In one of her most famous exploits Smoky parachuted using a special rig designed to fit one of the world’s smallest but toughest dogs. After saving Wynne’s life by warning of a falling shell, as their landing craft approached an enemy-held beach – a shell that killed the eight men that Wynne was standing beside – he nicknamed her the ‘angel from a foxhole’. She was awarded eight battle stars, surviving dozens of Japanese combat raids on Papua New Guinea, and braving a typhoon that ravaged Okinawa. She went on to fly numerous photo-recce and air-sea rescue missions, cocooned in a soldier’s pack hanging next to the machine-guns used to repel marauding Japanese fighters. Living in Bill Wynne’s tent, sleeping on a piece of green felt salvaged from a card table,and sharing his rations, Smoky became the de facto mascot of the regiment. A mystery, she was adopted by Corporal William ‘Bill’ Wynne, an air-crewman with the US 5th Air Force’s 26th Photo Reconnaissance Squadron. The GIs who discovered her presumed she had been some kind of Japanese army mascot, but it soon turned out that she understood neither commands rendered in Japanese nor English. In February 1944, as Japanese military advances threatened to engulf Australasia, a tiny, four-pound Yorkshire terrier was discovered hiding in a Japanese shell scrape amidst the thick jungles of Papua New Guinea.

Smoky the Brave is the extraordinary, touching and true story of a heroic dog and her adoptive masters in the jungles of the Pacific War.

Wynne sadly passed away in 2021, but he is survived by his loved ones who are determined to keep the memory of his and Smoky’s wartime story alive and to cherish its legacy. Wynne, who recounted his and Smoky’s wartime story in his own book entitled Yorkie Doodle Dandy A Memoir, which served as a reference for and is quoted in this book. This book could not have been written without William A. By Damien Lewis The World’s Smallest Dog with the World’s Biggest Heart

Smoky the Brave by Damien Lewis