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Relief on the Hoof: The Seagoing Cowboys, the Heifer Project, and UNRRA in Poland: Notes

Relief on the Hoof: The Seagoing Cowboys, the Heifer Project, and UNRRA in Poland
Notes

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Notes

table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Contents
  5. List of Illustrations
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. Note on Spelling, Translation, and Language
  8. Introduction: Global Agents of Humanitarian Aid
  9. Chapter 1. UNRRA, Food, and Winning the Peace
  10. Chapter 2. The UNRRA–Brethren Service Committee Partnership
  11. Chapter 3. On Becoming a Seagoing Cowboy
  12. Chapter 4. Working Animals as Humanitarian Aid
  13. Chapter 5. The Making of “Relief Animals”
  14. Chapter 6. Cowboys and Animals at Sea
  15. Chapter 7. Bovines, Equines, and Humans in Poland
  16. Chapter 8. UNRRA and Animal Politics in Poland
  17. Chapter 9. Heifer Project Animals in Poland
  18. Conclusion: Humanitarian Imaginaries
  19. List of Abbreviations
  20. Notes
  21. Bibliography
  22. Index
  23. Copyright

Notes

Introduction

  1. 1. On animal numbers, see George Woodbridge, UNRRA: The History of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 1:487. The total numbers of smaller animals delivered as part of the UNRRA program, also according to Woodbridge, are as follows: approximately 3,300 sheep, hogs, and goats; 172 rabbits; and 85,000 adult poultry. On animal numbers, see also Robert Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 1947, UNRRA selected records AG-018-040, accession 2015.245.1, record group RG-67.050, S-1021-0009-03, p. 182, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (hereafter USHMM). This report, which was “written and compiled” by Lintner, contains over two hundred typed pages and comprises a number of different document categories (e.g., statistical tables and charts, reports and summaries, and blank UNRRA forms.) I treat the Lintner report as a single discrete source. Not all documents in the report are signed or dated, and some are untitled. The report as a whole is not paginated. The page numbers provided here refer to a digital copy of the report available as a PDF through the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Library and Archives. I take page 1 to be the first page of the digital file. The United Nations Archives holds the original Lintner report. See Robert Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 1947, UNRRA Livestock Program, UNRRA selected records, S-1021-0009-03, United Nations Archives (hereafter UNA).
  2. 2. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 182, USHMM.
  3. 3. Donald F. Durnbaugh, Pragmatic Prophet: The Life of Michael Robert Zigler (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1989), 172–73. On the Brethren Service Committee, see “Cowboy Education Materials,” description of the Heifer Project in Polish, 1940s, folder 3, box 2, series 4/1/6, Poland—Ostróda and Warsaw Offices (hereafter POW), Brethren Historical Library and Archives (hereafter BHLA).
  4. 4. “Heifer Project Committee,” August 6, 1947, folder 44, box 38, series 18, Dan West Papers (hereafter DWP), BHLA; Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 67–68, USHMM.
  5. 5. The number of cowboys who came from the peace churches and from other Christian denominations is discussed in more detail in chapter 3.
  6. 6. “Shipping Record of the Heifer Project Committee,” Heifer Letters, 1946–55, folder 1, box 3, series 4/1/6, Heifer Project (hereafter HP), BHLA.
  7. 7. While the organization has operated publicly as Heifer International since 2003, its legal name remains Heifer Project International. “The Gates Foundation: How Heifer Is Making a Difference,” Heifer International, October 3, 2019, https://www.heifer.org/blog/the-gates-foundation-how-heifer-is-making-a-difference.html. See also “Seagoing Cowboys and the Heifer Project,” Civilian Public Service, accessed October 10, 2023, https://civilianpublicservice.org/storycontinues/heiferproject.
  8. 8. For a good overview of the Heifer Project and the seagoing cowboys program, see Peggy Reiff Miller, “Seagoing Cowboys and the Heifer Project: The Maryland Story,” Catoctin History, Fall/Winter 2005, reposted at https://seagoingcowboyswebsite.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/catoctin-history-article-webtext.pdf. See also Peggy Reiff Miller, “Celebrating TWO Anniversaries,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), July 12, 2024, https://seagoingcowboysblog.wordpress.com/. Subsequent references to Reiff Miller’s blog posts come from this website and can be located by title or by date.
  9. 9. “Background Information for the Use of Emergency Livestock Collection Committees,” Correspondence 1945–46, folder 9, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  10. 10. “Herbert H. Lehman to Brethren Service Committee,” Gospel Messenger, March 20, 1946. See also Amanda Melanie Bundy, “There Was a Man of UNRRA: Internationalism, Humanitarianism, and the Early Cold War in Europe, 1943–1947” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2017), 1. Lehman’s praise of the cattle tenders is also reflected in “Herbert Lehman to Mr. Zigler,” January 31, 1946, Contributed Supplies, Office of Voluntary and International Agency Liaison, Bureau of Service, S-1268-0000-0079-00001, p. 12, UNA. On Lehman, see Duane Tananbaum, Herbert H. Lehman: A Political Biography (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016).
  11. 11. United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, The Story of UNRRA (Washington, DC: UNRRA, Office of Public Information, 1948), 30. The quotation also appears in Edwin R. Henson, “Livestock for Rebuilding Europe,” Breeder’s Gazette, n.d. A copy of this article is in Clippings and Releases 1, 1940s–1960s, folder 7, box 2, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  12. 12. Woodbridge, UNRRA, 2:223.
  13. 13. Woodbridge, UNRRA, vol. 2. For Czechoslovakia, see p. 196; for Yugoslavia, see p. 158; and for Greece, see p. 117.
  14. 14. Historian Jacek Sawicki states that Poland received 135,193 horses and 16,442 cattle. See Jacek Sawicki, Misja UNRRA w Polsce: Raport zamknięcia (1945–1949) (Lublin: Wyd. Werset, 2017), 116. Historian Józef Łaptos states that UNRRA delivered “around 140,000” horses to Poland. See Józef Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka: Pomoc UNRRA dla Polski i polskich uchodźców w latach 1944–1947 (Kraków: Wyd. Naukowe Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego, 2018), 393. On animal numbers, see also Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 31–34, 133, USHMM; “Inwentarz żywy z dostaw UNRRA,” 1945–47, Ministerstwo Rolnictwa i Reform Rolnych (hereafter MRiRR), 2/162/0/26/3271, p. 2, Archiwum Akt Nowych (hereafter AAN); “Departament Produkcji Rolnej, Wyd. Wychowu Koni, ‘Przychód,’” 1946–47, Dostawy koni w ramach UNRRA, MRiRR, 2/162/0/21.5/3377, p. 138, AAN; Division of Operational Analysis UNRRA, “Provisional Report on Agriculture and Food in Poland,” 1944–49, UNRRA—Poland Mission, file 1032, S-0527-1068, p. 10, UNA; Charles Drury, “UNRRA in Poland,” The Empire Club of Canada Addresses, April 24, 1947, 331–44, https://speeches.empireclub.org/details.asp?ID=61185; “Appendix to the Minutes of the 16th Meeting of the Council of Foreign Voluntary Agencies in Poland, Notes from a talk Given by Dr. A.G. Wilder,” December 5, 1946, Działalność rady zagranicznych towarzystw charytatywnych w Polsce, protokóły, Ministerstwo Pracy i Opieki Społecznej w Warszawie (hereafter MPiOS), 2/402/0/6/337, p. 103, AAN; “Thurl Metzger to the Government of the Polish Republic,” Correspondence, 1947–49, folder 23, box 1, series 4/1/6, POW, BHLA; Aleksander Juźwik, “Zagraniczna pomoc charytatywna dla dzieci i młodzieży w Polsce w latach 1945–50,” Polska 1944/45–1980: Studia i Materiały 11 (2013): 114.
  15. 15. “Summary of Shipments by Countries,” 1945–53 Project Committee Reports, folder 19, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA; “Minutes of the Heifer Project Committee,” March 29, 1947, Correspondence 1947, folder 10, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA. China received 700 Heifer Project cattle, and Czechoslovakia received 500. Greece received just over 200 Heifer Project cattle from 1945 through to 1949. Italy’s total number of Heifer Project cattle was very large at 1,576, though half of these came in 1948, after the UNRRA period. Ethiopia and West Germany also received significant numbers of Heifer Project animals, though like with Italy most of these came after the partnership between UNRRA and the Brethren Service Committee had concluded. See also Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 443.
  16. 16. Mikołaj Brenk, “Social Response in Poland in 1944–1948,” Biuletyn Historii Wychowania 38 (2018): 276.
  17. 17. On animals’ wartime experiences, see, for example, Ryan Hediger, ed., Animals and War: Studies of Europe and North America (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Jacob Darwin Hamblin, “Environmental Dimensions of World War II,” in A Companion to World War Two, eds. Thomas W. Zeiler and Daniel M. DuBois (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2013), 698–99.
  18. 18. The wording here about transnational spaces is taken from a different context; the original does not refer to relief animals. See Ian Tyrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 6.
  19. 19. On bottom-up approaches to internationalism, see Jessica Reinisch and David Brydan, “Introduction: Internationalists in European History,” in Internationalists in European History: Rethinking the Twentieth Century, eds. Jessica Reinisch and David Brydan (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 6–8. The Reinisch and Brydan book uses the terms “agents” and “actors” in relation to internationalism, and I adopt both of these in this work too.
  20. 20. Donald E. Pienkos, For Your Freedom Through Ours: Polish American Efforts on Poland’s Behalf, 1863–1991 (New York: East European Monographs, 1991), 95. See also Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 344. Adjusted only for inflation, the $471 million figure was over $6 billion in 2023. See “Inflation Calculator,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, accessed July 26, 2024, https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/inflation-calculator. The official history of UNRRA written by George Woodbridge gives the value of the Poland program as both $474 million and $478 million rather than $471 million. $474 million comes from Woodbridge, UNRRA, 1:377; and $478 million comes from Woodbridge, UNRRA, 2:210. For just one Polish reference to the UNRRA aid program as “471,” see the English translation of a Życie Warszawy article: “The Problem of UNRRA Supplies,” Życie Warszawy, May 14, 1946, UNRRA—Poland Mission, 1944–49, file 7, S-0527-1064, UNA.
  21. 21. Benon Gaziński and Bogusław Wanot, “Działalność UNRRA i jej pomoc dla rolnictwa w Polsce,” Rocznik Muzeum Narodowego Rolnictwa w Szreniawie 19 (1993): 18.
  22. 22. UNRRA, Story of UNRRA, 52.
  23. 23. Jessica Reinisch, “‘We Shall Rebuild Anew a Powerful Nation’: UNRRA, Internationalism and National Reconstruction in Poland,” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 3 (2008): 462.
  24. 24. Dan West, “Heifers for Relief: A Challenge,” Gospel Messenger, July 28, 1945.
  25. 25. For an introduction to the large body of literature in human-animal studies (a field that in a broad and general sense informs this work), see Margo Demello, Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).

1. UNRRA, Food, and Winning the Peace

  1. 1. United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, The Story of UNRRA (Washington, DC: UNRRA, Office of Public Information, 1948), 3.
  2. 2. William I. Hitchcock, The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (New York: Free Press, 2008), 211.
  3. 3. Józef Łaptos, “Wpływ wielkich mocarstw na strukturę i kompetencje . . . międzynarodowej organizacji humanitarnej—United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA),” Rocznik Administracji Publicznej 2 (2016): 453.
  4. 4. UNRRA, Story of UNRRA, 6–7.
  5. 5. Ruth Jachertz and Alexander Nutzenadel, “Coping with Hunger? Visions of a Global Food System, 1930–1960,” Journal of Global History 6, no. 1 (2011): 101–2.
  6. 6. On the types and volume of UNRRA aid delivered, see Hitchcock, Bitter Road to Freedom, 247 and UNRRA, Story of UNRRA, 11.
  7. 7. The quote comes from “Get a Horse,” editorial, Life, December 30, 1946. See also Dorothy Stephenson, “Women Get Role in UNRRA Activities,” 1940–46, box 77, series A, part 1, Center on Conscience and War Records (hereafter CCWR), DG 025, Swarthmore College Peace Collection (hereafter SCPC).
  8. 8. Jessica Reinisch, “‘We Shall Rebuild Anew a Powerful Nation’: UNRRA, Internationalism and National Reconstruction in Poland,” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 3 (2008): 454. On UNRRA’s aid to Belarus and Ukraine, see Andrew Harder, “The Politics of Impartiality: The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in the Soviet Union, 1946–7,” Journal of Contemporary History 47, no. 2 (2012): 347–69.
  9. 9. On UNRRA and Polish DPs, see Andrzej M. Brzeziński, “Z polityki rządu RP na uchodźstwie wobec UNRRA,”Przegląd Zachodni 2 (1998): 89–113; Kamil Kowalski, “Remarks on the Genesis of UNRRA Negotiations Between the Great Powers and Selected Treaty Provisions,” Annales: Ethics in Economic Life 20, no. 7 (2017): 161–72. See also Paul Betts, Ruin and Renewal: Civilizing Europe After World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2020).
  10. 10. On UNRRA’s finances, see Barry Riley, The Political History of American Food Aid: An Uneasy Benevolence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 95-96; Philipp Weintraub, “An Experiment in International Welfare Planning,” Journal of Politics 7, no. 1 (1945): 3; Philipp Weintraub, “Reseeding Live-Stock Herds in Liberated Europe,” Baltimore Sun, June 28, 1945. On the role and evolution of aid programs as part of broader American foreign policy, see Vernon W. Ruttan, United States Development Assistance Policy: The Domestic Politics of Foreign Economic Aid (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
  11. 11. Harry S. Truman, “United States Participation in UNRRA: President’s Message to Congress,” US Department of State, November 13, 1945, https://www.cvce.eu/content/publication/2017/4/11/9df14347-dd75-4ae9-9828-a20a095fcf4b/publishable_en.pdf.
  12. 12. On American Relief for Poland, see Richard C. Lukas, Bitter Legacy: Polish-American Relations in the Wake of World War II (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 96, 104–8; Donald E. Pienkos, For Your Freedom Through Ours: Polish American Efforts on Poland’s Behalf, 1863–1991 (New York: East European Monographs, 1991), 6, 79, 87; Mikołaj Brenk, “Social Response in Poland in 1944–1948,” Biuletyn Historii Wychowania 38 (2018): 265–81. See also “Council of Foreign Voluntary Agencies in Poland: Reports,” 1947–49, Minutes and Reports 1947–49, folder 51, box 1, series 4/1/6, POW, BHLA.
  13. 13. Pienkos, For Your Freedom Through Ours, 95. On voluntary agencies working abroad, see also Marine Bull Pen: A Paper Issued in the Interests of Sea-Going Cowboys (CPS Reserve), no. 9, July 19, 1946, Marine Bullpens and News Circulars, 1946, folder 10, box 75, Melvin G. Gingerich Papers (hereafter MGP), Hist MSS 1–129, Mennonite Church Archives (hereafter MCA). Marine Bull Pen started in the Civilian Public Service and was directed at Conscientious Objectors who would go on to become seagoing cowboys. Copies of Marine Bull Pen can also be found in Clippings and Releases 3, 1940s–1960s, folder 9, box 2, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  14. 14. Hitchcock, Bitter Road to Freedom, 216.
  15. 15. George Woodbridge, UNRRA: The History of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 2:67–78.
  16. 16. Tehila Sasson, “From Empire to Humanity: The Russian Famine and the Imperial Origins of International Humanitarianism,” Journal of British Studies 55, no. 3 (2016): 537.
  17. 17. On relief planning in the immediate pre-UNRRA period, see Jessica Reinisch, “Internationalism in Relief: The Birth (and Death) of UNRRA,” Past and Present 210, suppl. 6 (2011): 261–4.
  18. 18. Herbert Lehman, Administrative Order No. 23, “UNRRA Policy Related to (1) Shipping of Relief Goods by Voluntary Agencies and (2) Acceptance and Distribution by UNRRA of Contributed Relief Goods”; UNRRA Standing Technical Committee on Welfare, “Memorandum on the Relation Between UNRRA and Voluntary Relief Organizations,” June 1944, 1–8, box 77, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC. On UNRRA’s relations with national governments, see also Woodbridge, UNRRA, 2:206–7. The Polish example is featured in this section.
  19. 19. Jessica Reinisch, “‘Auntie UNRRA’ at the Crossroads,” Past and Present 218, suppl. 8 (2013): 70.
  20. 20. Riley, Political History of American Food Aid, chap. 6, esp. p. 100. For a discussion of the concept of reconstruction, see Holly Case, “Reconstruction in East-Central Europe: Clearing the Rubble of Cold War Politics,” Past and Present 210, suppl. 6 (2011): 71–102.
  21. 21. “UNRRA Plans Are Well Advanced,” 1943–45, UNRRA, Rolnictwo, Biuro Zaopatzrenia Kraju, Ministerstwo Przemysłu, Handlu i Żeglugi Rządu RP [emigracyjnego] w Londynie, 2/132/0/7/533, p. 4, AAN.
  22. 22. “Get a Horse.”
  23. 23. Silvia Salvatici, “Sights of Benevolence: UNRRA’s Recipients Portrayed,” in Humanitarian Photography: A History, eds. Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 216. See also Davide Rodogno, Night on Earth: A History of International Humanitarianism in the Near East, 1918–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 36.
  24. 24. For a summary of the state of the “history and humanitarianism” field, see Matthew Hilton et al., “History and Humanitarianism: A Conversation,” Past and Present 241, no. 1 (2018): 1–38.
  25. 25. Tom Scott-Smith, On an Empty Stomach: Two Hundred Years of Disaster Relief (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), xiii.
  26. 26. Silvia Salvatici, A History of Humanitarianism, 1755–1989: In the Name of Others, trans. Philip Sanders (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 7, 117.
  27. 27. Christophe Traini, The Animal Rights Struggle: An Essay in Historical Sociology (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 96–97.
  28. 28. On evolving definitions of “humanitarian,” see Katherine Davies, “Continuity, Change and Contest: Meanings of ‘Humanitarian’ from the ‘Religion of Humanity’ to the Kosovo War” (HPG Working Paper, Overseas Development Institute, August 2012), 1–3, https://odi.org/en/publications/continuity-change-and-contest-meanings-of-humanitarian-from-the-religion-of-humanity-to-the-kosovo-war/.
  29. 29. Janet M. Davis, The Gospel of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 19. On the links between evangelical revivalism and organized animal advocacy, see Davies, “Continuity, Change and Contest,” chap. 1.
  30. 30. Salvatici, History of Humanitarianism, 6.
  31. 31. On modern approaches to humanitarianism and hunger, see Davies, “Continuity, Change and Contest,” 4, 13, and James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007), 2.
  32. 32. On DPs see, for example, Mark Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Jessica Reinisch, “Preparing for a New World Order: UNRRA and the International Management of Refugees,” in Post-War Europe: Refugees, Exile and Resettlement, 1945–1950, ed. Dan Stone (Gale Digital Collections, 2007); Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); Gerard Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch, “Refugees and the Nation-State in Europe, 1919–59,” Journal of Contemporary History 49, no. 3 (2014): 477–90; David Nasaw, The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War (New York: Penguin Books, 2021). For a recent comparative and transnational approach to European DPs, see the special issue of Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions 46, no. 2 (2022).
  33. 33. For a selection of key works on UNRRA or the broader humanitarian context of the immediate postwar period, see Hitchcock, Bitter Road to Freedom; Ben Shephard,The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (New York: Random House, 2010); G. Cohen, In War’s Wake; Tara Zahra, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families After World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Margarete Myers Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany, 1945–1957 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron, eds., Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet–East European Borderlands, 1945–1950 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
  34. 34. Jessica Reinisch, “The Reluctant Internationalists: A History of Public Health and International Organisations, Movements and Experts in Twentieth Century Europe,” The Reluctant Internationalists, September 1, 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20240422201816/http://www7.bbk.ac.uk/reluctantinternationalists/. Also from Reinisch on internationalism and nationalism, see Jessica Reinisch, “Introduction: Relief in the Aftermath of War,” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 3 (2008): 371–404; Reinisch, “We Shall Rebuild Anew,” 451–476; Reinisch, “Internationalism in Relief,” 258–89; Reinisch, “‘Auntie UNRRA’ at the Crossroads,” 70–97.
  35. 35. For more on the relationship between nationalism and internationalism in UNRRA and the UN more generally, see Mark Mazower, “Reconstruction: The Historiographical Issues,” Past and Present 210, suppl. 6 (2011): 17–28; Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). For a broader discussion of the philosophical and ideological underpinnings of the United Nations, see Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), esp. chap. 2.
  36. 36. See, for example, Jessica Reinisch and David Brydan, eds., Internationalists in European History: Rethinking the Twentieth Century (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).
  37. 37. For an earlier article that reviews the whole of the UNRRA Poland program from an economic perspective specifically, see Bogusław Marks, “Pomoc UNRRA w odbudowie gospodarki Polski (1945–1947),” Politologia: Acta Universitatis Lodziensis 19 (1990):163–89.
  38. 38. On the Heifer Project, see Józef Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka: Pomoc UNRRA dla Polski i polskich uchodźców w latach 1944–1947 (Kraków: Wyd. Naukowe Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego, 2018), 386–89.
  39. 39. Jacek Sawicki, Misja UNRRA w Polsce: Raport zamknięcia (1945–1949) (Lublin: Wyd. Werset, 2017).
  40. 40. On “Auntie UNRRA,” see Joanna Papuzińska, “Kochana ciocia UNRA,”Stolica: Warszawski Magazyn Ilustrowany 1–2 (2010): 31.
  41. 41. Jacek Zygmunt Sawicki, ed., Polska jesień, rosyjska zima: Spotkanie Juliena Bryana z misją UNRRA w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej 1946–1947—fotografie i zapiski (Warsaw: IPN, 2022), 63.
  42. 42. Ira A. Hirschmann,The Embers Still Burn (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949), 192.
  43. 43. Amanda Melanie Bundy, “There Was a Man of UNRRA: Internationalism, Humanitarianism, and the Early Cold War in Europe, 1943–1947” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2017), 139.
  44. 44. Eastern European Division Loan Department, “Preliminary Paper No. 6 for the Working Party on the Polish Loan Application” (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, May 26, 1947), https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/558411468095985925/pdf/multi-page.pdf.
  45. 45. These figures come from the website accompanying Peggy Reiff Miller’s blog. See Reiff Miller, “UNRRA Shipment of Livestock from Western Hemisphere by Destination,” Seagoing Cowboys, accessed February 13, 2020, https://seagoingcowboys.com/seagoing-cowboys/the-unrra-years/. This document is organized in chronological order by sailing date and includes the name of the ship, the loading port, and the destination. Reiff Miller relies in turn on the tables found in Robert Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 1947, UNRRA selected records AG-018-040, accession 2015.245.1, record group RG-67.050, S-1021-0009-03, USHMM. See also UNRRA, Story of UNRRA, 52. Note that some UNRRA reports take December 1946 as a tidy end date of the live animal program, meaning that the 1947 shipments are not reflected in the numbers.
  46. 46. Eastern European Division Loan Department, “Preliminary Paper No. 6,” 8. For a copy of the agreement that UNRRA made with Poland, see Woodbridge, UNRRA, 3:318–24.
  47. 47. Woodbridge, UNRRA, 2:203.
  48. 48. Piotr Jachowicz, “Działalność UNRRA w Polsce w latach 1945–1948,”Zeszyty Naukowe 2, no. 2 (1998): 48.
  49. 49. On UNRRA’s staff in Poland, see Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 346–52, 368; Woodbridge, UNRRA, 2:205–6. UNRRA’s international field staff reached a total of 20,000 in 1946. On UNRRA staffing, see Riley, Political History of American Food Aid, 103; Hitchcock, Bitter Road to Freedom, 216; Bundy, “There Was a Man of UNRRA,” 53; Sharif Gemie, Laure Humbert, and Fiona Reid, Outcast Europe: Refugees and Relief Workers in an Era of Total War, 1936–48 (London: Continuum, 2012); “Statement of Current Recruitment for UNRRA,” box 77, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC.
  50. 50. On this early period in the formation of UNRRA in Poland, see Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 148; Reinisch, “We Shall Rebuild Anew,” 461; Lukas, Bitter Legacy, 97; Woodbridge, UNRRA, 2:205.
  51. 51. Bundy, “There Was a Man of UNRRA,” 133. There was some dissatisfaction in the Polish government with the appointment of a Canadian to this role as opposed to some “top-flight” American. See Pierson Underwood, “Memorandum of Conversation, by Mr. Pierson Underwood of the War Areas Economic Division,” October 1, 1945, Diplomatic Papers, 1945, vol. 5, Europe, Foreign Relations of the United States, Office of the Historian, US Department of State, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945v05/d277.
  52. 52. Joseph H. Baird, “Polish Envoy Accuses Lehman of ‘Injecting Politics into Relief,” Evening Star, April 4, 1945.
  53. 53. Susan Armstrong-Reid and David Murray, Armies of Peace: Canada and the UNRRA Years (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 87–88.
  54. 54. For Drury’s views on Poland, see Lukas, Bitter Legacy, 98; “C.M. Drury to PM Osóbka-Morawski,” August 26, 1946, UNRRA-Poland Mission, 1944–49, file 7, S-0527-1064, UNA; Charles Drury, “UNRRA in Poland,” The Empire Club of Canada Addresses, April 24, 1947, 331–44, https://speeches.empireclub.org/details.asp?ID=61185.
  55. 55. United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, Economic Recovery in the Countries Assisted by UNRRA (Washington, DC: UNRRA, 1946), 70.
  56. 56. “Draft of the Supply Department’s Brief for the PRD’s Tour of Poland,” 1943–48, PRDG’s European Tour, S-1435-0000-0100-00001, p. 62, UNA. The many ways in which the Polish economy was destroyed by the war are summarized in UNRRA, Economic Recovery. On coal, see 92.
  57. 57. UNRRA, Economic Recovery, 91.
  58. 58. Herbert W. Robinson, Operational Analysis Papers No. 45: The Impact of UNRRA on the Polish Economy (London: Division of Operational Analysis, 1947), 21.
  59. 59. Woodbridge, UNRRA, 2:200.
  60. 60. Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 381.
  61. 61. “Provisional Report on Agriculture and Food in Poland,” file 1032, S-0527-1068, p. 9, UNA.
  62. 62. Itemized lists of destroyed resources and animal thefts were written up by various Polish authorities. For the province of Warsaw, see, for example, “Straty spowodowane przez przepęd bydła sowieckiego—powiat Grójec,” 1945, Wojewódzki Urząd Ziemski w Warszawie (hereafter WUZW), 72/509/0-814, Archiwum Państwowe w Warszawie (hereafter APW); “Protokóły oszacowania strat spowodowanych przepędem bydła do ZSSR—powiat sokołowski,” 1945, WUZW, 72/509/0-823, APW.
  63. 63. On fertilizers, see Eastern European Division Loan Department, “Preliminary Paper No. 6,” 23–28. On seeds, see Amalia Ribi Forclaz, “Seeds of Development: Agriculture, History and Politics,” Graduate Institute of Geneva, April 12, 2021, https://www.graduateinstitute.ch/communications/news/seeds-development-agriculture-history-and-politics.
  64. 64. Eastern European Division Loan Department, “Preliminary Paper No. 6,” 4.
  65. 65. “Polish War Losses According to a Statement of the Polish Bureau of War Reparations in Warsaw,” Council of Foreign Voluntary Agencies in Poland: Reports, 1947–49, folder 51, box 1, series 4/1/6, POW, BHLA. See also Woodbridge, UNRRA, 2:200; Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 381; “General Situation,” July 11, 1946, UNRRA—Poland Mission, 1944–49, file 7, S-0527-1064, UNA.
  66. 66. Marcin Zaremba, “The ‘War Syndrome’: World War II and Polish Society,” in Seeking Peace in the Wake of War: Europe, 1943–1947, eds. Stean-Ludwig Hoffmann et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 29–30; Marcin Zaremba, “Fearing the War After the War,” in Ends of War: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Past and New Polish Regions After 1944, eds. Paulina Gulińska-Jurgiel et al. (Düsseldorf: Wallstein, 2019), 275–96.
  67. 67. Marcin Zaremba, Wielka trwoga: Polska 1944–1947(Kraków: Wyd. Znak, 2012), 550.
  68. 68. European Regional Office of UNRRA, 50 Facts About UNRRA (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1946), fact 20.
  69. 69. Reinisch, “‘Auntie UNRRA’ at the Crossroads,” 75.
  70. 70. Natasha Wheatley, “Central Europe as Ground Zero of the New International Order,” Slavic Review 78, no. 4 (2019): 909. See also Patricia Clavin, “The Austrian Hunger Crisis and the Genesis of International Organization After the First World War,” International Affairs 90, no. 2 (2014): 265–78; Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
  71. 71. Case, “Reconstruction in East-Central Europe,” 85.
  72. 72. The cattle were sent to Germany in three shipments on the steamer West Arrow. Ethnic Germans from the Russian Empire who had settled in South Dakota were the main supporters of this aid project. The cattle attendants on the ships were sons of the farmers who had donated the cattle. See La Vern J. Rippley, “Gift Cows for Germany,” North Dakota History 40, no. 3 (1973): 4–15, esp. 13; La Vern J. Rippley, “American Milk Cows for Germany: A Sequel,” North Dakota History 44, no. 3 (1977): 15–23.
  73. 73. Davide Rodogno, Francesca Piana, and Shaloma Gauthier, “Shaping Poland: Relief and Rehabilitation Programmes Undertaken by Foreign Organizations, 1918–1922,” in Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s, eds. Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck, and Jakob Vogel (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 259.
  74. 74. For an analysis of the soup-kitchen model of relief provision, see Patrick J. Houlihan, “Renovating Christian Charity: Global Catholicism, the Save the Children Fund, and Humanitarianism During the First World War,” Past and Present 250, no. 1 (2021): 203-41, esp. p. 210 and p. 227.
  75. 75. Mark O. Hatfield, foreword to Herbert Hoover and Poland: A Documentary History of a Friendship, ed. George J. Lerski (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1977), xi. See also Salvatici, History of Humanitarianism, 106–7. On the European Children’s Fund and the ARA, see Rodogno, Night on Earth, 37–41. For more on the ARA, Hoover, and the European Children’s Fund, see Melissa J. Hibbard, “Children of the Polish Republic: Child Health, Welfare, and the Shaping of Modern Poland, 1915–1939” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Chicago, 2022), 94–99.
  76. 76. Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 213–15. On food as a weapon during the First World War, see Alice Weinreb, Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), chap. 1.
  77. 77. Sunil Amrith and Patricia Clavin, “Feeding the World: Connecting Europe and Asia, 1930–1945,” Past and Present 218, suppl. 8 (2013): 34, 48. On the ARA, see also Nick Cullather, “The Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” American Historical Review 112, no. 2 (2007): 348–51; Cabanes, Great War and Humanitarianism, chap. 4. On relief in the Russian famine of 1921–22, see Sasson, “From Empire to Humanity,” 519–37. For Hoover’s views on UNRRA, see Duane Tananbaum, Herbert H. Lehman: A Political Biography (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016), 226–28.
  78. 78. European Regional Office of UNRRA, 50 Facts About UNRRA, fact 13.
  79. 79. Houlihan, “Renovating Christian Charity,” 205.
  80. 80. Norris E. Dodd, “The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,” Agricultural History 23, no. 2 (1949): 83; Frank Trentmann, “Coping with Shortage: The Problem of Food Security and Global Visions of Coordination, c. 1890s–1950,” in Food and Conflict in Europe in the Age of the Two World Wars, eds. Frank Trentmann and Flemming Just (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 35.
  81. 81. Cullather, as quoted in Alice Weinreb, “‘For the Hungry Have No Past nor Do They Belong to a Political Party’: Debates over German Hunger After World War II,” Central European History 45, no. 1 (2012): 50.
  82. 82. Jachertz and Nutzenadel, “Coping with Hunger?,” 104.
  83. 83. Cullather, “Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” 337–38; Atina Grossmann, “Grams, Calories, and Food: Languages of Victimization, Entitlement and Human Rights in Occupied Germany, 1945–49,” Central European History 44, no. 1 (2011): 121.
  84. 84. Scott-Smith, On an Empty Stomach, 49, 117. On different national approaches to the calorie, see Jacob Darwin Hamblin, “The Vulnerability of Nations: Food Security in the Aftermath of World War II,” Global Environment 10 (2012): 46–47.
  85. 85. Dodd, “Food and Agriculture Organization,” 83.
  86. 86. I take the term “hunger studies” from Scott-Smith, On an Empty Stomach, chap. 7.
  87. 87. Cabanes, Great War and Humanitarianism, 225.
  88. 88. Scott-Smith, On an Empty Stomach, 36, 63, 69. The term “dietary determinism” is used multiple times in the book.
  89. 89. Jachertz and Nutzenadel, “Coping with Hunger?,” 107.
  90. 90. Grossmann, “Grams, Calories, and Food,” 119, 145.
  91. 91. Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 298–99, illustration 3.
  92. 92. On the contrast between postwar American abundance and European shortages, see Hamblin, “Vulnerability of Nations,” 48–59.
  93. 93. Weinreb, Modern Hungers, 10.
  94. 94. Roosevelt, as quoted in Grossmann, “Grams, Calories, and Food,” 120.
  95. 95. Lucius Clay is quoted in Cullather, “Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” 363.
  96. 96. Stuart Legg, Food: Secret of the Peace (National Film Board of Canada, 1945), https://www.nfb.ca/film/food_secret_of_the_peace/. For analysis of the films produced by Canada’s National Film Board for UNRRA, see Suzanne Langlois, “‘Neighbors Half the World Away’: The National Film Board of Canada at Work for UNRRA (1944–47),” in Canada and the United Nations: Legacies, Limits, Prospects, eds. Colin McCullough and Robert Teigrob (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), 44–81.
  97. 97. The term “relief geography” comes from Reinisch, “‘Auntie UNRRA’ at the Crossroads,” 76.
  98. 98. “Basis of Requirements for Cows,” Raporty misji UNRRA dotyczące rolnictwa i wyżywienia w Polsce, 1945–47, MRiRR, 2/162/0/2.4/506, p. 55, AAN. This is a condensed version of a report, also contained in this file, titled S.G. “The Role of Cattle Breeding in Poland’s Agricultural Economy,” March 1945.
  99. 99. “Introducing Remarks to the Provisional Programme of UNRRA Agricultural Imports for the Last Month of 1945 and the Whole of 1946,” UNRRA—Poland Mission, 1944–49, file 7, S-0527-1064, pp. 44–45, UNA. On definitions of hunger, see Vernon, Hunger, 158.
  100. 100. “Chief Medical Officer to Chief of Mission,” June 24, 1946, UNRRA—Poland Mission, 1944–49, file 29, S-0527-1064, UNA.
  101. 101. Collingham, Taste of War, 481; Grossmann, “Grams, Calories, and Food,” 119.
  102. 102. Ruth Jachertz, “‘To Keep Food out of Politics’: The UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 1945–1965,” in International Organizations and Development, 1945–1990, eds. Marc Frey, Sonke Kunkel, and Corinna Unger (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 77. For an influential contemporary British film about food produced for the Ministries of Food and Agriculture and shown at Hot Springs, see Paul Rotha, dir., World of Plenty (Paul Rotha Productions, 1943).
  103. 103. For a survey of how contemporaries thought about food and food policy, see Theodore W. Schultz, ed., Food for the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945). For additional context and background, see Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1930–1926 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 346.
  104. 104. Amy L. S. Staples, “To Win the Peace: The Food and Agriculture Organization, Sir John Boyd Orr, and the World Food Board Proposals,” Peace and Change 28, no. 4 (2003): 498–99.
  105. 105. Adam Puławski, “Revisiting Jan Karski’s Final Mission,” Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs 15, no. 2 (2021): 289, 295.
  106. 106. Wojciech Rappak, “Karski’s Reports: The Story and the History” (PhD diss., University College London, 2021), 26–27, 266–67.
  107. 107. Claude Lanzmann, dir., Shoah (New York: New Yorker Films, 1985). See also Interview with Jan Karski, Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, USHMM, accessed March 15, 2022, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1000017. The text of the Lanzmann-Karski interview has been published in Les Tempes Modernes (January–March 2010).
  108. 108. Puławski, “Revisiting Jan Karski’s Final Mission,” 295–96.
  109. 109. Richard J. Golsan, “‘L’Affaire’ Karski: Fiction, History, Memory Unreconciled,” L’Esprit Créateur 50, no. 4 (2010): 81–96. On Karski’s meeting with Roosevelt, see also Polish History Museum, curated by Dorota Szkodzińska, “Jan Karski: Humanity’s Hero,” Google Arts and Culture, accessed October 7, 2024, https://artsandculture.google.com/story/jan-karski-humanity-s-hero-polish-history-museum/EAXRBzXayhMA8A?hl=en.
  110. 110. “Introducing Remarks,” 44, UNA.
  111. 111. “Introducing Remarks,” 44, UNA.
  112. 112. “Provisional Report,” 10, UNA. The same figures are repeated in “Statement Given to UNRA by Stanislaw Mikolajczyk,” February 23, 1946, UNRRA—Poland Mission, 1944–49, file 78-B3L4, S-0527-1073, UNA.
  113. 113. This general point (not related to Poland specifically) is made by Michael Bresalier, “From Healthy Cows to Healthy Humans: Integrated Approaches to World Hunger, c. 1930–1965,” in Animals and the Shaping of Modern Medicine: One Health and Its Histories, eds. Abigail Woods et al. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 132.
  114. 114. “Report on UNRRA Livestock Imported to Poland from September 29, 1945 to July 28, 1946,” July 29, 1946, UNRRA Subject Files, file 72, S-0527-1107, UNA.
  115. 115. Gladwin Hill, “Bare Polish Farms Face Dark Future,” New York Times, November 4, 1945.
  116. 116. On the situation with cattle in the postwar years, see Joseph H. Short, “Blue-Ribbon Maryland Horses in UNRRA Poland Shipment,” Baltimore Sun, January 26, 1947; “Introducing Remarks,” 44–45, UNA. For replacement projections, see Hill, “Bare Polish Farms.”
  117. 117. “Provisional Report,” 10, UNA. For additional statistics, see also “Statement by Stanislaw Mikolajczyk,” UNA.
  118. 118. “Statement by Stanislaw Mikolajczyk,” UNA.
  119. 119. Weintraub, “Reseeding Live-Stock Herds”; Weintraub, “Experiment in International Welfare Planning,” 3.
  120. 120. For animals’ role in colonization, see Nancy Cushing, “‘Few Commodities More Hazardous’: Australian Live Animal Export, 1788–1880,” Environment and History 24 (2018): 449–52.
  121. 121. “Report on UNRRA Livestock,” UNA.
  122. 122. David E. Norcross, “The Story of Heifers for Relief,” September 1946, Clippings and Releases 1, 1940s–1960s, folder 7, box 2, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  123. 123. On the FAO, see Gove Hambidge, The Story of FAO (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1955); Corinne A. Pernet and Amalia Ribi Forclaz, “Revisiting the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO): International Histories of Agriculture, Nutrition, and Development,” International History Review 41, no. 2 (2019): 345–50.
  124. 124. Amalia Ribi Forclaz, “From Reconstruction to Development: The Early Years of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Conceptualization of Rural Welfare, 1945–1955,” International History Review 41, no. 2 (2019): 355.
  125. 125. Amy L. S. Staples, The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization Changed the World, 1945–1965 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006), 76, 91. See also Patricia Clavin, “International Organizations,” in The Cambridge History of the Second World War, vol. 2, Politics and Ideology, eds. Richard Bosworth and Joseph Maiolo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 153; Pernet and Forclaz, “Revisiting the FAO,” 346.
  126. 126. Weinreb, Modern Hungers, 92–93.

