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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
April 1945. As Allied bombs rain down on Europe, a 400-year-old institution looks set to be wiped off the face of the Earth. The famous white Lipizzaner stallions of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, unique and precious animals representing centuries of careful breeding, are scattered across rural Austria and Czechoslovakia in areas soon to be swallowed up by Soviet forces – there, doubtless, to become rations for the Red Army. Their only hope lies with the Americans: what if a small, highly mobile US task force could be sent deep behind German lines, through fanatical SS troops, to rescue the horses before the Soviets arrive. Just five light tanks, a handful of armoured cars and jeeps, and 300 battle-weary GIs must plunge headlong into the unknown on a rescue mission that could change the course of European history. So begins Operation Cowboy, the greatest Second World War story that has never been fully told. GIs will join forces with surrendered German soldiers and liberated prisoners of war to save the world's finest horses from fanatical SS and the ruthless Red Army in an extraordinary battle during the last few days of the war in Europe.
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To Fang Fang with love
Contents
AMERICAN–GERMAN RANKS GLOSSARY
* There were also generals of this rank of other army branches, such as ‘der Kavallerie’, ‘der Panzertruppe’, or ‘der Artillerie’.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
Most of the dialogue sequences in this book come from the veterans themselves, from written sources, diaries or spoken interviews. I have at times changed the tense to make it more immediate. Occasionally, where only basic descriptions of what happened exist, I have recreated small sections of dialogue, attempting to remain true to the characters and their manners of speech.
Prologue
10 September 1944. The banshee wails of air raid sirens were the first intimation that trouble was coming, their mournful rising and falling sending people scattering to public shelters, subway stations and basements. At the Spanish Riding School, the world’s most famous horse training academy inside Vienna’s Hofburg Palace, the well-practiced operation of moving the priceless white stallions under cover swung smoothly into action.
The director of the school, the tall, aristocratic-looking 46-year-old Alois Podhajsky burst from his office and immediately began organizing the grooms and riders, who were unlocking stalls and leading out the horses towards a shelter beneath another part of the school. Podhajsky had been born in Mostar,* then part of the Hapsburg Empire, and had risen to the rank of colonel in the Austrian Army. Soon after the Nazi takeover of Austria Podhajsky had been appointed director of the Spanish Riding School and become a colonel in the German Army. He was widely known and admired in the worldwide dressage community and had won a bronze medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Now, the institution that he had devoted his life to, and which had endured for nearly 400 years in the heart of Vienna, was in danger of being snuffed out in an afternoon.
Colonel Podhajsky was surprised, and saddened, to see that his stallions were becoming used to the raids – each time the sirens began their awful lament, the horses would move to the doors of their stalls and stand there patiently waiting to be let out, their large and expressive dark eyes peering through their stall bars.1 The American bomber streams were targeting Vienna more and more frequently as the strategic bombing campaign across Europe aimed to pulverize the Nazi military-industrial complex. The bombing was inaccurate, with ordnance often landing in the city’s historic heart, with its palaces, museums, cathedral and zoo all coming under attack.
The Lipizzaner stallions’ hooves clattered on the flagstones as they were led from their ornate stables, equipped with marble drinking troughs and smart black stall doors, into a concrete shelter that had been specially designed for these circumstances, their compact, muscular bodies moving without panic, tails held high and heads inquisitive and alert.
Soon, two new and disturbing sounds could be heard, as the sirens wailed mournfully on. The first was the firing of anti-aircraft guns across the city, the sky above filling with dirty brown and black puffs as the shells exploded among the high-flying bomber streams. Then a thumping sound grew progressively louder, much louder than the roaring of the guns: bombs were being released from the bellies of the 344 American B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators that filled the sky.
Podhajsky and the others stared up at the gray concrete roof of their shelter and then down at their equine charges, whose small ears rotated in alarm at the violent sounds, their nostrils flaring as they shuffled their feet, snorted and stamped. The detonations were getting closer, the ground reverberating as the large bombs impacted on their targets. The horses did not panic, thrash about or try to stampede. Podhajsky was pained to see that these fine beasts, representing five centuries of careful breeding and training, cowered just like the humans as the explosions grew louder and louder, lowering their heads to the ground in fear and confusion. On and on came the detonations, the sonic waves making the ground shake and little pieces of debris fall from the ceiling, almost invisible against the Lipizzaners’ gray-white hair. The humans held the horses’ heads and bowed down like their charges, some praying, others cursing as the American bombers passed over the Hofburg Palace. Bombs started to land all around the Spanish Riding School, detonating with huge concussive blasts in the Michaelerplatz and Stallburggasse,2 shrapnel lacerating the white Baroque façades of the tall buildings, stripping off roof tiles or caving in houses and shops with direct hits.
Inside the white Winter Riding School arena, constructed on the orders of Emperor Charles VI in 1729, the windows that backed the three levels of public seating areas vibrated madly at each detonation before suddenly imploding, shattered glass raining down like ice on to the sanded riding area. The huge and priceless crystal chandeliers that had hung from the 59-foot-tall ceiling were spared, having been packed up on Podhajsky’s orders. Above the royal box the huge portrait of the emperor, to which generations of riders had raised their birch-branch riding crops in salute, was also gone, leaving just a discolored patch of paintwork where it had hung. Where once Strauss had wafted from speakers, and white and gray stallions had performed with bicorn-hatted riders astride them, now the drone of aircraft engines, the wail of sirens and the thump of further detonations intruded on this unique survival of a bygone age.
When Colonel Podhajsky emerged from the air raid shelter he stood and stared at the broken glass that littered the arena. He shook his head but knew that they had been lucky. It had been the closest raid yet, but the Spanish Riding School had been spared heavy damage. The stallions, as traumatized as the grooms, were led back to their stalls while firemen tackled blazes in nearby streets and medics rushed the wounded to hospital. Podhajsky knew that this could not go on. It was his responsibility to preserve the world’s oldest riding school for Austria. But how?
