'Doing their bit': the British employment of military and civil defence dogs in the Second World War

The Second World War allowed for the utilisation of an unprecedented number of dogs for military duties both internationally and among the British Armed Forces.

In the first comprehensive scholarly account of the employment of British military and Civil Defence dogs in the Second World War, Kimberly Brice O'Donnell traces the development of the British military dog scheme from the British Army's belated establishment of the short-lived War Dog School and the Messenger Dog Service of the First World War to the more recent employment of canines during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early twenty-first century.