24.
THE CRAZIEST CARAVAN IN THE WORLD
HOSTAU, CZECHOSLOVAKIA,
MAY 15, 1945
Two weeks after his moonlight ride on King Peter’s horse, Captain Tom Stewart looked around the stable courtyard in Hostau, Czechoslovakia, with wonder. Even in a world gone crazy with war, nowhere on the planet had a scene unfolded that was quite like this one. Prince Ammazov, leader of the Cossacks, was mounted on one of his Russian Kabardins. He sported a tall papakha sheepskin hat and a long sheepskin cape. His ten-year-old daughter, already an expert rider, was mounted beside him on a sturdy Panje pony. The remainder of his Cossack troop, all in traditional garb, circled around, keeping watch over the horses. The German former staff of Hostau, now American POWs wearing civilian clothing, stood by with checklists, calling out instructions. Ragged-looking grooms—former POWs who were now free but had nowhere to go—held on to the lead ropes of their precious charges. Battered American jeeps, armored cars, and tanks were parked around the perimeters. Uniformed American GIs, most of whom had little experience with horses, worked together to ready hundreds of the world’s most beautiful animals for departure. Some of the old cavalry hands had volunteered to go with the Cossacks as outriders, and these soldiers were saddling up their chosen mounts. Hundreds of prancing, dancing, snorting, whinnying horses looked around with bright eyes, eager to set off, unaware how very much this journey would change their lives. A herd of jeeps, armored cars, and a couple of tanks were ready to gallop alongside. Some of the trucks were loaded down with horse equipment—halters, bridles, and harnesses. Others were laden with people’s household possessions. Everyone was leaving. Only Rudofsky, the former stud farm master, was planning to stay behind.
THE FIRST DAYS OF THE AMERICAN occupation had been harrowing for Rudofsky. Cut off from his family in nearby Bischofteinitz, he had anxiously awaited news of their fate. Not until after May 5, when the American 38th Infantry had taken the town, had he heard the frightening story about how young Ulli had hidden with his classmates inside the walls of the local castle as the American tanks approached. With the guns pointed straight at them, the boy’s teacher had handed him a strip of white cloth and pushed him outside in front of the others, whispering, “Americans don’t shoot children.” Fortunately, Ulli had survived the war unscathed, but Rudofsky was reluctant to abandon the boy, whose father was still missing—either dead or interned in a Russian prison camp. Besides, Rudofsky was convinced that with the Nazis defeated, Czechoslovakia had no more enemies, and its future looked bright. Prior to the war, Czechoslovakia had been a democracy, and Rudofsky believed it would become one again—a place with room for all.
COSSACKS.
Lessing tried to talk him out of staying. The two men carried on heated conversations out of earshot of the Americans.
“You are naive,” Lessing said. “The Czech partisans are proxies of the Bolsheviks. They hate Germans—with good reason—and you are an ethnic German.”
Rudofsky was adamant. He had done his duty to ensure the safety of the horses. He would not abandon his family. He would follow the horses only as far as the border.
“Why should I leave the country of my birth?” Rudofsky whispered to Lessing. “What have I to fear when I know I’ve never harmed a single Czech in my life? My family is here, my mother is too sick to travel, my brother’s wife and children look to me for support…”
As the rest of the crew prepared for departure from Hostau, Rudofsky kept busy, carefully checking off each item of equipment on a detailed inventory, in particular making sure that every one of the purebreds was accompanied by an official copy of his pedigree. Rudofsky knew that for the horses to be valued properly, and eventually returned to their rightful owners if possible, their bloodlines would need to be clearly documented.
While Rudofsky checked over his lists, Quinlivan and Stewart watched nearby as American soldiers sorted the horses into groups that would travel together, gently coaxing the most pregnant mares and the spindly newborn foals to walk up improvised loading ramps. At last, perhaps the most unlikely caravan in history was ready to set off.
HANK REED HAD BEEN planning for this moment for days. In the best of circumstances, moving more than three hundred horses overland was complicated. To do so under the current conditions was like tackling a Chinese puzzle. Reed had plenty of experience with large-scale horse operations. In his Fort Riley days, a hundred-mile horseback trek was all in a day’s work. But here, where everything was improvised and only a few of the soldiers knew anything about riding, the task would be infinitely harder to pull off. Moving so many horses without the proper equipment was fraught with danger. The jerry-rigged trucks might be hazardous. The stress of the journey might send the pregnant mares into labor. The horses might not cooperate. What was more, the crew assembled to move the horses was a motley assortment of people, many of whom had been sworn enemies just a few weeks earlier. To top it all off, Reed had agreed that for humanitarian reasons, families who wanted to hitch a ride with the caravan could come along, bringing their children and personal belongings.