Colonel Podhajsky had watched as the Nazi state had progressively interfered with the Spanish Riding School. The brood mares that provided the stallions for the school had already been taken from their special stud farm at Piber Castle in Upper Austria and transferred to German Army control. In 1942, these irreplaceable animals that carried, and with each foaling renewed, the bloodlines of the Lipizzaner had been sent to Hostau in Czechoslovakia, beyond Podhajsky’s influence. That left the stallions. But the Nazis, who had taken over Austria in 1938, had so far refused all his entreaties to have the precious animals evacuated to the country before the school was seriously hit. To the local Nazi leaders, evacuation of the Spanish Riding School, one of the preeminent symbols of Austria, would be defeatism.3 The citizens of Vienna had crowded the Winter Riding School for performances or to watch the morning exercises until May. It had provided them with some relief and diversion from the stresses of total war. But Alois Podhajsky would not stop until he had made the Nazis see sense. There was nothing that he could do about the grand buildings and stables, but it was the Lipizzaner stallions that were the heart of the school, its raison d’être. The school was alive and without the stallions the buildings were but museums to a finer and more refined age. The school had to be moved, the horses’ intensive training continued elsewhere and the legacy of half a millennium given a chance to live.
Podhajsky’s temporary solution to the danger of aerial bombing had been to house the 65 stallions in wooden stables at Lainzer Tiergarten, a 6,000-acre wooded wildlife preserve and former Imperial hunting ground in the southwest corner of Vienna. In this way there was no disturbance to their intricate training program. It wasn’t ideal, but the business of training the horses for the arena had to continue. Then the bombing intensified, and even the Lainzer was no longer safe, near misses landing close to the stables.
Colonel Podhajsky had continued to press the authorities for the orderly transfer of the stallions to the countryside. But he also began to make secret preparations to ensure that if the worst happened, the school could leave under its own power. Podhajsky was forced to take some of the stallions and put them in harness like common drays to pull wagons loaded with treasures and equipment. ‘They forgot the delicate dancing steps of the piaffe, the lively leaps of the capriole and the courbette, and the statuesque immobility of the levade,’4 wrote Podhajsky with sorrow. But he was determined that when the time arrived and the authorities finally caved in to his demands, the Spanish Riding School would not be helpless.
In December 1944, Podhajsky was thrown a lifeline. The castle of Anton, Count von Arco auf Valley outside Linz in Upper Austria had been mooted as a possible refuge for the stallions and riders from Vienna. The count was a notorious fellow, having assassinated Kurt Eisner, the first premier of Bavaria in February 1919. Pardoned in 1927 and released from prison, the count was currently residing in a concentration camp, having been taken into ‘protective custody’ by the Gestapo after remarking that he would be happy to assassinate again, which the Nazis interpreted as a threat to Hitler.5
His elegant wife, Countess Gabriele, showed Podhajsky over the castle, which was crammed to capacity with refugees from the east. Podhajsky was pleased to see that the stabling was more than adequate.
Though a home had been found for the stallions, the authorities were still loath to permit their evacuation, even as the Red Army bore down upon Vienna from the east. ‘The Spanish Riding School was a symbol for Vienna,’ wrote a frustrated Podhajsky, ‘and it was feared that its departure would bring home to the already uneasy population the hopelessness of the situation.’6 But Podhajsky managed, through a series of clever ruses, to move out 45 of the stallions by February 1945, leaving just fifteen in Vienna.7 And then, following a massive air raid, the high command finally caved in and issued the necessary evacuation orders authorizing the transfer of the Spanish Riding School to Arco Castle.
Though the army had given the order, the ultimate responsibility lay with the top Nazi in Vienna. Without his consent, the horses, staff and remaining treasures were going nowhere. Podhajsky would have to plead his case one more time.
*
Thirty-eight-year-old Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach was on the face of it an unlikely Nazi. His father, though a member of a noble German family, had been born an American citizen, the son of a major in the Union Army who had been part of the honor guard at President Abraham Lincoln’s funeral. The major had married a member of the powerful Norris family of Philadelphia. Von Schirach’s mother was also American, and from another wealthy Philadelphia family, the Tillons. The Gauleiter of Vienna was therefore descended from two signers of the Declaration of Independence, but had married the daughter of Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s personal photographer, and had served as Hitler Youth leader before going to the front in France to fight as a junior army officer, where he was decorated for gallantry. Hitler had appointed von Schirach Gauleiter of Vienna in 1940 and he had faithfully carried out the Führer’s anti-Semitic policies, deporting 65,000 Viennese Jews to camps in the east, actions that he summed up as a ‘contribution to European culture.’8
Alois Podhajsky met von Schirach face to face on 5 March 1945 at his villa at Pötzleinsdorf. The director of the Spanish Riding School was ushered into von Schirach’s huge and ornate office. The most powerful man in Austria was seated behind a large antique desk and rose to greet the colonel, who saluted him formally. Von Schirach was of average height, with dark hair parted and slicked back from his face. Podhajsky was surprised to note that von Schirach was wearing an army uniform instead of the usual ornate brown and gold uniform of a high Party leader, seemingly to indicate his affinity with the troops and the precarious military position of Vienna as the Soviets closed on the city.
‘Is everything under control with the Lipizzaners?’ asked von Schirach, seating himself once again behind his desk after standing to greet Podhajsky.
‘Herr Gauleiter, the situation demands the immediate evacuation of the horses,’ said Podhajsky without preamble. ‘The constant air attacks and the nearness of the front have rendered the School’s position untenable.’
Von Schirach said nothing for some time; the only sounds in the room the loud ticking of a large carriage clock atop the fireplace’s mantel and the crackling of logs burning steadily beneath. The Gauleiter sighed.
