As I sat in my office late one evening a couple of nattily dressed gentlemen, pork pie hats with feathers in them, tweed jackets, riding breeches, leather leggings, each carrying a riding crop, came in the open door. They spoke German and I could not believe they were German -- so far off from type. It turned out they were Hungarians and they had come for a purpose.
These two gentlemen were the stable masters for the famed Lippizaner horses, the pride and possession of the rulers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War I.
When the old empire was dissolved following that earlier war, these royal stables were more or less divided out among various segments of the Empire. A batch of the horses were kept in Austria and are one of the show attractions of Austria to this day. Other stables were in Hungary and what is now part of Czechoslovakia. In World War II, as the Russian armies were sweeping over Eastern Europe, these Hungarian stable masters selected some fifty or sixty of their finest animals and headed down the road toward what was to become the American zone in South Germany -- Bavaria, in fact. They arrived in Bavaria right after the collapse of Germany and had been foraging, both men and beasts, on the Bavarian countryside.
Quite a number of other animals, from Czechoslovakia, Poland and even Italy somehow were in that area at the time of the collapse. General Patton, responsible for the Bavarian area, clamped down on the occupation rules -- no food stuffs, no feed, nothing moved without a military permit. It happened that General Patton had on his staff a former race horse owner who was anxious that some of these horses be gathered up and brought to the United States. There was serious question as to whether the animals were really war booty -- that is, in possession of Germans at the time of collapse -- or whether they were like these Hungarian horses, merely animals that had fled to the area. As a result of this situation there was a lot of see-sawing, but in my book -- no matter to whom the horses belonged, if Patton wanted some of the horses (which as it turned out he did) he would find some excuse to seize any or all of them. The mission of the two callers in Hoehst that evening was simple. They wanted a military permit to get hay and pasture for their animals. They had been refused all along the line in Bavaria and they came to headquarters to get it.
Under the particular regulations at that point in the U.S. zone, I did not have authority to issue a permit for horse feed. These were most valuable animals. The stable masters in my office showed me the stud books of some of them running back nearly 300 years. The best advice I could give was to head back to Hungary as quickly as they could with these horses; that they would be seized as war booty, or otherwise taken over by the U.S. military, and their chances of survival in Hungary would be about as good as in the United States zone.
Obviously this did not please them, but they did as I suggested. The next day they headed down the back roadways toward Hungary foraging and scrounging feed and shelter from friendly farmers along the way. Some of the other animals in the American zone were indeed taken over by the Military and sent to the last remount depot in the U.S.A. There was considerable to-do about the animals both in Europe and the U.S. after the war. Some of them were sent back to Europe, others were turned over to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and later sold at public auction. No doubt some of their offspring are rambling around U.S. pastures today.
I was to have a similar problem with Karacul sheep. Old shepherds in charge of several hundred of the finest of the Hungarian Karacul herded their charges over mountain trails and roads and ended up in Bavaria. None except some German farmers were interested in these. They kept their charges in Bavaria during the winter of 1945-46. In the spring of 1946 some of the offspring were left with local farmers to pay for their keep and the rest trudged back to Hungary.
In the days ahead I had other horse problems, but nothing to compare to the 40,000 army horses dumped in the lap of Military Government on the surrender of North Italy. The collapse in Germany found most of her army outside the country in Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Norway. All of these countries had contributed to the German army horse pool through the requisitioning from the farms in each of these countries.
After the surrender, claimants against Germany for requisitioned stock came forward. In many instances some of the animals were returned. This was especially true in Poland where a large number of horses had been taken in the course of figthing back and forth across that country during the years of war. Most of these were carried out without much fanfare or disruption to anyone except the few German farmers who had some of these animals on their farms.
In Norway, where there was much difficulty in getting transport for the army horses and where a goodly number of horse-drawn military units had been stationed, the horses were taken over as war booty by Norway. Because of lack of feed and the burden it placed on the agricultural sector they were slaughtered for meat. Horse meat is widely consumed by some of the population in most of these areas. It was ironic that a couple of years later during a dire food crisis in Western Germany, some hospital equipment in West Germany was exchanged for several thousand tons of horse meat from Norway.
As a sidelight, the Eisenhower horse and the General Bedell Smith cow became a subject of much conversation around the agricultural staff. We also had what was called Churchill's horse problems. During the build-up for the invasion of Germany in England, General Eisenhower had a fine saddle horse which e rode for exercise. When the troops took off from England for the invasion of the Continent, the Eisenhower horse went along with the General's headquarter retinue -- sometimes by boat, other times by truck, and finally in a railway car. The railway car and horse eventually ended up in Berlin when the General moved his last headquarters to that city. All went well for awhile, food and provisions for the Western zones of Berlin were allowed to come in from the Russian-controlled German territory around Berlin. But in early October of 1945, the Russians suddenly and without warning cut off all food and animal supplies to the Western part of the city. Trouble was ahead. Foraging feed in the U.S. zone and getting it into Berlin for Ike's horse became quite a game as well as a conversation piece. In a catagory similar to this single horse problem was General Smith's cow.