2. The UNRRA–Brethren Service Committee Partnership

  1. 1. Margaret Nowak, “Church of the Brethren Send 800 Heifers to Poland,” People’s Voice, November 30, 1946. This article can be found in Clippings and Releases 4, 1940s–1960s, folder 10, box 2, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA. Additional statistics about the Brethren can also be found in Donald F. Durnbaugh, “Statistics and Addresses,” in Church of the Brethren: Past and Present, ed. Donald F. Durnbaugh (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1971), 143; Donald F. Durnbaugh, Pragmatic Prophet: The Life of Michael Robert Zigler (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1989), 76. On Brethren numbers (divided by congregation), see “M.R. Zigler to Paul French,” November 12, 1940, box 19, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC.
  2. 2. Perry Bush, Two Kingdoms, Two Loyalties: Mennonite Pacifism in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 6–7. See also Steven J. Taylor, Acts of Conscience: World War II, Mental Institutions, and Religious Objectors (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 26–27; Mennonite Central Committee, “Relief in Action; Europe,” 1941–42, box 21, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC.
  3. 3. Gunnar Jahn, “Award Ceremony Speech,” 1947, NobelPrize.org, February 23, 2023, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1947/ceremony-speech.
  4. 4. The origins of the Brethren and Mennonites, in the context of pacifism, are discussed in Peter Brock, Against the Draft: Essays on Conscientious Objection from the Radical Reformation to the Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). On the Brethren specifically, see Donald F. Durnbaugh, “Early History,” in Durnbaugh, Church of the Brethren, 9–22.
  5. 5. Lawrence W. Shultz, People and Places, 1890–1970: An Autobiography (Winona Lake, IN: Life and Light, 1971), 182.
  6. 6. Bush, Two Kingdoms, Two Loyalties, 19–20; M. J. Heisey, Peace and Persistence: Tracing the Brethren in Christ Through Three Generations (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003), 2–3.
  7. 7. A. J. R. Groom, Andre Barrinha, and William Olson, International Relations Then and Now, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2019), 25.
  8. 8. Kenneth I. Morse, New Windsor Center (New Windsor, MD: Brethren Service Center, 1979), 19, 20.
  9. 9. Durnbaugh, Pragmatic Prophet, 189; Morse, New Windsor Center, 40.
  10. 10. On early Quaker humanitarian relief work, see Tammy M. Proctor, “Repairing the Spirit: The Society of Friends, Total Warm and the Limits of Reconciliation,” Peace and Change: A Journal of Peace Research 45, no. 2 (2020): 198–224. On the Quakers in Spain, see Daniel Maul, “The Politics of Neutrality: The American Friends Service Committee and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939,” European Review of History 23, no. 1–2 (2016): 82–100.
  11. 11. For West’s own description of his time in Spain, see Dan West, “Cooperation with the AFSC in Spain,” in To Serve the Present Age: The Brethren Service Story, ed. Donald F. Durnbaugh (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1975), 107–10. On West’s arrival in Spain, see Gabriel Pretus, Humanitarian Relief in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen, 2013), 214.
  12. 12. Glee Yoder, Passing on the Gift: The Story of Dan West (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1978), chap. 12, esp. 100–101; J. Kenneth Kreider, A Cup of Cold Water: The Story of Brethren Service (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 2001), 131. On Dan West in Spain, see also Peggy Reiff Miller, “Heifer Project Myths,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), July 26, 2024.
  13. 13. On humanitarian conversion narratives generally, see Emily Bauman, “The Naïve Republic of Aid: Grassroots Exceptionalism in Humanitarian Memoir,” in Global Humanitarianism and Media Culture, eds. Michael Lawrence and Rachel Tavernor (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 83.
  14. 14. Edwin T. Randall, “More Values Than Many Sparrows,” 1947, Heifer Project 1947, folder 46, box 38, series 18, DWP, BHLA.
  15. 15. Peggy Reiff Miller, “Heifer International 75 Years Ago: Dan West’s Rationale for the Heifer Project,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), February 22, 2019.
  16. 16. For references to the almond tree story, see, for example, G. Yoder, Passing on the Gift, 11; “Down to Earth Project,” Time Magazine, July 24, 1944, in Cowboy Memories, eds. Bill Beck and Mel West (Little Rock, AR: Heifer Project International, 1994), 15; Peggy Reiff Miller, “Seagoing Cowboys and the Heifer Project: The Maryland Story,” Catoctin History, Fall/Winter 2005. Reiff Miller has revised her earlier position on the almond tree story; she now sees it as one of myths surrounding West and the Heifer Project. See “Myth 4” in Peggy Reiff Miller, “Heifer Project Myths, Part II,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), August 9, 2024.
  17. 17. Reiff Miller, “Heifer Project Myths, Part II”; Peggy Reiff Miller, “Dan West: Mischief Brewing” (speech delivered in Mill Ridge Village, Union, OH, February 22, 2019), 12–18; Peggy Reiff Miller, “The Woman Behind the Man Behind Heifer Project,” Messenger, July/August 2019.
  18. 18. The description of West as a “visionary” appears, for example, in Durnbaugh, Pragmatic Prophet, 174.
  19. 19. Kermit Eby, “Faith, Hope, and Heifers,” Progressive, August 1951. This article is part of Clippings and Releases 1, 1940s–1960s, folder 7, box 2, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA. For more on Eby, see Kermit Eby Papers (1933–63), Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
  20. 20. Reiff Miller, “Dan West,” 16–17. On West in Spain, see also Durnbaugh, Pragmatic Prophet, 114–17.
  21. 21. For context, see John Metzler, “The Relief Goods Program,” Gospel Messenger, November 10, 1945. For a breakdown of how the Heifer Project developed, see Peggy Reiff Miller, “The Impossible Dream: How the Heifer Project Came to Be,” Messenger, July/August 2009.
  22. 22. “Heifers—Relief on the Hoof,” Weekly Processor, July 15, 1946.
  23. 23. Morse, New Windsor Center, 40; G. Yoder, Passing on the Gift, 102.
  24. 24. George W. Cornell, “Bible-Spurred Cowboys Herding Cattle into Hard-Up Nations,” in Beck and West, Cowboy Memories, 77. A version of the quote also appears in Eby, “Faith, Hope, and Heifers” and in Kreider, A Cup of Cold Water, 131.
  25. 25. The phrase “passing on the gift” is used in G. Yoder, Passing on the Gift, 103. “Passing on the Gift” is a registered trademark of Heifer International; the practice reflected by this term remains in place to this day. See Erin Snow, “Passing on the Gift: Magic,” Heifer International, October 3, 2019, https://www.heifer.org/blog/passing-on-the-gift-magic.html.
  26. 26. Robin Patric Clair and Lindsey B. Anderson, “Portrayals of the Poor on the Cusp of Capitalism: Promotional Materials in the Case of Heifer international,” Management Communication Quarterly 27, no. 4 (2013): 545.
  27. 27. For more on these ideas, see Leo R. Ward, “Brethren Heifers for Relief,” Gospel Messenger, March 22, 1947; Reiff Miller, “Impossible Dream.”
  28. 28. The subtitle of this section comes from Tim Huber, “High Seas Service,” Mennonite World Review, September 14, 2015, https://anabaptistworld.org/high-seas-service/.
  29. 29. Peggy Reiff Miller, “Heifer Project Myths, Part III,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), August 23, 2024; Morse, New Windsor Center, 40.
  30. 30. Peggy Reiff Miller, private correspondence with author, January 6, 2024, January 23, 2024, and January 30, 2024; Thurl Metzger, “The Heifer Project,” in Durnbaugh, To Serve the Present Age, 145.
  31. 31. Reiff Miller, “Dan West,” 17.
  32. 32. Ralph E. Smeltzer, “Our Relief Fields,”Gospel Messenger, November 10, 1945.
  33. 33. See various letters to and from Dan West and UNRRA in 1944 and 1945 in Brethren Service Committee, S-1267-0000-0083-00001, UNA.
  34. 34. Durnbaugh, Pragmatic Prophet, 173.
  35. 35. “Heifer Project Committee,” August 1947, Correspondence 1947, folder 10, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  36. 36. Cheryl Brumbaugh-Cayford, with contributions from Peggy Reiff Miller, “‘Pass the Baton and Continue On’: Puerto Rico Celebrates 75 Years of Heifer,” Messenger, December 2019; Peggy Reiff Miller, “Celebrating 75 Years of Heifer International: Where It All Began,” World Ark, Spring 2020. See also “Down to Earth Project,” in Beck and West, Cowboy Memories, 15.
  37. 37. Peggy Reiff Miller, “Heifer Project’s Goodwill Mission to Puerto Rico,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), May 10, 2019.
  38. 38. Roger E. Sappington, Brethren Social Policy, 1908–1958 (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1961), 112.
  39. 39. Reiff Miller, “Impossible Dream”; Bill Beck, “Introduction,” in Beck and West, Cowboy Memories, 5. See also G. Yoder, Passing on the Gift, 105–7; “Report by Ralph M. Delk to Co-workers,” December 21, 1946, Correspondence 1945–46, folder 9, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA. On Heifer’s anniversary date, see Reiff Miller, “Heifer Project Myths, Part III.”
  40. 40. On this early planning period, see Durnbaugh, Pragmatic Prophet, 171–74; J. Kenneth Kreider, “M.R. Zigler, a Crusader for Peace,” in A Dunker Guide to Brethren History, ed. Walt Wiltschek (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 2010), 115–18; Reiff Miller, “Impossible Dream”; “Director General to M.R. Zigler,” June 18, 1945, Brethren Service Committee, S-1267-0000-0083-00001, p. 131, UNA.
  41. 41. David L. MacFarlane, “The UNRRA Experience in Relation to Developments in Food and Agriculture,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 30, no. 1 (1948): 72.
  42. 42. F. F. Elliott, “Redirecting World Agricultural Production and Trade Toward Better Nutrition,” Journal of Farm Economics 26, no. 1 (1944): 13.
  43. 43. Robert Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 1947, UNRRA selected records AG-018-040, accession 2015.245.1, record group RG-67.050, S-1021-0009-03, p. 95, USHMM.
  44. 44. “Paul French to M.R. Zigler,” March 3, 1944, box 20, series A, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC. The costs of moving animals from point of purchase to the ports is outlined in Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 95–112, USHMM.
  45. 45. George Woodbridge, UNRRA: The History of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 1:478, 1:787.
  46. 46. For early planning ideas, see “Director General to M.R. Zigler,” June 18, 1945, Brethren Service Committee, S-1267-0000-0083-00001, p. 131, UNA.
  47. 47. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 4, USHMM.
  48. 48. “Information for the Press,” December 6, 1945, Brethren Service Committee, S-1267-0000-0083-00001, p. 102, UNA.
  49. 49. On the sailing of Boolongena, see Reiff Miller, “Seagoing Cowboys and the Heifer Project,” as well as Peggy Reiff Miller, “Dr. Martin M. Kaplan: Heifer International’s Second Seagoing Cowboy Delivers Bulls to Greece, Part I,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), March 22, 2019. Kaplan was a veterinarian on the sailing.
  50. 50. “Report from M.E. Hays, Chief, Department of Supply, to Melvin P. McGovern, Mission Historian,” May 14, 1947, Office of the Historian, Monographs—Poland—Early History, S-1021-0041-0013-00001, p. 7, UNA; Ministerstwo Przemysłu, Handlu i Żeglugi Rządu RP [emigracyjnego] w Londynie, 2/132/0/7/533, AAN.
  51. 51. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 5–15, USHMM. On veterinarians, see Clive J. C. Phillips and Eduardo Santurtun, “The Welfare of Livestock Transported by Ship,” Veterinary Journal 196, no. 3 (2013): 310. Canadians could also volunteer to work as veterinarians on UNRRA ships. See, for example, “SS No. 9, Clarke,” Canadian Statesman, April 3, 1947, for a notice about Dr. W. Sherwin of Orono having worked as a vet on a Poland-bound UNRRA ship with 777 horses. See also “Desperate Case of Europe Outlined by Dr. W. Sherwin in Fine Address at Rotary,” Canadian Standard, July 24, 1947.
  52. 52. The various suggestions for where to get livestock attendants are reflected throughout the following file: Brethren Service Committee, S-1267-0000-0083-00001, pp. 112–23, UNA.
  53. 53. AMEDD Center of History and Heritage, “Transportation of Animals,” August 30, 2022, https://achh.army.mil/history/book-wwii-vetservicewwii-chapter15. On World War I animal transport, see BrookeUSA, “Shipping: Ports of Embarkation,” United States World War One Centennial Commission, August 30, 2022, https://www.worldwar1centennial.org/index.php/brookeusa-buying-animals/3162-brookeusa-buying-animals-article-2.html#ports-of-embarkation; David McAuslin, “Transport Service (The Innocent Abroad),” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association VI, no. 4 (1918): 536–47.
  54. 54. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 8, USHMM.
  55. 55. The May agreement between the BSC and UNRRA is available as “Agreement,” Brethren Service Committee, S-1267-0000-0006-00001, p. 7, UNA. The document is signed by Benjamin Bushong of the BSC and Phil W. Jordan, Procurement and Property Branch, Administrative Services, UNRRA. The agreement refers to the seagoing cowboys as “cattle tenders.” For an earlier draft of the agreement, see “Agreement Between BSC and UNRRA,” Correspondence 1945–46, folder 9, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  56. 56. “UNRRA and the Dunkers,” Gospel Messenger, September 1, 1945. This is a reprint of “Religion: UNRRA and the Dunkers,” Time, July 23, 1945. The article was widely reproduced. See also G. Yoder, Passing on the Gift, 108.
  57. 57. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 8, USHMM.
  58. 58. Reiff Miller, private correspondence with author, January 6, 2024. Belgium received 335 heifers, and France received 500. See “Summary of Shipments by Countries,” 1945–53 Project Committee Reports, folder 19, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  59. 59. “C.H. Wilson to C.M. Drury,” October 7, 1946, UNRRA—Poland Mission, 1944–49, file 29, S-0527-1064, UNA.
  60. 60. “M.R. Zigler et al. from A. Stauffer Curry,” May 30, 1945, box 85, series A, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC. On these two initial sailings, see Peggy Reiff Miller, “Second UNRRA Livestock Ship Departed the United States 75 Years Ago Today,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), June 26, 2020.
  61. 61. Even at the time, Friends were quick to point out that providing aid to those that needed it was not distinctly Christian. See Fiona Reid and Sharif Gemie, “The Friends Relief Service and Displaced People in Europe After the Second World War, 1945–48,” Quaker Studies 17, no. 2 (2013): 223–43.
  62. 62. “Text of La Guardia UNRRA Acceptance Speech,” New York Times, March 30, 1946. La Guardia’s term “great army of mercy” was used by the Polish press too. See “UNRRA-Wielka armia miłosierdzia kończy swą pracę,”Głos Wielkopolski, September 9, 1946. For La Guardia’s reference to “practical Christianity,” see his letter to the Heifer Project Committee dated November 16, 1946, and reproduced as “UNRRA Expresses Gratitude for Heifer Project,” Gospel Messenger, January 11, 1947. On Christianity and UNRRA, see also Amanda Melanie Bundy, “There Was a Man of UNRRA: Internationalism, Humanitarianism, and the Early Cold War in Europe, 1943–1947” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2017), 196.
  63. 63. United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, The Story of UNRRA (Washington, DC: UNRRA, Office of Public Information, 1948), 30.
  64. 64. Woodbridge, UNRRA, 1:550. Woodbridge’s use of this biblical phrasing in his history of UNRRA is also cited in the following: David Mayers, “Destruction Repaired and Destruction Anticipated: United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation (UNRRA), the Atomic Bomb, and US Policy, 1944–1946,” International History Review 38, no. 5 (2016): 967.
  65. 65. Gertrude Samuels, “The Unheard Cry of the World’s Children,” New York Times Magazine, October 12, 1947, reprinted in US Congress, Proceedings and Debates, July 26, 1947, to December 19, 1947, 80th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 93, part 12, A4619. The reference to “UNRRA” as a holy word also appears in an official UNRRA publication: UNRRA, Story of UNRRA, 46.
  66. 66. “Get a Horse,” editorial, Life, December 30, 1946.
  67. 67. “Bonnell Supports Truman Food Plea,” New York Times, February 11, 1946. The Brethren also used the term “Christian statesmanship” to describe the work they were doing in the postwar period. See Thurl Metzger, “Report of Work in Poland, October 15, 1946 to April 16, 1947,” 1945–53 Project Committee Reports, folder 19, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  68. 68. “Churchmen Back Truman on Food,” New York Times, February 21, 1946. The original documents are at Bureau of Service, Churches—Public Information File, S-1268-0000-0079-00001, UNA.
  69. 69. “Plea for Starving Made by Manning,” New York Times, March 25, 1946.
  70. 70. “Bonnell Supports Truman Food Plea.”
  71. 71. David Miller, dir., Seeds of Destiny (United States Department of War, 1946). David Miller and Art Arthur wrote the film script. On the film, see Irene Kahn Atkins, “Seeds of Destiny: A Case History,” Film and History 11, no. 2 (1981): 25–33.
  72. 72. On the ways in which visual images of suffering children remain a part of modern-day humanitarian fundraising campaigns, see Heidi Fehrenbach, “Children and Other Civilians: Photography and the Politics of Humanitarian Image-Making,” in Humanitarian Photography: A History, ed. Heidi Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 167; Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno, “The Morality of Sight: Humanitarian Photography in History,” in Fehrenbach and Rodogno, Humanitarian Photography, 1; Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno, “‘A Horrific Photo of a Drowned Syrian Child’: Humanitarian Photography and NGO Media Strategies in Historical Perspective,” International Review of the Red Cross 97, no. 900 (2015): 1125–26. For an analysis of earlier uses of the suffering children trope, see Friederike Kind-Kovács, “The Great War, the Child’s Body and the American Red Cross,” European Review of History 23, no. 1–2 (2016): 33–62. The focus here is on post–World War I Hungary and the work of the American Relief Administration. On the marketing of modern humanitarianism, see Kevin Rozario, “‘Delicious Horrors’: Mass Culture, the Red Cross, and the Appeal of Modern American Humanitarianism,” American Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2003): 417–55.
  73. 73. Miller, Seeds of Destiny.
  74. 74. Marine Bull Pen, no. 9, July 19, 1946, Marine Bullpens and News Circulars, 1946, folder 10, box 75, MGP, Hist MSS 1–129, MCA. See also Sappington, Brethren Social Policy, 87–88; Roger E. Sappington, “Social Involvement,” in Durnbaugh, Church of the Brethren, 102; Durnbaugh, Pragmatic Prophet, 173; Morse, New Windsor Center, 12; Brethren Service, “More Than a Milk Factory,” Gospel Messenger, June 21, 1947.
  75. 75. Philip West, “Dirty Fingernails, Heifers and China: Some Connecting Threads,” in Beck and West, Cowboy Memories, 112. West delivered this speech in 1993.
  76. 76. Kermit Eby as quoted in G. Yoder, Passing on the Gift, 114. The reference to bombs here may be picking up on a proposed Heifer Project advertising poster titled “Do You Have a Program for Peace?” which suggested that both atom bombs and heifers offered different types of “security.” The front panel features Heifer Project cows on the wharf next to a ship alongside the caption “We need more projects like this” and the words “to prevent” preceding an arrow. The arrow points to a plume of smoke from an atom bomb with the caption “this.” See “Do You Have a Program for Peace?,” 1945–53 Project Committee Reports, folder 19, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  77. 77. Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 2, 17. The argument about the religious elements in interwar humanitarian aid efforts are also made by Davide Rodogno, Night on Earth: A History of International Humanitarianism in the Near East, 1918–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 15. See also Sappington, Brethren Social Policy, 112.
  78. 78. The ideas in this section are inspired by Martin Conway, Michael Barnett, David A. Hollinger, and Mark L. Movsesian in their review of Christian Human Rights, by Samuel Moyn, H-Diplo Roundtable Review 17, no. 20 (2016): 1–19, http://www.tiny.cc/Roundtable-XVII-20. The Brethren, the Heifer Project, and UNRRA are not discussed in the roundtable. See also Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 1–24; Paul Betts, Ruin and Renewal: Civilizing Europe After World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2020), 16.
  79. 79. Bryan MacDonald, Food Power: The Rise and Fall of the Postwar American Food System (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
  80. 80. Todd H. Hall, Emotional Diplomacy: Official Emotion on the International Stage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 3; Yohan Ariffin, “Introduction: How Emotions Can Explain Outcomes in International Relations,” in Emotions in International Politics: Beyond Mainstream International Relations, eds. Yohan Ariffin, Jean Marc Coicaud, and Vesselin Popovski (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 23–47.
  81. 81. Cormac O. Grada, Famine: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 227.
  82. 82. Barry Riley, The Political History of American Food Aid: An Uneasy Benevolence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 92-96.
  83. 83. Kendra Smith-Howard,Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History since 1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 77; Ben Shephard, The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (New York: Random House, 2010), 255; Riley, Political History of American Food Aid, 86–87.
  84. 84. Jacob Darwin Hamblin, “The Vulnerability of Nations: Food Security in the Aftermath of World War II,” Global Environment 10 (2012): 58.
  85. 85. Frank Henry, “Through This Port: Life for Europe,” Baltimore Sun, March 24, 1946.
  86. 86. “Steady Stream of Cattle Pours from Newport News,” Suffolk News-Herald, May 16, 1946.
  87. 87. Mark St. John Erickson, “Newport News Became a Springboard for WWI War Horses,” AP News, December 4, 2016; BrookeUSA, “Shipping.”
  88. 88. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 165, 167, USHMM. Lintner’s report contains a long section devoted specifically to Newport News on pp. 152–67. A list of ships that sailed from Newport News is provided on pp. 168–74.
  89. 89. Michael Frome, “Noah’s Ark Docks at Newport News,” Washington Post, May 26, 1946, in Clippings and Releases 4, 1940s–1960s, folder 10, box 2, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  90. 90. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 19–25, USHMM.
  91. 91. Henry, “Through This Port.”
  92. 92. Peggy Reiff Miller, “Cattle for Israel,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), July 14, 2017. Details in this section about the stockyard also come from “Unique New Stockyard in Operation,” Daily Press, February 13, 1946. In 1949 the Levinsons started their own cattle delivery program for Israel specifically; there is virtually no research on this subject. According to Peggy Reiff Miller, in 1946 the Heifer Project started working directly with the Russian authorities on a plan to ship animals to Birobidzhan to help Jews living in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. The plan was apparently never realized. Reiff Miller, private correspondence with author, January 30, 2024.
  93. 93. “Unique New Stockyard in Operation.”
  94. 94. Philipp Weintraub, “Reseeding Live-Stock Herds in Liberated Europe,” Baltimore Sun, June 28, 1945, 12; Woodbridge, UNRRA, 1:489–91.
  95. 95. Benon Gaziński and Bogusław Wanot, “Działalność UNRRA i jej pomoc dla rolnictwa w Polsce,” Rocznik Muzeum Narodowego Rolnictwa w Szreniawie 19 (1993): 21; Eastern European Division Loan Department, “Preliminary Paper No. 6 for the Working Party on the Polish Loan Application” (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, May 26, 1947), https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/558411468095985925/pdf/multi-page.pdf, 58. See also “Denmark Gives to UNRRA,” New York Times, February 17, 1946; A. G. Wilder, “Horses in Poland,” Morgan Horse Magazine, May 1947; “Przychód,” Dostawy koni w ramach UNRRA, 1946–47, MRiRR, 2/162/0/21.5/3377, p. 162, AAN; “Minute Sheet: Denmark,” PRDG’s European Tour, S-1435-0000-0100-00001, p. 25, UNA.
  96. 96. Jarosław Wasielewski, “Jak po wojnie leczono konie z UNRRY w Gdańsku,” trojmiasto.pl, February 26, 2019,https://historia.trojmiasto.pl/Jak-w-Gdańsku-po-wojnie-konie-z-UNRRY-leczono-n132173.html#opinions-wrap. See also A. Pępkowski, “Dostawy zwierząt UNRRA dla Polski,”Medycyna Weterynaryjna 3, no. 6 (1947): 399.
  97. 97. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report 19–25, USHMM.
  98. 98. Woodbridge, UNRRA, 1:488.
  99. 99. Baukhage, “UNRRA Test of Sentiment for World Cooperation,” Highland Recorder, December 7, 1945.
  100. 100. I borrow this phrasing from scholar Ilaria Scgalia, who writes about the interwar period. See Ilaria Scgalia, The Emotions of Internationalism: Feeling International Cooperation in the Alps in the Interwar Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 3.
  101. 101. On states as emotional actors and on the concept of “emotional diplomacy,” see Hall, Emotional Diplomacy.
  102. 102. Bliss Lane as quoted in Jacek Zygmunt Sawicki, ed., Polska jesień, rosyjska zima: Spotkanie Juliena Bryana z misją UNRRA w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej 1946–1947—fotografie i zapiski (Warsaw: IPN, 2022), 64.
  103. 103. For an example see Emma Hutchison, Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions After Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

