.

•  •  •

The days passed. The rest of that winter of 1939–1940 was relatively quiet, for the “phony war” offered little chance of action or combat flying. Ant grew steadily and developed an assertive streak in keeping with a German shepherd’s typically muscular physique. All the Czech airmen won his affection but there was only ever one master. When Robert was eating, Ant remained at his side patiently awaiting his turn. When Robert went to sleep, Ant curled up on the bottom of his bed and woe betide any intruders.

It was so cold that January and February of 1940 that the airmen’s main preoccupation was keeping warm. The seven Czechs occupied one room in a blockhouse near the airfield and they slept in their greatcoats. Robert had the luxury of bedding down with Ant, a canine hot-water bottle with a fur lining. He was the only man never to wake with frozen toes.

Ant was quick to learn new tricks, and one in particular always drew a laugh. He became a one-dog welcoming party, greeting the Czechs as they returned from training flights or routine patrols by holding out his right front paw and “shaking hands” with each man in turn.

But this false peace couldn’t last. On May 10, Robert and his friends heard battle commence at first light on a cloudless morning.
German tanks thrust forward toward the French positions, heavy fire heralding the arrival of enemy bombers. French and Czech aircrew scrambled for their Morane fighters and the sky filled with raging dogfights. Six of the German bombers were brought down, but the euphoria was short-lived, as wave after wave of Panzer battle tanks punched through the French lines.

A plan was afoot for Robert’s squadron to bomb a group of nearby bridges, in an effort to hold up the German forces massing there. Their Potez 63 bombers were the finest the French Air Force possessed, and all fourteen of them were ready for action, their crews raring to go. But the tension of waiting to be ordered into the air was unbearable, and when Robert spotted a soccer ball lying by one of the hangars, he proposed a quick kick-about to lighten the mood.

He booted the ball hard at Karel, who flashed a bright smile, trapped it deftly under his right foot, and kicked it back even harder. But it was now Ant’s turn to shoot out from under the shade of a tree to intercept. The two men passed the ball to and fro, while Ant chased it down with relentless determination and unbeatable speed. In time soccer would prove Ant’s favorite game, but all of a sudden the adolescent dog wasn’t in a playful mood anymore.

Robert glanced up from the ball to see his young dog standing stiff-legged and staring at the horizon, hackles up and growling, just as he had done as a tiny puppy when two unidentified intruders had crept into his farmhouse. Robert scanned the skies to the southeast and could see nothing, but moments later the air-raid siren sounded.

Ant’s early warning had just been confirmed: they were about to face a savage onslaught from the skies.

Four

Ant proved to have a miraculous ability to sense enemy warplanes long before they were detectable by the human eye and ear, and sometimes even by radar.

R
obert yelled for Ant to follow him. He turned to run, only to realize that for the first time ever since their chance meeting the dog had refused to obey. He seemed rooted to the spot, barking defiantly as a large formation of Dornier Do 17s powered into view. The Dorniers were known as “flying pencils,” because they were so sleek, thin, and difficult to spot, and by the time you saw one it would be almost upon you.

Before they knew it, the first of the Luftwaffe’s warplanes swooped in low and released its bombs. It scored a direct hit on one of the hangars,
which exploded with a terrifying roar, shattered planking and galvanized iron spinning into the air. Two sharp blasts followed as the fuel tanks on one of the Potez fighter-bombers went up. A fireball punched above the roof, red-hot shards of metal raining down on the airmen.

Robert dived forward, bundled up his gangly dog into his arms, and sprinted hell-for-leather toward the far edge of the runway. The reverberations of the explosions were accompanied by the terrifying sound of heavy machine-gun fire as bullets tore up the ground at Robert’s heels. The airfield was being strafed as well as bombed, and those few precious seconds spent rescuing Ant had left Robert hopelessly exposed.

As bullets kicked up the dirt all around him, Robert spotted a shallow slit trench beneath a row of trees right on the airfield boundary. He pounded forward and hurled himself headlong into it, landing in a heap on top of Karel. Ant was sandwiched between them, but he was still yelping angrily as the Dorniers thundered overhead.

The planes circled around and came back for another attack. Further explosions forced Robert to bury his head in his hands as debris thrummed through the air, smashing into the dirt just inches from where they lay. Bullets went snarling overhead. Ant wasn’t making a sound anymore. His defiant barks and growls had given way to the fear that Robert could read in his eyes. Hugging him close, Robert felt his adolescent dog shudder with each new thud and snarl of an explosion.

The Germans turned their fire on a nearby group of aircraft, ones that had been left in the open on the edge of the airfield. As the bombs and bullets tore into those stationary warplanes, Robert could feel Ant’s heart pounding like a jackhammer. Karel too was shaking and Robert slipped a reassuring arm around his shoulder. For two hours they huddled together—two men and one dog—as the enemy bombers tore the French airbase apart.

When finally they clambered out of the trench they found that the Dorniers had done their worst. The hangars had been flattened and all fourteen of their Potez aircraft—the cream of the Armée de l’Air, as the French Air Force was known—had been blasted to smithereens. Nothing was left but smoldering wreckage and even the runway was filled with jagged craters. The squadron had ceased to exist, the airbase was finished, and the enemy’s mechanized units were bearing down on them fast.