Reed had given the job of fitting out the trucks to Fort Riley veteran Quin Quinlivan. Gifted with a sharp mind for technical tasks, the lieutenant jumped into the job with enthusiasm, devising ways to use the equipment they had to best accommodate the precious horses. He and his men built the ramps they needed for loading and improvised snow fences to raise the sides of the flatbeds. These makeshift trucks were hardly the padded train cars or specially fitted-out horse trailers normally used to transport valuable equines, but they were the best the men could do. Only the mares closest to foaling and the newborns too young to walk would ride in the trucks. The rest of the horses would be safer traveling on foot, herded in groups—cowboy-style—across the border.
The horses would have to caravan as far as Kötzting, a small town not far from the border where the Americans were holding and processing German prisoners of war. Reed had sent Kroll to secure stabling and pasture for the horses, and he had come back with a glum report. The local stables and cowsheds would be woefully inadequate for sensitive purebreds; the available pasture around Kötzting would support their three-hundred-odd horses for only a few weeks. Reed told Kroll that this would have to do. Eventually, though, they would need to find a more suitable long-term solution.
Reed knew that the technical difficulties of transporting the horses were outweighed by the delicate political situation. Since entering Czechoslovakia, Reed and the 2nd Cavalry had been dancing a tricky two-step with the Russians. After the capture of the stud farm at Hostau, the 42nd Squadron had moved farther into Czechoslovakia, leaving only a skeleton crew to guard the horse farm, and established a headquarters in the town of Nepomuk. About twenty-five miles east of Hostau, Nepomuk was situated on the line agreed upon by the Russians and other Allies, beyond which the Americans would advance no farther. Patrols from the 42nd first made contact with Russian forces advancing west on the evening of May 8. That same night, Reed had a confrontation with a Russian general who claimed that his orders were to keep moving west into territory already held by American troops. Reed had stood up and, sternly shaking his finger, told the Russian in no uncertain terms that he should not advance because American guns were still loaded. In that instance, the Russian had agreed to detour around the American-held town.
The situation on the ground in western Czechoslovakia remained confusing and chaotic as the two giant armies, Russian and American, crowded up against each other, sharing space with terrified local citizens, floods of newly captured prisoners of war, and roadways filled with lines of weary refugee families fleeing west. Mob violence broke out, with instances of execution-style killings of suspected German collaborators. Even some elements of the American infantry had at one point threatened to start shelling the farm in Hostau. As Reed later recounted in sworn testimony, “They took a dim view of this island of mixed Americans and Germans.” In this atmosphere, Reed knew that the horses needed to be moved quickly into American-held territory before the 2nd was ordered to pull back over the border. Once that happened, Reed would have no say about what became of the horses. A Czech representative had already visited the farm, seeming eager to make a claim that the horses belonged to the Czechoslovakian government—a claim that Rudofsky, the only man with knowledge of the horses located at Hostau before the war, roundly disputed. Reed knew that sorting out the provenance of these purebreds would call for diplomatic palaver between nations and would have to come later. The Americans could provide protection on the roadways leading out of Hostau, but the dangerous part would be to get the horses safely across a border manned by Czechoslovakian guards.
Reed knew that if he messed this up and the horses didn’t make it back to Germany in one piece, he would go down in history as the most inept cavalryman ever let loose in Europe. He would not just disappoint General Patton, he would create a public relations nightmare. All of this lurked in the back of his mind as he oversaw the complicated preparations. But there was even more to what drove Reed to nail down every detail. He had carried his men all the way through the war and out the other side. Rescuing these horses was the last big job that he had been given—and he was determined to see it through.
QUINLIVAN WITH WITEZ AT HOSTAU.
WHEN ALL WAS READY, Tom Stewart climbed aboard the lead jeep alongside a major who carried the order of march. As leaders of the procession, they headed off first, followed closely by trucks transporting the precious mares and foals.