3. On Becoming a Seagoing Cowboy

  1. 1. On New Windsor in this period, see Carter Brooke Jones, “New Windsor,” Sunday Star, March 17, 1946; Frank J. Batavick, Time’s Crossroads: The History of New Windsor, MD (Amazon.com and CreateSpace, 2017), 131; Donald F. Durnbaugh, Pragmatic Prophet: The Life of Michael Robert Zigler (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1989), 148; Lorell Weiss, Ten Years of Brethren Service (Elgin, IL: Brethren Service Commission, 1952), 52; Peggy Reiff Miller, “Seagoing Cowboys and the Heifer Project: The Maryland Story,” Catoctin History, Fall/Winter 2005. In the earliest months, the seagoing cowboys program and the Heifer Project were administered from temporary and provisional offices in Nappanee, Indiana; and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Both the Brethren Service Committee itself and the Church of the Brethren were headquartered in Elgin, Illinois. Peggy Reiff Miller, private correspondence with author, January 23, 2024.
  2. 2. “Information and Inspiration . . . ,” Gospel Messenger, April 6, 1946; L. Weiss, Ten Years of Brethren Service, 51; US Congress, Proceedings and Debates, February 19, 1946, to March 28, 1946, 79th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 92, part 2: 2388.
  3. 3. For more on the work done at New Windsor, see “Methodist Church Sends Clothing to World Service Center,” Suffolk News-Herald, July 15, 1947. On the donated material that arrived at New Windsor, see A Scrapbook of Cowboy Memories, 1994, From the Memories of Roger and Olive Roop, December 1985, folder 14, box 1, John E. Nunemaker Collection (hereafter JEN), Hist. MSS 1893, MCA; R. Jan Thompson and Roma Jo Thompson, Beyond our Means: How the Brethren Service Center Dared to Embrace the World (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 2009), chap. 9.
  4. 4. “World Brotherhood at Work, Notes on BSC Relief Work from Interview with Ben Bushong,” Brethren Service Committee, S-1268-0000-0039, p. 65, UNA; Reiff Miller, “Seagoing Cowboys and the Heifer Project.”
  5. 5. Reiff Miller, “Seagoing Cowboys and the Heifer Project”; Peggy Reiff Miller, “The Brethren Service Center Serves and Is Served by Seagoing Cowboys,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), September 12, 2015. The details in Miller’s post come from the journal of J. O. Yoder, who was at New Windsor in the fall of 1945. See J. Olen Yoder, Crossing to Poland (self-pub., 1986). Arthur Meyer was one cowboy who stopped at New Windsor before sailing on his assigned livestock ship in 1946. He describes his time at New Windsor in his diary. See Arthur Meyer, “Art Meyer’s Cattle Boat Experience: Introduction to Planned Book, Dated January 1991,” Seagoing Cowboys, accessed February 13, 2020, https://seagoingcowboyswebsite.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/stories_artmeyer.pdf. Similarly, Wayne Brant also spent time at New Windsor before his sailing. See Wayne Brant, “The Heifer Project,” in Scrapbook of Cowboy Memories, MCA.
  6. 6. For the romance between Kathryn Root and Earl Holderman (who met at the New Windsor Center in 1945 and were married for almost six decades), see Peggy Reiff Miller, “A Seagoing Cowboy Romance,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), February 14, 2020.
  7. 7. Kenneth I. Morse, Preaching in a Tavern and 129 Other Surprising Stories from Brethren Life (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1997), chap. 34; Kenneth I. Morse, New Windsor Center (New Windsor, MD: Brethren Service Center, 1979), 37; Jacob deNobel, “Taking a Look at Presidents Who Have Visited Carroll County,” Chicago Tribune, February 15, 2015; Frank Batavick, “New Windsor History,” New Windsor Heritage, accessed March 23, 2023, https://www.newwindsorheritage.org/history. In 2023 the Mission and Ministry Board of the Church of the Brethren decided to close down the Material Resources program at New Windsor. See “Mission and Ministry Board Makes Decision To Close Material Resources Program,” Church of the Brethren Newsline, October 23, 2023, https://www.brethren.org/news/2023/board-decides-to-close-material-resources/.
  8. 8. Robert Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 1947, UNRRA selected records AG-018-040, accession 2015.245.1, record group RG-67.050, S-1021-0009-03, pp. 9–10, USHMM.
  9. 9. US Department of Commerce, “Income of Nonfarm Families and Individuals: 1946,” in Current Population Reports: Consumer Income, ser. P-60, no. 1 (January 28, 1948), 1, https://www2.census.gov/prod2/popscan/p60-001.pdf.
  10. 10. The salary amounts for the supervisors and veterinarians come from Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 194, USHMM. See also “Letter to Undisclosed Multiple Recipients from Ralph E. Smeltzer of the BSC,” 1945, Correspondence, September 1945 to January 1946, folder 2, box 75, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA; “Paul French to Col. Lewis F. Kosch,” January 29, 1946, box 85, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC; “Melvin Gingerich to Verna Gingerich,” June 14, 1946, Correspondence June 1946, folder 3, box 75, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  11. 11. AMEDD Center of History and Heritage, “Transportation of Animals,” August 30, 2022, https://achh.army.mil/history/book-wwii-vetservicewwii-chapter15.
  12. 12. “Girven H. Culley to Wilmer L. Tjossem,” February 18, 1946, box 49, series F, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC.
  13. 13. “Charles C. Kocher Polish Trip Notes and Photos,” 1946, folder 1, box 1, Seagoing Cowboys Collection, Hist. MSS 1–973, MCA. See also Peggy Reiff Miller, “Hanging Out in the Port City,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), May 22, 2015.
  14. 14. L. Weiss, Ten Years of Brethren Service, 3–4.
  15. 15. There was an exception to the Brethren’s control over hiring: Initially, it was UNRRA that permitted African Americans to be cowboys on all-Black crews only. This is discussed later in the chapter.
  16. 16. On the Heifer Project’s ecumenicalism see Peggy Reiff Miller, “The Impossible Dream: How the Heifer Project Came to Be,” Messenger, July/August 2009. Advertisements in the Brethren’s Gospel Messenger encouraged local Heifer Project Committees to recruit seagoing cowboys from their congregations. See, for example, “Information and Inspiration . . . ,” Gospel Messenger, June 1, 1946.
  17. 17. Peggy Reiff Miller, “Mining for Gems in the Heifer Archives,” World Ark, Spring 2016. For reflections on the number of cowboys that came out of a peace church milieu, I thank Peggy Reiff Miller: Reiff Miller, private correspondence with author, January 7 and 23, 2024. Though some published secondary sources do provide specific numbers of cowboys from the peace churches—for example, that there were about one thousand Mennonite seagoing cowboys in total—Peggy Reiff Miller (who herself made this claim about Mennonite cowboy numbers in her earliest published work)—believes these figures to be unreliable for the reasons described above. See also Peggy Reiff Miller, “Coming of Age on a Cattle Boat,” Mennonite, January 10, 2006; Dave Janzen, “The Cowboy at Sea,” Mennonite, April 15, 1947.
  18. 18. See, for example, “The Church and World Order,” Gospel Messenger, November 2, 1946. This article is a reprint of a release from the Federal Council of Churches.
  19. 19. For an example of a typical newspaper advertisement, see “Newspaper Advertisement in 1946,” in Cowboy Memories, eds. Bill Beck and Mel West. Little Rock, AR: Heifer Project International, 1994), 3.
  20. 20. Origins of the Heifer Project (High Library, Elizabethtown College, 2014), https://archive.org/details/Heifer_Project.
  21. 21. Peggy Reiff Miller, “Seagoing Cowboy Program Began 75 Years Ago This Month!,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), June 12, 2020.
  22. 22. See, for example, “Lowell Zuck Travels for UNRRA,” Etownian, October 25, 1946. The Etownian was published by Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, PA. On Brethren projects devoted to German refugees from eastern Europe, see Morse, New Windsor Center, 69–70.
  23. 23. Harold McNett, interviewed by Gordon Miller, October 18, 2016, SdArch 38. item 38-1, Digital-Materials: SdArch38-SET-001, Harold McNett Seagoing Cowboy Oral History, SdArch 38, James Madison University Libraries Special Collections (hereafter JMU).
  24. 24. Melvin Gingerich, “On Becoming a Sea Going Cowboy,” 1–2, folder 13, box 75, MGP, HM1–973, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA. I take the title of chapter 3 from Gingerich’s memoir.
  25. 25. Thanks to Peggy Reiff Miller for clarifying this point for me.
  26. 26. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 31–34, 67, USHMM.
  27. 27. M. Gingerich, “Sea Going Cowboy,” MCA.
  28. 28. Dwight Smith, “The Odyssey of a Sea-Going Cowboy,” in Scrapbook of Cowboy Memories, MCA.
  29. 29. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 68, USHMM.
  30. 30. Don Chatfield, “For Brethren News,” March 1, 1946, Brethren Service Committee, S-1268-0000-0039, p. 95, UNA.
  31. 31. “Newspaper Advertisement in 1946,” in Beck and West, Cowboy Memories, 3.
  32. 32. “Positions Offered,” Living Church, October 20, 1946, 22.
  33. 33. The information about UNRRA lowering the maximum age for attendants to fifty comes from “Information and Inspiration . . . ,” Gospel Messenger, December 15, 1945. Peggy Reiff Miller notes that the oldest cowboy she has come across was in his seventies when he sailed in late 1945. Reiff Miller, private correspondence with author, January 23, 2024. Lintner states that the oldest cowboy was seventy-two. See Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 68, USHMM.
  34. 34. Rev. Floyd Bantz is very frank about being motivated by a desire for adventure and “to see the sea.” See Origins of the Heifer Project.
  35. 35. Harvey Cox, Just as I Am (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1983), 32.
  36. 36. “Questionnaire Completed by Albert J. Meyer, Poland Sea-Going Cowboys, 1958–59,” Completed Questionnaires, folder 5, box 76, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA. For more on men’s motivation to become seagoing cowboys, see “With an Attitude of Adventure and Service,” Mennonite, November 20, 1945.
  37. 37. The choice to pursue missionary work versus humanitarian work had been debated by the Brethren even before the war started. See Durnbaugh, Pragmatic Prophet, 114–15.
  38. 38. Sometimes the Brethren Service Committee included Bibles in its aid packages. See Robert Ebey, “A Trip to Poland with Brethren Service Heifers,” box 1, JEN Hist. MSS-1-893, p. 9, MCA. Ebey wrote his memoir in 1947, and then in 1993 he produced a very slightly amended version. I use the 1993 version throughout. See also Lawrence W. Shultz, People and Places, 1890–1970: An Autobiography (Winona Lake, IN: Life and Light, 1971), 105; “Seagoing Cowboys Given Bibles to Carry Overseas,” Gospel Messenger, July 27, 1946.
  39. 39. “Positions Offered,” 22.
  40. 40. M. Gingerich, “Sea Going Cowboy,” MCA. For another example, see “Help! Help! Help!,” Arkansas Methodist, May 9, 1946.
  41. 41. “UNRRA,” Baptist Record, August 29, 1946.
  42. 42. M. Gingerich, “Sea Going Cowboy,” MCA.
  43. 43. On an army veterinarian’s perspective on the composition of livestock tender crews during World War I, see David McAuslin, “Transport Service (The Innocent Abroad),” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association vol. VI, no. 4 (1918), pp. 536–47.
  44. 44. Melvin Gingerich, “Recommendations to the BSC and the MCC Related to Sea-Going Cowboys,” Correspondence A to G, 1946, folder 4, box 75, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  45. 45. “Untitled and undated letter,” folder 8, box 75, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA. See also “Impressions the Crews Made on the Cowboys,” in Beck and West, Cowboy Memories, 50.
  46. 46. “Suggestions for Livestock Attendants,” box 1, folder 6, Charles C. Kocher Miscellaneous, 1946–2001, HM1–973, MCA.
  47. 47. “Suggestions for Livestock Attendants,” MCA.
  48. 48. See, for example, “Help Wanted!,” Christian Century, September 4, 1946.
  49. 49. Alison Collis Greene, “Southern Christian Work Camps and a Cold War Campaign for Racial and Economic Justice,” in Working Alternatives: American and Catholic Experiments in Work and Economy, ed. John C. Seitz and Christine Firer Hinze (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 255, 272. The crew members are named in Peggy Reiff Miller, “Creighton Victory Cowboys Adopt a Polish Boy to Their Crew,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), November 12, 2021.
  50. 50. Peggy Reiff Miller, “Special Crew #3: Interracial Crew Works and Studies Together—Part II,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), July 22, 2016; Collis Greene, “Southern Christian Work Camps,” 272.
  51. 51. Collis Greene, “Southern Christian Work Camps,” 254; Reiff Miller, “Special Crew #3.”
  52. 52. Mays is quoted in Reiff Miller, “Special Crew #3.”
  53. 53. A collection of reference letters can be found in General Correspondence, 1946, folder 270, series 1, part 2, Howard Kester Papers, Coll 03834, Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina (hereafter UNC).
  54. 54. Collis Greene, “Southern Christian Work Camps,” 273. An account of the sailing was written by William Howard Deihl and is called “Heifers for Europe.” It is accessible in folder 276, box 9, Howard Kester Papers, Coll 03834, Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC.
  55. 55. “Brethren Fellowship Crew,” Gospel Messenger, November 2, 1946; Reiff Miller, “Special Crew #3”; Collis Greene, “Southern Christian Work Camps,” 255.
  56. 56. Elmer S. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys from Stark County,” Heritage, October 2002.
  57. 57. For a full list of medical conditions that disqualified a man from serving as a cattle attendant, see “Suggested Medical Standards to Be Applied by UNRRA,” box 85, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC.
  58. 58. “Ruth Steenburgh (FOR) to Dan West (BSC),” May 13, 1947, box 13, series E, John Nevin Sayre Papers (hereafter JNS), DG 117, SCPC.
  59. 59. Peggy Reiff Miller, “Seagoing Cowgirls?,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), April 28, 2017. Reiff Miller guesses that the first “seagoing cowgirl” was Julia Byrd in 1950; Byrd was a journalist and accompanied her husband on a ship bound for Germany. This was well past the UNRRA period. For cowgirl reminiscences from later periods, see Bill Beck, “Cowboys of the Future,” in Beck and West, Cowboy Memories, esp. the entry by Arlene Roehner, 131–33.
  60. 60. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 10, USHMM.
  61. 61. E. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys from Stark County”; “Memorandum to Paul French from Girven H. Culley,” February 8, 1946, box 85, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC.
  62. 62. G. Yoder, Passing on the Gift, 107. See also Durnbaugh, Pragmatic Prophet, 174.
  63. 63. The Heifer Project’s first executive director, from 1943 to 1944, was Marvin Senger. See Peggy Reiff Miller, “The Three Executives Who Helped Shape the Heifer Project, Part I,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), September 13, 2024. On Bushong, see also Peggy Reiff Miller, “Benjamin Bushong: Chief Engineer of the Seagoing Cowboy Program,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), May 26, 2023; “Edwin R. Henson to M.E. Hays,” January 20, 1947, file 721.2, S-0518-0864, UNA.
  64. 64. Morse, New Windsor Center, 34. A thank-you card dated July 3, 1946, and signed by Bushong is part of the Ernest L. Boyer Center Archives at Messiah College; see “Notecard,” July 3, 1946, catalog no. 1000 0001 8752, https://messiah.pastperfectonline.com/archive/6E49F89F-C755-4417-8D9F-364458938209.
  65. 65. Reiff Miller, “Impossible Dream”; Reiff Miller, private correspondence with author, January 24, 2024. On Carol Stine, see Marine Bull Pen, no. 6, June 7, 1946, Marine Bullpens and News Circulars, 1946, folder 10, box 75, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  66. 66. “Letter by Ben Bushong,” in Beck and West, Cowboy Memories, 25.
  67. 67. Brant, “Heifer Project,” in Scrapbook of Cowboy Memories, MCA.
  68. 68. “Military Conscription,” Gospel Messenger, June 23, 1945.
  69. 69. Robert S. Zigler, interview by W. Haven North, November 5, 1998, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection Foreign Assistance Series, https://adst.org/OH%20TOCs/Zigler-Robert-S.pdf.
  70. 70. Byron P. Royer, “Diary of Seagoing Cowboys,” in Beck and West, Cowboy Memories, 29. On the swearing of oaths, see also Vernard Eller, “Beliefs,” in Church of the Brethren: Past and Present, ed. Donald F. Durnbaugh (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1971), 49.
  71. 71. On the seagoing cowboys program and CPS see Peggy Reiff Miller, “Civilian Public Service Unit for Seagoing Cowboys,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), May 13, 2016.
  72. 72. On the peace churches’ efforts to influence government conscription policy, see Donald F. Durnbaugh, “The Fight Against War of the Historic Peace Churches, 1919–1941,” in Challenge to Mars: Essays on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945, eds. Peter Brock and Thomas P. Socknat (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 218–39, esp. 232.
  73. 73. J. Howard Kauffman, “Dilemmas of Christian Pacifism Within a Historic Peace Church,” Sociological Analysis 49, no. 4 (1989): 369. On Mennonite pacifism see Steven J. Taylor, Acts of Conscience: World War II, Mental Institutions, and Religious Objectors (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009), chap. 1 and 2. On the prewar debates within American Mennonite communities about the meaning of pacifism, see Melvin Gingerich, Service for Peace: A History of Mennonite Civilian Public Service (Akron, PA: Mennonite Central Committee, 1949), chap. 2. For an exploration of related ideas, see Melvin Gingerich, Youth and Christian Citizenship (Scottsdale, PA: Herald, 1949).
  74. 74. Perry Bush, Two Kingdoms, Two Loyalties: Mennonite Pacifism in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 6–7; J. Kenneth Kreider, A Cup of Cold Water: The Story of Brethren Service (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 2001), 1–4; Durnbaugh, Pragmatic Prophet, 38–40; Cynthia Eller, Conscientious Objectors and the Second World War: Moral and Religious Arguments in Support of Pacifism (New York: Praeger, 1991), 22–23.
  75. 75. “Relief Work with the American Friends Service Committee,” November 2, 1944, box 77, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC; Hertha Kraus, International Relief in Action, 1914–1943 (Philadelphia: Research Center, 1943), 227.
  76. 76. “Correspondence of Albert M. Gaeddert,” box 24, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC. Gaeddert was the director of Mennonite Central Committee camps during the war. On the subject of the Friends and relief work, see J. William Frost, “‘Our Deeds Carry Our Message’: The Early History of the American Friends Service Committee,” Quaker Studies 81, no. 1 (1992): 1–51.
  77. 77. NSBRO was first called the National Council for Religious Objectors; the group took the NSBRO name in November 1940. It later became the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors, and today it is known as the Center for Conscience and War. See Taylor, Acts of Conscience, 16–19; Durnbaugh, Pragmatic Prophet, 127–30. The correspondence between Paul Comly French and M. R. Zigler about NSBRO and the formation of an alternative service program is extensive. See box 19, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC.
  78. 78. L. Weiss, Ten Years of Brethren Service, 29; Cynthia Eller, “Oral History as Moral Discourse: Conscientious Objectors and the Second World War,” Oral History Review 18, no. 1 (1990): 51–53. For an overview of Selective Service in World War II, see Eller, Conscientious Objectors, chap. 2, esp. p. 27.
  79. 79. “Lewis Hershey to Herbert Lehman,” January 30, 1946, box 85, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC. See also Bush, Two Kingdoms, Two Loyalties, 18, 72–73; Taylor, Acts of Conscience, chap. 3. On Roosevelt, see Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present and Future of the United Nations (New York: Random House, 2006), 25.
  80. 80. The UN Charter is reprinted in Thomas G. Weiss and Sam Daws, The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 736–55. The quote here is from the preamble on p. 736.
  81. 81. Taylor, Acts of Conscience, 22, 34. For examples of Draft Board decisions regarding CO status, see box 19, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC.
  82. 82. Morse, New Windsor Center, 37; M. Gingerich, Service for Peace, chap. XXI; “M.R. Zigler to Paul French,” March 22, 1944, M. R. Zigler Correspondence, 1944, box 20, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC.
  83. 83. These figures are a little different in various secondary sources. See Eller, Conscientious Objectors, 28–30, 49–50; L. Weiss, Ten Years of Brethren Service, 14; M. Gingerich, Service for Peace, 1, 90, 452; Morse, New Windsor Center, 23–24; Taylor, Acts of Conscience, 35; Bush, Two Kingdoms, Two Loyalties, esp. chap. 3. For additional context see Joseph Kip Kosek, Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), chap. 5.
  84. 84. Durnbaugh, “Fight Against War,” 235; Mitchell L. Robinson, “Conscience and Conscription in a Free Society: U.S. Civilian Public Service,” in Brock and Socknat, Challenge to Mars, 316–17; Taylor, Acts of Conscience, 49–50; Bush, Two Kingdoms, Two Loyalties, 75–76; M. Gingerich, Service for Peace, chap. XXI. Camp costs are also discussed in E. Leroy Dakin, memo dated December 29, 1943, Correspondence of Albert Gaeddert, box 24, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC; “Paul French to M.R. Zigler,” November 10, 1943, M. R. Zigler Correspondence, July–December 1943, box 20, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC. On Mennonite costs specifically, see Mennonite Central Committee, “Relief in Action: Europe,” box 21, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC. In the same archival collection, see A Year of Civilian Public Service (Akron, PA: MCC, 1942).
  85. 85. Bush, Two Kingdoms, Two Loyalties, 72–74.
  86. 86. M. R. Zigler, “Our Testimony of 1942–43,” February 10, 1943, M. R. Zigler Correspondence, December 1942–June 1943, box 19, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC.
  87. 87. Taylor, Acts of Conscience, 43–44.
  88. 88. M. Gingerich, Service for Peace, 276.
  89. 89. “The Rural Life School,” Gospel Messenger, n.d., box 39, series C1, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC.
  90. 90. M. R. Zigler, “Memorandum to Men in Brethren CPS Camps,” January 29, 1943, M. R. Zigler Correspondence, December 1942–June 1943, box 19, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC.
  91. 91. Robinson, “Conscience and Conscription,” 316; Durnbaugh, Pragmatic Prophet, 136; L. Weiss, Ten Years of Brethren Service, 16–17, 21–24, 27; Eller, Conscientious Objectors, 31. For samples of documents related to CPS and the seagoing cowboys see Reiff Miller, “Civilian Public Service Unit.”
  92. 92. “Paul French to Col. Lewis F. Kosch,” SCPC. CPS camp directors had to approve men’s applications to become cattle handlers with the BSC. Applications can be found in “UNRRA: Selection of Cattle Men (Questions),” box 85, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC. For a personal description of the application process, see Gerhard Friesen, “Observations on My Trip to Poland,” Mennonite, March 5, 1946.
  93. 93. “Hershey to Lehman,” January 30, 1946, box 85, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC. The change of date to October 1944 is confirmed in “Lewis H. Beckford to Charles Brasharen,” May 1, 1946, CPS no. 24 Washington County, MD: Director, box 39, series C1, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC. See also M. Gingerich, Service for Peace, 187–89. Gingerich refers to a June 1944 cutoff date rather than an October cutoff date.
  94. 94. “Albert M. Gaeddert (MCC) to Paul French,” January 19, 1946, UNRRA: Cattle Reserves, box 85, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC.
  95. 95. “Edwin R. Henson to Col. Lewis Kosch,” April 5, 1946, UNRRA: Employment of COs as Cattleboat Attendants, box 106, series B (formerly series G), part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC. See also Mitchell L. Robinson, “‘Healing the Bitterness of War and Destruction’: CPS and Foreign Service,” Quaker History 85, no. 2 (1996): 41.
  96. 96. E. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys from Stark County”; Robinson, “Conscience and Conscription,” 312. See also “Cattleboat Attendants Approved by Selective Service (as of June 10, 1946),” 1–6, UNRRA: Cattle Reserves, box 85, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC.
  97. 97. “CPS Unit Number 152-01,” Civilian Public Service, https://civilianpublicservice.org/camps/152/1. On the religious background of COs see also Durnbaugh, Pragmatic Prophet, 144–45; Reiff Miller, “Civilian Public Service Unit”; M. Gingerich, Service for Peace, 188.
  98. 98. Anne M. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys,” SCPC, December 12, 2012, http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/peace/conscientiousobjection/CPSResources/SeagoingCowboys.html.
  99. 99. Taylor, Acts of Conscience, 108; M. Gingerich, Service for Peace, 384–86; Durnbaugh, Pragmatic Prophet, 133; Robinson, “Conscience and Conscription,” 324, 326; Eller, Conscientious Objectors, 72. For an outline of discharge procedures for CPS men, see “J.N. Weaver to Benjamin Bushong,” March 28, 1946, UNRRA: Cattle Handlers, box 85, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC.
  100. 100. Henry A. Fast, “Present MCC Evaluation of CPS,” April 24, 1943, General Correspondence, August 31, 1941–January 22, 1945, box 21, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC.
  101. 101. Wilbur Nachtigall, “Directors’ Conference,”Pike View Peace News, September–October 1945, from Mennonite Library and Archives, Bethel College, North Newton, KS. This was the internal newspaper of the CPS Camp #5 in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
  102. 102. Heifer Moos, August 27, 1946, Heifer Letters, 1946–55, folder 1, box 3, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA. Though the experiment started with thirty-six men, it ended with thirty-two.
  103. 103. Ancel Keys et al., The Biology of Human Starvation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1950), 14–15.
  104. 104. Leah M. Kalm and Richard D. Semba, “They Starved So That Others Be Better Fed: Remembering Ancel Keys and the Minnesota Experiment,” Journal of Nutrition 135, no. 6 (2005): 1352.
  105. 105. Heifer Moos, BHLA. According to the note in Heifer Moos, Lutz’s article first appeared in a Methodist Youth Fellowship paper called CONCERN (the upper case is used in the original reference).
  106. 106. Keys et al., Biology of Human Starvation; Harold Steere Guetzkow and Paul Hoover Bowman, Men and Hunger: A Psychological Manual for Relief Workers (Elgin, IL: Brethren Publishing House, 1946). See also Kreider, Cup of Cold Water, 18.
  107. 107. M. R. Zigler, “From the Sponsors,” in Guetzkow and Bowman, Men and Hunger, 9.
  108. 108. Guetzkow and Bowman, Men and Hunger, 9.
  109. 109. Guetzkow and Bowman, Men and Hunger, 12.
  110. 110. Keys et al., Biology of Human Starvation, 13.
  111. 111. “Irwin Abrams to Julia Branson et al.,” January 16, 1945, Relief and Rehabilitation, box 77, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC. On the Friends’ withdrawal from the administration of CPS, see Eller, Conscientious Objectors, 68.
  112. 112. American Friends Service Committee, “Foreign Service Policy,” January 1945, Relief and Rehabilitation, box 77, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC. On the Friends’ position, see also “Paul J. Furnas to ‘All Men in Friends’ CPS,” January 24, 1946, section 1, box 49, series F, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC.
  113. 113. Melvin Gingerich, “‘Two Weeks at Sea’ (Draft),” Speeches and Manuscripts, folder 13, box 75, MGP, HM1–973, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  114. 114. For biographical details about Melvin, see Owen Gingerich, “The Return of the Seagoing Cowboy: Horses Afloat and Books Astray,” American Scholar 68, no. 4 (1999): 71–81. The questionnaires that the seagoing cowboys completed are available in the Melvin G. Gingerich collection at the Mennonite Church Archives in Elkhart, Indiana. See Completed Questionnaires, folder 5, box 76, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA. The questionnaires number in the hundreds.
  115. 115. O. Gingerich, “Return of the Seagoing Cowboy,” 72.
  116. 116. “J.N. Byler to Melvin Gingerich,” letters from September 25, 1945, and December 5. 1945, Correspondence, folder 2, box 75, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  117. 117. “Final Directions for Gingerich-Oswald Crew,” folder 2, box 75, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA; Melvin Gingerich, “Cowboys Going to Sea,” Mennonite Weekly Review, June 18, 1946, Speeches and Manuscripts, folder 13, box 75, MGP, HM1–973, MSS 1–129, MCA. The Gingerich and Oswald crews were combined for logistical reasons, according to Reiff Miller, private correspondence with author, January 23, 2024.
  118. 118. “Miscellaneous Items,”Gospel Messenger, May 25, 1946.
  119. 119. “Brethren Fellowship Crew.” This article is mainly about the interracial cowboy crew that sailed to Poland in 1946, but the reflections in it on the place of Christianity in the livestock program are broader.
  120. 120. M. Gingerich, “‘Two Weeks at Sea’ (Draft),” MCA.
  121. 121. “Melvin Gingerich to ‘Dear Fellows’ from,” May 21, 1946, Correspondence September 1945 to January 1946, folder 2, box 75, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  122. 122. Nelle Morton, general secretary, Fellowship of Christian Churchmen, “to the fellowship cattle boat crew,” June 8, 1946, General Correspondence, 1946, series 1, part 2, folder 273, Scan 7, Howard Kester Papers, Coll 03834, Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC.
  123. 123. “Final Directions,” folder 2, box 75, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  124. 124. “Paul Erb to Melvin Gingerich,” April 29,1946, Correspondence A to G, 1946, folder 4, box 75, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  125. 125. Peggy Reiff Miller relayed to me that an administrator at the New Windsor Center heard one of the first outbound groups of men refer to themselves as “cowboys.” Reiff Miller, private correspondence with author, January 23, 2024. A Polish journalist has speculated that the term “seagoing cowboy” was simply more attractive, from a recruiting perspective, than the appellation “cattleman.” See Andrzej Fedorowicz, “Morscy kowboje przybywają do Gdańska,” Polityka, March 1–7, 2017, 57.
  126. 126. Katie Nodjimbadem, “The Lesser-Known History of African-American Cowboys,” Smithsonian Magazine, February 13, 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/lesser-known-history-african-american-cowboys-180962144/. On American cowboys, see also Jacqueline M. Moore, Cow Boys and Cattle Men: Class and Masculinities on the Texas Frontier, 1865–1900 (New York: NYU Press, 2009). In 2005 the United States Senate decreed the fourth Saturday of July “National Day of the American Cowboy.”
  127. 127. Nodjimbadem, “Lesser-Known History.”
  128. 128. “Cowboy Education (Pre-Sailing Study),” Publicity, 1940s, folder 3, box 2, series 4/1/6, POW, BHLA.
  129. 129. For more on Protestant masculinities (and on the feminization of Christianity), see Yvonne Maria Werner, ed., Christian Masculinity: Men and Religion in Northern Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2011).
  130. 130. “Herbert H. Lehman to Brethren Service Committee,” Gospel Messenger, March 20, 1946. See also Amanda Melanie Bundy, “There Was a Man of UNRRA: Internationalism, Humanitarianism, and the Early Cold War in Europe, 1943–1947” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2017), 1.

