Inside the World War II Rescue Mission That Brought Enemies Together to Save Priceless Horses from the Soviets—and Extinction

By the early spring of 1945, World War II in Europe wasn’t ending so much as unraveling. The Western Front had collapsed under the Allied advance, and across the Reich entire formations of the official German unified armed forces called the Wehrmacht were surrendering by the tens of thousands. As the empire disintegrated around them, exhausted soldiers clogged roads, abandoning vehicles without fuel as well as weapons without ammunition.

But surrender wasn’t universally accepted. SS units, the Nazi Party’s paramilitary, still moved through the chaos with their own chain of command and sense of purpose. In some places German soldiers, heading west, trying to surrender, had as much to fear from their own divisions as they did from the advancing Allies.

Scattered throughout that collapsing empire were assets no one had a clear plan for. Art. Archives. Livestock. Things too valuable to abandon, yet impossible to defend.

In the Czechoslovak town of Hostau, near the German border, lay a network of barns and pastures—a sanctuary.

Not for people.

For horses.

Following the annexation of Austria in 1938, the Nazis began consolidating horses from across Europe, stealing them from places like the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, the world’s oldest riding institution. By 1942, Hostau had become the heart of an ambitious program intended to produce an “Aryan” horse through selective breeding, with prized Lipizzaners, viewed as symbols of “racial purity” and famous for their white coats and aristocratic history, at its center.

Standing in those paddocks were animals who had survived empires, revolutions, and now nearly six years of industrialized warfare.

But at the end of a war, armies rarely preserve things. And these horses, though some of the most sought-after and expensive ones in the world, were not essential in the way fuel or weapons were. In a war defined by total mobilization, they were completely expendable.

And yet, they were all being protected.

The men overseeing the stud farm operation—Nazi officers, veterinarians, and handlers—understood the danger of their position: To the east, the Red Army was closing in. To the west, the Americans had carved deep into German Bavaria and were continuing toward Sudetenland, the annexed territory in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Hostau—and the Nazis—would soon be caught between the two forces. And then, they wouldn’t be protecting the horses just from starving locals and desperate refugees. Rumors traveled ahead of the Soviet advance: farms stripped bare, livestock slaughtered, supply depots emptied almost immediately by armies exhausted from years of warfare. Whether every story was true hardly mattered anymore.

Some of the German officers and handlers reached a conclusion that would have been unthinkable months earlier: If the horses were going to survive, the Nazis would need help from the enemy.

Among the first to grasp the urgency of the situation was Luftwaffe Lieutenant Colonel Walter Holters. The intelligence officer, whose unit had effectively become stranded at the farm after running short on fuel, arrived to find a world untouched by the raging war.

Holters had heard about the destruction the Soviet forces caused in Hungary, where they shot and ate 18 Lipizzaners. The realization left him with a treasonous idea: To save the horses, he’d need to ask the Americans for help. Not all of the farm’s leadership agreed. Stud manager Hubert Rudofsky resisted; trusting the Americans sounded as dangerous as waiting for the Soviets to arrive—why wouldn’t they just shoot him on the spot?

But with each passing day, the Red Army moved closer, and there was no time for contemplation.

In April 1945, German representatives drove directly toward American lines carrying white flags and one of the strangest proposals of the war. They petitioned Colonel Charles “Hank” Reed to intervene; a priceless herd of Lipizzaner and other valuable horses was in immediate danger.

Reed, who commanded the U.S. Second Cavalry Group under General George S. Patton’s 3rd Army, had spent years fighting his way across Europe. While Reed listened to the intel, the idea that this story could be a German trap swirled in the back of his mind. But then, what if it were true? Like many officers under Patton, he came from a cavalry tradition that understood horses as more than simply livestock. So instead of dismissing the proposal, he carried it up the chain of command—it would eventually land in front of Patton himself.

Patton was a lifelong horseman. Before tanks and mechanized divisions transformed modern warfare, cavalry officers occupied an almost mythic place within the Army. Patton, carrying the legacy, never fully let go of that identity. He had competed in the modern pentathlon at the 1912 Olympic Games, which included horse--riding, and retained an instinctive reverence for horses, even as Europe burned beneath tanks and aircraft.

The animals at Hostau were a political problem as much as a military one. Allied commanders had already established demarcation lines, and most of Czechoslovakia was expected to be liberated by Soviet forces. U.S. troops were generally under orders not to advance beyond the agreed lines. Nobody wanted an international incident in the final days of the war.

Officially, there were limits to what could be done.

Unofficially was another matter.

Patton sent a blunt message: “Get them. Make it fast.”

Right away, American reconnaissance troops began coordinating movement toward Hostau and opening communication channels with German officers overseeing the farm. Men who would have been attempting to kill each other a month earlier were now exchanging information in a desperate effort to quickly move hundreds of horses out of harm’s way.

Entrusted with the tactical execution was a lifelong equestrian, Captain Thomas Stewart; he would become the heartbeat of the mission.

To clear the way for the operation’s advance, Reed requested supporting fire from XII Corps’ artillery battalions. Heavy shelling opened up across the border, pounding suspected German positions and disrupting potential threats to the mission’s path toward Hostau. The thunder of American guns, employed to ward off any German division, rolled across the countryside as Stewart’s task force advanced toward the farm.

The drive into the farm passed through a landscape shaped by retreat and defeat. Burned vehicles littered roadsides. Refugees moved west in long columns. German authority seemed to dissolve with every passing mile. By the time his team reached the farm, the contrast was startling.

Inside the barns, handlers continued their routines with almost stubborn determination. The war felt impossibly distant despite the occasional rumble of artillery beyond the hills.