‘I must not lose my nerve and must consider what an adverse effect the removal of the Spanish Riding School must have on the people of Vienna,’ said von Schirach, almost to himself. ‘They would take it as an indication of the hopeless position of the city and be still more despondent.’ Von Schirach paused, inviting no reply from Podhajsky, who stood before the desk, his face a mask of frustration.
‘But it is not just for these reasons, Herr Oberst, for already in a day or two military measures can be brought in that will bring definite relief, so I ought not to upset even more the very sorely tried citizens.’9 Podhajsky had no idea to what ‘military measures’ von Schirach referred, but he doubted whether the Gauleiter really believed such measures would make much difference at this stage of the war. Podhajsky pointed out to von Schirach that the Gauleiter himself had written to the army high command before the New Year complaining that it was madness to keep the horses at the Hofburg, and suggesting that they should remain at the Lainzer. Because of the constant air raids, even the Lainzer had become untenable. Therefore, the horses and staff must leave Vienna. Podhajsky could not understand, given von Schirach’s evident interest in the Spanish Riding School, why he wanted to continue to expose the horses to air raids.10 Another deathly silence fell between the two men. Von Schirach stood and walked over to one of the long windows that looked out on pleasant formal gardens that were white with snow, his hands clasped behind his back. Then he turned and looked sharply at Podhajsky.
‘Looked at like that, you are right, but all the same it is not easy for me to agree to the evacuation, for I have always considered the Spanish Riding School to be Vienna, and with the departure of the Lipizzaners a piece of Vienna goes from us.’ Podhajsky could see the conflict written across von Schirach’s face, but he could also see that the Gauleiter had come to a decision.
‘But I love them too much to leave them in danger any longer. So go to Upper Austria!’11 Podhajsky was ecstatic – they would leave the following day. But though Podhajsky believed that he had saved the stallions, of the mares he had heard nothing for some time. As he hastened from von Schirach’s office back to the Hofburg, Podhajsky wondered again what had happened to the hundreds of brood mares that the army had transferred to Czechoslovakia, and which Podhajsky had spent years trying to protect. For if the Spanish Riding School were truly to survive the war, both of its parts must be saved and eventually reunited. As Podhajsky looked out of the window of his car as he was driven through the snow back towards Vienna, the warm glow of his victory over von Schirach had already cooled and the horrible feeling that events were beyond his control had begun to reassert itself as a heavy, panicky sensation that unsettled his stomach and made his head ache.
Notes
1. Alois Podhajsky, My Dancing White Horses (London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd, 1964), p. 95
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid: p. 96
5. Martin Broszat, Bayern in der NS-Zeit, Bd. 6. Oldenbourg-Verlag 1983, p. 73
6. Alois Podhajsky, My Dancing White Horses (London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd, 1964), p. 100
7. Ibid: p. 101
8. Robert S. Wistrich, Who’s Who in Nazi Germany (Routledge, 2001), p. 122
9. Alois Podhajsky, My Dancing White Horses (London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd, 1964), p. 102
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
* Today in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
CHAPTER 1
‘Always Ready’
‘If it should be necessary for us to fight the Russians, the sooner we do it, the better.’
General George S. Patton
Oppenheim, Germany, 24 March 1945. General Patton, a riding crop grasped in one gloved hand, strode purposefully across a pontoon bridge spanning a wide river, a retinue of staff officers jogging to keep up with the US Third Army commander. Military traffic passed slowly over the bridge, causing it to creak and groan under the weight of Sherman tanks, half-tracks, trucks and jeeps. Everything was headed in one direction – east.
Both banks of the river were deeply scarred from heavy shellfire and fighting, houses reduced to burnt-out smoking shells or collapsed into piles of rubble and timber. The GIs passing over the bridge on foot, their weapons slung over their shoulders, were surprised and excited to see ‘Old Blood and Guts’ Patton in the flesh, helmet festooned with three stars, pearl-handled revolver at his waist and tan riding breeches tucked into high brown boots.
Halfway across, Patton suddenly stopped and went to the rail. He looked down at the fast-flowing brown water before unbuttoning his fly and urinating into the river.1 His shocked staff paused and then followed his lead. Grinning fiercely, Patton buttoned up and continued to the far bank, where he stooped and grabbed up two handfuls of mud. He announced in a loud voice: ‘Thus William the Conqueror!’2 – a reference to the Duke of Normandy’s famous declaration to his followers at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 when he snatched up two handfuls of earth and shouted, ‘See, I have taken England with both hands!’
It was an important moment not just for Patton but for the entire Allied cause. Later in the afternoon Patton sent a message to the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. It consisted of one line: ‘Today, I pissed in the Rhine!’3
The Allies’ most aggressive commander and one of its best armies were into Germany, and there was little to stop them. In less than a month the Third Army cut a glorious swathe through central Germany. They took over 400,000 prisoners and seemed poised to charge on to Berlin. But then General Eisenhower ordered Patton to turn south. ‘Old Blood and Guts’ was beside himself – what the hell was south that mattered more than the lair of the Nazi beast, Berlin? Eisenhower told him that the Nazis planned to make a final stand amid the lofty crags of the Alps. Allied forces would head south into Bavaria, Austria and the Czech borderlands to prevent this nightmare scenario from becoming a reality. The ‘Alpine Redoubt’ must be destroyed.
Patton, promoted to a four-star general, protested but was powerless to change Eisenhower’s mind. Berlin would be left to the Soviet Union. Patton was appalled – he hated communism with a passion, and he felt personally robbed of a great victory. But he followed his orders. The mighty Third Army turned 90 degrees and headed south. Its 2d Cavalry Group threw out its reconnaissance squadrons to protect Patton’s flank as he advanced, dipping into western Czechoslovakia to secure small towns and villages. The Germans continued to resist fiercely in some places, but were also casting nervous looks over their shoulders at the Eastern Front, which by now stood just outside the Czech capital Prague and the Danube River. The distance between the American and Soviet lines was narrowing with each passing day. If the German armies protecting northeast Czechoslovakia collapsed, the Soviets would have Prague as well as Berlin, and all of the country up to the American lines. General Patton didn’t much like this scenario for he secretly harbored another ambition – to piss in the River Danube as well as in the Rhine.