4. Working Animals as Humanitarian Aid

  1. 1. Hannah Velten,Cow (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 10.
  2. 2. Velten,Cow, 17.
  3. 3. Cynthia Clark Northrup, ed., Encyclopedia of World Trade: From Ancient Times to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2015), 2:588.
  4. 4. Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 28.
  5. 5. Velten,Cow, 7, 69.
  6. 6. Tom Scott-Smith, On an Empty Stomach: Two Hundred Years of Disaster Relief (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 131. See also Maggie Black, Children First: The Story of UNICEF, Past and Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 64.
  7. 7. I am indebted to Yelena Abdullayeva for drawing my attention to the myth’s relevance to this story.
  8. 8. “National Sides,” European Central Bank, accessed August 12, 2024, https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/coins/2euro/html/index.en.html.
  9. 9. Ian Manners, “Global Europa: Mythology of the European Union in World Politics,” Journal of Common Market Studies 48, no. 1 (2010): 68–70. See also Sarah Dejaegher, “Europa and the Bull: The Significance of the Myth in Modern Europe,” New Federalist, June 14, 2011, https://www.thenewfederalist.eu/Europa-and-the-bull-The-significance-of-the-myth-in-modern-Europe,4280?lang=fr. On the myth and contemporary Poland, see Beata Klocek Di Biasio and Bohdan Michalski, “The Myth of Europe in Art and European Identities,” Politeja 5, no. 44 (2016): 1–31.
  10. 10. Leo R. Ward, “Brethren Heifers for Relief,” Gospel Messenger, March 22, 1947.
  11. 11. Frank Trentmann, “Coping with Shortage: The Problem of Food Security and Global Visions of Coordination, c. 1890s–1950,” in Food and Conflict in Europe in the Age of the Two World Wars, eds. Frank Trentmann and Flemming Just (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 34.
  12. 12. The expression “is fun to think with” normally appears in reference to animals or to food; I adapt it to refer to milk specifically. See Deborah Valenze, Milk: A Local and Global History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), ix. The phrase “gospel of milk” in the subtitle comes from Valenze, Milk, 249.
  13. 13. Hannah Velten,Milk: A Global History (New York: Reaktion Books, 2010), 10, 13.
  14. 14. Valenze, Milk, chap. 7.
  15. 15. Valenze, Milk, 148.
  16. 16. Valenze, Milk, 148. For a feminist criticism of the term “dairy cattle,” see Carol J. Adams, “Feminized Protein: Meaning, Representations, and Implications,” in Making Milk: The Past, Present, and Future of Our Primary Food, eds. Mathilde Cohen and Yoriko Otomo (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 26.
  17. 17. Valenze, Milk, 235.
  18. 18. Kendra Smith-Howard,Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History since 1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 5.
  19. 19. Mathilde Cohen, “Regulating Milk: Women and Cows in France and the United States,” American Journal of Comparative Law 65, no. 3 (2017): 475.
  20. 20. This section is adapted from Velten, Milk, 66, 71, 88, 91; Smith-Howard, Pure and Modern Milk, 157.
  21. 21. M. Cohen, “Regulating Milk,” 475–76. The association of milk with the word “purity” is made in many ways and contexts. On this, see Smith-Howard, Pure and Modern Milk, 8.
  22. 22. The terms come from Velten, Milk, 7.
  23. 23. Smith-Howard, Pure and Modern Milk, 34.
  24. 24. Matthew Lloyd Adams, “Herbert Hoover and the Organization of the American Relief Effort in Poland (1919–1923),” European Journal of American Studies 4, no. 2 (2009): 9. For the place of milk in British Quakers’ relief efforts after World War I, see Nerissa Kalee Aksamit, “Training Friends and Overseas Relief: The Friends Ambulance Unit and the Friends Relief Service, 1939 to 1948” (PhD diss., West Virginia University, 2019), 114–15.
  25. 25. League of Nations, Final Report of the Mixed Committee of the League of Nations on the Relation of Nutrition to Health, Agriculture and Economic Policy (Geneva: League of Nations, 1937), 87. The italics appear in the original report. On the League, see Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1930–1926 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Peter Becker and Natasha Wheatley, eds., Remaking Central Europe: The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
  26. 26. Abigail Woods, “Breeding Cows, Maximizing Milk: British Veterinarians and the Livestock Economy, 1930–50,” in Healing the Herds: Essays on Livestock Economies and the Globalization of Veterinary Medicine, eds. Karen Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 60.
  27. 27. Velten,Cow, 160–61. For a description of dairy cows’ lives in the context of the modern dairy industry, see Greta Gaard, “Critical Ecofeminism,” in Cohen and Otomo, Making Milk, 217.
  28. 28. Nick Cullather, “The Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” American Historical Review 112, no. 2 (2007): 354. For an overview of early nutritional science, see James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007), chap. 4.
  29. 29. Michael Bresalier, “From Healthy Cows to Healthy Humans: Integrated Approaches to World Hunger, c. 1930–1965,” in Animals and the Shaping of Modern Medicine: One Health and Its Histories, ed. Abigail Woods et al. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 123; Scott-Smith, On an Empty Stomach, chap. 5; Vernon, Hunger, 90.
  30. 30. Valenze, Milk, 251. See also 253, 289.
  31. 31. Amy L. S. Staples, “To Win the Peace: The Food and Agriculture Organization, Sir John Boyd Orr, and the World Food Board Proposals,” Peace and Change 28, no. 4 (2003): 497.
  32. 32. Peter J. Atkins, “Fattening Children or Fattening Farmers? School Milk in Britain, 1921–1941,” Economic History Review 58, no. 1 (2005): 64.
  33. 33. Thomas Webb et al., “‘We Cows Are in a Very Serious Predicament’: Constructions of Land Girls and Cattle in Britain in the Second World War,” Gender and History 34, no. 1 (2022): 181–82. On the provision of milk to schoolchildren, see Atkins, “Fattening Children or Fattening Farmers,” 57–78. See also Chris Otter, “Milk in Motion: Logistical Geographies in Twentieth-Century Britain,” Global Food History 9, no. 1 (2023): 48.
  34. 34. Dan West, “Hope for the World,” Gospel Messenger, September 11, 1948. This article makes reference to a meeting between West and Orr in the fall of 1946, in the middle of the Heifer Project’s work with UNRRA. Thanks to Peggy Reiff Miller for drawing my attention to this article. The description of Orr as a “crusading nutritionist” comes from Staples, “To Win the Peace,” 500.
  35. 35. Valenze, Milk, 254. See also So Bold an Aim: Ten Years of International Co-Operation Toward Freedom from Want (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1955), 35.
  36. 36. Valenze, Milk, 254. For a postwar celebration of milk, see Frank G. Boudreau, “Nutrition in War and Peace” (1947), repr., Milbank Quarterly 83, no. 4 (2005): 609–23. This paper was presented at the Conference of State and Provincial Health Authorities of North America in Quebec City, May 21, 1947.
  37. 37. Patrick J. Houlihan, “Renovating Christian Charity: Global Catholicism, the Save the Children Fund, and Humanitarianism During the First World War,” Past and Present 250, no. 1 (2021): 205; Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 298.
  38. 38. Herbert Hoover, “Can Europe’s Children Be Saved?” (address, National Committee on Food for the Small Democracies, New York, October 19, 1941), 1.
  39. 39. United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, Out of Chaos (Washington, DC: UNRRA, 1945). On postwar concern about children’s health, see also Jacob Darwin Hamblin, “The Vulnerability of Nations: Food Security in the Aftermath of World War II,” Global Environment 10 (2012): 47.
  40. 40. “Report by Dr. Henry Holle to Brig. Charles Drury, ‘Field Visit to Provinces of Cracow and Katowice,’” November 15, 1945, Health Country Mission Reports: Poland, S-1448-0000-0030-00001, p. 8, UNA. See also Józef Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka: Pomoc UNRRA dla Polski i polskich uchodźców w latach 1944–1947 (Kraków: Wyd. Naukowe Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego, 2018), 372–73.
  41. 41. John Vachon, “Poland—Gdańsk, Fresh Milk on the Dock,” S-0800-0009-0005-00005, UNRRA 4459, UNA.
  42. 42. Dan West, “Heifers for Relief: A Challenge,” Gospel Messenger, July 28, 1945.
  43. 43. “Answering Your Questions Regarding Heifers for Relief,” on or after January 1948, Relief Work (FOR): Brethren Service Committee and Heifer Project, 1945–48, box 13, series E, JNS, DG 117, SCPC.
  44. 44. Heifer Project Committee, Heifers for Relief: A Primer (Nappanee, IN: Heifer Project Committee, n.d. but the book refers to the war as ongoing), box 85, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC. The average costs of a heifer come from “Greenbelt Youngsters Buy Heifer for Needy Children,” Evening Star, July 15, 1946. A copy of Heifers for Relief is also in Clippings and Releases 3, 1940s–1960s, folder 9, box 2, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA. See also “World Brotherhood at Work, Notes on BSC Relief Work from Interview with Ben Bushong,” Brethren Service Committee, S-1268-0000-0039, p. 65, UNA.
  45. 45. “Basis of Requirements for Cows,” MRiRR, 2/162/0/2.4/506, p. 56, AAN.
  46. 46. On cattle breeds, see “Answering Your Questions,” SCPC.
  47. 47. Philipp Weintraub, “Reseeding Live-Stock Herds in Liberated Europe,” Baltimore Sun, June 28, 1945, 12. A Polish short film celebrating tractor donations appears as Polska Kronika Filmowa, Dostawy UNRRA—Wyładunek w porcie (Wytwórnia Filmowa Wojska Polskiego, 1945), accessed March 23, 2023, Filmoteka Narodowa—Instytut Audiowizualny (hereafter FINA), http://repozytorium.fn.org.pl/?q=en/node/4545.
  48. 48. A. Pępkowski, “Dostawy zwierząt UNRRA dla Polski,”Medycyna Weterynaryjna 3, no. 6 (1947): 399. See also Marek Żak, “Sytuacja aprowizacyjna Legnicy w latach 1945–1945,” Szkice Legnickie 36 (2015): 160, 166–68.
  49. 49. George Woodbridge, UNRRA: The History of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 1:488. On cattle breeds, see “M.R. Zigler to ‘to Whom It May Concern’ at UNRRA,” 1945, Brethren Service Committee, S-1267-0000-0083-00001, pp. 151–52, UNA; “A.G. Wilder to T.A. Pato,” October 31, 1946, file 945, S-0527-1105, UNA; Otter, “Milk in Motion,” 49.
  50. 50. Zigler, interviewed by North, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection Foreign Assistance Series.
  51. 51. Robert Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 1947, UNRRA selected records AG-018-040, accession 2015.245.1, record group RG-67.050, S-1021-0009-03, p. 78, USHMM.
  52. 52. “M.R. Zigler to ‘to Whom It May Concern,’” 151–52, UNA.
  53. 53. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 114, USHMM.
  54. 54. Bresalier, “From Healthy Cows to Healthy Humans,” 132.
  55. 55. See Gertrude Samuels, “The Unheard Cry of the World’s Children,” New York Times Magazine, October 12, 1947, repr. in US Congress, Proceedings and Debates, July 26, 1947, to December 19, 1947, 80th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 93, part 12: A4620.
  56. 56. Piotr Woltanowski, Andrzej Wincewicz, and Stanisław Sulkowski, “Protection of Children’s Human Rights and Health: A Legacy of Julian Kramsztyk, Janusz Korczak, and Ludwik Rajchman,” Global Pediatric Health 5 (2018): 5; Davide Rodogno, Night on Earth: A History of International Humanitarianism in the Near East, 1918–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 41–42.
  57. 57. UNICEF first used the general UN logo before adopting the cup-of-milk logo; the logo changed again in the 1960s. See Martina Tomassini and Ruthia Yi, “UNICEF: History of a Logo,” UNICEF, accessed April 28, 2022, https://www.unicef.org/about-unicef/unicef-logo-history. On the impetus behind the creation of UNICEF, see UNICEF, Today’s Children—Tomorrow’s Citizens (Lake Success, NY: UNESCO, 1948). See also Angela Villani, “Children in the Development Debate: The Role of UNICEF from 1946 to the First UN Development Decade,” Journal of World History 32, no. 3 (2021): 410.
  58. 58. Not all recipients agreed to drink powdered milk, however. See Maggie Black, Children and the Nations: The Story of UNICEF (Port Sydney, Australia: UNICEF, 1986), 44, http://www.cf-hst.net/unicef-temp/Child-Nation/Child-Nation-contents.htm.
  59. 59. UNICEF, Today’s Children, 3. See also Darel McConkey, Food and People: A UNESCO Project (New York: Manhattan Publishing, 1951), 8; Black, Children and the Nations, 47.
  60. 60. See Scott-Smith, On an Empty Stomach, 131.
  61. 61. “Basis of Requirements for Cows,” MRiRR, 2/162/0/2.4/506, p. 55, AAN.
  62. 62. Departament Ekonomiczny, Wyd. Obrotu Zewnętrznego, “UNRRA w Polsce,” Dostawy UNRRA, MRiRR, 2/162/0/2.4/511, p. 20, AAN.
  63. 63. On the history of horses in pre–World War II Poland, see Joanna Gellner, “Zauważone!—Zmiana stosunku do koni w Krakowie na przełomie XIX i XX wieku,” in Miasta/Zwierzęta, ed. Anna Jaroszuk, Igor Piotrowski, and Karolina Wróbel-Bardzik, vol. 8 of Almanach antropologiczny: Communicare (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2021), 90–101.
  64. 64. On horse physiology, see Greene, Horses at Work, 16–22.
  65. 65. Greene, Horses at Work, 5.
  66. 66. “Provisional Report on Agriculture and Food in Poland,” file 1032, S-0527-1068, p. 10, UNA; “Hodowla koni w Polsce,” Dziennik Bałtycki 156 (1946): 3.
  67. 67. “A.G. Wilder to T.A. Pato,” October 31, 1946, UNA.
  68. 68. “J.W. Kent, Regional Delegate, to E. Wróblewski, Chief Distribution Division,” July 2, 1946, Monthly Reports, 1946, S-1400-0000-0029, p. 21, UNA.
  69. 69. On horse numbers, see “Provisional Report,” 10, UNA; “Statement Given to UNRA by Stanisław Mikołajczyk,” file 78-B3L4, S-0527-1073, UNA; “UNRRA Mission to Poland,” February 1, 1947, Raporty misji UNRRA, MRiRR, 2/162/0/2.4/506, p. 119, AAN; “The Impact of UNRRA on the Polish Economy,” September 1946, Raporty misji UNRRA dotyczące wpływu dostaw UNRRA na godspodarkę Polski, MRiRR, 2/162/0/2.4/509, AAN.
  70. 70. “Provisional Report,” 9, UNA. The same statistics are presented in Eastern European Division Loan Department, “Preliminary Paper No. 6 for the Working Party on the Polish Loan Application” (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, May 26, 1947), https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/558411468095985925/pdf/multi-page.pdf, 5.
  71. 71. Charles Drury, “UNRRA in Poland,” The Empire Club of Canada Addresses, April 24, 1947, 331–44, https://speeches.empireclub.org/details.asp?ID=61185; Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 398.
  72. 72. Woodbridge, UNRRA, 2:221. Woodbridge also discusses tractors in UNRRA, 1:480–87.
  73. 73. At UNRRA’s request early in 1947, the Mennonite Central Committee formed a tractor unit; it was formally called the Unit for Tractor Operator Training in Poland. The job of the unit was to train people how to use the tractors that UNRRA had already sent. See Zygmunt Dulczewski and Andrzej Kwilecki, eds., Pamiętniki osadników Ziem Odzyskanych, 2nd ed. (Poznań: Wyd. Poznańskie, 1970), 296; Art Jost, “Tractor Unit to Poland,”Civilian Public Service Bulletin 6, no. 5 (1947), 2. This bulletin was a weekly publication of the Mennonite Civilian Public Service.
  74. 74. Irving Swerdlow, “UNRRA and Poland,” November 24, 1945, Bureau of Areas, Poland, S-1242-0000-0124-00003, p. 29, UNA.
  75. 75. “Reports—Field Trips Dr. Wilder, A.G. Wilder to M.E. Hays,” September 3, 1946, UNRRA Subject Files, file 72, S-0527-1107, UNA.
  76. 76. For a history of horse breeds in Poland, see Ministerstwo Obrony Narodowej, Koń i dogląd nad nim (Warsaw: Wojskowy Instytut Naukowo-Wydawniczy, 1946). On horses in medieval Poland, see Marcin Henryk Gapski, Końw kulturze Polskiegośredniowiecza (Poznań: Wyd. Nauka i Innowacje, 2014). On horses today, see Magdalena Anita Gajewska, “Polskie narracje o dobrostanie koni,” in Dobrostan zwierząt: Różne perspektywy, ed. Hanna Mamzer (Gdańsk: Katedra, 2018), 321–44.
  77. 77. “Reports—Field Trips Dr. Wilder,” UNA. On UNRRA’s support for artificial breeding programs, see Eastern European Division Loan Department, “Preliminary Paper No. 6.” On cattle breeding programs in Poland see Marian Kuczaj, “Przeszłość, teraźniejszość i przyszłość na Dolnym Śląsku,” Przegląd Hodowlany 10 (2011): 18–22.
  78. 78. “Report on Field Trip, 24 January,” January 31, 1946, UNRRA—Poland Mission, 1944–49, Requirements Branch, file 7, S-0527-1064, UNA.
  79. 79. “Reports—Field Trips Dr. Wilder,” UNA.
  80. 80. “Report on Field Trip, 24 January,” UNA. On Vachon’s photography mission, see also the letter from John Vachon to Penny, January 24, 1946, in Poland, 1946: The Photographs and Letters of John Vachon, ed. Ann Vachon, with an introduction by Brian Moore (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 20.
  81. 81. “Report on Field Trip, 24 January,” UNA.
  82. 82. Weintraub, “Reseeding Live-Stock Herds,” 12; Departament Ekonomiczny, Wyd. Obrotu Zewnętrznego, “Uwagi o planie importu rolniczego,” Dostawy UNRRA, MRiRR, 2/162/0/2.4/511, p. 125, AAN.
  83. 83. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 77, USHMM.
  84. 84. “Report on Field Trip, 24 January,” UNA.
  85. 85. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 77, 113, USHMM. Lintner writes that 65 percent of the horses were mares, but another UNRRA document puts that number at 80 percent. See “The Impact of UNRRA on the Polish Economy,” MRiRR, 2/162/0/2.4/509, p. 14, AAN.
  86. 86. Woodbridge, UNRRA, 1:488–89. On horse breeds sent by UNRRA, see also A. Pępkowski, “Dostawy zwierząt UNRRA dla Polski,”Medycyna Weterynaryjna 3, no. 5 (1947): 305.
  87. 87. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 137, USHMM.
  88. 88. “Reports—Field Trips Dr. Wilder,” UNA.