Stewart walked through the stables, taking it all in. In front of him stood hundreds of years of careful breeding—an exceptional lineage of horses gathered from around the world. The most valuable among them, the Lipizzaners, were created by the Habsburgs in the 16th century, and possessed not only beauty and nobility but also a rare combination of ability, strength, temperament, and intelligence. These majestic Lipizzaners now shifted nervously in their stalls. Foals pressed against their mothers. For the first time, Stewart understood the gravity of the mission, and why the Germans had taken such risks to contact the Americans. These were far from mere farm animals; they were living equine archives. If they disappeared, bloodlines stretching back centuries would go with them.

The challenge at hand was figuring out how to move them.

Logistical preparations accelerated. The enemies worked together to coordinate routes westward. Veterinarians made their way through the stables, assessing which animals could travel. Some mares were pregnant. Others were skittish after months of bombardment and relocation. In total, roughly 650 horses—half of them Lipizzaners—were marked as ready for the journey, with only a few left behind. American cavalrymen moved through battle-scarred terrain still echoing with distant artillery.

And all around the farm, the noose kept tightening. The Red Army advanced relentlessly from the east.

Reed gathered abandoned German trucks and, with the help of American personnel, secured enough vehicles to evacuate the pregnant mares and newborn foals. The rest would have riders—local villagers who joined the effort as handlers and escorts. On April 28, once Stewart felt assured that German forces surrounding the route to safety had been beaten back, the time had come to move the horses. And none of it a moment too soon, with the first Soviet tanks appearing on the horizon as the last of the horses slipped into the west.

Transporting hundreds of animals through an active theater of war introduced a fresh set of logistical complexities. There were 40 miles between the danger surrounding them and the safety of the American-controlled Bavaria. This caravan of trucks and horseback riders rushed west, passing around refugees, broken military units, and the physical wreckage of a disintegrating Reich. Maintaining the herd’s cohesion demanded an unwavering focus of American cavalrymen, veterinarians, and the makeshift coalition of handlers. Each mile gained brought the lineage closer to the security of American lines.

In two days, the horses marched into areas controlled by American forces. The extraordinary coalition that had made possible the effort, dubbed Operation Cowboy, dissolved almost as quickly as it had formed. Holters and the German officers faded into the tableau of a defeated nation, while the American soldiers returned to occupation duty.

Just days later, on May 8, Germany surrendered. The relocation of the animals continued in the weeks that followed, dispersing them across liberated Europe.

In the hours before the evacuation began, Waffen-SS units launched attacks against the farm and the American rescue force. Small firefights erupted along the western routes as American cavalrymen, German Wehrmacht troops, anti-communist Cossacks, and former prisoners of war found themselves fighting side by side to protect the mission. Two American soldiers—Pfc. Raymond Manz and Tec 5 Owen Sutton—were killed during the fighting. Others were wounded. But the rescue mission proceeded.

The obvious question lingered over the entire operation: Why? Why, after years of mechanized slaughter and unimaginable destruction, would soldiers, officers, and civilians from opposing sides risk their lives for horses?

Accounts from those involved often circle back to the same answer: They were exhausted by the demise. These were men who had crossed landscapes littered with shattered armor, collapsed towns, and civilian casualties.

Reed later said: “We were so tired of death and destruction, we wanted to do something beautiful.” For his efforts, he received the Distinguished Service Cross, the U.S. Army’s second-highest military decoration, while Stewart was honored with the Bronze Star, a high-ranking U.S. military decoration, and a German-made Drilling shotgun from Patton.

While the secret mission was already under way, Patton received an invitation to a horse exhibition in Austria and a request from Austrian military officer Colonel Alois Podhajsky to protect the Spanish Riding School and its remaining Lipizzaners. Many of the Lipizzaners rescued from Hostau eventually returned to the school, where Podhajsky’s team would care for them for decades, and their bloodlines would continue. Today, there are more than 11,600 of them around the world.

The War My Father Brought Home

My father, Robert J. Smith, had been a company commander in General George S. Patton’s 3rd Army. He’d led men across Europe, including crossing the Rhine at Oppenheim (the first successful Allied assault into the last major natural barrier protecting the Reich), and like a lot of men who came home from war, he didn’t talk about it much—at least, not until the end. In the summer of 1998, as cancer stripped all things down to the essential—including his ego—the stories started coming out. They weren’t his usual, polished ones about work and the rogue’s gallery of union men he held so dear. These were the real ones. Chaos. Surrender. Hitler’s SS. Villages cleared house by house. Situational close-quarter combat. The kind of details that don’t make it into history books.

Seventeen years later, in the summer of 2015, I found myself sitting in a Manhattan film production office trying to explain to a group of producers why the Operation Cowboy story mattered to me, and what I might bring to it as a hired-gun screenwriter. Growing up, I thought I already understood World War II.
Like most Americans, I inherited the major landmarks of the conflict—the Blitz, the Bulge, Normandy, Dresden, the broad strokes of victory and catastrophe. But listening to my father near the end of his life changed the scales. History became smaller. Stranger. More human. Less about mythology and more about accumulation—the emotional residue men carried home with them. Operation Cowboy struck a chord for me—the mission didn’t alter the outcome of the war, but it revealed something essential about the people inside it.

My father once told me that the most important lesson he learned in the service came during his first week at Officer Candidate School. An Army captain walked into the room, dropped a piece of cooked spaghetti onto a table, and said: “Your unit is like cooked spaghetti. If you push it from behind, it bunches up and goes nowhere. But if you get in front of it and pull, it’ll follow you anywhere.” After years spent participating in destruction, a small group of exhausted human beings chose to pull together and, however briefly, preserve something instead.