PODCAST EP. 380: "Judy" — A Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever Short Story

Speaker 1 (00:50.626)

Welcome to On the Wing Podcast presented by Purina Pro Plan. Got a a little bit of a different sort of episode for you today. Casey Sill, the voice of the Upland Newsroom, is going to read an article that he wrote called Judy, a World War II Bird Dog that Endures the Unthinkable. Now, Casey wrote this story for the Quail Forever Journal back in the fall of 2025.

And it stands out as one of our favorites from the Quail Forever Journal. And so we're gonna try something a little bit different. And hopefully you like it. I definitely want to hear your feedback. Send me an email at on the wing podcast at pheasantsforever.org. Let me know what you think. And we'll dip into our archives and find some other stories to have the authors read if you like this. But I again want to thank Purina Pro Plan.

For being the presenting sponsor of On the Wing Podcast and the National Dog Food Sponsor of Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever's Wildlife Habitat Mission. My pups have always eaten Purina Pro Plan, not just because Purina supports the wildlife habitat mission of our organization, which obviously is incredibly important to me. But what's most important is that when I put Purina Pro Plan into the bowl for my bird dogs, I know that that food was created for them. Specifically, it was created for the working bird dogs like yours and like mine. You can learn more at proplansport.com. All right, without further ado, here's Casey and Judy.

Speaker 2 (02:30.926)

The Japanese bomb hit the HMS Grasshopper shortly after midday on February 14th, 1942. The explosion rocked the stern, tearing through the rear mast deck before detonating. The grasshopper didn't sink immediately, but fire racing toward her aft magazine threatened to obliterate the ship altogether. The captain aimed for a small island in the distance, and the ship ran aground in its shallows.

As the dust settled and survivors made their way ashore, among the missing was a six year old liver and white pointer named Judy.

Judy was born in Shanghai, China in the winter of nineteen thirty six. Reared at a gun dog kennel meant to serve the hoity toady British aristocrats living there at the time, she was named for the Mandarin word for the peaceful one, or shooty.

She was purchased by two officers from the HMS Nat, a British insect class gunboat when she was just six months old in order to serve as the ship's mascot. The crew quickly dubbed her Judy of Sussex, envisioning hunts for King Quail along the banks of the Yangtze River where the ship patrolled. In his book about Judy, author Damian Lewis recalls First Lieutenant R. Haynes issuing a directive to the ship when he introduced Judy. From this moment onwards, Haynes said, no shooting party will be able to return to ship when he

Claiming to have shot 23 quail, but that only one could be found. By the time she was a year old, Judy had already endured a night spent loss on the streets of downtown Shanghai and a fall into the fast-moving Yangtze, both of which should have proven fatal. Transferred along with much of the crew to the HMS Grasshopper in the spring of 1939, Judy quickly developed a reputation of being both brave and foolhardy.

Speaker 2 (04:17.643)

As tensions rose across the Far East and the South Pacific, the grasshopper led out of Shanghai for the relative safety of British controlled Singapore. The ship was still stationed there on the morning of december seventh, nineteen forty one, or december eighth, local time, when waves of Japanese bombers attacked Singapore with the same ferocity as Pearl Harbor, some 7,000 miles to the east. In the chaos that followed, the grasshopper fled, only to be caught by twin engine bombers on Valentine's Day, nineteen forty two.

Visions of escape ended when the ship slammed into the rocky shallows, fifty yards off an unnamed Pacific Island.

Speaker 2 (04:56.92)

The next evening, Petty Officer George White returned to the ship to hunt for salvageable provisions. As he tore through the shattered hole, he heard a faint whimper from behind an overturned locker in a half flooded room. When he lifted the locker away there was Judy, alive and well.

Speaker 2 (05:14.744)

The crew spent five days on Shipwreck Island before being picked up by a local Dutch trawler. Prior to their escape, Judy found and dug up a fresh water source on the beach that undoubtedly saved the lives of some of the more frail and wounded castaways. From there they steamed west for the island of Sumatra and then up the Indragiri River, where they continued on foot to the Allied city of Padang. Here Judy warded off poisonous snakes and hunted game for the crew.

Before being attacked by a crocodile that left two deep gashes in her shoulder. The men of the grasshopper made it to Padeng just as the Japanese were closing in on the city. After a grueling five week journey through the jungle, the entire group was captured by the Japanese army in the spring of nineteen forty two.

Crew was transferred to the city of Belwon and eventually placed in POW Camp Gloger One. During the trip, Judy was hidden from the Japanese in a burlap rice sack, a trick that would save her life multiple times throughout the war.

Speaker 2 (06:17.814)

Allied POWs suffered unspeakable brutality and torture at the hands of their Japanese captors during the war, and Gloger One was no exception. The fact Judy wasn't immediately shot as a simple act of cruelty is beyond remarkable, but somehow she was allowed to remain with the crew. She was not, however, afforded a rational allotment, and what was given to the human prisoners was barely enough to keep starvation at bay. As they all withered away, Judy's protectors sacrificed a portion of what little they had to keep her alive.

Up to this point in her life, ownership of Judy was somewhat collective. She was looked after by a number of the crew, some of them having come and gone after the shipwreck, others having died at the hands of the Japanese. But a new arrival at Gloger One changed all that.

RAF leading aircraftman Frank Williams arrived at the camp shortly after Judy and was immediately drawn to the emaciated pointer. He took it upon himself to look after her, and she would remain by his side until the day she died. One of Judy's pastimes at the camp was sneaking under the wire to scrounge for food. But her protectors eventually discovered that wasn't all she was up to. As sometime into their stay at Gloger One, Judy gave birth to five healthy puppies.