5. The Making of “Relief Animals”

  1. 1. Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 78, 87–88.
  2. 2. Kendra Smith-Howard,Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History since 1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 6.
  3. 3. Robert Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 1947, UNRRA selected records AG-018-040, accession 2015.245.1, record group RG-67.050, S-1021-0009-03, p. 16, USHMM.
  4. 4. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 97, USHMM. One of the consequences of a surplus horse population was a rise in horse meat production. UNRRA sent Canadian and American horse meat as part of its aid packages, including to Poland. See “Alta. and Sask. Get Horse Meat Packing Plants,” Coleman Journal, August 23, 1945; “6 Plants Pack Horse Meat,” New York Sun, August 29, 1946; Charles Grutzner, “Flesh Being Canned Here,” New York Times, September 26, 1946; Morley Murray, “Horse Meat for the Hungry,” Maclean’s Magazine, February 1, 1947.
  5. 5. The purchasing procedure is outlined in Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 76–80, USHMM.
  6. 6. E. Wiszniewski, “Notatka,” Inwentarz żywy z dostaw UNRRA, MRiRR, 2/162/0/2.4/517, pp. 3–4, AAN. Wiszniewski’s claims are repeated in the following article: Benon Gaziński and Bogusław Wanot, “Działalność UNRRA i jej pomoc dla rolnictwa w Polsce,” Rocznik Muzeum Narodowego Rolnictwa w Szreniawie 19 (1993): 20.
  7. 7. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 83–84, 136, USHMM.
  8. 8. “Ticks Tie Up UNRRA,” New York Times, February 17, 1946.
  9. 9. On the inland movement of animals, see Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 19–21, 80–82, 86, 91–94, USHMM.
  10. 10. USDA, “Regulations Governing the Inspection, Humane Treatment, and Safe Transport of Animals for Export,” 1944, Brethren Service Committee, S-1267-0000-0083-00001, UNA. This legislation also governed space and ventilation requirements for animals aboard ships and general care standards (including the need for animal attendants, though the specific ratio of men to animals was not provided; section 91.17 on p. 6 says that the number should be “sufficient”). On inspections, see also United States Bureau of Animal Industry, Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Animal Industry, Agricultural Research Administration (1945), 75.
  11. 11. On inspecting procedures, see Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 82–87, USHMM.
  12. 12. Letter from Ralph M. Delk, “Heifer News,” May 14, 1947, Heifer Letters, 1946–55, folder 1, box 3, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  13. 13. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 86, 135, USHMM.
  14. 14. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 82–87, 133–35, USHMM.
  15. 15. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 136, USHMM.
  16. 16. A Scrapbook of Cowboy Memories, 1994, From the Memories of Roger and Olive Roop, December 1985, folder 14, box 1, JEN, Hist. MSS 1893, MCA.
  17. 17. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 22–25, USHMM.
  18. 18. For a description of sick animals arriving at the port of Newport News, see Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 154–56, USHMM.
  19. 19. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 88, USHMM.
  20. 20. George Woodbridge, UNRRA: The History of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 2:219.
  21. 21. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 80, USHMM.
  22. 22. “Horses in War,” National Humane Review, December 1939.
  23. 23. The American Red Star gave assistance to England’s Royal Society for the Protection of Animals, for example. See Janet M. Davis, The Gospel of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 209–11; “Foreign War Animal Relief,” National Humane Review, July 1940; “Aid to Britain,” National Humane Review, December 1941; “The History of American Humane’s Rescue Team,” American Humane, July 8, 2022, https://www.americanhumane.org/fact-sheet/the-history-of-american-humanes-red-star-rescue-team/. Red Star also intervened in animal care during rail strikes in the US in May 1946. See “American Red Star Animal Relief Saves Livestock,” National Humane Review, August 1946.
  24. 24. US Congress, Senate, Committee on Armed Services, Hearing Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services United States Senate, 80th Cong., 1st sess., 1947, 108.
  25. 25. “Mr. Norgord’s Findings,” National Humane Review, April 1946; Hearing Before a Subcommittee, 111.
  26. 26. James M. Ross, “Kindness and Comfort Paramount in Shipping Horses and Dairy Cattle Overseas to Replace Losses in Farm Animals,” National Humane Review, April 1946. On veterinary care and military-related animal shipments during World War II, see AMEDD Center of History and Heritage, “Transportation of Animals,” August 30, 2022, https://achh.army.mil/history/book-wwii-vetservicewwii-chapter15.
  27. 27. Ross, “Kindness and Comfort Paramount.”
  28. 28. On Christian elements in American animal welfare, see Davis, Gospel of Kindness, 21, 219.
  29. 29. John C. MacFarlane, “Heifers for Hope,” Our Dumb Animals, April 1968; John C. MacFarlane, “Livestock Conservation—Part I,” Our Dumb Animals, June 1966. This paper was published jointly by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the American Humane Education Society.
  30. 30. “Massachusetts S.P.C.A. Sponsors Step Ramp,” Our Dumb Animals, September 1966.
  31. 31. James M. Ross, “Horses Under UNRRA for Overseas,” Our Dumb Animals, November 1946.
  32. 32. Ross, “Horses Under UNRRA for Overseas.”
  33. 33. “Federal Laws Urged for Livestock Safety,” National Humane Review, January 1948. The rules governing export animal transport appear here: USDA, “Regulations Governing the Inspection,” UNA.
  34. 34. C. P. Norgord, “American Humane Association, Local SPCAs, Act to Protect Animals Shipped Overseas,” National Humane Review, August 1946.
  35. 35. “UNRRA Shipments,” Our Dumb Animals, December 1946.
  36. 36. The Contributed Supplies Branch was established in June 1944 and headed for a time (at least until the spring of 1945) by one Dan Albert West; this Dan West was born in 1894 in Lansing, Michigan, and was no relation to the Brethren Dan West. On the Contributed Supplies Branch, see Carson W. Clements, “The Development and Failure of American Policy Toward Czechoslovakia, 1938–1948” (PhD diss., Miami University, 2001). For more on UNRRA’s relationship to donors and its policies on donated goods, see Administrative Order No. 23, June 12, 1945, Committee on Contributed Supplies, S-1263-0000-0029-00001, UNA. The same information appears in “Rec. Administrative Order No. 23,” June 12, 1945, Brethren Service Committee, S-1267-0000-0083-00001, p. 2402, UNA. On animal acquisitions, see also Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 16, USHMM.
  37. 37. On the Rebuilders of Poland, see “2,300 koni w darze od Polonii Amerykańskiej,” Zagoń Ojczysty, February 1947, Wnioski o odznaczenia dla obywateli amerykańskich, 1947, MRiRR, 162/0/24/5068, p. 16, AAN. On horses donated by American Polonia, see “Departament Ekonomiczny, Wyd. Obrotu Wewnętrznego,” Rozliczenia za towary z dostaw UNRRA, 1947–49, MRiRR, 2/162/0/2.5/564, AAN; “Inwentarz żywy z dostaw UNRRA,” 1947, MRiRR, 2/162/0/26/3271, p. 2, AAN. Occasionally, the animals purchased by organizations other than UNRRA (and the Heifer Project) but traveling on UNRRA ships were counted as “UNRRA animals” and therefore appear in UNRRA’s statistics related to the number of animals it delivered.
  38. 38. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 149, USHMM.
  39. 39. “Polish Supply and Reconstruction Mission in North America to the Ministry of Agriculture in Warsaw,” September 30, 1946, MRiRR, 2/162/0/2.4/519, p. 49, AAN.
  40. 40. “Brethren Overseas Relief: How It Is Distributed,” Gospel Messenger, November 24, 1945.
  41. 41. Donald F. Durnbaugh, Pragmatic Prophet: The Life of Michael Robert Zigler (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1989), 173; Duane Tananbaum, Herbert H. Lehman: A Political Biography (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016), 245–46.
  42. 42. “M.R. Zigler to ‘To Whom It May Concern’ at UNRRA,” 1945, Brethren Service Committee, S-1267-0000-0083-00001, pp. 151–52, UNA.
  43. 43. “Report by Ralph M. Delk to Co-Workers,” folder 9, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  44. 44. Philip West, “Dirty Fingernails, Heifers and China: Some Connecting Threads,” in Cowboy Memories, eds. Bill Beck and Mel West (Little Rock, AR: Heifer Project International, 1994), 112.
  45. 45. William I. Hitchcock, The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (New York: Free Press, 2008), 243–44.
  46. 46. Woodbridge, UNRRA, 1:488. See also M. P. Coppock, “I Wanted to See if I Would Get Seasick,” in Beck and West, Cowboy Memories, 39.
  47. 47. Clara Wood and Bruce Wood, “Nie Mam Nic,” Gospel Messenger, August 16, 1947; Clarence H. Rosenberger, “A ‘Cowboy’ Evaluates the Trip to Europe with Relief Cattle,” Gospel Messenger, September 22, 1945.
  48. 48. Peggy Reiff Miller, private correspondence with author, January 23, 2024.
  49. 49. Glee Yoder, Passing on the Gift: The Story of Dan West (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1978), 103–4.
  50. 50. Peggy Reiff Miller, “The Impossible Dream: How the Heifer Project Came to Be,” Messenger, July/August 2009.
  51. 51. Peggy Reiff Miller, “‘Hope’ the Heifer: A Christmas Story,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), December 23, 2016. That many heifers were called “Hope” comes from Reiff Miller, private correspondence with author, January 23, 2024. On the orphanage in Konstancin, see Adam Zyszczyk, “Domy Dziecka w gminie Konstancin-Jeziorna 1919–2015,” OkoliceKonstancina.pl, June 1, 2019, https://okolicekonstancina.pl/2019/06/01/domy-dziecka-w-gminie-konstancin-jeziorna-1919–2015/.
  52. 52. “Poland Has Hope,” Clippings and Releases 2, 1940s–1960s, folder 8, box 2, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  53. 53. Brethren Service, “More Than a Milk Factory,” Gospel Messenger, June 21, 1947.
  54. 54. “Report by Ralph M. Delk” (emphasis in original).
  55. 55. Marine Bull Pen, no. 6, June 7, 1946, Marine Bullpens and News Circulars, 1946, folder 10, box 75, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  56. 56. “Six Heifers and a Bull Bound for Europe,” Baltimore Sun, August 25, 1945.
  57. 57. The donation was made through the American Baptist Convention. See “Weston Children’s Gift to Europe’s Hungry,” Boston Globe, June 22, 1947. For another example, see “Church Gives $737 to Buy Heifers for Overseas Aid,” Sunday Star, June 9, 1946.
  58. 58. “Sea-Going Cowboys Sought to Escort 200,000 Heifers,” Boston Globe, March 27, 1946.
  59. 59. “Ralph M. Delk (BSC) to His Co-Workers,” November 6, 1946, Relief Work (FOR): Brethren Service Committee and Heifer Project, 1945–48, box 13, series E, JNS, DG 117, SCPC.
  60. 60. Leo R. Ward, “Brethren Heifers for Relief,” Gospel Messenger, March 22, 1947.
  61. 61. Ward, “Brethren Heifers for Relief.”
  62. 62. “Bon Voyage Party Given Europe-Bound Heifer,” Hollywood Citizen News, July 31, 1946, Clippings and Releases 4, 1940s–1960s, folder 10, box 2, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  63. 63. Annex #1, “Feeding of 150 Heifers en Route,” 1945, and Annex #2, “Bedding for 150 Heifers en Route,” 1945, Brethren Service Committee, S-1267-0000-0083-00001, pp. 171, 172, UNA. This file contains detailed costs for many other parts of the animals’ trip to a receiving country and for their earliest days at their destinations.
  64. 64. Dan West, “Heifers for Relief,” September 20, 1945, Heifer Project before November 8, 1946, 1938–46, folder 48, box 38, series 18, DWP, BHLA. On the locations of specific collection farms, see Loren Walters, “Material and Projects: Commission on World Service,” March 8, 1946, Heifer Project before November 8, 1946, 1938–46, folder 48, box 38, series 18, DWP, BHLA.
  65. 65. “Ralph M. Delk to Co-Workers,” November 21, 1946, 1945–53 Project Committee Reports, folder 19, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  66. 66. Peggy Reiff Miller, “The Roger Roop Heifer Project Collection Farm,” The Seagoing Cowboys (blog), September 25, 2015.
  67. 67. West, “Dirty Fingernails, Heifers and China,” 112.
  68. 68. Letter from Ralph M. Delk, “Heifer News,” May 14, 1947, Heifer Letters, HP, BHLA.
  69. 69. For details about the Roop farm, see Peggy Reiff Miller, “Activities of Heifer Project, Part II,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), October 23, 2015; Peggy Reiff Miller, “Seagoing Cowboys and the Heifer Project: The Maryland Story,” Catoctin History, Fall/Winter 2005.
  70. 70. Peggy Reiff Miller, “Activities of Heifer Project, Part I,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), October 9, 2015.
  71. 71. Reiff Miller, “Seagoing Cowboys and the Heifer Project.” Details also come from E. W. Wixson, “The Roop Holding Center,” in Beck and West, Cowboy Memories, 21; Pat Roop Bubel, “A Place for Heifers,” Messenger, May 1976.
  72. 72. Letter from Ralph M. Delk, “Heifer News,” May 14, 1947, Heifer Letters, HP, BHLA. For more about the activities on the Roop farm, see Reiff Miller, “Activities of Heifer Project, Part II.”
  73. 73. “Minutes of the Heifer Project Committee,” March 29, 1947, Correspondence 1947, folder 10, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  74. 74. The dedication comes from Reiff Miller, “Seagoing Cowboys and the Heifer Project.” On dedications, see also Robert Tate Allen, “350 Heifers for France Dedicated at Union Bridge,” Washington Post, April 7, 1946, Brethren Service Committee, S-1268-0000-0039, p. 40, UNA.
  75. 75. Wixson, “Roop Holding Center,” in Beck and West, Cowboy Memories, 21.
  76. 76. Reiff Miller, “Seagoing Cowboys and the Heifer Project.”
  77. 77. Ross, “Kindness and Comfort Paramount.”
  78. 78. Jacob C. Wine, “Diary of My Trip to Europe on a Cattle Boat,” 1946, Seagoing Cowboy Diary, part 2, Manchester University Archives and Brethren Historical Collection, accessed August 19, 2022, https://www.manchester.edu/oaa/library/archives/DigitalCollections/seagoingcowboydiary.htm. Thank you to Peggy Reiff Miller for clarifying details about Wine’s route.
  79. 79. Woodbridge, UNRRA, 1:489–90.
  80. 80. W. R. Strieber, “UNRRA Veterinarian’s Duties,” Iowa State University Veterinarian 9, no. 3 (1947): 152.
  81. 81. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 24, USHMM.
  82. 82. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 22–26, 135–36, USHMM. The quoted term comes from p. 23.

