Though sled dogs have been helping humans since they were first tamed and broken to the trace thousands of years ago, their history of supporting soldiers is much more recent. Most of that support can be traced back to the U.S. Army’s involvement in Alaska in the early 1900s and to Europeans’ efforts to use dogs on both the Western and Alpine fronts during World War I. “Seward’s Folly” was a vast and capricious land.
As military presence in Alaska grew, local sourdoughs and Indians provided much information about the vagaries of land and weather. The military soon learned that moving troops in winter was virtually impossible without dog teams, and military outposts began using them as winter transport, mostly hiring local teams and drivers on contract. This method was easier and more cost-effective than attempting to set up a military operation. Billy Mitchell, who later became known as the father of the U.S. Air Force, was sent to Alaska in 1901 as a young lieutenant to supervise the establishment of the Washington–Alaska Military Cable and Telegraph System.
When he arrived at Fort Egbert (in eastern Alaska near Eagle), hardly any work was being done on the telegraph system. Troops had been using horses to haul equipment for the project in the summer months, but during the long, brutal winters all work essentially ceased. Lieutenant Mitchell had been given a deadline of five years to complete an extremely difficult section of the line stretched from the Canadian border to Valdez on the coast and Tanana in the interior. Being innovative in solving problems in Alaska, just as he was later when he proved that the flimsy aircraft of the day could sink a battleship, he consulted local civilian and native populations.
He devised a plan to use dog teams to move equipment and supplies into place during the winter when the ground was frozen. With all supplies in position, work on the telegraph line could move along uninterrupted during the long days of summer.1 Mitchell was the first military leader to purchase sled dogs and keep them year-round instead of relying on seasonal contracts.
Following the advice of the locals, Mitchell soon became an expert at selecting sled dogs. Before long he had acquired two hundred dogs, which he kept in a corral at Fort Egbert, running loose in a huge pack. This is contrary to today’s standard practice, in which dogs are kept individually chained. One of the best dogs Mitchell acquired was a Mackenzie River husky named Pointer, who weighed about 120 pounds.
The dog was so fierce,” Mitchell said, “that I had to cut off his fangs to keep him from killing the other dogs.” This was a common practice among the Alaskan Eskimos, as reported by the Czechoslovakian explorer Ian Wetzl: “At six months of age wolf pups that had been taken from their parents had their incisors pulled, filed, or broken off. After being castrated also, the dogs were then trained to the trace.”
After losing his fangs, Pointer became “tremendously attached” to Mitchell and eventually became his best lead dog. Mitchell credits Pointer with saving his life on numerous occasions when he broke through river ice. Mitchell said, “Pointer was so strong that if he could get his front feet on anything solid, he could pull the next dog out and then the next.”
One day while scouting the telegraph route, with the ambient temperature hovering at minus sixty degrees Fahrenheit, Lieutenant Mitchell broke through thin ice and fell into icy water up to his shoulders as Pointer struggled to pull the entire team free. Many a musher and dog team have perished when ice fractured beneath them. Mitchell used many dog handling techniques common to the indigenous peoples of Alaska. Removing incisors was one.
Another technique was to use a twenty-foot whip to keep order among the team. He would even stand by with his whip during feeding time to ensure that no dog would steal the others’ food or start a fight. Mitchell initially trained two good dog teams so that he and a companion could scout the proposed route of the telegraph line. During this reconnaissance, Mitchell learned what the dogs could do. He also learned that, contrary to expectations, men could work in the extreme cold of Alaska’s winter.
After Mitchell’s survey trip, teams of men and dogs were put to work in earnest moving cables, poles, and other equipment. The stalled telegraph line was completed in only two years, three years ahead of the original schedule,8 largely because of Mitchell’s foresight. During the Alaskan gold rush from 1898 to 1906, dog teams were the primary method of hauling freight throughout the region. Dog teams were hitched to sleds during the winter.
In summer they were hitched to small trams on rails, to carts, and even to barges that they pulled along streams. So many people were using dogs throughout this boisterous era that high stakes gambling for gold soon spawned wagering on dog races and freight pulling contests. These races continued long after the gold strike ended. The All-Alaska Sweepstakes, which became known internationally, was the most famous, and many competitors became known throughout the world. Scotty Allan won the All-Alaska three times as well as placing second three times and third twice.