*
‘Give me ten years and you won’t recognize Germany,’ Adolf Hitler had declared shortly after he became chancellor in January 1933. This prophecy had come to fruition as far as 27-year-old Captain Ferdinand P. Sperl was concerned, sat in the front passenger seat of a US Army jeep in Nuremberg.
The medieval city of Nuremberg, once one of the most famous historic centers in Europe, was now a smoking ruin, its once beautiful half-timbered Hansel and Gretel heart, the Old Town, reduced to piles of rubble, burnt wooden beams and the ghostly shells of buildings. As the spiritual home of Nazism, Nuremberg, infamous for its prewar torchlit rallies, had received special attention from British and American bombers and had been blown to pieces – all except the great Nazi Party rally grounds, which ironically survived perfectly intact. The city immortalized on celluloid in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will was now just a brown smudge on the map of Germany, 95 per cent of its historic quarter gone, a story that had been repeated the length and breadth of the ‘Thousand Year Reich’.
Any further progress by Sperl’s jeep was impossible – the road ahead was covered with several feet of rubble and charred wood.
‘We’ll never get through this lot,’ said Sperl to his driver. ‘Let’s find another route.’ The private driving the jeep executed a rough three-point turn in the street, tires crunching over broken glass, the following jeeps and trucks doing likewise, as the little convoy slowly worked its way north through Nuremberg, headed for the American front lines on the Czechoslovak frontier.
Although Captain Sperl wore the olive-drab uniform of the US Army, he wasn’t an American by birth but a ‘Ritchie Boy’. The US Army realized that it needed language specialists for service overseas, and who better than natives of the countries that the US Army would fight through? To this end, over 15,000 young men either volunteered or were drafted into the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) and received intelligence and interrogation training at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. Among them were over 2,000 German and Austrian Jews that had fled the Nazis.
Sperl was a typical Ritchie Boy. Born into a family of hoteliers in Berne, Switzerland in 1918, he had come to America in 1939 as an exchange student at Cornell University.4 He’d joined the army in 1941 and his language skills had led to his selection for intelligence work. Sperl had received further specialist training in England from the British Army’s Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC), the intelligence outfit concerned with gathering information from captured enemy personnel. Sperl had landed in Normandy in the summer of 1944 with Interrogation Prisoners of War (IPW) 10, the US Army’s version of the British unit. Each US division’s G-2 intelligence section included a Military Intelligence Interpreter Team, an IPW team and an Aerial Photo Intelligence Team.5
IPW 10 was on a special mission that had been sanctioned directly by the Supreme Allied Commander, General Eisenhower. They had orders to move up to the Czech border where the 2d Cavalry Group had established its headquarters. For several weeks now IPW 10 had been trailing American combat formations as they advanced steadily across southern Germany. Captain Sperl and his men, who were all German-speakers, were on the lookout for prisoners-of-war who might be candidates for detailed interrogation, but primarily they were interested in finding high-ranking Nazis in disguise. Reports had been circulating for some time that many senior Nazi officials and SS officers were passing themselves off as ordinary German soldiers in an effort to escape the Allied net that was rapidly closing around the remaining German-held areas. Particular targets were the SS who had commanded and operated the concentration camps, Abwehr and SD intelligence agents, Gestapo officers, SS field police, Nazi Party officials and German military field intelligence units, not to mention the big ‘personalities’ – the men closest to Hitler. Secret documents and files were sought that might prove of use to the Allies after the war.
Whenever Sperl and his unit came upon an American outfit that had taken prisoners they would question any who looked like good prospects or who behaved suspiciously. Any prisoners that they were especially interested in were sent back to the Seventh Army Interrogation Center established in Augsburg in Bavaria for detailed and often aggressive questioning. It was a nightmare job considering the number of prisoners the Allies were taking – in the Third Army’s sector alone upwards of a thousand German servicemen a day were putting up their hands, providing many opportunities for the more unsavory Nazi leaders, functionaries and scientists to escape the Third Reich’s rapidly sinking ship.
Captain Sperl and his unit had headed northeast towards Nuremberg, stopping for gas at a GI depot along the way where they had learned some momentous news. The American and Soviet armies had met somewhere along the Elbe River, meaning that Germany was now cut in two. More scuttlebutt told that communist partisans near Lake Como had shot Benito Mussolini, the strutting Italian dictator, along with his mistress, and that the Red Army was on the outskirts of Berlin.6 To Sperl and his men, this news meant that the war couldn’t last but a few more weeks at the most.
What they saw of Nuremberg confirmed in their minds that Germany had truly lost the war. And it was not just Nuremberg. Practically every city and large town that Sperl’s unit had passed through had been heavily damaged by aerial attack, and almost every major bridge was down, either destroyed by Allied aircraft to stop the Germans escaping or demolished by the Germans to prevent the Allies from advancing. The roads between the devastated towns were filled with desperate refugees all trudging forlornly in one direction – west. Their only concern was to place as much distance between themselves and the brutal Red Army that was steamrollering in from the east and leaving a trail of human misery in its wake. But still the war went on. Sperl pointed his jeep in the direction of Czechoslovakia and started forward. Last reports were that the forward elements of 2d Cavalry Group had been embroiled in a stiff fight for some town by the name of Asch.