6. Cowboys and Animals at Sea

  1. 1. On the lack of source material generally, see Nancy Cushing, “Hazardous Commodities: Australian Live Animal Export from the Long Nineteenth Century to Today,” whitehorsepress, February 19, 2018, https://whitehorsepress.blog/2018/02/19/hazardous-commodities-australian-live-animal-export-from-the-long-nineteenth-century-to-today/.
  2. 2. There are rare accounts of animal transport during World War I, such as this one from the perspective of an army veterinarian: David McAuslin, “Transport Service (The Innocent Abroad),” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association VI, no. 4 (1918): 536–47.
  3. 3. Peggy Reiff Miller estimates that she has had some degree of contact with four hundred former seagoing cowboys. Reiff Miller, private correspondence with author, July 22, 2024. See also Peggy Reiff Miller, “In Memoriam,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), May 31, 2024. On seagoing cowboy reunions, see Peggy Reiff Miller, “Seagoing Cowboy Crew Reunions,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), October 14, 2016; and Dick Wanner, “Seagoing Cowboys Hold a Roundup, Talk About Old Times,” Lancaster Farming, last updated December 7, 2022, https://www.lancasterfarming.com/farming-news/news/seagoing-cowboys-hold-a-roundup-talk-about-old-times/article_9f358722-4957-5864-b394-24daea6132bf.html.
  4. 4. George Woodbridge, UNRRA: The History of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 1:516.
  5. 5. Dan Regan, “UNRRA: World Shipper,” Army Transportation Journal 2, no. 7 (1946): 5.
  6. 6. On the ship conversion process, see Robert Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 1947, UNRRA selected records AG-018-040, accession 2015.245.1, record group RG-67.050, S-1021-0009-03, pp. 26–30, USHMM.
  7. 7. The number of ships and ships’ capacities are not consistent throughout various sources. In the official history of UNRRA, Woodbridge says there were seventy-one livestock carriers. See Woodbridge, UNRRA, 1:516. In his history of UNRRA in Poland, Łaptos states that the UNRRA fleet consisted of seventy-three ships, which is also the number that Robert Lintner provides. See Józef Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka: Pomoc UNRRA dla Polski i polskich uchodźców w latach 1944–1947 (Kraków: Wyd. Naukowe Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego, 2018), 389; Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 90, USHMM. See also “Youths Sail World with UNRRA Herds,” New York Times, July 1, 1946; United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, The Story of UNRRA (Washington, DC: UNRRA, Office of Public Information, 1948), 30.
  8. 8. Woodbridge, UNRRA, 1:479.
  9. 9. Woodbridge, UNRRA, 1:487. See also Elmer S. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys from Stark County,” Heritage, October 2002.
  10. 10. On Liberty production, see M. D. Harris et al., “Revisiting (Some of) the Lasting Impacts of the Liberty Ships via a Metallurgical Analysis of Rivets from the SS ‘John W. Brown,’” Journal of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society 67 (2015): 2965–66.
  11. 11. Kathryn C. Hulme, Undiscovered Country: A Spiritual Adventure(Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), 176–77, 184.
  12. 12. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 7–8, 90, USHMM. See also Peggy Reiff Miller, “WWII Ships Re-Purposed as Livestock Carriers,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), August 28, 2015; “Youths Sail World with UNRRA Herds.”
  13. 13. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 90, USHMM. On Victory ship, see also “Victory Ships Take Cattle to Europe,” Baltimore Sun, January 7, 1946.
  14. 14. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 7, 90, USHMM.
  15. 15. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 17, USHMM. See also Regan, “UNRRA: World Shipper,” 4.
  16. 16. E. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys from Stark County.”
  17. 17. E. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys from Stark County.”
  18. 18. “Ice-Coated Freighter Docks Here with Pulp After Stormy Passage,” Boston Globe, January 24, 1947.
  19. 19. I discuss modern-day live animal maritime shipping in the conclusion.
  20. 20. This description of the loading process refers to Newport News and is taken from Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 158, USHMM. See also Peggy Reiff Miller, “Seagoing Cowboy Myths,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), January 10, 2025. For other descriptions of loading, see James M. Ross, “Kindness and Comfort Paramount in Shipping Horses and Dairy Cattle Overseas to Replace Losses in Farm Animals,” National Humane Review, April 1946; “Greece Cattle Sails Today,” Baltimore Sun, June 25, 1945; McNett, interviewed by Miller, Harold McNett Seagoing Cowboy Oral History, JMU.
  21. 21. J. Olen Yoder, Crossing to Poland (self-pub., 1986), 30. Thanks to Peggy Reiff Miller for sharing this resource with me.
  22. 22. This phrasing comes from Jonathan Peyton and is quoted in Nancy Cushing, “Animal Mobilities and the Founding of New South Wales,” in “Visions of Australia: Environments in History,” eds. Christof Mauch, Ruth Morgan, and Emily O’Gorman, special issue, RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society 2 (2017): 19, https://doi.org/10.5282/rcc/7905.
  23. 23. Dave Janzen, “The Cowboy at Sea,” Mennonite, April 15, 1947.
  24. 24. Smith, “The Odyssey of a Sea-Going Cowboy,” in A Scrapbook of Cowboy Memories, 1994, From the Memories of Roger and Olive Roop, December 1985, folder 14, box 1, JEN, Hist. MSS 1893, MCA. This anecdote is also repeated in Peggy Reiff Miller, “The Odyssey of a Seagoing Cowboy by Dwight Smith—Part II,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), February 14, 2025.
  25. 25. On the optimal sanitary-spatial conditions for cattle, see Chris Otter, “Milk in Motion: Logistical Geographies in Twentieth-Century Britain,” Global Food History 9, no. 1 (2023): 50.
  26. 26. E. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys from Stark County.”
  27. 27. Luke Bomberger, “Man Overboard?,” in Scrapbook of Cowboy Memories, MCA.
  28. 28. “Reed Ramsey’s Trip to Poland,” Josephine’s Journal, accessed February 13, 2020, http://www.josephinesjournal.com/reed.htm. Ramsey traveled to Poland in 1946 when he was seventeen years old.
  29. 29. M. P. Coppock, “I Wanted to See if I Would Get Seasick,” in Cowboy Memories, eds. Bill Beck and Mel West (Little Rock, AR: Heifer Project International, 1994), 39.
  30. 30. US Congress, Senate, Committee on Armed Services, Hearing Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services United States Senate, 80th Cong., 1st sess., 1947, 108, see “Question of Ownership of Captured Horses.”
  31. 31. Woodbridge, UNRRA, 1:490.
  32. 32. Reuel B. Pritchett with Dale Aukerman, On the Ground Floor of Heaven (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1980), 105.
  33. 33. Byron P. Royer, “Diary of Seagoing Cowboys,” in Beck and West, Cowboy Memories, 32. The full diary can be found at the Brethren Historical Library and Archives: “‘A Seagoing Cowboy in Italy,’ by Byron P. Royer,” 1947, series 18, Byron P. Royer Papers, BHLA. This passage appears on p. 42.
  34. 34. J. Yoder, Crossing to Poland, 33.
  35. 35. J. Yoder, Crossing to Poland, 33, 35.
  36. 36. W. R. Strieber, “UNRRA Veterinarian’s Duties,” Iowa State University Veterinarian 9, no. 3 (1947): 153.
  37. 37. Owen Gingerich, “The Return of the Seagoing Cowboy: Horses Afloat and Books Astray,” American Scholar 68, no. 4 (1999): 73.
  38. 38. “Announcement,” Gospel Messenger, November 16, 1946. The accident is also described in “Delk to His Co-Workers,” box 13, series E, JNS, DG 117, SCPC.
  39. 39. Peggy Reiff Miller, “Coming of Age on a Cattle Boat,” Mennonite, January 10, 2006.
  40. 40. Janzen, “Cowboy at Sea.”
  41. 41. O. Gingerich, “Return of the Seagoing Cowboy,” 75.
  42. 42. E. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys from Stark County”; Melvin Gingerich, “We Reach Poland,” Mennonite Weekly Review, August 22, 1946, Travel, Poland Sea-Going Cowboys, Speeches and Manuscripts, folder 13, box 75, MGP, HM1–973, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  43. 43. E. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys from Stark County.”
  44. 44. “Greece Cattle Sails Today.”
  45. 45. Maynard Miller, “Nunemaker’s Voyage,” Mennonite Historical Bulletin, October 1991.
  46. 46. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 9, USHMM.
  47. 47. Robert Ebey, “A Trip to Poland with Brethren Service Heifers,” box 1, JEN, Hist. MSS-1-893, p. 25, MCA.
  48. 48. Marine Bull Pen, no. 4, May 10, 1946, Marine Bullpens and News Circulars, folder 10, box 75, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA. For more on what ships’ captains thought about cowboys, see Don Chatfield, “For Brethren News,” March 1, 1946, Brethren Service Committee, S-1268-0000-0039, p. 93, UNA.
  49. 49. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 6, USHMM; Peggy Reiff Miller, “UNRRA Livestock Trips from the Eyes of a Veterinarian,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), March 12, 2021.
  50. 50. Strieber, “UNRRA Veterinarian’s Duties,” 152.
  51. 51. McNett, interviewed by Miller, Harold McNett Seagoing Cowboy Oral History, JMU.
  52. 52. O. Gingerich, “Return of the Seagoing Cowboy,” 73. Rev. Floyd Bantz also called the veterinarian on his ship to Greece in the summer of 1945 incompetent. See Origins of the Heifer Project (High Library, Elizabethtown College, 2014), https://archive.org/details/Heifer_Project.
  53. 53. Strieber, “UNRRA Veterinarian’s Duties,” 153. See also Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 10–11, USHMM. The veterinarians documented illnesses on a form called “Veterinarian’s Report on Voyage” (Form S-148). A copy of this form, dated May 9, 1946, is included in Lintner’s report on p. 63.
  54. 54. AMEDD Center of History and Heritage, “Transportation of Animals,” August 30, 2022, https://achh.army.mil/history/book-wwii-vetservicewwii-chapter15.
  55. 55. E. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys from Stark County.”
  56. 56. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 187–93, esp. 188, USHMM.
  57. 57. Strieber, “UNRRA Veterinarian’s Duties,” 153.
  58. 58. E. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys from Stark County.”
  59. 59. Arthur Meyer, “Art Meyer’s Cattle Boat Experience: Introduction to Planned Book, Dated January 1991,” Seagoing Cowboys, accessed February 13, 2020, https://seagoingcowboyswebsite.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/stories_artmeyer.pdf. Arthur Meyer also completed one of Melvin Gingerich’s questionnaires about the seagoing cowboy experience. See Completed Questionnaires, folder 5, box 76, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  60. 60. Cushing, “Animal Mobilities,” 19.
  61. 61. Frank Henry, “Through This Port: Life for Europe,” Baltimore Sun, March 24, 1946.
  62. 62. “Horse Foaling,” Texas A&M University Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences News, March 10, 2011, https://vetmed.tamu.edu/news/pet-talk/horse-foaling/.
  63. 63. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 87, USHMM.
  64. 64. Ira M. Wine, “Untitled” in Scrapbook of Cowboy Memories, MCA. For a reminiscence about a colt’s birth—and death, along with the mare—on board a ship to Poland, see Kenneth M. Heatwole, “Cattleboat Trip of Kenneth Heatwole, 1946,” Seagoing Cowboys, accessed February 13, 2020, https://seagoingcowboyswebsite.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/stories_kenheatwole.pdf. Paul Libby, who was twenty-four when he went to Poland in 1946, also talks about the many calves that were born and died on board his sailing. Libby had been a Methodist Conscientious Objector during the war. See A. Kern, Better Days Films—Day 12 (Seattle Community Media, 2013), https://archive.org/details/scm-316182-betterdaysfilms-day12-. This short film includes many terrific photographs from Libby’s personal collection. On-board births are also described in the biography of author William Styron; Styron worked as a cowboy aboard a sailing of SS Cedar Rapids Victory to Trieste in 1946. See James L. W. West III, William Styron, a Life (New York: Random House, 1998), 131. For a story of a calf born en route from Union Bridge to the port in Baltimore, see Thurl Metzger, “A Calf Is Born in Baltimore,” 1945–53, folder 1, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  65. 65. Melvin Gingerich, “Cowboys Going to Sea,” Mennonite Weekly Review, June 18, 1946, Speeches and Manuscripts, folder 13, box 75, MGP, HM1–973, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  66. 66. Ebey, “Trip to Poland,” 11, MCA.
  67. 67. E. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys from Stark County.”
  68. 68. Scrapbook of Cowboy Memories, MCA.
  69. 69. Elmer Summy, “Care of the Livestock,” in Beck and West, Cowboy Memories, 25.
  70. 70. Richard Rush, “My Cattle-Boat Experience, December 29, 1945–March 3, 1946,” folder 14, box 1, Seagoing Cowboys Collection, HM 1–973, MCA.
  71. 71. E. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys from Stark County”; entry for July 8, 1946, in Meyer, “Art Meyer’s Cattle Boat Experience.” The work routine is also outlined in Leslie Eisan, Pathways of Peace: A History of the Civilian Public Service Program Administered by the Brethren Service Committee (Elgin, IL: Brethren Publishing House, 1948), 327–30.
  72. 72. “George Weber, to Greece by Cattleship,” Completed Questionnaires, folder 5, box 76, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  73. 73. “Greece Cattle Sails Today.”
  74. 74. See entry for July 18, 1946, in Heatwole, “Cattleboat Trip of Kenneth Heatwole.”
  75. 75. E. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys from Stark County.”
  76. 76. Heatwole, “Cattleboat Trip of Kenneth Heatwole.”
  77. 77. Russell Helstern and Ed Grater, “Information for Livestock Attendants,” February 28, 1946, Travel, Poland Sea-Going Cowboys, folder 8, box 75, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  78. 78. Deborah Valenze, Milk: A Local and Global History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 1.
  79. 79. Miller, “Nunemaker’s Voyage.”
  80. 80. “John Nunemaker,” in Scrapbook of Cowboy Memories, MCA. In Peggy Reiff Miller’s picture book, The Seagoing Cowboy, the characters are composites, but Nunemaker is one of the main models for the titular cowboy, and Nunemaker’s horse Queen is represented as Queenie in the book. See Peggy Reiff Miller, The Seagoing Cowboy, illustrated by Claire Ewart (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 2016). For more on this horse and Nunemaker, see Peggy Reiff Miller, “The Real Cowboy John,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), May 27, 2016.
  81. 81. Martine Hausberger et al., “A Review of the Human-Horse Relationship,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 109, no. 1 (2008): 1–24.
  82. 82. For human-nonhuman emotional communities in another context, see Thomas Webb et al., “More-Than-Human Emotional Communities: British Soldiers and Mules in Second World War Burma,” Cultural and Social History 17, no. 2 (2020): 246.
  83. 83. Perry D. Avery, Ralph B. Diller and Andrew Avery Jr., “Trip to Poland, Summer 1946,” in Beck and West, Cowboy Memories, 49.
  84. 84. Elaine Walker, Horse (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 34, 140.
  85. 85. E. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys from Stark County.”
  86. 86. M. Gingerich, “Cowboys Going to Sea,” MCA.
  87. 87. E. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys from Stark County.”
  88. 88. Helstern and Grater, “Information for Livestock Attendants.”
  89. 89. Janzen, “Cowboy at Sea.”
  90. 90. See entry for June 28, 1946, in Meyer, “Art Meyer’s Cattle Boat Experience.”
  91. 91. Marine Bull Pen, no. 3, April 26, 1946, Marine Bullpens and News Circulars, folder 10, box 75, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  92. 92. E. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys from Stark County.”
  93. 93. Peggy Reiff Miller, “Luke Bomberger,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), August 26, 2016. See also Reiff Miller, “Coming of Age.”
  94. 94. Gerald Liepert, “Jerry Liepert’s Cattleboat Trip to Europe: 1946–47,” ed. Jamie Liepert Langston, Keepers (blog), April 3, 2008, http://keepersthe.blogspot.com/2008/04/jerry-lieperts-cattleboat-trip-to.html. On horses, see also Harvey Cox, Just as I Am (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1983), 36.
  95. 95. “‘Seagoing Cowboy in Italy,’ by Byron P. Royer,” BHLA.
  96. 96. Scrapbook of Cowboy Memories, MCA.
  97. 97. Ebey, “Trip to Poland,” 10, MCA.
  98. 98. On the subject of bad weather, see Ebey, “Trip to Poland,” MCA; Peggy Reiff Miller, “Seagoing Cowboy Meets German Relatives, December 1946,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), December 8, 2017. A particularly bad storm is also described by Jerry Liepert; the storm threw seventy horses overboard. See Liepert, “Jerry Liepert’s Cattleboat Trip.”
  99. 99. Hearing Before a Subcommittee, 108, see “Question of Ownership of Captured Horses.”
  100. 100. Hearing Before a Subcommittee, 109.
  101. 101. “Letters to Lillian,” March 31–May 1, 1946, 20, Foreign Travel, Involvement and Contacts, series D, part 1, George and Lillian Willoughby Papers, DG 236, SCPC.
  102. 102. Royer, “Diary of Seagoing Cowboys,” in Beck and West, Cowboy Memories, 32.
  103. 103. E. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys from Stark County.” Cowboy James Martin (who had been in the CPS) also remarked in his memoir that the captain ordered the regular removal of manure. See James Martin, “Seagoing Cowboy, March 6, 2007,” Seagoing Cowboys, accessed July 26, 2024, https://seagoingcowboyswebsite.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/stories_jamesmartin.pdf.
  104. 104. Warren Sawyer, interview by Shaun Illingworth, July 18, 2008, https://oralhistory.rutgers.edu/interviewees/64-text-html/1513-sawyer-warren.
  105. 105. J. Yoder, Crossing to Poland, 33.
  106. 106. On horse deaths, see Edgar H. Grater, “Sea Horses,” Gospel Messenger, September 20, 1947.
  107. 107. J. Yoder, Crossing to Poland, 29.
  108. 108. On animals that died aboard the ships, see J. Yoder, Crossing to Poland, 40; entry for July 2, 1946, in Meyer, “Art Meyer’s Cattle Boat Experience”; E. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys from Stark County.”
  109. 109. J. Yoder, Crossing to Poland, 31.
  110. 110. E. Yoder, “Seagoing Cowboys from Stark County.” See also Cox, Just as I Am, 35.
  111. 111. See entry for July 8, 1946, in Meyer, “Art Meyer’s Cattle Boat Experience.”
  112. 112. “Dead labor” is adapted from Jonathan Peyton, “‘A Strange Enough Way’: An Embodied Natural History of Experience, Animals and Food on the Teslin Trail,” Geoforum 58 (2015): 19.
  113. 113. J. Yoder, Crossing to Poland, 40.
  114. 114. See entries for July 9 and July 13, 1946, in Meyer, “Art Meyer’s Cattle Boat Experience.”
  115. 115. John E. Gingerich, “Cattle Boat Memoir,” in Scrapbook of Cowboy Memories, MCA.
  116. 116. J. Yoder, Crossing to Poland, 29.
  117. 117. “Telegram from Warsaw to Washington,” December 17, 1945, Brethren Service Committee—Poland, S-1267-0000-0093-00001, p. 12, UNA.
  118. 118. “Report on SS Mount Whitney,” UNRRA Subject Files, S-0527-1107, UNA.
  119. 119. For a detailed description of some of the common ailments that affected horses, see Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 154–57, USHMM.
  120. 120. “5,000 Horses Wait for Ships to Europe,” New York Times, September 27, 1946.
  121. 121. “Copy and Translation of the Minutes of the Conference Held on 10.3.47 at the Offices of the Representative for UNRRA and Import Affairs of the Ministry of Agriculture at Sopot, Rokossowskiego,” Minutes of Meetings, file 54, S-0527-1107, UNA. A Polish report summarizes the health risks for horses aboard the UNRRA ships. See E. Wiszniewski, “Notatka,” Inwentarz żywy z dostaw UNRRA, MRiRR, 2/162/0/2.4/517, pp. 8–11, AAN.
  122. 122. Strieber, “UNRRA Veterinarian’s Duties,” 153.
  123. 123. “UNRRA in Operation—by Countries,” Monthly Review, August 1945.
  124. 124. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 24, USHMM. See also Jacek Sawicki, Misja UNRRA w Polsce: Raport zamknięcia (1945–1949) (Lublin: Wyd. Werset, 2017), 124.
  125. 125. Woodbridge, UNRRA, 1:491. A loss rate of approximately 4 percent is confirmed in Hearing Before a Subcommittee, 109, see “Question of Ownership of Captured Horses.”
  126. 126. Loss rates are different in different documents because the various reports sometimes feature only specific ports, or they organize the animal species differently, or they deal with slightly different periods. The figures here are taken from data included in Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 40–41, USHMM. See esp. table 3 in “Number of animals shipped and lost by ports” and “Shipment of livestock from western hemisphere with losses by ships.”
  127. 127. “Heifer Project Committee,” August 6, 1947, Heifer Project Committee, c. 1947–48, folder 44, box 38, series 18, DWP, BHLA.
  128. 128. Peggy Reiff Miller, “UNRRA Livestock Shipments with Losses by Ship,” Seagoing Cowboys, accessed August 16, 2024, https://seagoingcowboys.com/seagoing-cowboys/the-unrra-years/.
  129. 129. “Report on UNRRA Livestock Imported to Poland from September 29, 1945 to July 28, 1946,” July 29, 1946, UNRRA Subject Files, file 72, S-0527-1107, UNA.
  130. 130. “Henson to Kosch,” April 5, 1946, box 106, series B (formerly series G), part 1: NSBRO Files, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC.
  131. 131. “Reports—Field Trips Dr. Wilder, A.G. Wilder to M.E. Hays,” September 3, 1946, UNRRA Subject Files, file 72, S-0527-1107, UNA.
  132. 132. The first horse shipments to Szczecin came in September 1946. See “Woj. Komisja Rozdziału Inwentarzy to Woj. Pełnomocnika Akcji Siewnej Szczecin,” November 11, 1946, UNRRA—Przydziały koni, Urząd Wojewódzki Szczeciński (hereafter UWS), 65/317/0/19.1/5129, p. 133, Wojewódzkie Archiwum Państwowe w Szczecinie (hereafter APwSz). On the state of Poland’s ports immediately after the war, see “Transport Rehabilitation in Poland” (London: Division of Operational Analysis, April 1947), chap. 5, S-1297-0000-0426-00001, UNA. For a brief history of the Gdańsk port in the immediate postwar period and beyond, see Bronisław Poźniak, “70 Lat Urzędu Celnego w Gdańsku,” Strefa Historii, June 15, 2015, http://strefahistorii.pl/article/1147–70-lat-urzedu-celnego-w-Gda%C5%84sku.
  133. 133. “Report on UNRRA Livestock,” UNA.
  134. 134. “Letters to Lillian,” 7, 11, SCPC.
  135. 135. On the response from the American Humane Association to losses, see “UNRRA Horse Ships Caught in Hurricane and Ice at Sea,” National Humane Review, November 1947.
  136. 136. “Report on UNRRA Livestock,” UNA.
  137. 137. See, for example, “Dispatch by Leith White,” January 9, 1945, UNRRA—Poland Mission, 1944–49, file 1222, S-0527-1073, UNA. On the fate of other goods delivered to Poland, see “Co się dzieje z towarami UNRRA,” Kurier Szczeciński, November 4, 1945.
  138. 138. Jacob Darwin Hamblin, “The Vulnerability of Nations: Food Security in the Aftermath of World War II,” Global Environment 10 (2012): 49–51, 58–59.
  139. 139. Rev. Peter H. Bury, “Poland,” Brethren Missionary, January 25, 1947.
  140. 140. “Final Directions for Gingerich-Oswald Crew,” folder 2, box 75, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  141. 141. E. S. Rowland, “Poland Found in Ruins,” Gospel Messenger, May 25, 1946.
  142. 142. Ebey, “Trip to Poland,” 27, MCA.
  143. 143. O. Gingerich, “Return of the Seagoing Cowboy,” 75.
  144. 144. Peggy Reiff Miller, “Seagoing Cowboys Mingle with Returning WWII Soldiers,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), March 2015. See also Eisan, Pathways of Peace, 330.
  145. 145. Alpheus Rohrer, “Diary of a Saltwater Cowboy to Poland in January and February of 1946,” in Scrapbook of Cowboy Memories, MCA.
  146. 146. Daniel Hertzler, “With Heifers to Poland and Greece,” Mennonite, June 20, 2016, https://anabaptistworld.org/heifers-poland-greece/. Cowboy Hertzler was a former editor of Gospel Herald, which was predecessor to The Mennonite.
  147. 147. Janzen, “Cowboy at Sea.”
  148. 148. J. Yoder, Crossing to Poland, 13.
  149. 149. Helstern and Grater, “Information for Livestock Attendants.”
  150. 150. Melvin Gingerich, “We Return to Newport News,” folder 13, box 75, MGP, HM1–973, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  151. 151. Lintner, UNRRA Livestock Program Historical Report, 193, USHMM.
  152. 152. For views of the regular crew, see Completed Questionnaires, folder 5, box 76, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  153. 153. O. Gingerich, “Return of the Seagoing Cowboy,” 76.
  154. 154. O. Gingerich, “Return of the Seagoing Cowboy,” 76.
  155. 155. “Erb to Gingerich,” folder 4, box 75, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  156. 156. Ebey, “Trip to Poland,” 9, MCA.
  157. 157. Edwin T. Randall, “A Privilege for a Preacher,” Gospel Messenger, November 9, 1946.