Explorers such as Roald Amundsen and Vilhjalmur Stefansson asked him for advice about their upcoming Arctic explorations. During World War I, foreign military powers sought his expertise. During the Great War in Europe from 1914 to 1918, all combatants used dogs in many roles. The French and Belgian armies used draught dogs to pull carts of supplies and ammunition as well as to transport wounded soldiers. French and German soldiers met in combat in the Vosges Mountains on the Western Front during the severe winter of 1914–15.
Much of the fighting was done on skis, and deep snow made it hard to supply soldiers with food and ammunition.10 A French army captain named Mufflet, who had been to Alaska during the gold rush, suggested using dog teams in the Vosges to move freight over the snow. The French government asked Scotty Allan to supply dogs and sleds and to train soldiers in dog driving.
For this mission, Allan purchased 106 dogs around Nome. To transport them to a barge that would take them to the cargo ship anchored offshore, Allan tied all the dogs to one long rope like a gangline. He attached this rope to a team of horses and a wagon to supply braking power. He put a good lead dog in front, and the world’s longest dog team proceeded without incident to the barge, where the dogs were loaded for the first leg of their journey to France, along with sleds, harnesses, and two tons of dried fish.
After docking in Vancouver, the Alaskan dogs were transported in secrecy across Canada on a guarded railroad train. Three hundred more dogs from Canada and the Arctic joined the original Alaskan group in Quebec. Sixty more sleds and 350 dog harnesses had been made and added to the shipment. The next problem was how to ship over 400 dogs across the Atlantic, which was infested with German submarines.
The ship’s captain did not want any dogs on deck because their noise might alert enemy subs to the ship’s position, but Allan trained the dogs not to sing or bark during the two-week passage. The dogs were housed in shipping crates chained to the deck, which served as dog kennels at the front.13 Once he arrived in the mountains of France, Allan’s next task was to train fifty Chasseurs Alpins, French mountain soldiers, to drive the dogs.
These soldiers and dogs were under the command of the French lieutenant René Hass, with Allan acting as technical adviser, and the men had to overcome the language barrier, learning English dog commands. Training went extremely well except for one enormous dogfight that involved piles of fighting dogs up to six feet deep. Less than two months after leaving Nome, dog teams with French drivers were hauling supplies and ammunition to areas that previously could not be reached.
One group of these dogs delivered ninety tons of ammunition to an artillery battery in only four days. It had taken up to two weeks for a combination of men, horses, and mules to accomplish the same thing. Columns of dog teams often stretched over a mile. Allan noted that “the soldiers acted more like it was play than work, even whooping and hollering in attempts to pass each other.”
On another mission, dogs assisted in laying over eighteen miles of field telephone wire in one night, allowing a totally isolated unit of soldiers to communicate with headquarters again.15 When the mountain snows melted, dogs were hitched to cars on a narrow-gauge railway that had been laid to continue transport of supplies and munitions. The cost of their upkeep was small since plenty of horse flesh was available from the slaughter of combat. Dogs were eminently more economical than horses. Two seven-dog teams could do the work of five horses in the formidable terrain.
Three Alaskan sled dogs in French service were awarded the Croix de Guerre, one of France’s highest military honors, for their actions in combat. Details of their deeds are not available, but after the war, all the dogs who worked with the Chasseurs Alpins were rewarded with a life of leisure for their heroic service to their adopted country.
They were released from service and became pets in France’s Alpine tourist region. World War I is well remembered for the massive carnage on the Western Front. Less universally recognized is the difficult fighting between the Italian and Austro-Hungarian armies that took place in brutal mountain conditions on the Alpine Front. In one remote area, regional operations were carried out around Mount Adamello in the Trentino salient.
Fighting at altitudes ranging from 10,200 to 11,500 feet. Battles occurred over a long period (1914–18), in terrain that was considered almost impossible for any military engagement. Military historians consider this combat “unique in the annals of mountain warfare.”17 Severe winter conditions combined with the altitude made troop supply one of the greatest challenges for military commanders. Pian di Neve was a glacier that surrounded an area of the Tonale Pass at 6,108 feet. This glacier was a key location for the Italian Alpini (mountain troops) who fought here.
Horses and mules replaced the men who originally carried supplies across the glacier, five miles round trip. But these animals could not cope with the extremely severe weather, which dropped up to thirteen feet of snow. Dog teams eventually replaced them for this arduous task. Dogs transported three tons of provisions and nearly ten tons of firewood daily during the last two years of World War I to supply the four thousand men fighting in this hostile region.