*
A little American M-24 Chaffee tank crawled slowly down a narrow medieval street in the small town of Asch, just across the Czech border from American-occupied Bavaria. The tank’s tracks crunched over shards of broken glass from windows blown out by artillery fire, with the dismounted soldiers of a platoon of Troop C, 42d Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron, 2d Cavalry Group hugging the house fronts behind. Wooden shutters had been torn off many of the windows and lay in the streets, or hung at crazy angles on the faces of the stone and wood buildings. Black smoke billowed here and there from doorways and windows while some roofs showed the evidence of artillery strikes, with tiles missing and the gnarled stumps of broken wooden roof beams visible. No civilians were to be seen on the streets – they huddled in terror in their basements as the roar of the armored vehicles made the houses vibrate. Here and there Nazi propaganda posters remained pasted to walls, exhorting the populace to heroic resistance against the hated invader.
The GIs moved mostly silently, half bent over, communicating only by hand signals, their carbines and machine guns ready for instant action. Only their footfalls and the occasional curse as one of their number stumbled on smashed wood or masonry broke the men’s steely silence. Their uniforms were dirty and stained, grenades dangling like green pineapples from their equipment straps, their young faces serious with concentration and grimy from the smoke and dust. Hardened veterans almost to a man, the GIs were taking no chances. Many had fought all the way from Normandy the summer before. No one wanted to be the last man to get shot in the European campaign.
Farther back along the road was a German motorcycle combination lying on its side, its rear tire shredded and almost torn from the wheel rim, a widening pool of gasoline flooding the road from its ruptured fuel tank. Its three occupants had been shot to pieces by the devastating fire of a four-barreled anti-aircraft gun mounted on the rear of an American half-track that the troops had grimly nicknamed ‘The Meat Chopper’. Two of the Germans lay sprawled face-down in the road, dead, their bodies hideously mutilated by the thumb-sized machine-gun rounds – one almost decapitated – while an American medic, a red cross in a white circle painted vividly on four sides of his helmet, was patching up the third German, who lay groaning and half-conscious in a pool of his own sticky blood.7 Different town, the same sights and sounds. The GIs had a word they used for almost every situation they encountered – ‘FUBAR’. It meant ‘fucked up beyond all recognition’. It was about the only word the troopers uttered now as they shuffled on with their mission. France, Germany and now Czechoslovakia. Different countries but always the same outcome: ‘FUBAR’.
The 42d Armored Reconnaissance Squadron (Mechanized), numbering 755 men, along with its sister unit called 2d Squadron, formed the 2d Cavalry Group. They were the eyes and ears of XII Corps, one of two corps that formed Patton’s US Third Army, and they were always in the vanguard of each new assault. After landing in Normandy on 19 July 1944, the 2d Cavalry Group’s two squadrons had fought through France, in the bloody snows of the Ardennes, then crossed the Rhine into Germany, punching across Bavaria to the western border of Czechoslovakia.8 Their job was to push ahead of the slower infantry divisions, seeking out the Germans and sometimes fighting them single-handed until help arrived. It had meant nine months of unremitting slaughter and stress for the young men of the 2d Cavalry Group, and the route from Normandy to Asch was liberally dotted with the cold graves of their comrades and friends.9 The 2d Cavalry Group’s assault on Asch was the first attempt by the Americans to capture a town of any significance in German-occupied Czechoslovakia.
The 2d Cavalry’s lineage was ancient by American standards and stretched back to two regiments of light dragoons that had been formed in the first decade of the 19th century. Every GI in the 2d was proud of his regiment’s lineage and battle honors, and like their forbears they had added only glory to an already glorious story.
The early dragoon regiments had seen plenty of action during the War of 1812, fighting against Britain. Amalgamated into a single regiment in 1814, when the war ended the following year it was disbanded. President Andrew Jackson re-activated the unit as the Second Regiment of Dragoons in May 1836, and for much of the 19th century it was present at the seemingly incessant Indian Wars that ravaged the western US as the nation sought to force the Native Americans on to reservations and appropriate their tribal lands for exploitation and settlement. The 2d Cavalry first saw action against the Seminoles in Florida in the 1830s, lost men at the horrific Fetterman Massacre on the Great Plains in 1866, and was at the battles of Powder River and the Rosebud in 1876, shortly before George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry were obliterated at the Little Bighorn. In 1898 the 2d were shoulder-to-shoulder with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders up San Juan Hill in Cuba, and were fielded by General ‘Black Jack’ Pershing during the Aisne-Marne Offensive in France in 1918, which also marked the regiment’s last occasion in combat as horsed cavalry.
Their motto was, appropriately enough, Toujours Prêt meaning ‘Always Ready’, and as General Patton’s vanguard reconnaissance unit for the Third Army in Europe they had earned the proud nickname ‘The Ghosts of Patton’s Army’ for their uncanny ability to get behind German lines time and again.
Since the mechanization of the US Army in the late 1930s, old horsed cavalry units like the 2d had either morphed into the new armored divisions of the modern field army, or were re-roled as mechanized scouts. The 2d had become a ‘Cavalry Group’ in December 1943, one of a series of lightly equipped cavalry reconnaissance units that fulfilled for the modern battlefield a role equivalent to the horsed troopers of yesteryear – riding ahead of the line of advance to seek out the enemy, and often pinning him in place with aggressive offensive action until the armored and infantry boys arrived to finish him off.10 The group was highly mechanized to an extent not seen in most armies at the time, reflecting America’s massive industrial might, guaranteeing that the cavalry group was almost constantly in the van during the advance across Europe, with all the danger that that entailed. That danger hadn’t diminished as Patton’s forces entered Czechoslovakia, as the 42d Squadron soon discovered.
