Rather than training the dogs to drop explosives, the Soviets rigged up an explosive vest that would detonate automatically once the canine was underneath the tank. This would obviously kill the dog, but in the grim mathematics of war, this was reckoned a net positive for the Soviets. After all, it’s easier to train a new dog than build a new tank. But if the idea worked in theory, it wasn’t as useful in practice. The dogs were trained to run underneath tanks, but they often had a hard time telling a Soviet tank from a German tank.
So assuming that they could get the dogs to run underneath a moving tank, there was no guarantee it would be the right one. And that was already a big assumption. As it turns out, most dogs were reluctant to run underneath 23 tons of rolling armor. Many dogs would instinctively bolt back towards the Soviet lines, detonating their explosives there. While the Soviets claimed that the dogs knocked out hundreds of German tanks, they probably weren’t nearly as effective in combat as Soviet planners hoped. And other armies found that dogs are much more useful when you don’t try to turn them into bombs.
America also used dogs in the war
The Americans, for instance, used dogs extensively during the war as sentries and guards who alerted their handlers of enemy troops trying to sneak through the lines. And dogs often served as messengers delivering orders between units on the battlefield. Attempts were even made to train dogs to detect mines, a standard use of canines in war today. But due to a lack of understanding about how dogs can detect the scent of explosives, the army tried to teach them to recognize disturbed patches of dirt instead, and the dogs didn’t perform well enough to make them effective tools for finding mines.
The Americans also tried to train dogs to do some more disturbing tasks. In the earlier years of the war, the Americans fell on the idea of training packs of dogs to attack Japanese people indiscriminately. They could then be released on Japanese-held islands in the Pacific and clear out the defenders. A number of Japanese-American soldiers were chosen to serve as bait to train the dogs to only attack Japanese people, the idea being that the dogs would be able to tell an American soldier apart from a Japanese one. But the program made little progress and was ultimately scrapped.
That’s not to suggest that dogs were useless in war. One of the most famous dogs in the American Army was Chips, a sentry dog who saw action across Europe. During the invasion of Sicily, Chips found himself pinned down with his unit in front of an Italian machine gun nest. Chips broke free from his handler and ran into the gun emplacement, attacking the Italians inside. The gunners fled the pillbox and surrendered to the Americans. Chips was awarded a number of official medals, but these were revoked due to army policy, and Chips was given some unofficial commendations by the men in his unit instead.