The project of using dogs to transport provisions was started by the Milan kennel club. Sanitary corpsmen helping to move wounded soldiers from the front had proposed using dogs: the kennel club established a committee to procure them, and experiments were conducted as early as 1915. As in France, there were no northern breed sled dogs available, but Italy recruited dogs from the surrounding countryside instead of bringing them in from elsewhere. Some were even enlisted from southern Italy. Ultimately 250 shepherds’ dogs were trained as sled dogs in military kennels at Bologna.
Various breeds including Saint Bernards were purchased for twenty to thirty lire each. Dogs had to be ten months to three years old and needed heavy coats. White coloring was desirable for camouflage on snow. All dogs had a serial number tattooed inside an ear, but most handlers also gave them names. Dogs were so well disciplined that they could be fed in two parallel rows facing each other. Their food was placed in bowls between the rows, and they would not budge from their position of “attention” until a bugle was sounded.
To prevent fights, dogs were trained not to invade another dog’s space during feeding time. In the mountain’s dogs received the same rations as Alpini soldiers: bread and meat in the morning and bread at the evening meal.19 Teams of two or three dogs wearing leather harnesses were attached to sleds by wooden shafts. The Cagnari (as dog drivers were called) used skis or walked alongside their dogs instead of riding the sled as the French did, imitating Alaskan mushing.
The center dog was considered the lead dog. This hitch was called a troika after the Russian three-horse configuration. Sleds were similar in design to Antarctic sleds but were simpler in construction, with blunt rear ends. A brake consisting of a wooden board pierced with iron spikes was attached to the rear with chains. Cagnari could step on it with both feet for maximum braking on the glacier ice.
Sleds were used to transport both men and material; there was even a group of sled-stretchers for evacuating the wounded. Italian dog teams made three trips across the glacier each day to supply troops, with only one day of rest each week.
Each team towed a sled loaded with 120 to 140 pounds of cargo.20 The main kennel, at Garibaldi Pass on Mandrone Glacier in the Adamello Group, housed two hundred dogs. It was a wooden shack built on a concrete slab raised three feet off the snow for insulation. Dogs rested on straw in compartments off a central corridor. Another group of forty dogs kept in a forward area at Passo Lobbia Althpar was used to supply advances in troop lines.
There was also a small collection center for injured and ill dogs in the bottom of the Valley d’Avio, near the village of Temْ where dogs could rest, acclimate, and heal before being sent back to the front lines. One Alpini officer described dogs in action as “wonderful, robust, and intelligent animals,” eager to work. They departed on each supply trek as soon as the sled was barely loaded.
Dogs would trot on moderate terrain, but on steeper sections, they would slow to a walk and lower their heads to pull. Teams were even credited with spoiling Austrian ambushes by barking when they encountered unfamiliar smells on the wind. Italian sled dogs served loyally and gallantly throughout 1917–18, and many were lost to enemy artillery fire. Just before the armistice ending the Great War, the Austrians hastily left the glacier district with the Italian Alpine Corps in pursuit.
In the soldiers’ haste to end the war, all the dogs were abandoned and forgotten at Temْ. Hungry and thirsty, they reverted to the wild for survival. Finally, they became a threat to local civilians. Unlike Scotty Allan’s huskies that were rewarded for their duty in France, the faithful Italian Alpine sled dogs ended their military service without recognition or reward. Because there was a meat shortage in the mountains, they were eventually hunted to extinction, and most ended up in the stew pot.23 The U.S.
The army made no use of sled dogs during World War I. Except for a regiment of American troops dispatched into northern Russia (North Russia Expeditionary Force) in 1918–19, it was not engaged in combat in areas where dogs might have proved useful. By contrast, the British Army, which was in overall command of the international force in northern Russia and Siberia, used Canadian dog teams with Canadian soldier-drivers attached to the Royal Army Medical Corps (ramc).
The dogs were “usefully employed in drawing stretchers with wounded from the firing line.”24 These Canadian huskies served the British forces around Murmansk and Archangel in combat against the Bolshevik army. As was true for other combatants during the Great War who used sled dogs, the evacuation of wounded proved one of the most important tasks of the Canadian sled teams in northern Russia. The sleds used were lightweight, double-ended Nansen types, called Shackleton sleighs by the English, capable of carrying 800– 1,000 pounds as well as a four-stanchion basket type freight sled.