7. Bovines, Equines, and Humans in Poland

  1. 1. On Constanza, see Jacek Sawicki, Misja UNRRA w Polsce: Raport zamknięcia (1945–1949) (Lublin: Wyd. Werset, 2017), chap. 1; Józef Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka: Pomoc UNRRA dla Polski i polskich uchodźców w latach 1944–1947 (Kraków: Wyd. Naukowe Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego, 2018), 337–39.
  2. 2. Duane Tananbaum, Herbert H. Lehman: A Political Biography (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016), 223.
  3. 3. George Woodbridge, UNRRA: The History of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 1:350. See also “Draft of the Supply Department’s Brief for the PRD’s Tour of Poland,” PRDG’s European Tour, S-1435-0000-0100-00001, p. 60, UNA.
  4. 4. Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 338; Benon Gaziński and Bogusław Wanot, “Działalność UNRRA i jej pomoc dla rolnictwa w Polsce,”Rocznik Muzeum Naro-dowego Rolnictwa w Szreniawie 19 (1993): 18.
  5. 5. “UNRRA Activities in Poland,” UNRRA—Poland Mission, 1944–49, file 74, S-0527-1068, UNA; Woodbridge, UNRRA, 2:212. See also Sawicki, Misja UNRRA w Polsce, 100.
  6. 6. “Report on UNRRA Livestock Imported to Poland from September 29, 1945 to July 28, 1946,” July 29, 1946, UNRRA Subject Files, file 72, S-0527-1107, UNA.
  7. 7. Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 338; Gaziński and Wanot, “Działalność UNRRA i jej pomoc,” 18. For a brief contemporary overview of the three Polish ports of Gdynia, Gdańsk, and Szczecin, see Porty Gdynia, Gdańsk, Szczecin(Gdynia: Główny Urząd Morski, 1946).
  8. 8. Sawicki, Misja UNRRA w Polsce, 108.
  9. 9. Herbert W. Robinson, Operational Analysis Papers No. 45: The Impact of UNRRA on the Polish Economy (London: Division of Operational Analysis, 1947), 4, 7.
  10. 10. Bruno Kamiński, “Fear Management: Foreign Threats in the Postwar Polish Propaganda—the Influence and the Reception of the Communist Media (1944–1956)” (PhD diss., European University Institute, 2016), 234–35.
  11. 11. “Provisional Report on Agriculture and Food in Poland,” file 1032, S-0527-1068, p. 10, UNA.
  12. 12. Robert S. Zigler, interview by W. Haven North, November 5, 1998, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection Foreign Assistance Series, https://adst.org/OH%20TOCs/Zigler-Robert-S.pdf.
  13. 13. See, for example, Ralph E. Smeltzer, “From a Relief Worker’s Diary,” Gospel Messenger, December 28, 1946; L. W. Shultz, “‘Poland Devastated’ Is Visitor’s Report,” Gospel Messenger, June 15, 1946.
  14. 14. Glenn N. Rohrer, “My Sea-Going Cowboy Experience,” in A Scrapbook of Cowboy Memories, 1994, From the Memories of Roger and Olive Roop, December 1985, folder 14, box 1, JEN, Hist. MSS 1893, MCA.
  15. 15. “Lowell Zuck Travels for UNRRA,” Etownian, October 25, 1946.
  16. 16. See entry for July 16, 1946, in Arthur Meyer, “Art Meyer’s Cattle Boat Experience: Introduction to Planned Book, Dated January 1991,” Seagoing Cowboys, accessed February 13, 2020, https://seagoingcowboyswebsite.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/stories_artmeyer.pdf.
  17. 17. Gerhard Friesen, “Observations on My Trip to Poland,” Mennonite, March 5, 1946. In their memoirs cowboys frequently used the prewar German name for Gdańsk: Danzig. I use Gdańsk because the city was within Polish borders after the war and this was its official name.
  18. 18. Friesen, “Observations on My Trip.”
  19. 19. Dwight Smith, “The Odyssey of a Sea-Going Cowboy,” in Scrapbook of Cowboy Memories, MCA.
  20. 20. Smith, “Odyssey of a Sea-Going Cowboy,” in Scrapbook of Cowboy Memories, MCA.
  21. 21. Owen Gingerich, “The Return of the Seagoing Cowboy: Horses Afloat and Books Astray,” American Scholar 68, no. 4 (1999): 76.
  22. 22. “Questionnaire Completed by Leroy L. Peachey (Who Had Been in the CPS) About His 1946 Trip to Poland,” Completed Questionnaires, folder 5, box 76, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  23. 23. Harvey Cox, Just as I Am (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1983), 37.
  24. 24. J. Olen Yoder, Crossing to Poland (self-pub., 1986), 49–50.
  25. 25. On Stutthof, see Peggy Reiff Miller, “Stories from the S.S. Mount Whitney—We Must Never Forget,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), April 28, 2023; and “More on the Stutthof Concentration Camp #1,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), June 9, 2023.
  26. 26. “Outgoing Cablegram from R. Lintner to Warsaw,” November 26, 1946, Brethren Service Committee—Personnel, S-1267-0000-0091-00001, p. 4, UNA.
  27. 27. See entry for July 25, 1946, in Kenneth M. Heatwole, “Cattleboat Trip of Kenneth Heatwole, 1946,” Seagoing Cowboys, accessed February 13, 2020, https://seagoingcowboyswebsite.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/stories_kenheatwole.pdf.
  28. 28. Warren D. Sawyer, “I Took One Trip to Danzig . . . ,” in Scrapbook of Cowboy Memories, MCA.
  29. 29. Alpheus Rohrer, “Diary of a Saltwater Cowboy to Poland in January and February of 1946,” in Scrapbook of Cowboy Memories, 4, MCA; Richard Rush, “My Cattle-Boat Experience, December 29, 1945–March 3, 1946,” folder 14, box 1, Seagoing Cowboys Collection, HM 1–973, MCA.
  30. 30. Peggy Reiff Miller, “Cowboys at Christmas,” World Ark, Holiday 2014.
  31. 31. J. Yoder, Crossing to Poland, 49. On labor shortages on the docks, see also McNett, interviewed by Miller, Harold McNett Seagoing Cowboy Oral History, JMU.
  32. 32. Cox, Just as I Am, 37, 39.
  33. 33. See entry for July 26, 1946, in Heatwole, “Cattleboat Trip of Kenneth Heatwole.”
  34. 34. “Suggestions for Livestock Attendants,” folder 8, box 75, MGP, Hist. MSS. 1–129, MCA.
  35. 35. Melvin Gingerich, “Recommendations to the BSC and the MCC Related to Sea-Going Cowboys,” Correspondence A to G, 1946, folder 4, box 75, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA. The BSC’s opposition to smoking suited UNRRA very well, as the fire hazard on ships packed with hay was great. See Melvin Gingerich, “We Reach Poland,” Mennonite Weekly Review, August 22, 1946, Travel, Poland Sea-Going Cowboys, Speeches and Manuscripts, folder 13, box 75, MGP, HM1–973, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA. For the BSC’s views on the black market, see also “Cowboy Education (Pre-Sailing Study),” folder 3, box 2, series 4/1/6, POW, BHLA. On the search for souvenirs, see Friesen, “Observations on My Trip.” On the long history of Mennonites in what became northern Poland in the postwar period, see Edmund Kizik, “Mennonici,” in Pod wspólnym niebem, eds. M. Kopczyński and W. Tygielski (Warsaw: Muzeum Historii Polski, 2010), 215–34.
  36. 36. Russell Helstern and Ed Grater, “Information for Livestock Attendants,” February 28, 1946, Travel, Poland Sea-Going Cowboys, folder 8, box 75, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  37. 37. Friesen, “Observations on My Trip.”
  38. 38. “Protokół,” May 6, 1946, Biuro Odbioru Transportów Morskich w Gdańsku, 2/319/0/2/21, AAN. Specific firms were hired for unloading; these included Bałtyk, Pantarei, and Wiator. See “Notatka w sprawie wyładunku inwentarza żywego z UNRRA,” Dostawy koni i bydła z UNRRA, 1946–48, Związek Samopomocy Chłopskiej (hereafter ZSC), 2/160/0/3/1104, p. 3, AAN. See also “Protokół,” June 26, 1946, Biuro Odbioru Transportów Morskich w Gdańsku, 2/319/0/2/21, AAN. On dock workers’ employment conditions, including the chronic shortage of skilled men for the job, see various articles in Gazeta Morska—Pismo Marynarki Wojennej from 1946.
  39. 39. Woodbridge, UNRRA, 2:212.
  40. 40. “Departament Kontroli, Samopomoc Chłopska to Pełnomocnik do Spraw Akcji Siewnej,” February 14, 1946, Kontrola przeprowadzona przez główny inspek-torat . . . , 1946, MRiRR, 2/162/0/4/682, pp. 11–12, AAN.
  41. 41. Shultz, “Poland Devastated.” See also “Proposed Church of the Brethren Relief Party,” December 1946, Brethren Service Committee, S-1267-0000-0093-00001, p. 3, UNA.
  42. 42. “Departament Kontroli, Samopomoc Chłopska,” p. 11, AAN.
  43. 43. “Copy and Translation of the Minutes of the Conference Held on 10.3.47 at the Offices of the Representative for UNRRA and Import Affairs of the Ministry of Agriculture at Sopot, Rokossowskiego,” Minutes of Meetings, file 54, S-0527-1107, UNA.
  44. 44. “J.B. Oliver to UNRRA,” January 24, 1947, file 2000, S-0527-1105, UNA.
  45. 45. M. M., “Przychodzą statki z końmi,”Dziennik Bałtycki 199 (1946): 3.
  46. 46. Joel, “Farmboy Seminarian on a Cattleboat to Poland, 1946,” Far Outliers, December 26, 2009, https://faroutliers.com/2009/12/26/farmboy-seminarian-on-a-cattleboat-to-poland-1946/.
  47. 47. Peggy Reiff Miller, “The Real Cowboy John,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), May 27, 2016.
  48. 48. “Sea-Going Cowboys Research,” “UNRRA Livestock Summary” (copied from UNRRA Weekly Bulletin), June 29, 1946, folder 2, box 76, Melvin C. Gingerich Collection, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA; Gingerich, “We Reach Poland.”
  49. 49. “Letters to Lillian,” March 31–May 1, 1946, Foreign Travel, Involvement and Contacts, series D, part 1, George and Lillian Willoughby Papers, DG 236, SCPC. George wrote pages and pages to Lillian about everything he saw and experienced on all parts of his trip to Poland in April 1946 aboard SS Clarksville Victory with a crew composed mostly of men from the Civilian Public Service (George himself had been in the CPS).
  50. 50. Woodbridge, UNRRA, 2:223.
  51. 51. “Questionnaire of Leroy D. Reitz of Pennsylvania Who Made Two Trips to Poland, Both in 1946,” Completed Questionnaires, folder 5, box 76, MGP, HIST. MSS. 1–129, MCA.
  52. 52. “Livestock: Rough on General Story,” Clippings and Releases 2, 1940s–1960s, folder 8, box 2, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  53. 53. “Farm Folk Grateful for Animals from American Farms,” Clippings and Releases 1, folder 7, box 2, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  54. 54. Peggy Reiff Miller, “The SS Park Victory: Livestock Trip #2, Poland, December 1945—Part IV,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), March 23, 2018.
  55. 55. For other examples, see L. W. Shultz, “Mission to Poland,” Gospel Messenger, February 23, 1946; and Mark Ebersole, “The Story of the Cattle Sent to Italy,” Gospel Messenger, April 5, 1947.
  56. 56. Dan Shenk, “Aftermath,” Truth, August 25, 1996.
  57. 57. Marek Żak, “Sytuacja aprowizacyjna Legnicy w latach 1945–1945,”Szkice Legnickie 36 (2015): 160.
  58. 58. See entry for July 18, 1946, in Meyer, “Art Meyer’s Cattle Boat Experience.”
  59. 59. William Reams, “Colby’s Cowboys,” 2005, folder 9, box 1, Seagoing Cowboy Collection, HM 1–973, p. 4, MCA.
  60. 60. “Copy and Translation of the Minutes,” UNA.
  61. 61. The large ministries involved in receiving UNRRA (and other aid) shipments included the Ministry of Food Supply and Trade (Ministerstwo Aprowizacji i Handlu) and the Ministry of Shipping and Foreign Trade (Ministerstwo Żeglugi i Handlu Zagranicznego). See Aleksander Juźwik, “Zagraniczna pomoc charytatywna dla dzieci i młodzieży w Polsce w latach 1945–50,” Polska 1944/45–1980: Studia i Materiały 11 (2013): 96; Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 352; Woodbridge, UNRRA, 2:39.
  62. 62. United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, The Story of UNRRA (Washington, DC: UNRRA, Office of Public Information, 1948), 14–15.
  63. 63. “Report on Field Trip to Baltic Port Area and Bydgoszcz,” February 12, 1946, UNRRA—Poland Mission, 1944–49, Food and Agricultural Rehabilitation Division, Warsaw, file 7, S-0527-1064, UNA. See also Piotr Jachowicz, “Działalność UNRRA w Polsce w latach 1945–1948,”Zeszyty Naukowe 2, no. 2 (1998): 47.
  64. 64. Woodbridge, UNRRA, 2:48.
  65. 65. Rohrer, “Diary of a Saltwater Cowboy,” in Scrapbook of Cowboy Memories, MCA; Woodbridge, UNRRA, 1:489.
  66. 66. Departament produkcji rolnej, MRiRR, 2/162/0/21.5/3378, AAN.
  67. 67. “Państwowa lecznica wet. UNRRA to naczelnik wojewódzki, wydział wet.,” September 29, 1946, UWS, 65/317/0/25/5518, p. 7, APwSz.
  68. 68. “Report on UNRRA Livestock,” UNA. See also Departament Produkcji Rolnej, Wyd. Chowu Koni, MRiRR, 2/162/0/21.5/3378, p. 56, AAN.
  69. 69. “Instrukcja w sprawie przydziału koni chorych z dostaw UNRRA,” October 25, 1946, Ministerstwo Ziem Odzyskanych w Warszawie (hereafter MZO), 2/196/0/06/1031, p. 1, AAN.
  70. 70. A. Pępkowski, “Dostawy zwierząt UNRRA dla Polski,”Medycyna Weterynaryjna 3, no. 4 (1947): 233. On Polish veterinarians, see “Monthly Report,” c. May 1946, in “Reports—Field Trips Dr. Wilder, A.G. Wilder to M.E. Hays,” September 3, 1946, UNRRA Subject Files, file 72, S-0527-1107, UNA.
  71. 71. Jarosław Wasielewski, “Jak po wojnie leczono konie z UNRRY w Gdańsku,” trojmiasto.pl, February 26, 2019,https://historia.trojmiasto.pl/Jak-w-Gdańsku-po-wojnie-konie-z-UNRRY-leczono-n132173.html#opinions-wrap.
  72. 72. “Report on UNRRA Livestock,” UNA. A report on the clinic itself is in the same UN file folder: A. G. Wilder, “Report on field trip,” July 1946.
  73. 73. A. Pępkowski, “Dostawy zwierząt UNRRA dla Polski,”Medycyna Weterynaryjna 3, no. 4 (1947): 233.
  74. 74. “Dr. B. Nowicki, Państwowy Instytut Weterynaryjny to MRiRR (February 18, 1946),” MRiRR, 2/162/0/4/682, p. 10, AAN. See also A. Pępkowski, “Dostawy zwierząt UNRRA dla Polski,” Medycyna Weterynaryjna 3, no. 6 (1947): 400. On postwar rebuilding of the veterinary field, see Sprawozdanie z działalności spółdzielni lekarzy weterynaryjnych R.P. z.o.u. “Składnica weterynaryjna” za rok 1946 (Warsaw: Nakładem Składnicy Weterynaryjnej Spółdzielni Lekarzy Weterynaryjnych R.P., 1947), 7.
  75. 75. Wasielewski, “Jak po wojnie leczono konie.”
  76. 76. Witold Stefański, “Materiały w sprawie produkcji antygenu,”Medycyna Weterynaryjna 3, no. 10 (1947): 656. See also the February 1947 issue of Medycyna Weterynaryjna.
  77. 77. “Protokół, November 28, 1946 w biurze przedstawiciela MRiRR do Spraw UNRRA,” MRiRR, 2/162/0/26/3259, pp. 42, 45, AAN.
  78. 78. “Rachunek,” January 15, 1947, UWS, 65/317/0/25/5518, p. 1, APwSZ. See also “Instrukcja w sprawie rozdziału artykułów rolniczych z dostaw UNRAA,” 13; Sprawa przydziału inwentarza żywego z dostaw UNRA—korespondencja z powia-tami, 1946, WUZW, 72/509/0-542, p. 13, APW.
  79. 79. “Rolnicza Centrala Mięsna, oddz. w Warszawie, to MRiRR,” September 19, 1946, Dostawy koni i bydła z UNRRA, 1946–48, ZSC, 2/160/0/3/1104, AAN.
  80. 80. “Protokół w sprawie państwowej lecznicy zwierząt z dostaw UNRRA,” September 12, 1946, 9; Ministry of Agriculture to Wydział Wet. Woj. Urz. Ziem. W Szczecinie, 77, Dział Weterynaryjny, Lecznice UNRRA, UWS, 65/317/0/25/5518, ApwSZ.
  81. 81. Veterinary manuals included the following: Władysław Jastrzębiec, ed., Poradnik weterynaryjny dla rolników i hodowców (Warsaw: Wyd. Księgarnia Rolnicza, 1945); Ministerstwo Obrony Narodowej, Instrukcja weterynaryjna: Zapobieganie i zwalczanie chorób zaraźliwych u koni (Łódź: Wojskowy Instytut Naukowo-Wydawniczy, 1946); Jan K. Chodowiecki, Gospodarska hodowla koni, 3rd ed. (Kraków: Polskie Towarzystwo Zootechnicze, 1946); A. Sztremer,Opieka nad źrebną klaczą i źrebnięciem(Olsztyn: Druk Państwowa, 1947).
  82. 82. Woodbridge, UNRRA, 1:491.
  83. 83. “Report on UNRRA Livestock,” UNA.
  84. 84. Departament Ekonomiczny, Wyd. Obrotu Zewnętrznego, “UNRRA Mission to Poland,” February 1, 1947, MRiRR, 2/162/0/2.4/506, p. 112, AAN.
  85. 85. Rohrer, “Diary of a Saltwater Cowboy,” in Scrapbook of Cowboy Memories, MCA.
  86. 86. M. M., “Przychodzą statki z końmi,”Dziennik Bałtycki 199 (1946): 3.
  87. 87. Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 391.
  88. 88. Sprawa przydziału inwentarza, WUZW, 72/509/0-542, APW. On the role of private companies in transporting animals, see also Thurl Metzger, “Report of Work in Poland, October 15, 1946 to April 16, 1947,” 1945–53 Project Committee Reports, folder 19, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  89. 89. The Central Office for Meat was also translated as the Agricultural Meat Corporation. On this body’s work, see “The Agricultural Meat Corporation Ltd. in Warsaw,” in Katalog oficjalny pierwszych Międzynarodowych Targów Gdańskich, 2.VIII-10.VIII, 1947 (Gdańsk: Wydawcy Międzynarodowe Targi Gdańskie, 1947), 116; “Rolnicza centrala mięsna to MRiRR,” November 9, 1945, ZSC, 2/160/0/3/1104, AAN; “Leo Gerstenzang to C.M. Drury,” February 18, 1946, Monthly Reports: December–January, S-1400-0000-0025-00001, p. 55, UNA. Gerstenzang was the chief officer of Regional Delegates of the UNRRA Mission to Poland.
  90. 90. “Uwagi do konferencji,” September 28, 1946, ZSC, 2/160/0/3/1104, AAN.
  91. 91. See assorted letters throughout the following files: Dotyczy: podziału koni otrzymanych z Ameryki przez UNRRA, 1945–46, WUZW, 72/509/0-828, APW; Sprawa przydziału inwentarza, WUZW, 72/509/0-542, APW.
  92. 92. “Report on UNRRA Livestock,” UNA; “Urząd Ziemski to Biuro Kontroli, Szczecin,” August 31, 1946, UWS, 5/317/0/19.1/5129, pp. 29–30, APwSZ; Sprawa przydziału inwentarza, WUZW, 72/509/0-542, APW.
  93. 93. “Naczelnik Wyd. Rolnego to Woj. Inspektorat Pożarnictwa w Pruszkowie,” May 7, 1946, Sprawa przydziału inwentarza, WUZW, 72/509/0-542, APW; “Konie z UNRRA,” Zagoń Ojczysty, August 1946.
  94. 94. “Powiatowa Komisja Rozdziału, Szczecin to Urząd Ziemski Zachodnio Pomorski,” October 5, 1946, UWS, 65/317/0/19.1/5129, p. 85, APwSZ.
  95. 95. “Report on UNRRA Livestock,” UNA; Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 393.
  96. 96. M. E. Hays, “Field Trip,” September 10, 1945, UNRRA—Poland Mission, 1944–49, file 7, S-0527-1064, UNA. See also Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 393.
  97. 97. “Report on UNRRA Livestock,” UNA. See also “Dr. Wilder Describes Polish Trip,” Morgan Horse Magazine, May 1946.
  98. 98. The process of expropriating large holdings and distributing plots of land to individual peasants or, alternatively, creating state farms, is described in Marta Błąd, “Land Reform in People’s Poland (1944–89),” Rural History 32 (2021): 149–65, esp. 152. For additional context, see also Anna Wylegała, “Beyond the Victimhood Narrative: A Case Study of Unexpectedly Successful Collectivization in Communist Poland,” Journal of Social History 56, no. 4 (2023): 805–27.
  99. 99. For payments in kind that Poland made for some of the goods it received, see Andrzej Jezierski and Cecylia Leszczyńska, Historia Gospodarcza Polski (Warsaw: Wyd. Key Text, 1997), 397.
  100. 100. Woodbridge, UNRRA, 2:40–41. For a contemporary analysis in the US media of the need to pay for UNRRA aid, see Douglas Larsen, “Critics Charge Breakdown of UNRRA Financing Means Hunger for Millions,” Wilmington Morning Star, November 25, 1945. For a discussion of payment arrangements related to Hoover’s ARA, see Davide Rodogno, Night on Earth: A History of International Humanitarianism in the Near East, 1918–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 33–35.
  101. 101. Sawicki, Misja UNRRA w Polsce, 15–16, 112. On postwar rationing in Poland, see Mateusz Pazgan, “Zagadnienia aprowizacji ludności województwa wrocławskiego z perspektywy starostwa kamiennogórskiego w latach 1945–1947,” Annales Universitatis Mariae-Curie-Skłodowska 69, no. 1–2 (2014): 75, 77–78; Woodbridge, UNRRA, 2:221. On Communist food policies more generally, see Katarzyna Stańczyk-Wiślicz, “Eating Healthy, Eating Modern: The ‘Urbanization’ of Food Tastes in Communist Poland (1945–1989),” Ethnologia Polona 41 (2020): 141–62.
  102. 102. Jessica Reinisch, “‘We Shall Rebuild Anew a Powerful Nation’: UNRRA, Internationalism and National Reconstruction in Poland,” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 3 (2008): 461–62. See also “Impact of UNRRA on Poland: Highlights—April 1947,” Council of Foreign Voluntary Agencies in Poland: Reports, 1947–49, folder 51, box 1, series 4/1/6, POW, BHLA.
  103. 103. Different documents give approximate costs for horses, and these can vary quite a bit. See, for example, Ministerstwo Ziem Odzyskanych w Warszawie, 2/196/0/7/1442, p. 301, AAN.
  104. 104. “Wg rozdzielnika,” November 27, 1946, MZO, 2/196/0/06/1031, p. 23, AAN.
  105. 105. “KROWA,” Głos Pomorski, July 27–28, 1946.
  106. 106. “Wojewódzki Urząd Ziemski Szczeciński to Kierownik Pow. Biura Rolnego,” November 21, 1946, UWS, 65/317/0/19.1/5129, p. 143, APwSZ. See also “Woje-wódzki Urząd Ziemski w Lublinie to Powiatowy Urząd Ziemski w Puławach,” October 5, 1946, Powiatowy Urząd Ziemski w Puławach, 35/733/0/-/108, p. 19, Archiwum Państwowe w Lublinie.
  107. 107. For complaints about the insurance rules, see Departament Kontroli, starting on 58, Kontrole przeprowadzone w działach Rolnictwa i Reform Rolnych Urzędów . . . , 1946–49, MRiRR, 2/162/0/4/797, AAN.
  108. 108. Ministerstwo Rolnictwa i Reform Rolnych, “Wg rozdzielnika,” November 27, 1946, MZO, 2/196/0/06/1031, p. 23, AAN.
  109. 109. Korespondencja, umowy, sprawozdania związane z rozdziałem, 1946–47, MZO, 2/196/0/11/1971, p. 201, AAN.
  110. 110. “Zarząd Powiatowy Zw. Samopomocy Chłopskiej w Wałczu to Narodowy Bank Polski w Szczecinie,” September 3, 1949, UWS, 65/317/0/19.1/5130, p. 68, APwSZ.
  111. 111. “Regulamin administrowania przez Państwowy Bank Rolny,” June 26, 1946, UWS, 65/317/0/19.1/5128, p. 3, APwSZ. See also Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 395.
  112. 112. “23,000 koni oraz 60,00 sztuk bydła,” 1946. This is a newspaper clipping that comes from Wycinki Prasowe, 1945–46, Centralny Urząd Planowania (hereafter CUP), 2/192/0/3.22/1183,p. 26, AAN. See also Sawicki, Misja UNRRA w Polsce, 117.
  113. 113. “Henryk Bartold to BSC,” January 29, 1948, Thank-You Letters 1948, folder 31, box 1, series 4/1/6, POW, BHLA.
  114. 114. “Konie z UNRRA w drodze,” 1946. This newspaper clipping comes from Wycinki Prasowe, 1945–46, CUP, 2/192/0/3.22/1183, p. 26, AAN.
  115. 115. “Instrukcja,” 1946, Komisja “A”- Ustalenia priorytetów przywozowych. Odbudowa Rolnictwa, 1946, CUP, 2/192/0/8.18/3804A, p. 5, AAN.
  116. 116. “Powiatowa Komisja Rozdziału, Szczecin to Urząd Ziemski Zachodnio Pomorski,” October 1, 1946, UWS, 65/317/0/19.1/5129, pp. 87–89, APwSZ.
  117. 117. Departament Kontroli, “Sprawozdanie from Dr. Stefan Trzeciak, Inspektor, Biuro Kontroli MRiRR to Minister MRiRR,” December 22, 1947, MRiRR, 2/162/0/4/797, AAN.
  118. 118. “Woj. Szczeciński, Dział Reform Rolnych, to Ministerstwo Rolnictwa i Reform Rolnych,” February 1948, Wykazy Sprowadzonych Koni, UWS, 65/317/0/19.1/5130, p. 25, APwSZ.
  119. 119. Pazgan, “Zagadnienia aprowizacji ludności,” 80–81; Sawicki, Misja UNRRA w Polsce, 116.
  120. 120. On how horses adjusted to their new environments, see “Konie z UNRRA,” Zagoń Ojczysty, August 1946; P. J., “Jak należy obchodzić się z koniem z dostaw UNRRA,”Głos Pomorski, October 4, 1946; A. Pępkowski, “Dostawy zwierząt UNRRA dla Polski,”Medycyna Weterynaryjna 3, no. 5 (1947): 305.
  121. 121. Gaziński and Wanot, “Działalność UNRRA i jej pomoc,” 21–22.
  122. 122. “Notatka w sprawie wyładunku,” ZSC, 2/160/0/3/1104, p. 7, AAN.
  123. 123. The term “Wild West” was used by postwar contemporaries and is the title of Beata Halicka’s book: The Polish Wild West: Forced Migration and Cultural Appropriation in the Polish-German Borderlands, 1945–1948, trans. Paul McNamara (London: Routledge, 2020). On the origins of the term, see Kinga Siewor, “Regained Landscapes: The Transfer of Power and Tradition in Polish Discourse of the Regained Territories,” in East Central Europe Between the Colonial and the Postcolonial in the Twentieth Century, eds. Siegfried Huigen and Dorota Kołodziejczyk (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 190–91. The script from the 1967 movie Our Folks (Sami swoi) (dir. Sylwester Chęciński) also makes this link between the “wild” region and “wild” horses. A character says, “He he! UNRRA knows that it’s the Wild West here and so sends wild horses.” See “Scenariusz filmu ‘Sami Swoi’ Sylwestra Chęcińskiego,” Film Sami Swoi, accessed August 23, 2022, https://filmsamiswoi.wixsite.com/strona/scenariusz1. On the subject of the film, see Agata Zborowska, Życie Rzeczy w Powojennej Polsce (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2018), 220–21.
  124. 124. Halicka, Polish Wild West, 2.
  125. 125. “Na nowym szlaku,”Gazeta Informacyjna, July 27, 1946.
  126. 126. Urszula Kozłowska and Tomasz Sikowski, “The Implementation of the Soviet Healthcare Model in ‘People’s Democracy’ Countries—the Case of Post-War Poland (1944–1953),” Social History of Medicine 34, no. 4 (2020): 1204.
  127. 127. Małgorzata Praczyk, “Śmierć zwierząt w narracjach autobiograficznych osadników na ‘Ziemiach Odzyskanych’: Uwagi o obecności,” Autobiografia 1, no. 12 (2019): 50–51. See also Kamiński, “Fear Management,” 234.
  128. 128. Z. Tomaszewski, “Obejmujemy folwarki poniemieckie,”Głos Ludu, March 21, 1946.
  129. 129. “Report from the Regional Delegate for the Districts of Łódź and Kielce to Edward Z. Wróblewski, Chief of Distribution Division,” July 23, 1946, Monthly Reports, 1946, S-1400-0000-0029, p. 33, UNA.
  130. 130. Błąd, “Land Reform in People’s Poland,” 153–54.
  131. 131. The term “moral reconstruction” was used slightly differently by Russell W. Yohn of North Manchester, Indiana, when he called for more aid to be given to a specific ethnic German family in the region. See “Yohn to ‘Ostroda’, Warsaw,” February 14, 1948, General 1946–48, folder 1, box 1, series 4/1/6, POW, BHLA. On reconstructing the west, see Praczyk, “Śmierć zwierząt,” 50–51. See also Kamiński, “Fear Management,” 234.
  132. 132. Praczyk, “Śmierć zwierząt,” 41–55, esp. 46–47, 50–51.
  133. 133. Małgorzata Praczyk,Pamięć środowiskowa we wspomnieniach osadników na “Ziemiach Odzyskanych” (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Instytutu Historii UAM, 2018), 191; Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 393. See also Emilia Kledzik, Maciej Michalski, and Małgorzata Praczyk, eds.,“Ziemie Odzyskane”: W poszukiwaniu nowych narracji (Poznań: Instytut Historii UAM, 2018).
  134. 134. “Rozdzielnik Geograficzny,” Sprawa przydziału inwentarza, WUZW, 72/509/0-542, APW.
  135. 135. Eastern European Division Loan Department, “Preliminary Paper No. 6 for the Working Party on the Polish Loan Application” (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, May 26, 1947), https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/558411468095985925/pdf/multi-page.pdf, 17.
  136. 136. Praczyk,Pamięć środowiskowa, 210–16.
  137. 137. Holly Case, “Reconstruction in East-Central Europe: Clearing the Rubble of Cold War Politics,” Past and Present 210, suppl. 6 (2011): 88.
  138. 138. Metzger, “Report of Work in Poland,” BHLA.
  139. 139. Praczyk,Pamięć środowiskowa, 297.
  140. 140. Zygmunt Dulczewskis and Andrzej Kwilecki, eds., Pamiętniki osadników Ziem Odzyskanych, 2nd ed. (Poznań: Wyd. Poznańskie, 1970), 349. For additional references to UNRRA in peasant memoirs, see Józef Skrzypski, “Opis mojej wsi,” 1949–51, Towarzystwo Pamiętnikarstwa Polskiego, 2/2617/0/11068, AAN.

