POMONA, CALIFORNIA, DECEMBER 1, 1948
As 1948 drew to a close, three years had passed since the war had been won at the cost of more than four hundred thousand American lives. The troops were home and the veterans, like the characters in the popular 1947 movie The Best Years of Our Lives, had bottled up their stories and gotten on with their business. The men of the 2nd Cavalry had scattered across America, picking up the pieces of the lives they had left behind during the war years. Some, like Captain Quinlivan, were still in the army; others, like Tom Stewart, had been discharged and were trying to find their footing in the civilian world. Many of them had cut out newspaper and magazine articles about the horses’ triumphant arrival in Newport News, but as the years passed, the men lost track of the horses, and the memory of the wartime rescue was tucked away with the rest of their war souvenirs.
By this time, the 231 horses imported to America by Fred Hamilton and the horse detectives, in two separate shipments in 1945 and 1946, had met a variety of fates. Although none of the transported horses had been intended for sale, support for the Remount Service quickly began to dwindle, and by late 1946, Hamilton had been required to auction off most of the Thoroughbreds at Front Royal. His promise of the Thoroughbreds’ great value was not borne out. The refusal of the American Jockey Club to register the Thoroughbreds had greatly diminished their worth. Of the sixty-four imported by Hamilton, only four—among them Nordlicht—would be registered. A syndicate headed by Christopher Chenery (of the family who would later own Secretariat) bought the famed German Thoroughbred for $20,300, a relatively high price tag for a stallion at the time. But without registration papers, the majority of these horses’ descendants could not be raced, significantly limiting their value. As a result, most of the horses that had been captured to such great fanfare just a few years before had mostly gone on to ordinary lives in private hands.
The army cavalry had a last hurrah when it cobbled together an equestrian team to ride in the 1948 Olympics in London. In November of that year, the Army Equestrian Team made their final public appearance at the National Horse Show in Madison Square Garden. When members of the Dutch team spotted a couple of their own horses in the American stables, the army handed them back to their rightful owners. Meanwhile, cavalry veterans were offered a chance to purchase army horses at a discount. Quite a few took advantage of the offer to buy strings of horses and establish riding academies. The future of equestrian sports from here on in would be civilian. Still, a few of the horses from Hostau, including Witez and Lotnik, remained with the Remount Service, their destiny uncertain, their plight unknown to most of the men involved in their rescue.
On July 1, 1948, the Defense Department, under the order of President Truman, formally transferred its remaining Remount Depots with all of their livestock and equipment to the Department of Agriculture. Army horsemen hoped the transfer of the Pomona Remount Depot would preserve its unique Arabian breeding program. But with lightning speed, the horse lovers’ hopes were dashed. The Agriculture Department declared that its budget would not support any horse-breeding operations. They planned to sell off all remaining animals immediately. The number of horses in the army had already dropped precipitously, from the more than 200,000 horses in 1941 to just 327 in 1949. At Fort Riley, the soldiers lovingly cared for some of the distinguished beloved retired horses from the army’s competitive equestrian days. At the Pomona Remount Depot, only Kellogg’s prized Arabians, the imports from Janów Podlaski, and nine Lipizzaner remained.
Witez had lived through the bombings of wartime, but now, in his formerly peaceful home, a new sort of battle ensued. The former Kellogg Ranch had turned into the center of a storm of controversy, pitting horse lovers and animal rights activists against bean counters in Washington. As soon as the Department of Agriculture assumed control of the Pomona Remount Depot, their staff began a ruthless process of selection, culling the Arabian herd. Many of the able-bodied animals were sold off. Older mares and stallions, in good health but past their prime for breeding, were targeted for euthanization. Only the cream of the crop remained.
Arabian lovers, horrified by this callous treatment, started rescue operations, determined to save as many of the beautiful animals as possible. Sometimes they succeeded. When Raseyn, a twenty-two-year-old stallion and well-loved veteran of the Sunday shows, was discovered to be sterile, he was slated to be destroyed. A local humane horse advocate spirited him off the grounds (even the official history of the ranch declared that no one knew how she had pulled it off) and gave him a new home. In a letter to W. K. Kellogg, she wrote, “Your darling Raseyn is happy here, I’m sure. Once in a while, he puts his head against me as much to tell me that he loves me. The feeling is mutual. I have been feeding him small pans of chopped carrots, ground hay, ground grain, and added vitamins every three hours, and now he puts up his head and speaks whenever I get near his corral.”