Some Shackleton sleighs were even fitted with removable combined handlebars and side rails. Both sled versions were equipped with springboard brakes. Like most freight sleds of the era, neither allowed the driver to comfortably stand on the runners and riders. Dogs were attached to the sleds in either a four-dog tandem configuration of a seven-dog double tandem (Nome hitch). Harnesses were leather “horse collar” design. After the war, sled dogs were still maintained in Alaska, even during austere times when the military defense budget was drastically cut.
There were still a few army dog teams in Alaska during the 1920s and 1930s, years when the army slaughtered horses because if lacked funds to feed them. It had been proved over the years that in Alaska’s snowdog teams were the only dependable transportation. In 1926 the U.S. War Department published a technical regulation concerning dog transportation. It was a forerunner of later field manuals published in 1941 and 1944.
The regulation, tr 1380–20, was definitive. It stated that dog transportation “is of great value in countries where snow and ice conditions and lack of roads preclude the use of the horse or mule or motorized transportation.” This regulation defined the types of dog teams as heavy and light. Heavy transportation was used to carry men and supplies. Loads were not to exceed the total weight of the dogs minus the weight of the driver. These teams could travel from two and a half to three miles an hour for eight hours. Light transportation, also called messenger transportation, was designed for fast travel in emergencies or for speedy communication.
Teams for light transportation could travel at five to six miles an hour for eight hours with a load of no more than twenty-five pounds per dog. These classifications remained standard throughout the entire period of military use of sled dogs. Recommended speeds and load-carrying capacities changed slightly over the years. The command “Mush!” was an official term designated in the original 1926 technical regulation defining dog training and commands.
In later years this term lost favor with army dog drivers. The 1941 version of the manual substituted “All Right!” and stated that it was preferable to “Mush!” However, “Mush!” was still favored by Alaskan dog freighters when the last manual was published in 1944. For use in Alaska, the technical regulation highly recommended two specific dog breeds: the Mackenzie River husky and the Kobuk Valley dog. The Mackenzie River husky was finally recognized toward the end of World War II in attempts to breed the ideal Army transportation dog.
The regulation also mentioned malamutes and Siberian huskies as being suited for the area. These were the primary dogs used during World War II. Various types of sleds were also defined by this technical regulation. The three basic types included one modeled on an Alaskan freight sled that was thirteen feet in overall length, a small eight-foot messenger basket-type sled, and a smaller freight sled ten feet, three inches long that could be used as a trailer or hooked in tandem to increase the load-carrying capacity.
Sled design remained unchanged through the publication period of FM 25–6, Basic Field Manual, Dog Team Transportation (1941). In 1938, twenty years after the Armistice ended World War I, a team consisting of descendants from Scotty Allan’s heroic huskies was called back into the French army by the war minister. This dog team helped Lieutenant Flotard (an Alpine soldier and instructor at the Military High Mountain School) and with his comrade Paul-Ø©mile Victor complete a winter traverse of the Alps.
Their trek from Nice to Chamonix by the Haute route (high road of the Alps) was considered quite a feat. During this military exercise, they navigated rigorous obstacles including a dozen steep gorges and nine mountain ridges. When the dogs arrived in Chamonix they were celebrated as heroes. The classic winter traverse received considerable publicity both within France and internationally.
Here again, in the Alps it was proved that sled dogs could pull heavily loaded sleds where mules with similar loads could not go in winter.31 Only a few years later, the U.S. Army learned this fact again at Camp Hale, Colorado. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, there were only fifty sled dogs left in the U.S. Army in Alaska.32 The few men who drove them represented the paramount military authority on dog transportation at the time.
But when the army expanded its sled dog operations, these were not the people consulted. Those who took part in polar expeditions were summoned for their knowledge. Several factors contributed to this oversight. It occurred partly because New England, where dog racing was popular, was close to Washington dc, and it was partly influenced by individuals like Admiral Richard E. Byrd. Also, the army in Alaska was not considered to be at the forefront of recognition, innovation, or modernization.
Alaska was not a career-building assignment for officers. Being assigned there was considered banishment from the mainstream. The modern mechanized military judged dog teams, like horses, to be antiquated. Then its rediscovered sled dogs’ unsurpassed capability for traversing ice and unbroken snow, the terrain that encompassed almost 45 percent of the North American landmass and nearly 65 percent of that of Eurasia. This part of the world became an important consideration in the truly global conflict of World War II and its aftermath, the cold war.
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