General Walter Bedell "Beetle" Smith was afflicted with severe stomach ulcers and doctors had decreed that he must have a steady diet of raw milk daily -- no pasteurization or tampering with it. Accordingly, a cow was procured in England and milk from that cow was delivered to General Smith's mess daily. The cow also followed General Smith and like the Eisenhower horse ended up in Berlin. These were small incidents but little items which Food and Agriculture had to handle. They caused some grousing, but all in all when it was considered what these men were doing and the observation that Abraham Lincoln made when some of his associates complained about General Grant's drinking. Lincoln is said to have inquired what brand of whisky Grant liked and remarked that "as long as he was winning battles, Grant should have all the whiskey of the right kind he wanted."
Churchill's horse problem was rather simple. A fine racing stallion from the Churchill stables had been caught in Poland at the outbreak of the war. On the collapse of Germany orders went out to "find the Churchill horse." He was found in the American zone and the British were promptly notified. In a few hours the horse was on his way to his home stable in England.
On September 13th, I decided to go to Berlin for talks with Generals Hugh Hester and William Draper and others about policies for the American zone. Each country was going about their job of occupying and looting and dismantling Germany with little clear guidelines of what should or should not be undertaken.
Traffic between Frankfurt and the American sector in Berlin was still pretty much of a venture. The roadway through the Russian zone was open but hazardous. Bridges were blown, roads torn up, and there were many detours around villages and broken parts of the highway. If one happened to miss a detour or turned down the wrong road there was trouble with the Russians. There were wild stories about jeeps and officers losing their way and never being heard from again, but I think this was mostly talk. That strays did get into difficulties though is unquestioned.
The rail line for anything except troops or military goods had not been opened, and passenger traffic by train was more of a hazard because one had to go through the Russian check-points and one might be subject to delay for a few minutes or for several hours. An old C47, workhorse of the air transport command, left Frankfurt each morning for Berlin and another left Berlin for Frankfurt at the same hour. I used the plane. It was nothing plush: bucket seats, parachutes required on one's back ready for jumping, and piles of equipment filled the fuselage.
A young Second Lieutenant, rather nervous on his first trip up, had the controls and I was the lone passenger. All went well except that clouds had closed in as we neared Berlin and after flying for what seemed like hours we found ourselves out over East Germany close to the Polish border. After a frantic turn around and a lot of chatter on the intercom we headed back to Berlin and Tempelhof airport deep in the heart of that bombed-out city. As we came in under the clouds over what was one of the world's great cities, the scene below was ever so much like a forest of brick chimneys standing stark and naked amid piles upon piles of brick.
The city seemed to have been pounded to dust stone by stone and brick by brick. As a modest air travel buff in the States before the war I had read accounts of a marvelous Templehof airport. It proved to be just about what the newspaper stories had reported. It was not badly damaged by the bombing and was then one of the most modern and efficient airports in the world.
Once billeted in Berlin and checked-in with various sections of our staff in the Allied Commission, I took a day off to look around. I visited the ruins of the famed Hitler Riech Chancellery; the bunker and burned-out Reichstag BUIlding; Hindenburg Gate and many of the places we had read about before getting into the war. I was interested in the Neimuller Church in the American sector of West Berlin. Pastor Neimuller had been one of the few influential figures who had challenged the Hitler myth and succeeded in escaping the gallows. Hanging on the front of this church was a modern bronze statue of the Crucifixion, untouched by all of the destruction around except for a single bullet hole on the cheek just under the right eye. I wrote of the town: "The heart of Berlin is total destruction -- the city is like a corpse trying to walk, a skeleton trying to be gay. People are hungry and will stop at nothing to get food. Sixty-nine percent of the population on this day are women -- most of them widows whose husbands are gone, or girls who have grown up to womanhood and haven't seen their father."
I did not accomplish much on the Berlin trip. I met General Hugh Hester, the chief of the agricultural section; General William Draper, the economics director; and General Lucius Clay, with whom I almost immediately got into an argument about food problems. I found him tough, a stickler for following orders of his superiors, no matter how distasteful. We were messed up in the Morgenthau policy at the time. He was a patient listener and I got answers straight from the shoulder. In the many critical situations and troublesome days ahead, I came to admire Clay's rigid code and straight-forward talk. I always knew where he stood and that was unusual in an army bureaucracy.
My plane did not get off the morning of the 16th so I took advantage of the delay and opened up my ever-present portable typewriter to report in part as follows:
"In recent days we have traveled down through that part of Germany occupied by the Russians, the British, and a portion of the French zone and we have covered all of the territory between the Northern boundary of the American zone to Munich in lower Bavaria. The story is about the same everywhere, except different Allied faces are seen in the various zones. German villages are generally unhurt and undamaged by war. German cities are uniformly blasted to the ground. Farmers are going about their business of farming very much as they have gone about it in the last 400 years in most parts of Germany -- the fall wheat is sown, the fall plowing is done, the potatoes are pitted and all crops are under shelter.
"In recent weeks there has been a marked change in the German population in our zone. The average German is still pretty bewildered and almost despairingly uncertain of his future or that of Germany, but he is working and planning and making and doing things with unbelievable ingenuity.
"Because of the need for lumber in the Armed Forces, the need for transport for other uses and the lack of coal, very little has been done yet in a large way on rebuilding homes and shelter. Yet as one drives through towns literally leveled to the ground, streaks of light emerge from the basements and cellars and a little investigation reveals that every cellar in Germany is occupied by from one to five families."
The eternal will to survive was strong and the beginning of a new Germany dated from the hardships of that grim winter.
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