DOGS AT WAR

68 thousand dogs of various services fought on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War.
Experience from recent wars shows that, alongside powerful military equipment, dogs in the Red Army have not lost their importance in warfare; on the contrary, in the conditions of maneuver warfare, they have become an indispensable means of supporting combat across a number of services:

1. It was established that six well-functioning communication dogs could replace the work of 10 messengers, speeding up message delivery by 1.5-2 times. The accelerated unwinding of telephone cable on combat lines in summer and winter, using special installations on boats and trucks, deserves special attention. Communication dogs delivered 200,000 messages and unwound 7,883 km of telephone cable.

2. The sled dog unit, using boats in winter (and carts in summer), fully provided for the evacuation of the wounded in the rifle regiment, replacing the medic in all types of combat. The wounded suffered fewer injuries, and their delivery to the regimental aid station was three times faster. During the Great Patriotic War, the dogs of the ambulance sled dogs evacuated over 700,000 wounded (along with their weapons) from the battlefield, transporting 3,862 tons of ammunition and various cargo.

3. Mine-detection dogs found minefields and each individual mine, regardless of its casing, of various systems, regardless of the time of installation or the time of year. Mine-detection dogs detected and defused 4,000,000 mines and explosive devices, checked 1,223 square kilometers of land for mines, inspected 7,278 roads, and cleared 3,974 warehouses and various buildings. Among the thousands of cities and towns cleared by mine-detection dogs are major cities in the USSR and Europe: Minsk, Kharkov, Kyiv, Odessa, Warsaw, Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Budapest, Belgrade, Prague, Königsberg, and others.

4. Scout and guard dogs successfully led reconnaissance teams through the front lines into the enemy rear, undetected. Training dogs for this service is demanding and labor-intensive. Dogs with excellent sense of smell, hearing, and a well-developed ferocity are selected for this service. Particular emphasis is placed on developing discipline in scout dogs.

5. Tank-destroying dogs stopped enemy tank attacks at the cost of their own lives. During the Great Patriotic War, a total of 304 Nazi tanks were knocked out or destroyed. On average, 13 trained tank-destroying dogs were used to destroy one enemy tank.

Many purebred dogs died in tank destroyer units early in the war. And then, in 1941, the question arose about the need to use mongrel dogs, commonly known as "mutts." "Mongrel!" Sometimes the word is used with a certain contempt. And what's its fault that it's not so pretty? However, she's certainly smart and hardworking. Found on front-line roads, in the ashes, the mongrels became our faithful assistants." (A. Mazover)

During the Great Patriotic War, more than 75% of all dogs that fought on the front lines were crossbreeds and mongrels.