‘Contact left,’ yelled Major Robert Andrews, the squadron’s S-3 or Operations Officer, who was personally leading the assault on Asch standing on the rear deck of the leading Chaffee tank manning its large .50 caliber Browning machine gun. Three German soldiers, rifles slung casually over their right shoulders, had unexpectedly emerged from an alleyway between two solidly built ancient houses. They appeared surprised to be confronted by the tank, which was advancing cautiously.11
Walking beside Major Andrews’ tank was the young second-in-command of the 42d’s Troop C, First Lieutenant Bob McCaleb. When Andrews shouted his warning, McCaleb, his Colt .45 pistol drawn, motioned towards the three German soldiers who had wandered into the road, shouting ‘Kommen sie hier!’12 Recovering from their shock, the Germans, instead of throwing up their hands in surrender, darted towards an alleyway between two tall brick buildings, unslinging their Mauser rifles as they ran. But they were not quick enough. Major Andrews swung the .50 cal. and loosed off a long thumping burst, the big rounds knocking two of the Germans down. The third just managed to make it into the alleyway before the tank gunner fired a 75mm high explosive shell that literally blew the two wounded Germans to pieces, scattering body parts all over the road in a gory dénouement.13
The GIs were not shocked by the mess spread across the road or hanging from a nearby lamppost – most had become desensitized to such horrific sights after months in the front line. Though most were barely out of their teens, they already had the weary look of veterans.
Although the 42d had seen very hard fighting over the past months, recently everyone had started to notice a change in the enemy. More and more regular German soldiers were giving themselves up without much of a fight. They often presented a pitiable sight, with their uniforms worn and shabby and their bodies lean from food shortages. Many of Hitler’s regular army soldiers, excluding the SS, were now frightened half-trained teenagers or middle-aged men, the scrapings of the Wehrmacht’s manpower barrel, drafted into increasingly patched-together units to stave off a seemingly inevitable defeat.14
But though the Americans heavily outnumbered German forces along the Czech frontier, the fighting spirit of some enemy formations was startlingly undiminished. Though offensive action was now virtually impossible owing to a lack of tanks and a critical shortage of gasoline, some German units were able to man strongpoints and roadblocks, and could yet spring many a nasty surprise on the Americans as they invaded western Czechoslovakia. Towns and villages proved to be particularly difficult locations to take, with American armor funneled into narrow, mediaeval streets and squares overlooked by tall houses and churches.
The tank that Major Andrews rode on started to grind jerkily forward, the accompanying GIs hugging the buildings on either side of the road, many crouching even lower than before in an attempt to make themselves the smallest possible target as they nervously passed windows and doorways, ready to engage any lingering enemy soldiers. Suddenly, machine-gun rounds tore over their heads, stitching a neat row of holes in the wall above them, the weapon’s unmistakable ripping report identifying it as a ‘buzz saw’, as the GIs had nicknamed the German MG42 because of its stupendous rate of fire.
The bullets thudded into the upper stories of the surrounding buildings or ricocheted into the road, kicking up spurts of dust from the cobbles as the GIs hit the dirt or pressed themselves into narrow doorways. Andrews snatched up the field glasses that he was wearing around his neck and put them to his eyes. He could see puffs of smoke coming from a loading bay some distance away on the left.15 He made ready to direct fire on to this new target when there was a sudden blinding flash and the road filled with smoke and flying debris.
Andrews was blown off the top of the tank, landing hard on the road surface where he lay stunned and winded as debris showered down all around him. Several other American soldiers were down, some wounded, others stunned by the concussive blast. Andrews rolled onto his back. All was confusion. Thick smoke and a pall of dust made it hard to see, and the explosion had temporarily muffled his hearing. He could see that Captain Harris, the commanding officer of Troop C, was down, both grimy hands clamped to one of his legs, red blood oozing from between his fingers as his lips pulled back from his teeth in a silent snarl of agony.
Lieutenant McCaleb was crouched in a nearby doorway and was shouting something, his combat jacket and trousers neatly sliced as if by claws, but the skin beneath miraculously untouched.16 Andrews couldn’t hear what McCaleb was yelling. He groaned and sat up, automatically checking his body for wounds. His clothes were also torn, but apart from a few cuts and scratches and having the wind knocked out of him, he appeared to be unwounded. The Company F Chaffee tank rolled on ahead of him, apparently out of control, smoke pouring from a neat hole drilled through its turret. Andrews knew then what had happened. One word was on his lips – Panzerfaust.
Andrews’ Chaffee had fallen victim to precisely the thing that American tankers most feared. It had been ambushed in a narrow, built-up street and hit by a weapon that the Americans were encountering in fearsome numbers all along the front, a last-ditch answer to the Allies overwhelming superiority in tanks and armored cars: the world’s first rocket-propelled grenade. This cheap, throwaway tubular weapon with its bulbous shaped-charged warhead was being issued like candy to German foot soldiers and Volkssturm home guards. The weapon was shoulder-fired using a rifle bullet as a primer and could penetrate the armor of all Allied tanks, including the Sherman and the brilliant Soviet T-34. A little, lightly armored reconnaissance tank like a Chaffee stood no chance, particularly if the weapon was launched from just a hundred feet or less.
Andrews watched dazed as the mortally wounded Chaffee suddenly picked up speed, its engine whining as it blundered out of control up the road before slamming into the corner of a house, partially collapsing the building’s façade. No sooner had the tank impacted the wall than there was a whoosh and a tremendous bang as another Panzerfaust round drilled through the turret. No one baled out of the burning tank, and Andrews knew instinctively that the five men inside were all dead.17
Andrews, his hearing gradually returning, picked up his helmet and yelled across at Bob McCaleb. ‘Get your men moving, Lieutenant!’ McCaleb was to assume command of Troop C now that Harris was out of commission. Troop B hurried forward to take point while McCaleb got his men together and his casualties evacuated.18
Within seconds the dismounted troopers were hurrying forward ready to tackle the German position with carbine and grenade. Andrews moved with them, his body sore from being thrown from the tank. The war was supposed to be practically over, but it was clear that the defenders of Asch hadn’t yet got the news. Andrews ducked as a sniper round pinged off a wall above his head. Breaking into Czechoslovakia was proving to be as costly and dangerous as any of the fights the 42d had encountered since landing in Normandy nine bloody months before. He pulled his pistol from its leather holster, cocked it and stumbled forward, keeping low as he joined his men beside the road at a half-run.
