# A four-pound dog, a string, and seventy feet of dark pipe.

- Series: [Miu Animations](https://miu.fm/miuanimations.md)
- Published: 2026-10-27
- Page: https://miu.fm/miuanimations/a-four-pound-dog-a-string-and-seventy-feet-of-dark-pipe

## Story

A four-pound dog, a string, and seventy feet of dark pipe.

Early in 1945, at an airfield the Americans were using at Lingayen Gulf on Luzon, the Signal Corps needed a telegraph wire run under the strip. Digging it up would have taken about three days and left the men and the parked planes in the open. There was a culvert under the strip, about 70 feet long and 8 inches across, and sand had sifted in at its joints until it was half full in places. Corporal Bill Wynne of the 26th Photo Reconnaissance Squadron had a Yorkshire terrier called Smoky, about four pounds and seven inches tall, found in New Guinea the year before and bought for two Australian pounds. They tied a string to her collar and to the wire, a sergeant held her at one end, and Wynne ran to the other and called her. About ten feet in, the string caught. He called again, and she went on, and came out at his end through the dust with the string still on her collar. Three cables were pulled through behind it. Afterwards she visited the wounded in hospital, and she is often called the first therapy dog. She died in 1957; since 2005 a bronze of her sitting in a helmet has stood in Cleveland's Rocky River Reservation.

Told the way Norman McLaren's Blinkity Blank (1955) tells things: lines of light scratched into black film, coming and going in the dark.

Who called you through something you were afraid of?

Sources: Peter Jedick in Cleveland Magazine (2007, from Bill Wynne's own telling), Wynne's book Yorkie Doodle Dandy (1996), the Australian War Memorial's Places of Pride, and Cleveland Metroparks.

Film and music: ours, an homage made independently of the makers of Blinkity Blank. Sounds: recordings by akennedybrewer, danielpodlovics, Eakoontz, Elenalostale, Filmscore, IENBA, kijjaz, kyles, laughatlantic, marc.om, Mewsel, mhtaylor67, petersrin, ritaclare, schneidi67, slv1 and nvmbky (CC0) on Freesound. Piano samples: Apple Logic; orchestra: Apple GarageBand; cello: University of Iowa Electronic Music Studios. Font: Courier Prime (OFL).

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