Pooli

Pooli — short, in the manner of wartime naval humour, for "Princess Papule" — joined the attack transport USS Fremont in 1944 and stayed aboard for the rest of the Pacific war. She was a ship's cat in the oldest sense: part mouser, part mascot, and mostly a source of ordinary comfort for a crew a very long way from home.

She was aboard for some of the hardest fighting of the Pacific campaign, and by the end of the war she had accumulated a service record that would not have disgraced a sailor — three service ribbons and four battle stars, marking the operations the Fremont had taken part in. Photographs from 1959 show an elderly Pooli, then fifteen years old, sitting on a table in her custom-made uniform with the ribbons pinned to it, being saluted at a birthday party held in her honour. Those pictures are the reason she is still remembered; they circulated widely at the time and have circulated again, repeatedly, in the internet era.

Cats had been carried on ships for thousands of years by the time Pooli went to sea, for the entirely practical reason that rodents destroyed rope, sails, stores and morale in roughly that order. But the affection they attracted always went well beyond the job description. A cat aboard a warship was a small piece of domestic normality in an environment that offered almost none, and crews became attached to them fiercely — naming them, photographing them, listing them on the ship's books and, in Pooli's case, decorating them.

The tradition largely ended in the second half of the twentieth century. The Royal Navy formally banned cats from ocean-going vessels on hygiene grounds in 1975, and other navies followed suit. Pooli belongs to the last generation of a practice that had run continuously from the ancient world to the age of radar, and she is one of the best-documented examples of it.

She lived a long life after the war, retiring with her handler and dying in the late 1950s, having outlasted the conflict she served in by well over a decade.