A thunder of hoofbeats filled the air as this improbable parade crowded Hostau’s narrow main street. Placid white mares, frisky colts, bounding Arabians, and stocky Russian horses passed in front of the Church of St. James, heading out of town. From the truck beds, tiny foals struggling to balance on spindly legs peered with wonder through the slats of the vehicles’ improvised sides.
Witez set off eagerly, eyes bright, tail aloft. On his back, one of the cavalry riders, a cowboy who hailed from Idaho, looked like he was having the time of his life. Few of the horses stabled at Hostau, horses used for breeding, were trained to be ridden under saddle, but Witez was one. The bay had been given the important job of riding herd on the young stallions, the group that would be most excitable. Quinlivan was mounted on Witez’s stablemate, the gray Arabian Lotnik, and rode with the older stallions.
Reed and his men had planned out each stage of the ride and marshaled all of the manpower at their disposal. It was hard to believe that just two weeks earlier, Stewart and his men had fought their way into Hostau. Now, in addition to the men of the 2nd Cavalry, hundreds of American soldiers lined the streets to allow them to pass safely. At each intersection, American vehicles guarded the roads.
Yet the group had barely gotten started when trouble began to brew. Before they’d left the village limits, the young stallions got too close to the mares, and the handlers lost control. Quinlivan steadied Lotnik as he watched a couple of stallions break loose from the group and gallop away. The horses hightailed it across the fields, back in the direction of the stables. There was no time to send someone after them—every hand was needed in the caravan; they would have to retrieve them later.
Tom Stewart stayed up front in his jeep, sticking close to the trucks. The motorized vehicles could have made the trek in under a day, but they moved along slowly, keeping pace with the groups of horses traveling on foot. The road crossed flower-studded meadows, plunged them deep into forest and then back out along sunny trails. When night fell and it was too dark to keep riding, the groups slept in barns along the route as Lessing and Kroll circulated among the groups tending to the horses that needed attention. Many were footsore, unaccustomed to walking so far.
The second day was bright and clear. Rudolf Lessing, mounted on Indigo, rode toward the front of the first large herd. Before long, they could see a small burg in the distance, and Lessing’s heart skipped a beat when he realized that soon they would cross the border between Czechoslovakia and Germany. They were headed toward the town of Furth im Wald, a medieval cluster of buildings along the Chamb River. An elegant arched bridge led over the river into the village. Once they crossed the bridge, they would be in Bavaria, now officially an American protectorate.
Above the town gate that led to Furth im Wald hung a shield with a gruesome medieval depiction of a white horse’s severed head. According to local legend, a notorious bandit knight once tried to evade prison by mounting his white horse and charging toward the gate at a gallop. However, the alert gatekeeper dropped the gate’s iron grating to stop him, decapitating the horse and thwarting the robber-knight’s escape plot. Now men and white horses had to hope that the gate would not slam shut in front of them, as it had in the legend. The riders could see the spires of the town in the distance, but the caravan still faced the obstacle of crossing the horses over a border manned by Czechoslovakian guards.
As the first group of horses and riders approached the checkpoints, Lessing saw an armed Czech border control officer manning a large red-and-white-striped gate. As the caravan got closer, the border guards ordered the gate shut, then gathered in front of it, pointing their guns directly at the men and horses. Stewart’s jeep and the horse-laden trucks were idling, and soon the first group of horses caught up and began prancing and pawing, not understanding why they couldn’t move forward. Lessing, staring down at the guns as he reined in Indigo, quickly saw the danger. The second group of horses was not far behind; if the mares and stallions got too close, all hell would start, and some of them might bolt. Lessing grew increasingly nervous. He had heard many stories of unruly, scared horses being gunned down by frightened or trigger-happy soldiers. The Czech partisans manning the barricades were shouting that the horses could not go through. The Americans had no permission to remove horses or any other property from Czechoslovakian territory. Lessing knew that these were not Czech horses—all of them had been brought from other countries, and they were now under American control. But as a German prisoner of war, Lessing was afraid to say anything for fear of making matters worse.
A moment later, he saw the second group of horses appear in the distance. To his relief, he spotted Quinlivan and Lotnik trotting toward the group to join Stewart in asking the border guards what the holdup was. The men repeated the litany—the horses could not leave Czech territory. The Americans had no authority here. Quinlivan sized up the situation. He saw hot tempers, pointed guns, and snorting and pawing horses whose coiled energy was about to explode. Stewart nodded, and Quinlivan swiftly took the matter in hand. He radioed the tanks, which had just pulled up at the tail of the convoy, and told them to point their guns directly at the barricades.
