This definitive biography of Stubby and his best friend benefits from exhaustive research that restores fractured story threads, unearths unpublished photographs, and reconnects Stubby, now on display at the Smithsonian, with Conroy's almost forgotten descendants. Along the way Stubby won friends on the battlefield and beyond, earned commendations on two continents, and stole the heart of a nation. After starting out as mascot for Conroy's 102nd Infantry Regiment, he advanced to become a working military service dog-alerting soldiers to impending gas attacks and helping medics locate friendly survivors on the battlefield-and a source of inspiration and pride for their 26th ''Yankee'' Division. In short order this brindle-patterned recruit had worked his way up the ranks from stray to stowaway to star. The bond the pair formed in Connecticut carried them across an ocean, into the trenches of France, and onto the path of history. It all started one summer's day in 1917, just months after the United States had pledged to join the Great War, when a seemingly average, stump-tailed terrier wandered onto an Army training field at the campus of Yale University and adopted Pvt. In this inspiring, all-American story, readers meet a stray dog turned national icon and World War I hero thanks to his unexpected friendship with a soldier bound for France.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |