Introduction Global Agents of Humanitarian Aid

Between 1945 and 1947, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) delivered approximately 286,000 horses, mules, and donkeys, along with 37,000 cattle, to countries whose livestock and agricultural lands had been devastated by Nazi and Nazi-allied aggression during the war. Additionally, UNRRA provided thousands of smaller animals, including sheep, pigs, rabbits, and poultry, to its target countries.¹ Poland was a primary beneficiary of the UNRRA livestock program. Czechoslovakia, Greece, and Yugoslavia also received UNRRA animals, as did, albeit to a lesser extent, Albania, China, Ethiopia, and Italy. The live animals complemented the more widely recognized forms of humanitarian relief that UNRRA provided, including grain, meat, nonperishable foods, clothing, farming equipment, and medical supplies.

Although UNRRA’s animal deliveries were hardly sufficient to replace the number of animals lost, they marked a significant investment in postwar rehabilitation. The horses and cattle were especially valuable. Agricultural experts estimated that across Europe during the Second World War an astounding twenty-seven million cattle and eight million horses had been killed.² Postwar European recovery, food security, and the prevention of the social and political unrest that could be expected to follow hunger would be impossible to realize without replenishing the lost cattle and horses. UNRRA horses were immediately put to use as draft animals on agricultural fields while UNRRA dairy cows became producers of milk. Milk was the food that everyone in this period—humanitarian aid planners, politicians, and food scientists—agreed had unmatched nutritional value and ought to be fed to hungry people, children in particular. UNRRA animals were also used as breeding stock, and at least some of the cattle and horses in Europe today can trace their origins to UNRRA’s postwar humanitarian relief program. As such, and in contrast to modern-day live animal maritime export, the animals were sent not as food—the intention was not to turn the animals into meat, or at least not immediately—but rather as the means to producing food.

Animals’ inclusion in the broad category of “UNRRA aid” was by no means certain at UNRRA’s inception. Shipping large animals from America to Europe—the horses and cattle came primarily from the United States—was expensive and logistically complicated. It also depended on securing a pool of competent livestock handlers, men who would accompany the animals on their trans-Atlantic crossings and provide them with daily care. Assembling such a workforce was a challenging undertaking, especially given that so many American men were still in the armed forces in 1945 and 1946. UNRRA found a solution in an unlikely place: the American peace churches. The Brethren Service Committee (BSC), a national agency of the Church of the Brethren in the United States, took on the job of recruiting the livestock handlers for UNRRA.³ In undertaking this work, the BSC provided vital support to the operation of the UNRRA livestock fleet and played a key role in realizing the monumental ambitions of postwar agricultural rehabilitation.

The BSC recruited a total of 6,759 men to fill 8,851 available positions. Most of the recruited men made just one sailing as livestock handlers—or “seagoing cowboys,” as they came to be known—but some made more than one trip. Each of UNRRA’s 360 livestock sailings included seagoing cowboys. The seagoing cowboys were young and old and represented a range of social classes, professions, religious affiliations, and racial and ethnic backgrounds; they reflected mid-century America itself.⁴ A significant minority—perhaps up to a quarter of the total—came from Brethren congregations and from the related peace church denominations: the Mennonites and, to a lesser extent, the Quakers.⁵ This book focuses on this specific subset of seagoing cowboys, on those men who came out of a Christian milieu and shared the Christian values of the BSC that recruited them. It was also these men, as we shall see, who left a uniquely rich source base describing their experiences as seagoing cowboys and as agents of humanitarian aid provision.

In addition to recruiting and training men to work as animal attendants on the UNRRA ships, the BSC ran its own independent postwar humanitarian aid program called the Heifer Project. The Heifer Project collected heifers—young female cattle, usually under two or three years of age who had not yet given birth—to be delivered as gifts from Americans to people in designated receiving countries. The idea for the Heifer Project originated even before the Second World War had started, in the late 1930s, when the Brethren worked with the Quakers to deliver food aid to Spain during the Civil War. There in Spain the Brethren member Dan West had the idea that would evolve into the Heifer Project. Why hand out single cups of milk, West asked, when the whole milk-giving animal would be far more useful? The cow, according to the Brethren, was “the foster mother of the human race . . . one of the chief sustaining forces of human life.”⁶ By 1943 West’s idea to ship living cattle as humanitarian aid was formalized into the Heifer Project and was adopted by the BSC as a national plan. What started out as the Heifer Project is known today as Heifer Project International, a global nonprofit that has received financial support from well-known organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.⁷

Approximately four thousand Heifer Project animals were on 13 of the 360 UNRRA livestock sailings. The men recruited by the BSC to work as animal handlers were present on all of the trips irrespective of whether the ship was loaded only with UNRRA animals or with Heifer Project animals in addition to UNRRA animals; the vast majority of the sailings included only UNRRA animals.⁸ The Brethren’s justification for running a live animal program was similar to UNRRA’s: living animals delivered as aid gave the best value as relief commodities for the long term. As Fiorello La Guardia, UNRRA director from March 1946, said, “Grain and canned milk are relief . . . but a farm animal, with a future, spells rehabilitation.”⁹ The prosperity and rehabilitation imagined by contemporaries at this crucial postwar moment was dependent on the successful transfer, integration, and employment of horses and cattle.

The relationship between the tiny BSC and the UNRRA behemoth was mutually beneficial. For its part, UNRRA profited from the Brethren’s ability to recruit and train reliable attendants to work on the UNRRA live aid ships. Without these men it would have been difficult to ship so many animals in such a short period of time. The Brethren, in turn, got free passage for “their” Heifer Project animals on the UNRRA ships and fulfilled their communities’ desire to contribute directly to alleviating some of the suffering caused by the war. The Brethren would not have been able to afford to ship so many cattle otherwise. Herbert Lehman, Democratic governor of New York from 1933 to 1942 and UNRRA’s first director general until his replacement by La Guardia, praised the BSC and the Heifer Project for making such a substantial contribution to the postwar relief effort. The Brethren-recruited cowboys, Lehman said, did “a splendid job not only as livestock tenders but also as representatives of their land and way of life.”¹⁰ They facilitated what UNRRA itself described as “the most important waterborne migration of animals since the time of Noah.”¹¹

According to George Woodbridge, an American member of UNRRA’s European Regional Office in London and UNRRA’s official historian, Poland received 151,400 horses and 17,000 cattle through the UNRRA program.¹² The horses and cattle arrived in Poland on 177 of the 360 livestock sailings that UNRRA made. In comparison, Czechoslovakia received 27,000 horses and approximately 5,000 head of cattle, while Yugoslavia received just over 23,000 horses and mules plus a small number of dairy cattle. Greece received 62,200 animals, the vast majority of which were mules, horses, and donkeys.¹³ While available sources provide slightly different figures for the number of animals that each country received, they all show that Poland’s share of the total was significantly larger than that of any other country.¹⁴ That Poland was prioritized for livestock aid reflected UNRRA’s assessment of this one country’s enormous need and of its importance to the geopolitical interests of the United States, especially as early Cold War tensions formed. UNRRA was largely American-dominated from both a financial and a political perspective.

Poland’s allocation of Heifer Project animals was similarly greater than other countries’ during the UNRRA period: Poland received approximately eight hundred Heifer Project cattle from 1945 through 1947. Additional Heifer Project cattle arrived in Poland after the UNRRA period ended and until 1949 (the year the Brethren left Poland), bringing the total number of Heifer Project cattle delivered to Poland to 1,013. Czechoslovakia, Greece, Italy, and China received hundreds of Heifer Project animals each. Altogether, from 1944 to 1953 (so, again, well after the UNRRA period), the Heifer Project delivered almost seven thousand cattle to all destinations plus almost six thousand goats, hundreds of pigs and horses, and tens of thousands of chickens.¹⁵

We know very little about these animals or about the animal handlers that sailed on the UNRRA ships, just as we know little about the vast organizational efforts that brought the livestock programs to life. Similarly, the meaning and importance of the animals, from both the givers’ and the receivers’ perspectives, have not been studied in a systematic fashion or incorporated into other analyses of the period. This book addresses these gaps by providing an integrated history of the seagoing cowboys, the Heifer Project, the BSC, and UNRRA. In doing so, it speaks to a number of themes and subfields simultaneously.

One of these is the history of humanitarianism and food aid. As we know, the war was at least in part a battle for food and land resources, and Hitler’s war aims included gaining control over the rich agricultural fields of eastern Europe. After the war, and largely as a response to wartime experiences, the pursuit of food security became a priority for policymakers. Postwar humanitarian aid programs were built on the premise that hunger was politically destabilizing and that food security offered the best hope for sociopolitical stability. Horses and cattle were key to agricultural production and therefore to alleviating food anxiety.

Despite the significance of animals to planned postwar recovery, they are seldom taken seriously in the literature about mid-century humanitarianism. Animals are rarely even named as a separate category in lists of the types of aid delivered. Instead they are too often subsumed by, and made invisible within, the category of “agricultural tools” as in this summary of aid deliveries: “3.5 thousand tractors, fertilizers, dairy cows, horses, seeds.”¹⁶ The well-used terms “relief animals” and “live aid” are arguably more descriptive, but even these combine animal species and thereby erase the differences between a chicken and a horse in terms of their contributions to agricultural development and to postwar rehabilitation. At any rate, the categories, statistics, and numbers both obscure and reveal the simple but important reality of live animal transport, which is that live animals can become sick and die along the path to becoming humanitarian aid. What this means is that the number of animals loaded at the starting ports in the United States was never the same as the number that arrived at the destinations. On some sailings animal deaths reached double-digit percentages, though the average was around 3 to 4 percent; for every thousand animals that left America, at least a few dozen (mainly horses, who are notoriously poor sailors and succumb easily to shipping illnesses) died during the ocean crossing. Sometimes animals became so sick that they died just hours or days after disembarkation. Long and arduous in-country transport routes resulted in further animal losses due to both death and theft, meaning, of course, that these animals never actually became the relief animals that program administrators wanted them to be.

In turning our focus specifically to the dairy cows and horses that formed an essential component of postwar aid programs, we see that the early postwar period was one of very active animal population movements and not just of human population movements. These animals were both objects and agents of a new mid-century globalization drive, and their inclusion in the postwar aid programs reflected the aspirations and successes (and failures too) of global cooperation. This is not a book about animals in war—a subject that has enjoyed a fair bit of scholarly and popular interest in recent years—but a story of how some animals’ fates were determined by war and, more precisely, by plans for shaping the postwar global order.¹⁷ The UNRRA and Heifer Project relief animals came to occupy what we might call “transnational spaces, both mental and material.”¹⁸ Animals’ presence between borders and in global spaces mattered for practical reasons as well as for symbolic ones.

The histories of postwar humanitarian aid and of animals as aid converge in the collaboration between UNRRA and the BSC. I show how it came to be that an organization like UNRRA—massive, complex, highly bureaucratic, and ostensibly secular—found common cause and partnered, albeit in this partial and specific way, with the comparatively tiny and actively Christian BSC to move hundreds of thousands of animals from one continent to another at record speed. This book is about the interactions and sometimes surprising overlap between different expressions of mid-century humanitarianism and relief provision. The differences were not as great as one might expect.

But this is not just a top-down history of organizations big and small. Instead, in concentrating on some of the seemingly peripheral actors involved in delivering international aid—the seagoing cowboys—this work follows a general shift in the internationalism literature toward favoring bottom-up approaches to understanding the motivations and intentions of global humanitarian actors and agents and to unpacking the meaning and effects of relief programs at local levels.¹⁹ The seagoing cowboys—and specifically those who came out of peace church circles and who are the focus of this book—were unique international actors. Even as they embodied the privileges of UNRRA and of American economic and political power when they appeared on foreign shores, the men’s identities were rooted in whole or part in their faith communities. It was as Christians that many of them answered the call of the BSC to help in the first place. In diary entries from aboard the livestock ships, in letters home from port cities, and in memoirs and interviews given weeks and even decades after the fact, the men described in detail how they did their work and what it meant to them to participate as they did in an international humanitarian relief effort.

The history I tell here is a layered one. It is partly American history, and it is partly global history. Yet ultimately the targets of the aid programs were national, and the circumstances of animals’ lives unfolded in specific national contexts too. I follow the relief animals from the United States through to their final destinations in Poland. I focus on the Polish context because for both UNRRA and the Heifer Project, Poland was exceptionally important. The Poland program of UNRRA (in Polish it is rendered Administracja Narodów Zjednoczonych do Spraw Pomocy i Odbudowy) was the largest of the European aid programs: UNRRA delivered approximately $471 million dollars’ worth of aid, or 16 percent of the total amount allocated for country programs, to Poland. This did not include the considerable additional expenditure on Displaced Persons of Polish origin. The $471 million amount was well advertised: In Poland the UNRRA aid program was sometimes referred to simply as “471.” Only the China aid program was larger, valued at $535 million.²⁰ The total amount of aid delivered to Poland measured two million long tons as of September 1947; this required well over a thousand ships.²¹ Though UNRRA wound down at the start of 1947, it fulfilled deliveries of previously promised goods and animals well into 1947.²² If ancillary costs related to administration and shipping are added to the Poland program, then its value rises higher still, to approximately $600 million.²³

The first chapter focuses on UNRRA’s creation during the wartime period. It outlines UNRRA’s general relief priorities and goals during the busy two years that the organization was active and introduces UNRRA’s “three Rs”: relief, rehabilitation, and reconstruction. These were the concepts that guided the organization’s actions and determined the types of aid that it would deliver. Contemporary thinking about food had changed by the time of the Second World War. The idea that food was a fundamental human right and that food insecurity was a global problem shaped how UNRRA conceived of its role and determined the types of aid it would provide. Chapter 1 also introduces the bases on which UNRRA made the decision to devote so many resources, especially animal resources, to Poland specifically.

The second chapter is about the relationship that developed between UNRRA and its supposedly secular model of humanitarian aid provision, on the one hand, and on the other the Christian humanitarianism represented by the BSC. The collaboration between UNRRA and the Brethren worked well for many reasons, not the least of which was that UNRRA itself used a rhetoric of Christian obligation and mission in its approaches to relief and, to some extent, in its conceptions of the international sphere. Chapter 2 also considers the place of animals in evolving humanitarian aid programming. For mid-century Christian humanitarians as for secular internationalists, animals embodied the hope for agricultural—and therefore broader socioeconomic—rehabilitation. Both types of relief providers were interested in stimulating longer-term independent development in addition to providing immediate assistance. This is why the considerable bureaucratic and logistical effort required to make the live animal deliveries was warranted. The rehabilitation of largely agricultural societies—such as those in Poland and in other parts of eastern Europe—was impossible without cattle and horses.

Chapter 3 traces the route that some of the men followed from their homes across the United States to the UNRRA ships. This chapter, based largely on records from the Brethren and Mennonite church archives and from the UNRRA archives, outlines how the BSC, the relief arm of a very small American peace church denomination, managed to provide the logistical support for the largest international aid program in the history of the twentieth century. Examined in this chapter are both peace church history and wartime history, including the history of conscription and conscientious objection in the United States. A small but revealing number of animal attendants on UNRRA ships had been Conscientious Objectors during the war. The peace churches had worked closely with one another during the war to advocate in favor of service options for drafted men, and this wartime collaboration in turn contributed to shaping the peace churches’ cooperation in postwar relief projects. Moreover, the wartime period had provided the churches with a more profound sense of their common cause and had given them hands-on experience in effective community mobilization. After the war, the peace churches felt called upon once again to work in the international arena by organizing donations, charity, and aid on an unprecedented scale. The peace churches did this because they believed that humanitarian aid delivery fostered brotherhood and fellowship and that it reflected Christian duty and responsibility; as Dan West said, it constituted “a new testimony to our Master.”²⁴

The fourth chapter begins with cattle, the star species of the Brethren’s Heifer Project and an important part of the UNRRA program. Cattle have carried both real and symbolic value in our world. This is largely because of female cattle’s ability to produce an exceptionally nutritious milk that many humans like to drink, and therefore a key part of chapter 4 is about how cows’ milk became a preeminent food relief product by the middle of the twentieth century. This chapter returns to the theme of food as a basic right, focusing on the right to milk specifically. It was during this period from 1945 to 1947 that milk became the symbol of united nations working together to nourish the hungry. Notwithstanding the importance of milk and cattle, however, horses formed a crucial component of UNRRA’s aid program, too, and so the fourth chapter also considers this species’ role in postwar rehabilitation.

The fifth chapter is about the logistics of the animals’ transformations into humanitarian aid. It follows animals along their various stops in the United States and examines their encounters with public and private agencies, most notably with government bureaucracies and animal welfare activists. While it is true that large numbers of animals had been shipped across oceans before—for military purposes, mainly—the animals shipped during the UNRRA period were meant to live for the long term, and their bodies and moods needed to be suitable for work soon after landing. Relief animals were privileged and represented a different kind of investment, which meant that the incentive to keep them relatively healthy during their journeys was high. Yet none of this meant that the animals were insulated from the discomforts and dangers associated with travel. Indeed, it was the animals that bore the burden of realizing some of the humanitarian goals of the mid-twentieth century. The chapter ends just before the animals, now firmly in the category of “relief stock,” boarded the ships that would take them to their destinations abroad.