Seizing an opportunity, Williams used the litter as a chance to protect Judy. It was well known that the Japanese commandant was a dog lover, and Williams bribed the colonel with the gift of a puppy. In return, Judy was officially registered as a POW and given a daily ration allotment. Two years went by at the camp. The POWs endured daily slave labor, torture, and starvation. Through it all, Judy became a beacon of hope for the prisoners. A wet nose, the face, or wag of the tail.

Helped keep them going, and Judy was a constant morale boost to men who had almost nothing else. In the spring of 1944, a new commandant arrived at the camp and announced the prisoners would be transferred back to Singapore, now under Japanese occupation. The men were ordered to leave Judy behind. Williams immediately hatched a plan to smuggle Judy aboard their transport ship. He trained her to jump into a burlap sack at the sound of a whistle and sit perfectly still.

Speaker 2 (08:33.09)

When the day of their transfer came, he tied Judy to a pole with a slipknot, and waited until after the guards had checked his sack for contraband. With a soft whistle, she tore loose from the rope and hopped into the bag right under the nose of the guards. She somehow went undetected through two more inspections, and settled onto the ship safe and sound with her master.

On june twenty sixth, nineteen forty four, the ship headed east across the Pacific with seven hundred POWs packed like sardines in its sweltering hole. Judy was lying across Williams' leg fast asleep when an explosion rocked the ship. A moment later a second torpedo ripped into the hole. As the water rushed in, Williams pushed Judy out of a porthole before escaping himself, and the ship sank in twelve minutes. Williams was rescued two hours later, but Judy was nowhere to be found.

When he staggered into their new camp in Singapore two days later, he was immediately knocked to the ground by a blow to the back. Rolling over, there was Judy, standing over him and licking his face, still stained and stinking from the oily seas she was pulled from.

Speaker 2 (09:45.048)

Judy had not only survived, but had pulled half a dozen or more men to safety before being rescued. This had taken an incredible toll on her body, which was already on the verge of collapse from two years in a POW camp. Slowly, Williams and the rest of Judy's family nursed her back to health. She had now survived the sinking of two ships, which had claimed the lives of over two hundred men in total.

She recovered just as the war ground into its final year, but there was no light at the end of the tunnel for Judy or her compatriots as the noose tightened on the Japanese Empire.

Speaker 2 (10:24.898)

By August nineteen forty four the crew was back in Sumatra's forced laborers on what became known as the Picanbaro Death Railway. Here the POW's treatment went from inhumane to unfathomable. They worked endlessly, and rations were reduced as Japanese supply lines were cut by the Allies. Judy's rations were cut completely, as even the guards began to starve. The men developed ulcers, beriberi, malaria, dysentery, and a myriad of other sickness and disease.

As their rations were reduced further and further, they resorted to picking maggots out of their latrines, which they rinsed and ate. By fall, ten men died daily, twenty lives per kilometer of track. Local forced laborers died by the hundreds.

On January tenth, nineteen forty five, a B-29 superfortress flew overhead, the first sign of the Allied advance. The sight sent the Japanese guards into a rage, and as Japanese morale deteriorated, their treatment of the POWs worsened considerably. That spring, Judy cornered a guard who had savagely beaten a prisoner, teeth bared, she took off into the jungle just as the guard leveled his rifle and fired. She reappeared hours later, limping with blood running down her side.

The bullet had grazed her back, but missed her vitals.

Speaker 2 (11:47.48)

By july nineteen forty five, B twenty nines appeared overhead daily, yet the work continued. In August, the commandant ordered Judy shot, likely so the guards would have something to eat. But as she had time and time again throughout the war, Judy slipped through the guards' fingers and was nowhere to be found each time they searched for her.

Speaker 2 (12:07.864)

The last spike on the Picanborough Death Railway was driven the morning of August 15, 1945, the day the war in the Pacific ended. Two weeks later, on September 4th, British soldiers liberated the camp. After three years and six months at the hands of the Japanese, Judy, Williams, and the remaining crew of the Grasshopper would be going home.

Speaker 2 (12:32.16)

After six months in quarantine back in England, Judy was awarded the Dickon Medal, the animal version of Britain's highest military honor. She remains the only dog to ever be officially registered as a prisoner of war. Judy and Williams lived together in Portsmouth, England until 1948, when Williams accepted a job in Tanzania. Naturally, Judy tagged along. She spent her final years chasing wild game in East Africa until one afternoon, she led off into the bush and didn't return.

She was found four days later by local villagers who passed the word along to Williams. He arrived at the village expecting the worst, and there was Judy, still alive yet again. But this time the exhaustion from her adventure was too much. Judy of Sussex died in Tanzania on February seventeenth, nineteen fifty. She was fourteen years old.

Speaker 1 (13:29.858)

Well, I hope you enjoyed Casey's reading of the story, Judy. As we depart for today's episode, I want to once again thank Onyx for being a partner in On the Wing Podcast. hunting season is almost here. You've been checking those roadside counts, checking the reports. It's time to get ready for real. Before you know it, you'll be opening those kennel doors and your bird dogs.

Kind of like Judy will be a running the fields in the forests in search of feathers. So now is the time for you to open up that Onyx Hunt app and start finding new opportunities, research new properties, and build a plan for the fall. The best seasons don't start on opening day, they start right now with Onyx Hunt. All right, folks, thanks for listening. Really appreciate it. Again, let me know what you think of the story, Judy.

And having some more episodes focused on stories from the archives of the Pheasants Forever Journal and the Quail Forever Journal, you can email me at onthewingpodcast at pheasantsforever.org. In the meantime, I'm Bob St. Pierre reminding you to always follow the dog. Something good will rise. Thanks for listening, folks.