Other aged horses were not so lucky. Jadaan, Valentino’s horse, was euthanized, his skeleton donated to the school of veterinary medicine at the University of California, Davis, his hide promised (but never delivered) to the Cody Museum in Wyoming. Kellogg, by then eighty-eight years old and blind, was reported to be heartbroken by this turn of events. He had donated the ranch “with no strings attached,” believing the horse-breeding operations would continue in perpetuity. With each passing day, the horse group shrank—some sold, others put down, and some lucky ones given refuge by kindhearted fans. As long as the Kellogg Ranch remained in the army’s hands, there had been great reluctance to sell off the rescued horses—a public relations disaster for the army as well as a sentimental one—but with the changing of the guard, the bureaucrats in the Agriculture Department had no such scruples. Lotnik, once the pearl of Hostau, was sold to a local horseman to be used as a pleasure horse.
By the fall of 1948, only the most valuable horses in the Kellogg stables remained. Among these was Witez. In October 1948, even these horses—the most valuable of all—were to be sold off in a closed-bid auction, until this announcement faced a prompt and noisy backlash. Horse organizations and interested individuals sent off a flurry of telegrams to President Truman, a slew of critical articles appeared in Southland papers, delegations of powerful horse advocates met with California governor Earl Warren, and an ambitious young congressman named Richard Nixon made a personal plea to the Department of Agriculture. Petitioners believed that the ranch and its herd should be kept together and another organization should take over—one committed to continuing its mission. Hoping to tamp down the controversy, the Department of Agriculture changed tack. Rather than auction the remaining animals, they decided to move them to Fort Reno, Oklahoma, where the horse-breeding operations had not yet been fully curtailed. Many assumed that the horses would be quietly sold away from the prying eyes of the Southern California press, though this had not been publicly stated. One thing was clear: The War Assets Administration had designated the horses as surplus government property. The United States government was not in the horse business any longer, and these animals, products of the most refined pedigrees in the world, were about as valuable to them as a bunch of cast-off tires from an old-model jeep.
ON DECEMBER 1, 1948, the Pomona ranch appeared serene, its palm trees silhouetted against the gray San Gabriel Mountains, as uniformed officers watched a line of horses parading toward a waiting railcar. The gathered horse handlers were clearly downcast, reluctant to see their stunning charges loaded for departure. The Arabians stepped lightly across the dusty train yard, seeming too regal for these ordinary surroundings. The mild California sunshine shone upon their fine coats, bringing out the copper, silver, and gold. A gaggle of reporters and press photographers had gathered to witness the dispersal.
Four mares with foals at their sides loaded first, then four yearling stallions, one six-year-old, one ten-year old, and a pure white Lipizzaner coach horse. As each horse was safely stowed into the specially made box stalls in the train cars, the handlers who were staying behind exited the train with somber expressions and empty hands.
At the very back of the line, last to load, stood Witez. With his large dark eyes, he paused, looking at the assembled crowd like a monarch surveying his subjects. Joe Benes let the lead rope loose so that Witez could show his well-shaped head and sculpted muzzle to best advantage. As cameras flashed, the stallion flicked his curved ears forward, their delicate tips pointing inward. Benes waited until the photographers had finished, then clucked softly. The chieftain followed him into the shadowy boxcar without looking back.
After Witez was settled in the train, Benes offered him a sugar lump, then planted a kiss on the animal’s soft muzzle, lingering an extra moment at his side. But the train’s engine was revving, and Benes, who had been caring for this stallion and riding him daily since his arrival from Front Royal in 1946, had no choice but to unclasp the lead rope, coil it over the hook next to Witez’s improvised stall, and walk away.
Had anyone noticed, as he boarded the train, the brand just behind the stallion’s left shoulder? Witez still wore the mark of his birthplace in Poland: a royal crown. But that had not protected this knight, this chieftain, this warrior. This train to nowhere rattled east all the same.
The next day, the papers ran the headline “Kellogg Herd Slashed Again.” At the end of 1947, Colonel Fred Hamilton, who had worked so hard to bring the captured horses to the United States, had retired from the army on disability at the age of fifty-one. Publicly, he remained an outspoken advocate for horses. Privately, he had taken to calling these last remaining horses “the war orphans.”