The Bomber Dog

The Bomber Dog by Megan Rix is a Second World War story for 9 year olds, told mostly from the dog's point of view.

What happens

It opens in occupied France in 1940. A girl called Sabine sees German soldiers coming down the lane and grabs one German Shepherd puppy from the litter. She tells her little brother to say that this one died. Then she runs to the coast and hands the puppy to British soldiers waiting in a rowing boat.

He arrives in Dover. The first thing that happens to him there is being chased by seagulls.

A stray spaniel called Molly sees it and takes him on. She scatters the gulls. She knocks over a doorstep milk bottle so he can drink. She leads him to her den in a broken shed on the allotments and shows him where the pig bins are. He grows twice her size and she stays the boss of their two-dog pack anyway.

Then a bomb lands on the shed.

What he does next is the reason a young search-and-rescue volunteer called Nathan notices him at all, and Nathan is days away from his call-up papers.

The writing keeps to what a dog would actually know. The bluebottles round the pig bins that he keeps jumping at and never catches. The air-raid siren he's heard since he was born and has learned to ignore, and the one night his hackles go up before the whistling even starts.

If you've got a reader who works through every animal story in the house, they will get through this one quickly and then want the next.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This is a war story and the animals are in the war, not beside it. Soldiers come to take a litter of puppies and the family clearly expect the worst for them. A pack of five stray dogs attacks over a ham bone. A bomb knocks the puppy unconscious in the very first chapter and leaves Molly bleeding on the ground with her breathing gone ragged. The book's own cover copy promises a parachute jump that goes badly wrong later, so more is coming.

For a child who finds animals being hurt genuinely upsetting, this isn't the one. If they've read sad animal stories before and come out the other side, they'll be fine, and the rescues in here are as strong as the danger.

There's also a lot of real history tucked in without a lesson attached. Why the Nazis wanted German Shepherds. What the pig bins on street corners were for. What NARPAC was, and that somebody drove an ambulance for animals during air raids.

What to read next

Megan Rix has another wartime one in the library, The Victory Dogs. That one starts in London in 1940 with a family dog about to have puppies and a big brother tying his tie for the army, and the war reaches the animals there in much the same way.