26/08/2026
Amazing dog!!💕💕
Fact Slap 👋
🐕 NATIONAL DOG DAY — JUDY: PRISONER OF WAR
Judy was an English Pointer who served as a ship’s dog aboard the Royal Navy gunboats HMS Gnat and later HMS Grasshopper on the Yangtze before and during the Second World War.
And she may have one of the most extraordinary service records of any dog that ever lived.
Judy apparently became particularly good at detecting approaching aircraft before the crew could hear them, giving the sailors an unofficial early warning. That became considerably more useful when Grasshopper was caught up in the desperate British evacuation from Singapore in February 1942.
While attempting to escape to the Dutch East Indies, Grasshopper was bombed and sunk.
Judy was trapped below by fallen lockers but survived and was rescued when a crewman returned to the wreck looking for supplies.
The survivors reached an apparently uninhabited island.
There was just one fairly important problem.
No fresh water.
Judy disappeared into the vegetation and began digging. She found a freshwater spring, providing the shipwrecked sailors with the water they needed to survive.
The group eventually reached Sumatra and then trekked roughly 200 miles through jungle and across mountains attempting to reach the evacuating Allied forces. During the journey Judy even survived an encounter with a crocodile.
After five weeks they finally reached Padang.
They were one day too late.
The last evacuation ship had gone.
The men were captured by the Japanese — and Judy went with them.
At Gloegoer prisoner-of-war camp in Medan she met RAF Leading Aircraftman Frank Williams, who shared his meagre ration of rice with her.
The two became inseparable.
Williams eventually persuaded the Japanese camp commandant to officially register Judy as a prisoner of war.
Her POW number was:
81A Gloegoer Medan.
She is widely regarded as the only dog officially registered as a Japanese prisoner of war.
Judy helped prisoners survive psychologically as well as physically, but she also placed herself between prisoners and guards when they were beaten.
Then came another shipwreck.
In 1944 prisoners were being transported aboard the Harugiku Maru when it was torpedoed by the British submarine HMS Truculent.
Judy had been smuggled aboard.
She survived the sinking and, according to accounts from the prisoners, helped men struggling in the water by allowing them to grab onto her and bringing floating debris towards them.
She was later smuggled into yet another prison camp and eventually reunited with Frank.
Even surviving the war wasn’t quite enough.
As liberation approached, Judy was reportedly in danger of being killed by the Japanese guards, so Frank hid her until Allied forces arrived.
Then came the next problem.
How do you get a former canine prisoner of war back to Britain?
Smuggle her aboard a troopship, obviously.
Judy reached Britain but had to spend six months in quarantine. Frank was required to find £12 to pay for it, money he couldn’t afford, so an appeal was published in the Tail-Waggers Club magazine.
Sixty-one people donated £18 18s 8d.
Judy was coming home.
In 1946 the PDSA awarded her the Dickin Medal, sometimes described as the animals’ Victoria Cross, for her courage and devotion while imprisoned by the Japanese.
Her citation remembered her magnificent courage and endurance in Japanese prison camps, which helped maintain morale among her fellow prisoners.
And Judy stayed with Frank.
When he later travelled to East Africa to work on the post-war groundnut scheme, Judy went with him.
In 1950, aged around 13, she developed a tumour and had to be put to sleep.
Frank buried her in her RAF jacket, together with her campaign medals — the 1939–45 Star, Pacific Star and Defence Medal — and built a memorial over her grave at Nachingwea in what is now Tanzania.
Decades later that memorial deteriorated and its plaque disappeared. Following an appeal connected with St Andrew’s Church in Stapleford, Cambridgeshire, Judy’s memorial was restored and a new plaque installed in 2018.
Her collar and Dickin Medal have also been displayed by the Imperial War Museum.
Ship’s dog.
Aircraft warning system.
Shipwreck survivor — twice.
Freshwater finder.
Jungle survivor.
Japanese prisoner of war 81A.
Dickin Medal recipient.
And, when the war was finally over, Frank Williams simply took his mate home.
Judy wasn’t just a very good dog.
She was one of the lads. 🐕
