Cry Havoc, and Let Slip the Dogs of War — with bombs strapped to them:
But the USSR had been contemplating the issue of warring with tanks for some time, and they had a plan: they were going to sic dogs on them.
So far as the wars of men go, dogs have always been tossed the short end of the stick. Nary does a modern movie depict the way the Romans used mastiffs with razored collars in battle, nor the fully armored Death Hounds (I didn’t make up the name) that the medieval knights would loose on a field to snap at the legs of opponents and dispatch the wounded that littered the ground. In fact, dogs have fought alongside their masters through most of history. At the eve of World War II, the Soviets had a fully operational four-legged fighter division, and a dog with a bomb is a potent foe.
The Soviets were unable to address the looming tank problem with any new technologies right away, thus they were forced to contemplate tackling the issue with the means at hand. Landmines were a viable option, but because one couldn’t count on the Nazis seeking out the mines, they had to figure a way to make the mines seek the tanks.
The answer laid in the dog division. The trainers would starve the dogs, then train them to find food under a tank. The dogs quickly learned that being released from their pens meant to run out to where the training tank was parked and find some vittles. Once trained, the dogs would be fitted with a bomb attached to the back, and loosed into a field of oncoming German Panzers. When the dog climbed underneath the tank — where there was no armor — the bomb would detonate and gut the enemy vehicle.
Realization of that plan was a little less successful. The dogs had been trained to look under a Soviet tank for food, and would sometimes be loosed into a battle just to turn around and find a friendly tank to climb under. Sometimes the dogs would spook at the rumble of a running diesel engine and run away from the battle. Sometimes the dogs just decided they didn’t want to go.
Despite the problems, the Anti-tank dogs were successful at disabling a reported 300 Nazi tanks.