Sergeant Stubby
The highest ranking dog in American military history.
The once-stray Boston Terrier first entered the historical record in the summer of 1917, when he wandered onto the grounds of a military training facility in New Haven, Connecticut, called Camp Yale, where the U.S. Army’s 102nd Infantry regiment was getting set to join the fight along war-torn Europe’s Western Front.
He’d eagerly accompany the doughboys to-be as they went through their exercises and combat training routines throughout their last few months of drilling, endearing himself to just about all of them along the way until, despite the very strict rules against keeping pets on base, he was made the regiment’s unofficial mascot. They called him Stubby.
Private J. Robert Conroy of the 26th Yankee Division quickly became his closest companion, and when the regiment shipped out to France aboard a giant troop ship called the SS Minnesota in late October, Conroy smuggled him on board under his overcoat, and kept him hidden from everyone in a position of authority for the entirety of the crossing.
The regiment’s commanding officer, whose name has since been been lost to history, eventually discovered him just after the ship first arrived in port that November, but when he confronted Conroy about this gross violation of procedure, Stubby trotted over, and - so the story goes - stood at attention in front of the angry colonel, and raised his right paw up to his brow. A proper salute, which he’d learned to do while training with the 26th Yankee Division back at Yale. It immediately diffused the tension.
That was the last time anyone important questioned Stubby’s presence there for the rest of the tour.
He adjusted to the noisy, violent chaos of trench warfare remarkably well, by all accounts, but before he - or any of the other members of the 102nd, for that matter - had time to get settled in, he was terribly injured in a German mustard gas attack that left him temporarily blind. He spent the next several weeks recovering in a nearby field hospital, but the experience didn’t dampen his spirit, and, precisely because of it, in fact, he’d go on to become a uniquely invaluable part of the unit’s defense infrastructure when he returned to the front early in the summer of 1918.