It was called Operation Cowboy, but the yard of an elegant horse stud just inside the Czech border in the dying days of World War II resembled an equine comedy-chaos.
As a foreign legion of more than 100 riders led 300 Austrian Lipizzaner show horses and Arab stud breeders to freedom, within minutes 13 riders were unseated, tossed from fleeing mounts.
“There was an appalling confusion of uncontrolled, riderless stallions and mares,” stud staff recounted.
We were so tired of death and destruction; we wanted to do something beautiful
“In this whirling mass of biting, kicking horses, the attendants, some totally inexperienced, had great difficulty in halting the excited animals and avoiding being trampled under the hoofs of the frenzied herd.”
It was one unforeseen setback in the two-week covert US military operation that dodged uncompromising remnant Waffen SS soldiers and equally brutal troops of the advancing Red Army, detailed in Ghost Riders by British war historian Mark Felton.
The operation to rescue performing stallions from Vienna’s Spanish Riding School began in April 1945 when German intelligence officer Colonel Walter Holters fortuitously arrived at a US 2nd Cavalry Regiment command post near the Bavarian-Czech border.
Ordered to turn out his pockets as he insisted on seeing the unit’s commanding officer, Hank Reed, Holters produced photographs of horses. He proceeded to ask Reed if he liked horses.
A former cavalry officer and reservist for the US equestrian team at the 1932 Olympics, Reed admitted he did, and recognised photos of Lipizzaner stallions.
“They are the purest breed of horse in existence today,” Holters insisted, with a breeding program dating back more than 500 years. “The horses I have shown you are in great danger. You must save those horses.”
Holters’ fear, shared by Spanish Riding School director Colonel Alois Podhajsky and Hostau stud manager Colonel Hubert Rudofsky, was that the Russian Bolshevik army, then about three days march from the western Czechoslovakian town of Hostau, would slaughter all 600 horses crowded onto the 460ha Trauttmansdorff stud.
A month earlier, Soviet tanks had forced 22 Lipizzaner stallions evacuated from Budapest’s Royal Hungarian Spanish Riding School to surrender.
Red Army soldiers butchered 18 stallions for rations, with four put into harness to pull overloaded ammunition wagons. Grooms or riders who attempted to protect the horses were also shot.
School director Lieutenant Colonel Vitez Geza Hazslinszky-Krull von Hazslin survived to warn Podhajsky of the risk to his Viennese Lipizzaners from Soviet troops, given rights to Czechoslovakia at the Yalta Conference in February 1945.
As Holters also conveyed horror stories of Soviet treatment of Allied prisoners of war who were stripped and shot dead, Reed was persuaded to act, although he required permission from US General George “Old Blood and Guts” Patton.
Frustrated that the Yalta agreement stopped Allied troops at the Czech-Bavarian border and cruelled his ambition to “piss in the Danube at Prague”, Patton was enthusiastic about saving valuable horses from the Communists, even if it required a temporary incursion some 50km into Soviet territory, still defended by SS fanatics as regular German soldiers surrendered in their thousands to the Allies rather than become prisoners of a vengeful Red Army.
Since the Soviet massacre of Polish officers at Katyn in 1940, Patton had opined that “If I ever marched my corps of two divisions in between the Russians and the Germans, I’d attack in both directions.”
Receiving a message from Patton to “Get them. Make it fast,” Reed later said he was delighted to end his European mission with a horse rescue.
“We were so tired of death and destruction; we wanted to do something beautiful,” Reed said.
Along with breeding mares for the Vienna school, Hostau hosted 200 famous European racehorses and 100 Arab stallions, collected by Nazi equine breeding chief Gustav Rau to breed a “super horse” for the new European “master race”.
Rau had identified Lipizzaners as the “purest” horse breed in Europe and planned to use them as base bloodstock for his super horse.
Working from 14 stud farms, including one in Auschwitz concentration camp grounds, Rau used young mares to breed horses that were closely related, and moved Lipizanner mares to soil and pastures that Podhajsky considered risked their survival.
Rau had fled when Reed’s troops began planning an evacuation, leaving Americans to work with Rudofsky, who had encouraged Holters’ rescue mission.
With many mares due to foal, Rudofsky and Hostau veterinarian Captain Rudolf Lessing knew they could not walk 40km into Bavaria.
After the German surrender on May 7, 1945, US soldiers requisitioned German army trucks to increase their own vehicle count, constructing crates from salvaged materials to cart out mares and small foals.
Watched by Russian agents, the mission rolled on May 15, when Captain Tom Stewart bellowed “Let’s move”. His Jeep led a convoy of three groups of horses.
Polish and Austrian grooms and released German prisoners added another 20-odd riders, charged with controlling hundreds of horses, followed by 30 trucks carrying mares and foals.
Their destination at Furth im Wald in Bavaria was in sight when three Czech partisans, armed with German rifles and Soviet machine guns, stopped the convoy at a roadblock on a narrow bridge.
“You can’t take these horses out of Czechoslovakia,” the leader yelled. In a tense showdown, Quinlivan stood his ground.
Two groups of horses and riders had tangled among trucks carrying mares and foals.
As the partisans stepped down, dozens of Lipizzaner stallions, with their Arabian and thoroughbred stablemates, stampeded across the bridge into Bavaria.
Ghost Riders, Mark Felton, Icon Books, $29.99