08/26/2026
Judy was a pure bred liver and white English Pointer who began her service not as a pet but as a working ship's mascot, first aboard HMS Gnat and then HMS Grasshopper on the rivers of China. She survived enemy attacks on both vessels before her luck seemed to run out in February 1942, when the Grasshopper was sunk and she was taken prisoner alongside her crew, beginning three years as a captive of the Japanese in the jungles of Sumatra.
In the camp at Rengat she had already saved lives before anyone gave her credit for it, sniffing out a freshwater spring after the crew were forced to abandon ship on a barren island. The men called her their guardian angel and shared what little food they had to keep her alive. By the time she reached Medan in August 1942 her ribs showed through her coat and she carried the same haunted look as the men around her, yet something in her refused to give in, and that refusal steadied the prisoners who watched her.
It was at Medan that she met Leading Aircraftman Frank Williams, who offered her his own ration of rice. From that moment the two were inseparable. Judy took to defending the men from the guards, barking and snapping at their heels whenever a beating began, which only marked her as a target in return. Williams knew she needed real protection, and in a moment of remarkable audacity he persuaded the camp commandant, Colonel Banno, to register her as an official prisoner of war. She was entered onto the roll as PoW 81A Gloergoer, Medan, the only animal ever to hold that status.
When the camp moved in June 1944 the men refused to leave her behind. Williams taught her to lie motionless inside a rice sack, and she stayed silent through hours on parade in tropical heat while hidden against his back. The following day the transport ship, the SS Van Warwyck, was torpedoed. Williams forced her through a ten inch porthole into the burning, oil slicked water below and then followed. Of around seven hundred men aboard, only two hundred survived. Judy was among the swimmers who could not find dry ground unaided, and survivors later described her pushing driftwood towards drowning men and letting them cling to her body as she ferried them to safety, returning again and again into the water. She was eventually hauled aboard a Japanese vessel, where a captain ordered her thrown back into the sea, and was only saved when Colonel Banno intervened a second time.
For the year that followed, Judy and Williams were moved between camps along the route of the Sumatran railway, working her own careful patterns of survival, warning the men of crocodiles and tigers, hunting her own food in the jungle beyond the wire, and returning each night to the whistle only Williams used for her. She lost a litter of puppies and their father to the brutality of the camp, yet the prisoners who named her the old girl held onto the belief that if she could endure, so could they.
When peace came in August 1945 the greater fight was getting her home. Dogs were banned from the troopship SS Antenor, so for three days the men hid her below decks until the vessel was too far out to sea to turn back. She was smuggled ashore at Liverpool through the goodwill of men who felt they owed her their lives, then spent six months in quarantine while Williams visited every week. On her release in 1946 she was awarded the PDSA Dickin Medal, the animals' Victoria Cross, for the courage and watchfulness that had helped keep her fellow prisoners alive.
Judy never fully left the world she had survived. In 1948 she followed Williams to East Africa, taking to the wilder life there as naturally as she had the jungles of Sumatra, protecting him from snakes and seeing off baboons. Two years later she fell ill after going missing for nine days, and though surgery for a tumour seemed to succeed, her recovery did not last. On 17 February 1950, Williams made the decision to let her go peacefully. He buried her beneath a plaque recording a life that had asked nothing of her and had still given everything.
