What happened to the dogs that the USSR tried to use to blow up German tanks?

serpa

The first group of anti-tank dogs arrived at the frontline at the end of the summer of 1941 and included 30 dogs, 40 trainers, 6 cooks, 6 drivers and 10 miners. Their deployment revealed serious problems — to save fuel and ammunition, dogs had been trained on tanks which stood still and did not fire their guns. In the field, dogs refused to dive under moving tanks. Some persistent dogs ran near the tanks, waiting for them to stop, but got shot in the process. Gunfire from the tanks scared away many of the dogs. They would run back to the trenches, often detonating the charge upon jumping in, injuring Soviet soldiers. To prevent that, the returning dogs had to be shot, often by the people who had sent them. This made the trainers unwilling to work with new dogs. Some went so far as to say that the army did not stop with sacrificing people to the war and went on to slaughter dogs too; those were prosecuted by the military police. Out of the first group of 30 dogs, only four managed to detonate their bombs near the German tanks, inflicting an unknown amount of damage. Six exploded upon returning to the Soviet trenches, killing and injuring soldiers.[3] Three dogs were shot by the Germans and taken away, despite furious attempts of the Soviets to prevent it. This gave away all details of the detonation mechanism to the Germans. A captured German officer later reported that they learned of the anti-tank dog design from the collected killed animals and considered the program desperate and inefficient. A massive German propaganda campaign sought to discredit the Soviet Army, saying that Soviet soldiers refuse to fight and therefore the Soviets used dogs instead.[3] Another serious training mistake was revealed later — Soviets used their own diesel-engine tanks to train the dogs rather than German tanks, which had gasoline engines.[5] As the dogs relied on their acute sense of smell, the dogs sought out familiar Soviet tanks instead of strange-smelling German tanks.[7] The efficiency of using anti-tank dogs in World War II remains uncertain. There are claims by the Soviet sources that around 300 German tanks were damaged by Soviet anti-tank dogs.[2] This claim was questioned by the Soviets themselves as propaganda, trying to justify the dog training program.[3] There are however documented claims of individual successes of the program, with the number of damaged tanks usually being within a dozen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog Giving new meaning to the word 'dogfight'. Dec 17 09, 6:18 PM