“Open that gate, or I’ll open it for you,” Quinlivan said firmly. The guns and guards faced off. The only sound was the muffled clatter of horses’ hooves. Then the surly border guard jerked his head and the barrier lifted.
Galloping and trotting, dancing and prancing, showing the gaits for which they were so rightly famed, the white horses streamed forward, the sunlight glinting across their backs, across the bridge, and over the border into the American protectorate in Germany.
Among the surging horses, Witez’s burnished bay coat also stood out. Throughout the ride, he had been the perfect mentor. He seemed to be telling the frisky young stallions to settle down and get a move on, that this was serious business. Only after the last horse had passed the barriers did Quinlivan follow on Lotnik.
At the border, Hubert Rudofsky stood straight and tall in his unfamiliar civilian clothes, holding a clipboard. With a businesslike demeanor, he checked off the name of each horse, every one of which he knew by sight, as they passed. As the last of the purebreds passed through the gate, Rudofsky placed a crisp checkmark next to the name. With a heavy heart, he turned around and went home.
When he returned to Hostau, the long aisles of the whitewashed stables stood empty and hushed. Since the days of the Imperial Dragoons, these halls had rung with the sounds of a busy stable—the ring of hammer on anvil when the blacksmith labored, the hollow stamping of hooves on straw, the rattle of polished silver curb chains as horses shook their heads in high spirits, the gentle whinnies that echoed far and near as grooms approached with buckets full of oats. Now the air seemed drained of sound, leaving only a hollow emptiness.
At forty-eight years old, Rudofsky had nowhere to go but back to his mother’s house in the neighboring town of Bischofteinitz. At least his nephew, Ulli, who had held the white flag as he surrendered to the American forces, would be eager to welcome him home.
ON THE AFTERNOON OF May 16, when Stewart, Quinlivan, and Lessing finally arrived in Kötzting, Germany, with more than three hundred exhausted, footsore purebreds, they could not have found a setting less hospitable for sensitive, pampered horses. The small town was bursting at the seams. The 111th Panzer Division, the same mighty tank division that the 2nd had fought during the battle of Lunéville, had surrendered en masse to the Americans on May 7. The 2nd Cavalry would have to process each and every soldier—give him a medical exam, fingerprint him, draw up his discharge papers, all under the seal of the 2nd Cavalry. Even processing five hundred men per day, the task would take over a month to complete. For now, the seventeen thousand German prisoners of war were encamped under guard in empty fields. Adding to the chaos was a flood of refugees—German speakers who had fled Bohemia and Silesia in advance of the Russians and now sought shelter anywhere they could find it. Even the citizens of the town were squeezed into cramped quarters, as every house billeted American soldiers. In the narrow, hilly lanes, shouting matches quickly escalated into street brawls, and petty thieves circulated, preying on the downtrodden and vulnerable.
Despite their fatigue from the journey, the horsemen had no time to rest. The barns, cowsheds, and pastures that Kroll had located for them were scattered around the nearby countryside. All of the horses had made the journey safely, but as Lessing, Quinlivan, and Stewart surveyed the poor conditions in Kötzting, they knew they still faced a mighty challenge—to keep the horses fed, watered, and safe from thieves would take the utmost vigilance from a force already spread thin with other demands.
Hank Reed was not on hand to witness their arrival; his headquarters remained in Czechoslovakia. He had taken over the castle belonging to Baron von Skoda, owner of the Skoda Works, one of Germany’s biggest providers of arms and explosives during the war, making sure that this important facility did not fall into rogue hands during the time of turnover. Soon, the Americans would be retreating from Czechoslovakia, leaving the territory to the Russians. But in the meantime, Reed was required to keep boots on the ground and guns loaded until the Third Army—the 2nd Cavalry included—was ordered to retreat.
For Reed and his men, nothing could diminish what they had accomplished in rescuing these four-footed beauties. All of the horses were safe in American territory, not a single one hurt on the ride. Back in ’42, when Reed had taken command of the 2nd Cavalry, it had seemed that the force’s days of equestrian valor were behind them forever. But today, the regiment known by the code name Thoroughbred had earned a place among its honored mounted forebears.