*
When Captain Sperl and IPW 10 arrived at the 2d Cavalry Group’s headquarters on 25 April 1945 they discovered that the unit had requisitioned an old farmhouse outside the battle-scarred Bavarian town of Vohenstrauss, located just ten minutes by motor vehicle from the Czech frontier where the forward platoons had dug in following the battle for Asch.
Sperl ducked through the medieval building’s low door and into a dining room that the 2d Cavalry had hastily converted into a command center. A large oak dining table was covered with military maps, while a signaler sat at a small camp table in one corner monitoring a large green-painted army radio transmitter that occasionally buzzed with static and disjointed voices as units made reports. Clerks and staff officers bustled about, while the aroma of strong fresh coffee wafted from the kitchen down the hall. Sperl removed his helmet and sought out Colonel Charles Hancock Reed, the illustrious commanding officer of the 2d Cavalry Group.
Hank Reed, 44, was of average height and well built with dark brown hair neatly parted in the middle. He stood up from his desk to shake Sperl’s hand and enquired about his journey in his courtly Southern accent. An orderly handed Sperl a tin mug full of steaming hot coffee.
Reed was a cavalryman of the old school who had started out in the horsed cavalry and been switched reluctantly to the impersonal steel beasts of modern mechanized warfare. Born on a farm near Richmond, Virginia, Reed was the son of a wealthy local merchant. He had grown up always with horses, riding before he could properly walk. Graduating from West Point in 1922, Reed had proved to be a great horseman, though an average academic student. His equestrian skills had seen him make the Army Horse Show team in 1930 and 1931 and he had been a reserve for the 1932 Olympics.
A graduate of the Advanced Equitation Course, the top military cavalry course in the army, Reed played polo and show jumped. He and his wife Janice had no children, but Reed doted on his polo ponies and rapidly rose up the ranks until he shipped out to England in 1943 at the head of the 2d Cavalry Group bound for the coming invasion of Europe. He missed horses passionately and hadn’t ridden since an occasional hack in between breaks from the hectic pre-D-Day training program in England. His two chestnut polo ponies, Tea Kettle and Skin Quarter, were safe at home at the Reed family place at Stanford Hill, Richmond. In many ways, Hank Reed shared much in common with his commander, General Patton, who had represented the United States at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. With a strong background in running, fencing and shooting, Patton had finished fifth in the first modern pentathlon. But it was at riding that Patton really excelled, being like Reed a highly accomplished polo player.
Colonel Reed beckoned Captain Sperl over to the map table. Something interesting had occurred requiring Sperl’s particular skills, he said.
‘Corps wants a priority snatch mission, Sperl,’ said Reed, leaning over a map of the Czech borderlands. It was an order that had trickled down to him from XII Corps headquarters. ‘They have received some intel that a Kraut air force unit is stranded here’ – Reed indicated a point on the map called Dianahof near the town of Waier,* just inside the Czech frontier. ‘It’s an old hunting lodge in the forest. The Krauts number about twenty men and they’re babysitting a whole bunch of records and files that Corps wants. Your orders are to proceed to Dianahof and persuade their commander to surrender to us. The priority from up above is to keep the documents safe, at all costs,’ said Reed. Sperl nodded.
‘Do you think that you and your team can handle it?’ asked Reed with some concern.
It was an ideal IPW mission, and the prize that awaited Sperl at Dianahof could be of immense value to the Allied cause.
‘Yes, sir,’ replied Sperl. The very nature of IPW work was fraught with dangers, and Captain Sperl had had his fair share of close calls in the campaign across Europe. But as he chatted more with Reed it was clear that the material at Dianahof should be worth the risk of dipping behind enemy lines. Reed told him to make his plan, brief him and be ready to leave on the mission the following day, 26 April. If Sperl had worries, he didn’t share them with Hank Reed. In his line of work, often only daring action could secure the prize. It was part and parcel of the job he’d been selected for.
Later that evening he would coin a humorous name for this mysterious little mission: Operation Sauerkraut.
Notes
1. Charles Whiting, Patton’s Last Battle (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 2007), p. 120
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4.Peoria Star Journal, May 5, 2006
5. Ibid.
6. John E. Dolibois, Pattern of Circles: An Ambassador’s Story (Kindle: Kent State University Press, 2013), p. 71
7. A.L. Lambert and G.B. Layton, The Ghosts of Patton’s Third Army: Second United States Cavalry: A History (Historical Section, Second Cavalry Association), p. 256
8. Gordon L. Rottman, World War II US Cavalry Groups (Oxford: Osprey, 2012), p. 33
9. ‘XII Corps: Spearhead of Patton’s Third Army’ by Lieutenant-Colonel George Dyer; ‘Question of Ownership of Captured Horses’, United States Congress: Committee on Armed Services, 1947, Washington D.C., 1948, p. 242
10. Gordon L. Rottman, World War II US Cavalry Groups, (Oxford: Osprey, 2012), 33
11. ‘Question of Ownership of Captured Horses’, United States Congress: Committee on Armed Services, 1947, Washington D.C., 1948, p. 242
12. Ibid.
13. A.L. Lambert and G.B. Layton, The Ghosts of Patton’s Third Army: Second United States Cavalry: A History (Historical Section, Second Cavalry Association), p. 287
14. ‘XII Corps Report of Operations 1 April 1945–30 April 1945’, Archives II, NARA, MMRC
15. A.L. Lambert and G.B. Layton, The Ghosts of Patton’s Third Army: Second United States Cavalry: A History (Historical Section, Second Cavalry Association), p. 287
16. Ibid.
17. ‘XII Corps Report of Operations 1 April 1945–30 April 1945’, Archives II, NARA, MMRC
18. A.L. Lambert and G.B. Layton, The Ghosts of Patton’s Third Army: Second United States Cavalry: A History (Historical Section, Second Cavalry Association), p. 287
* Now Rybník.