With the French Army in retreat, Robert and his companions were forced to move three times before they found a brief respite—and replacement aircraft—at the airfield at La Malmaison. Events were moving at such a rapid pace now that when Robert prepared for takeoff from their new base, he couldn’t know for sure if he would be able to land in the same place afterward—and that meant he couldn’t be sure of shaking Ant’s paw at the end of the sortie.

What would happen to Ant if the German tanks appeared at the gates while Robert was in the air? The thought was unbearable. Robert risked his life every time he flew—that came with the territory. But the very idea of never seeing Ant again—that was a risk he wasn’t prepared to accept. There was only one thing he could do: Robert decided that Ant would have to fly with him on each of his coming missions against the enemy.

Strictly speaking, it was against French Air Force rules for an animal to fly, which was why Ant had never joined Robert on a combat sortie. As a tiny puppy he’d been easily hidden for their one flight together, but not anymore. Yet the French were never famously rule-bound, and with their country ravaged by war Robert would have to gamble that a Gallic blind eye would be turned.

When he was scrambled for his next sortie, Robert whistled for his dog to follow. He ran for the hangar with Ant bounding along beside him. Before now Ant had been banned from the flight line, and there was something in the way he kept looking up at his master
that suggested he expected to be ordered back to their quarters at any moment. When no command came, Ant wagged his tail into an excited frenzy, his eyes glowing with anticipation. The bond had grown so close between man and dog that Robert almost felt as if he could read Ant’s thoughts. He knew that his dog was dying to get into the air alongside his master, and that he could barely believe that he was going to be allowed to do so.

Robert climbed into the waiting Potez 63 and called his dog’s name. It seemed almost the most natural thing in the world for Ant to leap onto the wing of the aircraft and climb in beside him. The dog turned round and round in a tight circle, taking in the cramped confines of the glasshouse with the gunner’s machine gun at the rear. He seemed to find the snugness to his liking, for he flopped down in contentment on the floor and curled up at Robert’s feet.

Ant barely stirred when the twin engines roared into life. But as the plane taxied onto the runway, shaking a little from side to side as it crossed some rough ground, Ant raised his head and stared quizzically at his master. Seeing reassurance in the steady gaze that was returned, he dropped his head onto his outstretched forepaws and closed his eyes, content once more.

To Robert’s surprise his young dog—still really a puppy at four months old—didn’t seem to react at all on takeoff. A quick nuzzle of the hand that reached down to pat his head and Ant seemed happy. Even more extraordinary was the dog’s reaction to combat: as the Potez dived, soared, and swooped to avoid the brown and white puffs of German antiaircraft fire that bloomed all around them, Ant seemed to doze through it all.

The perils of the mission didn’t seem to worry him in the slightest. He showed little sign of alarm on hearing Robert’s gun open fire at the German fighters that swooped to attack. His ears pricked up a little as the punching percussions of machine-gun fire filled the gun turret, his nose twitched at the thick cordite fumes that drifted all
around him, but other than that he didn’t seem inclined to stir from his laid-back position prone on the metal floor.

Whether their sortie had done much to disrupt the Nazis’ lightning advance didn’t seem to matter much to the war pup on his first foray into combat. As long as he was keeping his master company while he worked, Ant appeared blissfully happy.

As the mighty Wehrmacht war machine rolled onward, the dangers intensified. Hurricane fighters from the RAF’s Advanced Air Striking Force joined the French Air Force in its desperate efforts to prevent the retreating British Expeditionary Force from being cut off. In the midst of this maelstrom, Robert and his fellow Czech airmen seemed to be leading charmed lives, for none had yet been shot down. The superstitious among them began to wonder if the presence of their cool and fearless canine mascot in the air had something to do with their good fortune.

On the morning of May 21, however, their run of luck came to an end. Accompanied by an escort of Hurricanes, the squadron set out to hit the German armored columns crossing the River Somme. As the fighter-bombers swept in to attack, a storm of antiaircraft fire blasted across the sky. It seemed to Robert that they were flying into a terrible wall of thunder and lightning, and for a fleeting moment he wondered if it had been right to bring Ant on such a seemingly deadly sortie.

They pressed home their attack and saw the German forces scatter in alarm beneath their bombs, but as Robert craned his neck to count his comrades during the climb away from the target, his heart missed a beat. Far below him he could see that Karel’s plane had gone into a steep dive. Thick black smoke poured from the fuselage as the Potez dropped like a stone.

That night, in a bar in the tiny village of Amifontaine, adjacent to their airbase, the six remaining Czechs drank the traditional toast to a fallen comrade. No matter how familiar they were by now with mortal danger, it was hard to believe that the most carefree among
them had been the first to perish. Each man had a fond memory of Karel—more often than not of him persuading the prettiest girl to let him walk her home from a dance.

As the reminiscences poured forth Ant knew that something was wrong, though he had no idea what exactly. He wandered from man to man seeking an explanation. Then he gazed at the empty chair where Karel should have been sitting and whimpered softly, as if realizing that this was the cause of tonight’s unhappiness. He crossed to the door and stood expectantly—waiting, it seemed, for their absent friend to return. Finally, with a look of puzzlement in his eyes, he lay at Robert’s feet, his head resting on his master’s boots. The shadow of death that had descended over the band of brothers had snuffed out even Ant’s irrepressible spirit.