Disclaimer - If your a sensitive animal lover, you may find this rather disturbing.

During some casual Russian model kit browsing on the net, I came across a new upcoming kit from a Russian company called Zvezda. "Dogs Fighting Against Tanks". Apparently, during the first couple years of the Great Patriotic War against Fascists, dogs with explosives strapped to their backs were trained to run under German tanks. An antenna type detonator would trigger the explosives when it touched the under side of the tank, blowing up both the dog and the enemy tank in the process. They were kind of like "Kamikaze Dogs" I suppose.. Seems they utilized dogs in this manner due to a shortage of anti-tank weapons.

Here is the history background direct from Zvezda:

"In 1941-1942 because of high deficiency of anti-tank means the Soviet army had been used for fighting against the German tanks more than 60 thousands dogs trained in accordance with the special program and equipped with fixed on back tarpaulin bag carrying 2-4 kgs of explosives with antenna type exploder. It was enough for antenna to touch a metal for explode. Dogs were trained to run rapidly under a tank from short distance, so it quickly came into the dead zone of tank’s machine gun. Machine gunner had not enough time to point and fire such small and quick target. The first battalion of dogs fighting against tanks was sent to front in July of 1941. During the war those dogs destroyed more than 300 fascist tanks. Just during the battle of Stalingrad special troops of the 62nd army under the command of major Kunin and senior lieutenant Shantsev hit and burnt the whole enemy's tank brigade – 63 tanks and 2 armoured cars. As far as army was supplied with anti-tank artillery necessity in dogs fighting against tanks was reducing, and in October of 1943 such troops were disband. Remained dogs were redirected for mine searching tasks."

I was unaware of this special suicide dog task force, learn something new every day..