CHAPTER 2
Colonel ‘H’
‘We must live for the school. Offer our lives to it. Then, perhaps, little by little, the light will grow from the tiny candle we keep lit here, and the great art – of the haute école – will not be snuffed out.’
Oberst Alois Podhajsky
‘I must speak to your commanding officer, at once,’ demanded the smartly dressed German air force officer who had just wound down the rear window of his staff car. A young GI had his carbine leveled at the vehicle, while the other members of the small 42d Cavalry Squadron forward outpost covered him.
‘Do you understand, young man,’ continued the bespectacled German officer to the young trooper, ‘it is a matter of the utmost urgency.’
By the early afternoon of 26 April 1945, Captain Sperl and his small IPW team had been almost ready to roll out to Dianahof and the stranded German unit with its small goldmine of intelligence files when a radio message arrived at the 2d Cavalry’s HQ at Vohenstrauss from a 42d Squadron outpost reporting a strange encounter.
A German staff car, with a white flag tied to its aerial, had just been flagged down. Far from simply surrendering, the officer in the backseat repeatedly demanded to speak to a senior American officer. Colonel Reed ordered that the car be escorted through to his HQ at once.
A few minutes later the large black Mercedes, its paintwork flecked with mud up to the door handles, sedately swung into the dirt front yard of the farmhouse and stopped. An escorting American jeep pulled alongside, a GI standing in the back covering the German car with his .30 cal. machine gun. A young Luftwaffe driver climbed cautiously from behind the Mercedes’ wheel and gingerly opened a rear door, conscious of the weapon pointed at his chest. Out clambered a short, middle-aged Luftwaffe lieutenant-colonel, dressed in a blue greatcoat, cap and dirty jackboots. Reed had called for Sperl, and now the captain strode confidently over and saluted the senior German officer.
‘Herr Oberst,’ said Sperl formally, using the German form of colonel. The colonel returned his salute.
‘I wish to speak to your commanding officer,’ announced the German in his own language.
‘Please follow me, sir,’ replied Sperl fluently, leading him over to where his men had erected the IPW tent the day before. Colonel Reed watched the German suspiciously then turned and went back inside the farmhouse and returned to his paperwork.
*
‘Please, Herr Oberst,’ said Sperl politely, indicating that the German should sit on one of the camp chairs set around a small green map table, its surface dominated by a black manual Imperial typewriter and a sheaf of papers in a buff folder. The colonel removed his cap, revealing a receded widow’s peak, and settled himself on the chair stiffly. Sperl looked him over. The German was aged about 50 and sported a little toothbrush moustache similar to Hitler’s.
‘How can I help you, Herr Oberst?’ began Sperl in a friendly tone.
‘I must speak to your commanding officer on a matter of the greatest urgency,’ replied the German in an agitated voice.
‘Before we get to that, what is your name and rank?’
‘Walter H., Oberstleutnant, Luftwaffe,’ sighed the German, refusing to divulge his surname.
Sperl, unsatisfied with the German officer’s answer, repeated his question several more times, but he adamantly refused to give his surname. To an experienced interrogator like Sperl it seemed probable that the German’s reticence indicated that he was involved in intelligence work of some sort.
‘Turn out your pockets, please,’ demanded Sperl. The German sighed, then stood and started rooting through his greatcoat and tunic pockets, tossing various items on to the table in front of him. The German carried no identity papers – another intelligence ‘flag’ in Sperl’s meticulous mind. Picking up the colonel’s leather wallet, Sperl carefully rifled through it. No family snapshots, just some black-and-white photographs, of horses. Sperl was no expert, but the white horses in the pictures looked beautiful and expensive.
‘Why do you have these, Herr Oberst?’ asked Sperl. The German shrugged and repeated his demand to speak to Sperl’s commanding officer. The colonel clearly had something to hide. Sperl pressed him for a while until the German finally and rather unwillingly addressed the issue of the photographs. Sperl thought that he had seen and heard a lot of crazy things since landing in Normandy, but the story that poured forth from the agitated and impatient German was both extraordinary and intriguing in equal measure.
*
Half an hour later Sperl strode across to Reed’s HQ leaving the mysterious Colonel Walter H. under close guard in his tent. In his right hand he carried the collection of horse photographs. Entering Reed’s makeshift office, he placed the photos on the colonel’s desk blotter. ‘I think you might find these interesting, sir,’ said Sperl, straightening up.
Reed put down his pen and stared at the photos.
‘Those are some fine steeds, Captain,’ said Reed. ‘Lipizzaners, if I’m not mistaken.’ The look on Reed’s face was almost wistful as he gazed at the small images. Reed suddenly snapped out of his reverie and looked up at Sperl sharply.
‘Where’d you get these, Captain?’ he demanded.
‘Off that Kraut air force colonel, sir,’ replied Sperl, a broad grin creasing his face. ‘And there’s a story that goes with them that I think you ought to hear.’
*
Oberstleutnant ‘Walter H.’ stared at the small badge consisting of a tiny ‘2’ over a pair of crossed sabres that Reed wore pinned to one collar of his olive-drab shirt showing his cavalry arm of service. The opposite side displayed the silver eagle of a US Army colonel.
‘Do you like horses, Herr Oberst?’1 asked Walter H. in excellent though strongly accented English.
‘I do,’ replied Reed, meeting Walter H.’s keen gaze.
‘Do you know anything about the famous Spanish Riding School of Vienna? The Lipizzaner stallions?’2