The sixth chapter is about the cowboys’ and animals’ time aboard the ships that sailed from the United States to foreign ports. Cowboys’ own descriptions of their daily routines with the animals highlight interactions between species that are frequently overlooked. Chapter 6 argues that nonhuman animals have interests and experiences that ought to be treated separately from human experiences.²⁵ In analyzing the choices humans make for animals, we can learn a great deal about collective values and priorities, and, as a result, we can develop a deeper understanding of specific historical moments and contexts. In this case what we see are, generally speaking, committed animal handlers working with what was sometimes substandard equipment and with infrastructure that was not always well suited to animal transport. It is also on the ships that we see the extent to which the UNRRA and the Brethren programs were intertwined: the cowboys hired by the BSC worked on UNRRA ships with Brethren and UNRRA animals essentially side by side. The arrangement was sensible and expedient, to be sure, and it also offers a symbolically rich example of the ongoing connections between mid-century secular humanitarianism and Christian charity.

In the seventh chapter, we reach Poland. The seagoing cowboys were among the first civilians to arrive in postwar Poland, a country that already by 1945 was under Soviet influence and whose government was increasingly dominated by Communists. Like the men, the newly arrived horses and cattle were witnesses to wartime destruction. Using UNRRA documents and Polish government records, chapter 7 describes what happened to the animals once they left the ships that had docked in ports along Poland’s Baltic coast. This chapter examines the animals’ encounters with the Polish state and describes their experiences during overland journeys to final destinations. Considered, too, is the geography of animal distribution and what it tells us about emerging political priorities and identities in postwar Poland. Most of the cattle and horses delivered as UNRRA aid to Poland went to the so-called Recovered Territories. These were the lands that Poland gained in the west from defeated Germany, and the animals’ presence there was integral to claiming and civilizing this sensitive new frontier, the so-called Wild West. This chapter provides a useful example of what “thinking with animals” can reveal about time and place.

In the eighth chapter, we move away from real animals who had needs and jobs to do and focus instead on animals as symbols. An underlying theme of this book is that specific animal species mattered in postwar humanitarian relief because of the tangible and practical role they played in agricultural renewal but also because of what they represented, both to the givers and to the receivers. This chapter traces the Polish government’s shifting views of UNRRA, the Americans, and animal aid. The Communist-dominated government went from praising UNRRA and its animals to, by the end of 1946, criticizing the quality of the incoming horses in particular. Animals formed an easy target as so many of them arrived in the country exhausted, weak, and sick after their long trans-Atlantic voyages. Americans, the Polish Communists could claim, were obviously animal abusers. Such rhetoric contributed to an undoing of long-dominant associations in Poland between animal welfare, the west, and civilization, and it facilitated the drawing of new cultural boundaries between the Communist world and the capitalist one that would last for decades. In tracing this discursive evolution, chapter 8 situates animals in the broader story of the establishment of Communist rule in Poland.

Chapter 9 is about the Heifer Project animals in Poland. For a number of reasons, these animals—cattle almost exclusively—retained the privileges that had defined their journeys through the aid chain all along the way. This last chapter also discusses the visits that seagoing cowboys made to animal recipients’ farms and shows how these visits connected givers and receivers. The chapter concludes with a brief description of the Heifer Project’s evolution after UNRRA folded in 1947. I draw the line at the moment when the Heifer Project’s cooperation with UNRRA ended and the cowboys either moved on to their postwar lives in America or, if they made additional trips as providers of humanitarian aid, they did so as representatives of the Heifer Project exclusively.

Overall, this book is about the animals and the aid programs that operated at mid-century. Animals played a crucial role in those programs and yet have been largely written out of analyses of postwar relief programming. The book is also about the seagoing cowboys who were central to animal aid delivery and yet have been mostly ignored in the big narratives that tell the history of this period. I bring these subjects together not only to tell these stories in their own right but also to give us new ways of understanding how various contemporaries understood relief and rehabilitation, agriculture, nutrition, and, of course, humanitarianism.