8. UNRRA and Animal Politics in Poland

  1. 1. For Polish uses of “Auntie UNRRA,” see, for example, Mateusz Pazgan, “Zagadnienia aprowizacji ludności województwa wrocławskiego z perspektywy starostwa kamiennogórskiego w latach 1945–1947,” Annales Universitatis Mariae-Curie-Skłodowska 69, no. 1–2 (2014): 79; “Zaraz po wojnie przyjechała do Polski ‘Cioteczka Unra,’” Polskie Radio, November 9, 2020, https://www.polskieradio.pl/39/156/Artykul/2616894,Zaraz-po-wojnie-przyjechala-do-Polski-cioteczka-Unra. On the general Polish reception of UNRRA donations, see Józef Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka: Pomoc UNRRA dla Polski i polskich uchodźców w latach 1944–1947 (Kraków: Wyd. Naukowe Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego, 2018), 448.
  2. 2. This phrase comes from a drawing by Jerzy Zaruba published in the satirical magazine Pins (Szpilki). See Szpilki, September 25, 1945.
  3. 3. Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 395.
  4. 4. That the aid contributed to creating a positive view of the government is discussed in Bruno Kamiński, “Fear Management: Foreign Threats in the Postwar Polish Propaganda—the Influence and the Reception of the Communist Media (1944–1956)” (PhD diss., European University Institute, 2016), 236–39, esp. 238.
  5. 5. “Pomoc UNRRA zachowa Polska we wdzięcznej pamięci,”Kurier Szczeciński, November 14, 1945.
  6. 6. “Przekrój tygodnia,”Przekrój, September 8–14, 1946. See also the three-minute film Generalny dyrektor UNRRA La Guardia z wizytą w Polsce (Wytwórnia Filmowa Wojska Polskiego, 1946), accessed January 27, 2022, FINA, http://repozytorium.fn.org.pl/?q=pl/node/4444.
  7. 7. W. B., “W Sezamie UNRRA,”Naprzód Dolnośląski, August 30, 1946. On Silesia, see John J. Kulczycki,Belonging to the Nation: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Polish-German Borderlands, 1939–1951 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
  8. 8. Przybycie i wyładunek transportu koni z darów UNRRA (Wytwórnia Filmowa Wojska Polskiego, 1946), accessed July 26, 2024, FINA, http://www.repozytorium.fn.org.pl/?q=pl/node/4368. The film is also discussed in Agata Zborowska, Życie rzeczy w powojennej Polsce (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2018), 220.
  9. 9. Orka wiosenna (Wytwórnia Filmowa Wojska Polskiego, 1946), accessed July 26, 2024, FINA, http://www.repozytorium.fn.org.pl/?q=pl/node/4316.
  10. 10. On dairying as “women’s work,” see Richie Nimmo, “The Mechanical Calf,” in Making Milk: The Past, Present, and Future of Our Primary Food, eds. Mathilde Cohen and Yoriko Otomo (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 84.
  11. 11. Eastern European Division Loan Department, “Preliminary Paper No. 6 for the Working Party on the Polish Loan Application” (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, May 26, 1947), https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/558411468095985925/pdf/multi-page.pdf, 78–81. See also UNRRA, Economic Recovery in the Countries Assisted by UNRRA (Washington, DC: UNRRA, 1946), 76; Richard C. Lukas, Bitter Legacy: Polish-American Relations in the Wake of World War II (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 101; Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 352. On milk rations, see “Translated Letter from Lublin District Office, Supply and Trade Division to Melvin P. McGovern,” June 28, 1946, Monthly Reports, 1946, S-1400-0000-0029, p. 25, UNA; George Woodbridge, UNRRA: The History of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 2:221; Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 372–73.
  12. 12. Orka wiosenna.
  13. 13. Sabina Brzozowska, “Człowiek—zwierzę—rzecz w Chłopach Władysława Reymonta,” Porównania 2, no. 29 (2021): 99–103. The term “interspecies parallel” appears on p. 100.
  14. 14. Ladislas Reymont, The Peasants: Spring, trans. Michael H. Dziewicki (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), 92, https://archive.org/details/bwb_P8-CSD-500/page/n3/mode/2up?q=. The English phrase “we owe our lives to her alone” appears in the Polish version as “moja żywicielka jedyna,” “my only breadwinner” or “life giver.” See Władysław Reymont, Chłopi, Część trzecia—Wiosna, wolnelektury.pl, para. 1055, accessed July 28, 2024, https://wolnelektury.pl/katalog/lektura/chlopi-czesc-trzecia-wiosna.html#f1055. Thanks to Rafał Stolarz for drawing my attention to Reymont’s depiction of cows as żywicielki.
  15. 15. Ladislas Reymont, The Peasants: Winter, trans. Michael H. Dziewicki (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925), 19, https://archive.org/details/peasantswinter0000ladi/mode/2up.
  16. 16. L. Reymont, Peasants: Winter, 18, 20.
  17. 17. L. Reymont, Peasants: Winter, 15.
  18. 18. L. Reymont, Peasants: Winter, 16.
  19. 19. L. Reymont, Peasants: Winter, 83.
  20. 20. See also Brzozowska, “Człowiek—zwierzę,” 101.
  21. 21. L. W. Shultz, “Notes Concerning the Livestock Situation in Poland,” 1945–53, folder 1, box 1, series 4/1/9, Heifer Project, BHLA.
  22. 22. This figure was achieved through a calculation that assumed that only kids under twelve plus pregnant women and nursing mothers would consume milk; it did not account for other demographic groups, such as the elderly. “UNRRA Mission to Poland,” February 1, 1947, MRiRR, 2/162/0/2.4/506, p. 140, AAN; UNRRA, Economic Recovery, 76.
  23. 23. On the UNRRA angle, see Silvia Salvatici, “Sights of Benevolence: UNRRA’s Recipients Portrayed,” in Humanitarian Photography: A History, eds. Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 202, 216–17. On visual imagery, see also Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno, “The Morality of Sight: Humanitarian Photography in History,” in Humanitarian Photography: A History, ed. Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1; Paul Betts, “The Polemics of Pity: British Photographs of Berlin, 1945–47,” in Humanitarianism and Media, 1900 to the Present, ed. Johanness Paulmann (New York: Berghahn, 2019), 128–29.
  24. 24. Vachon uses the term “UNRRA angle” in a letter to his wife Penny, April 6, 7, or so, 1946, in Poland, 1946: The Photographs and Letters of John Vachon, ed. Ann Vachon, with an introduction by Brian Moore (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 53.
  25. 25. See fig. 1 in chap. 4.
  26. 26. Merle Curti, American Philanthropy Abroad: A History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 484. See also Robin Patric Clair and Lindsey B. Anderson, “Portrayals of the Poor on the Cusp of Capitalism: Promotional Materials in the Case of Heifer international,” Management Communication Quarterly 27, no. 4 (2013): 548.
  27. 27. Eastern European Division Loan Department, “Preliminary Paper No. 6.”
  28. 28. “Wojewoda Olsztyński to Wicepremier W. Gomulka, Minister Ziem Odzyskanych,” July 17, 1947, MZO, 2/196/07/1428, pp. 30–32, AAN.
  29. 29. Departament Kontroli, K.L., “Dzielą się zgodnie z ludzką krzywdą,”Dziennik Ludowy, August 18, 1946, MRiRR, 2/162/0/4/948, p. 3, AAN.
  30. 30. Pomoc UNRRA dla Polski. Sprawozdanie, MPiOS, 2/402/0/6/328, pp. 107–21, AAN.
  31. 31. “The Provincial Land Office to the Zw. Samopomocy Chłopskiej,” February 11, 1946, WUZW, 72/509/0-828, p. 22, APW.
  32. 32. O. S., “Tajemnica rozdziału koni i krów dla osadników,” Dziennik Ludowy, August 13, 1946. The article is reprinted on p. 27 in Wydz. Rolniczy, UNRRA—Przydziały Koni, UWS, 65/317/0/19.1/5129, APwSz.
  33. 33. See “Visitation Notes Related to the Family of Eryka Bienkowska,” June 19, 1948, Visitations, 1948, folder 32, box 1, series 4/1/6, POW, BHLA; Kontrola rozdzielnictwa UNRRA (inwentarza żywego), 1947–48, MZO, 2/196/0/06/1031, AAN. Cases related to fraud tactics are on pp. 63–74.
  34. 34. Zygmunt Dulczewski and Andrzej Kwilecki, eds.,Pamiętniki osadników Ziem Odzyskanych, 2nd ed. (Poznań: Wyd. Poznańskie, 1970), 354.
  35. 35. “Woj. Urząd Ziemski w Warszawie to MRiRR,” April 16, 1946, Sprawa przydziału inwentarza, WUZW, 72/509/0-542, APW. On bribery and corruption, see also Pobierania łapówek za przydział koni z darów UNRRA, Komisja Specjalna do Walki z Nadużyciami i Szkodnictwem Gospodarczym w Warszawie (hereafter KSWNSG), 2/170/0/3.22/1000, AAN. See also “Niesprawiedliwy rozdział koni z UNRRA,” in Jedność Narodowa, which appears in this archival file on p. 20.
  36. 36. “Urząd Ziemski to Biuro Kontroli, Szczecin,” August 31, 1946, Wydz. Rolniczy, UNRRA—Przydziały Koni, UWS, 65/317/0/19.1/5129, pp. 29–30, APwSz.
  37. 37. “Raport,” February 12, 1946, Dotyczy: podziału koni otrzymanych z Ameryki przez UNRRA, 1945–46, WUZW, 72/509/0-828, p. 23, APW.
  38. 38. “M.E. Hays to Ł. Witkowski,” August 1, 1946, MRiRR, 2/162/0/21.5/3012, pp. 79, 81, AAN.
  39. 39. On the Polish transportation system, see “Transport Rehabilitation in Poland” (London: Division of Operational Analysis, April 1947), S-1297-0000-0426-00001, UNA.
  40. 40. “Rozdzielnictwo inwentarza żywego,” June 30, 1947, Kontrola rozdzielnictwa UNRRA, MZO, 2/196/0/06/1031, pp. 54–57, AAN.
  41. 41. “Rozdzielnik Geograficzny,” Sprawa przydziału inwentarza, WUZW, 72/509/0-542, APW.
  42. 42. “Urząd Ziemski to Biuro Kontroli, Szczecin,” August 31, 1946, UWS, 65/317/0/19.1/5129, pp. 29–30, APwSz.
  43. 43. The contemporary popularity of the phrase is highlighted in Aleksandra Sułwa, “Skarby z UNRRA i zrzuty od innych ciotek: W paczkach przysyłano do Polski też wolność,” Dziennik Polski, June 23, 2017, https://dziennikpolski24.pl/skarby-z-unrra-i-zrzuty-od-innych-ciotek-w-paczkach-przysylano-do-polski-tez-wolnosc/ar/12203627. Another play on the acronym (in English) is “You Never Really Relieved Anybody.” See Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 276–77.
  44. 44. “Sprawozdanie,” July 24, 1947, Kontrola rozdzielnictwa UNRRA, MZO, 2/196/0/06/1031, p. 41, AAN.
  45. 45. See, for example, “Napad rabusiów na transport UNRRA,” 1946. This is a newspaper clipping and comes from Wycinki Prasowe, 1945–46, CUP, 2/192/0/3.22/1183, p. 22, AAN.
  46. 46. Aleksander Juźwik, “Zagraniczna pomoc charytatywna dla dzieci i młodzieży w Polsce w latach 1945–50,”Polska 1944/45–1980: Studia i Materiały 11 (2013): 96.
  47. 47. On the Guard, see Ochrona transportów towarów UNNRA: Organizacja i działalność Straży Wartowniczo-Konwojowej UNRRA, 1946–47, Ministerstwo Żeglugi i Handlu Zagranicznego w Warszawie, 2/286/0/24/417, AAN. On the problem of theft, see also “Protokół konferencji Polskich władz portowych,” July 16, 1946, Protokoły, sprawozdania, raporty, zestawienia dostaw, 1946–48, ZSC, 2/160/0/3/1104, AAN.
  48. 48. “Dr. George Tells Trip Experience,” Union County Journal, July 1, 1946.
  49. 49. Juźwik, “Zagraniczna pomoc charytatywna,” 96. For a scathing contemporary account of the Communist corruption that plagued UNRRA efforts in Poland, see Edward S. Kerstein, Red Star over Poland: A Report from Behind the Iron Curtain (Appleton, WI: C. C. Nelson, 1947). Kerstein was a Polish-speaking American dispatched by The Milwaukee Journal in the fall of 1945 to Poland to report on the evolving situation there.
  50. 50. Benon Gaziński and Bogusław Wanot, “Działalność UNRRA i jej pomoc dla rolnictwa w Polsce,” Rocznik Muzeum Narodowego Rolnictwa w Szreniawie 19 (1993): 18.
  51. 51. Jerzy Kukliński, “Straż wartowniczo-konwojowa UNRRA i straż morska,” Gedanopedia, December 15, 2015,https://gdansk.gedanopedia.pl/gdansk/?title=STRA%C5%BB_WARTOWNICZO-KONWOJOWA_UNRRA_I_STRA%C5%BB_MORSKA.
  52. 52. For the relevant legislation, see “Dziennik Ustaw—rok 1945 nr 53 poz. 302,” Infor, accessed June 6, 2022, https://www.infor.pl/akt-prawny/DZU.1945.053.0000302,metryka,dekret-o-utworzeniu-i-zakresie-dzialania-komisji-specjalnej-do-walki-z-naduzyciami-i-szkodnictwem-gospodarczym.html. See also “Wysiedlanie złodziei towarów UNRRA,”Gazeta Morska, August 6, 1946.
  53. 53. Piotr Majer, “Komisja Specjalna do Walk z Nadużyciami i Szkodnictwem Gospodarczym (1945–1954): Uwagi o genezie, działalności i ewolucji,” Studia Prawnoustrojowe 6 (2006): 186–87. For a detailed analysis of the commission and for a few brief references to cases that involved UNRRA animals and/or goods, see Piotr Fiedorczyk, Komisja specjalna do walki z nadużyciami i szkodnictwem gospodarczym 1945–1954(Białystok: Temida 2, 2002).
  54. 54. “Delegatura w Gdańsku to Komisja Specjalna w Warszawie,” August 30, 1946, KSWNSG, 2/170/0/4/1937, pp. 2–3, AAN. Additional cases of corruption can be found in UNRRA—w latach 1947, 1948, 1949: Wnioski, postanowienia, orzeczenia, 1946–1949, KSWNSG, 2/170/0/4/1939, AAN. A particularly well-documented case is in Sfałszowanie rachunku oraz nabycie konia po cenie niższej od obowiązującej, 1946, KSWNSG, 2/170/0/3.22/1011, AAN. This case pertains to one Józef Kiercz, a member of the local distribution commission in Września, who was sentenced to a year of forced labor for obtaining an UNRRA horse without paying for it.
  55. 55. Kontrola rozdzielnictwa UNRRA (inwentarza żywego), 1947–48, MZO, 2/196/0/06/1031, pp. 63–74, AAN.
  56. 56. For an example, see “Delegatura w Gdańsku to Komisja Specjalna w Warszawie,” September 30, 1947, KSWNSG, 2/170/0/4/1939, pp. 2–3, AAN.
  57. 57. Thurl Metzger, “Report of Work in Poland, October 15, 1946 to April 16, 1947,” 1945–53 Project Committee Reports, folder 19, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  58. 58. “Inspektor MRiRR J. Konarzewski to Biuro Kontroli,” November 5, 1948, MRiRR, 2/162/0/4/797, pp. 1–2, AAN.
  59. 59. “Report by Stefan Radwański,” October 30, 1948, MRiRR, 2/162/0/4/797, pp. 17–20, AAN. Radwański was an inspector with the Inspection Department of the Ministry of Agriculture. Depositions from witnesses critical of distribution methods can be found in Kontrole przeprowadzone w Działach Rolnictwa i Reform Rolnych Urzędów . . . , 1946–49, MRiRR, 2/162/0/4/797, AAN, starting on p. 21.
  60. 60. “Report on UNRRA Livestock Imported to Poland from September 29, 1945 to July 28, 1946,” July 29, 1946, UNRRA Subject Files, file 72, S-0527-1107, UNA; “Report on Field Trip to Baltic Port Area and Bydgoszcz,” February 12, 1946, UNRRA—Poland Mission, 1944–49, Food and Agricultural Rehabilitation Division, Warsaw, file 7, S-0527-1064, UNA.
  61. 61. “Ł. Witkowski to T.A. Pato,” February 17, 1947, S-0527-1107, UNA.
  62. 62. “Protokóły z konferencji i narad,” MRiRR, 162/0/26/3259, AAN.
  63. 63. “Sprawozdanie Urzędu woj. Szczecińskiego do dnia 30. XI.46 r.,” UWS, 65/317/0/25/5518, pp. 66, 68, APwSz.
  64. 64. Dulczewski and Kwilecki, Pamiętniki osadników, 292–93.
  65. 65. Peggy Reiff Miller, “UNRRA Livestock Shipments with Losses by Ship,” Seagoing Cowboys, accessed August 16, 2024, https://seagoingcowboys.com/seagoing-cowboys/the-unrra-years/; Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 391.
  66. 66. Konie z pomocy UNRRA dla Polski (Przedsiębiorstwo Państwowe “Film Polski,” 1947), accessed July 26, 2024, FINA, http://www.repozytorium.fn.org.pl/?q=pl/node/9350.
  67. 67. For an overview of interwar Polish animal welfare, see Eva Plach, “The Animal Welfare Movement in Interwar Poland,” Polish Review 57, no. 2 (2012): 21–43.
  68. 68. Protokóły z zebrań, 1946–51, Towarzystwo Ochrony Zwierząt w Polsce (hereafter TOZ), 2/152/0/2/7, AAN; Sprawozdania z działalności Oddziałów TOZ, 1946–51, TOZ, 2/152/0/2/18, AAN.
  69. 69. Tony Judt as quoted in Paul Betts, Ruin and Renewal: Civilizing Europe After World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2020), 2–3.
  70. 70. “Higiena Zwierząt,” c. 1950, MRiRR, AAN.
  71. 71. “Okólnik Nr. 34 Komendanta Głównego Milicji Obywatelskiej z dn. 27 list. 1945,” Zjednoczenie Towarzystwa Opieki nad Zwierzętami RP, 2/554, p. 82, AAN. On the 1928 legislation, see Plach, “Animal Welfare Movement,” 21–43.
  72. 72. “Likwidacja niehumanitarnego uboju,”Kurier Codzienny, March 11, 1948; “List otwarty do Pana Prezesa TOZ,”Dziennik Ludowy, March 21, 1948; “Nie dręczyć zwierząt,”Express Wieczorny, September 4, 1946, Wycinki prasowe, 1947–51, TOZ, 2/152/0/2/59, pp. 9, 11, 17, AAN. On horses, see also Gabriela Czapiewska, “Historyczne uwarunkowania rozwoju rolnictwa uspołecznionego na Pomorzu Środkowym,”Słupskie Prace Geograficzne 1 (2003): 55.
  73. 73. Sprawozdania z działalności: Zarządu Głównego od kwietnia 1939, TOZ, 2/152/0/2/15, AAN.
  74. 74. “Tadeusz Matecki to Bureau International Humanitaire Zoophile,” December 29, 1947, TOZ, 2/152/0/5/57, pp. 52–53, AAN.
  75. 75. “Apel do społeczeństwa,” Współpraca z instytucjami zagranicznymi: Korespondencja, informacje, TOZ, 2/152/0/5/57, p. 111, AAN. On horse inspections, see also “Sprawozdanie z kontroli działalności Zarządu Głównego Tow-a Och. Zw. w Polsce,” December 23, 1950, TOZ, 2/152/0/2/16, p. 4, AAN.
  76. 76. “Sprawozdanie z działalności Zarządu Głównego Zjednoczenia TOZ,” TOZ, 2/152/0/2/15, AAN.
  77. 77. A focus on the “rational” care of horses (including UNRRA horses) is reflected in A. Sztremer, Opieka nad źrebną klaczą i źrebnięciem(Olsztyn: Druk Państwowa, 1947).
  78. 78. “Sprawozdanie z kontroli działalności,” 4, AAN.
  79. 79. “Sprawozdanie z kontroli działalności,” 1, AAN; “Pełnomocnik, TOZ w Li-kwidacji,” December 19, 1951, TOZ- ZG, 2/62, p. 24, AAN.
  80. 80. “Tadeusz Matecki to Margrethe Astrup,” December 31, 1947, TOZ, 2/152/0/5/57, p. 82, AAN; “Co przywozimy i wywozimy przez porty Polskie,” Dziennik Bałtycki 123 (1946): 4.
  81. 81. “TOZ/Matecki to Bureau International Humanitaire Zoophile,” after February 12, 1947, TOZ, 2/152/0/5/57, p. 56, AAN. For another description of the arriving animals, see “Tadeusz Matecki to the Bureau International Humanitaire Zoophile,” September 22, 1947, TOZ, 2/152/0/5/57, p. 45, AAN. The bureau was under the leadership of a Swedish British woman called Lizzy Lind-Af-Hageby and was supported by some British royals. See “Bureau International Humanitaire Zoophile to Tadeusz Matecki,” September 3, 1947, February 18, 1947, TOZ, 2/152/0/5/57, pp. 42, 60, AAN.
  82. 82. “Tadeusz Matecki to Bureau International Humanitaire Zoophile,” December 29, 1947, TOZ, 2/152/0/5/57, pp. 50–51, AAN.

9. Heifer Project Animals in Poland

  1. 1. On Heifer Project shipments to Poland, see “Letter from Ralph M. Delk,” January 14, 1947, Heifer Letters, HP, BHLA; Departament Ekonomiczny, Wyd. Obrotu Zewnętrznego, “Assorted Lists,” MRiRR, 2/162/0/2.4/528, pp. 2–12, AAN; “Rozchód 5.X.1945 do 31.XI. 1947,” MRiRR, 2/262/0/26/3271, p. 2, AAN; “Pomoc Zagraniczna,” 1945–46, MPiOS, 2/402/0/260, p. 76, AAN; Relief Work (FOR): Brethren Service Committee and Heifer Project, 1945–48, box 13, series E, JNS, DG 117, SCPC; “Report by Ralph M. Delk to Co-Workers,” folder 9, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA; “Heifer Project Committee,” August 1947, Correspondence 1947, folder 10, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  2. 2. “Shipments Made by Heifer Project Committee as of January 1, 1949,” in 1945–53 Project Committee Reports, folder 19, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA; Thurl Metzger, “Report of Work in Poland, October 15, 1946 to April 16, 1947,” 1945–53 Project Committee Reports, folder 19, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA. The fact that horses were included in this shipment does not appear in all references to the Mount Whitney sailing of early 1947.
  3. 3. John Bowman, “Relief Workers in Europe,” Gospel Messenger, September 13, 1946; “Shipped: One Harness Maker with Supplies,” Gospel Messenger, November 29, 1947; J. Kenneth Kreider, A Cup of Cold Water: The Story of Brethren Service (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 2001), chap. 9.
  4. 4. Many examples of requests for animals (including from the Izabelin Home for the Aged) can be found in Applications Granted, 1946–47, folder 27, box 1, series 4/1/6, POW, BHLA. This file contains English translations of requests sent to the Brethren but also some original Polish-language requests.
  5. 5. Letter from Ralph M. Delk, “Heifer News,” May 14, 1947, Heifer Letters, HP, BHLA.
  6. 6. Peggy Reiff Miller, “Special Post: SS Woodstock Victory Carries Heifer Project Cattle to Poland 70 Years Ago Today,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), March 3, 2016.
  7. 7. UNRRA Standing Technical Committee on Welfare, “Memorandum on the Relation Between UNRRA and Voluntary Relief Organizations,” June 1944, 7, box 77, series A, part 1, CCWR, DG 025, SCPC.
  8. 8. On the financial aspects of aid distribution, see Ben Shephard, “‘Becoming Planning Minded’: The Theory and Practice of Relief, 1940–1945,” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 3 (2008): 410; Mathew Lloyd Adams, “Herbert Hoover and the Organization of the American Relief Effort in Poland (1919–1923),” European Journal of American Studies 4, no. 2 (2009): 1–19.
  9. 9. “Oświadczenie Odbioru,” Applications Granted, 1946–47, folder 27, box 1, series 4/1/6, POW, BHLA.
  10. 10. “Act of Transferring the Heifer from American Gifts to the Polish Citizens,” Heifer Project before November 8, 1946, folder 48, box 38, series 18, DWP, BHLA. Another example of a completed animal transfer document appears as “Act of Transferring the Heifer,” July 19, 1946, 1945–53 Project Committee Reports, folder 19, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  11. 11. “Act of Transferring the Heifer from American Gifts,” DWP, BHLA. See also Departament Ekonomiczny, Wyd. Obrotu Zewnętrznego, “Assorted Lists,” MRiRR, 2/162/0/2.4/528, pp. 2–12, AAN; “Rozchód 5.X.1945 do 31. XI. 1947,” MRiRR, 2/262/0/26/3271, p. 2, AAN.
  12. 12. Richard Rush, “My Cattle-Boat Experience, December 29, 1945–March 3, 1946,” folder 14, box 1, Seagoing Cowboys Collection, HM 1–973, MCA.
  13. 13. Mr. and Mrs. Joe Thomasson, “Madera County Aids World Peace Through Project,” in Cowboy Memories, eds. Bill Beck and Mel West (Little Rock, AR: Heifer Project International, 1994), 89.
  14. 14. Glee Yoder, Passing on the Gift: The Story of Dan West (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1978), 103.
  15. 15. “Delk to His Co-Workers,” box 13, series E, JNS, DG 117, SCPC.
  16. 16. Metzger, “Report of Work in Poland,” BHLA.
  17. 17. Metzger, “Report of Work in Poland,” BHLA.
  18. 18. “K. Załuski, Ministry of Shipping and Foreign Trade, to Donald R. Sabin, Acting Chief of Mission to Poland, UNRRA,” March 13, 1947, Brethren Service Committee, Poland Mission, Department of Finance and Administration, S-1397-0000-0006-00001, p. 4, UNA; “UNRRA 1947–49,” Correspondence 1947–49, folder 21, box 1, series 4/1/6, POW, BHLA; Thurl Metzger, The Road to Development (Little Rock, AR: Heifer Project International, 1981), 21; Thurl Metzger, “The Polish Student Project,” Gospel Messenger, May 8, 1948; Peggy Reiff Miller, “Was There Confiscation of UNRRA and Heifer Project Livestock?,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), June 23, 2017.
  19. 19. Józef Łaptos,Humanitaryzm i polityka: Pomoc UNRRA dla Polski i polskich uchodźców w latach 1944–1947 (Kraków: Wyd. Naukowe Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego, 2018), 443.
  20. 20. “Report of the Council of Foreign Voluntary Relief Agencies in Poland,” June 1949, Zagraniczna dobrowolna pomoc dla Polski, Sprawozdanie za okres 1945–49, MPiOS, 2/402/0/6/351, p. 9, AAN.
  21. 21. Visitations, 1948, folder 32, box 1, series 4/1/6, POW, BHLA.
  22. 22. Metzger, “Report of Work in Poland,” BHLA.
  23. 23. Dillon W. Throckmorton, “I Saw Your Heifers in Poland,” Gospel Messenger, November 30, 1946; Marine Bull Pen, no. 10, August 29, 1946, Marine Bullpens and News Circulars, folder 10, box 75, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA. On Throckmorton’s mission to check up on animal placements, see also “Benjamin Bushong to ‘To Whom It May Concern,’” June 8, 1946, Poland Mission, Department of Finance and Administration, Brethren Service Committee, S-1397-0000-0006-0001, p. 13, UNA.
  24. 24. Throckmorton, “I Saw Your Heifers.”
  25. 25. Ralph E. Smeltzer, “From a Relief Worker’s Diary,” Gospel Messenger, December 28, 1946.
  26. 26. Smeltzer, “From a Relief Worker’s Diary.” The village of Krzywe Koło is rendered as Krzyive Kele in Smeltzer’s account.
  27. 27. A cow in the early 2000s might be expected to produce a peak yield of thirty-five liters each day. Milk yields have increased significantly with factory farming, and this has had the effect of shortening cows’ productive working lives to just a few years. Hannah Velten compares the effect of this intensive work to a person jogging for six hours each day of the week. See Hannah Velten, Cow (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 160.
  28. 28. Smeltzer, “From a Relief Worker’s Diary.”
  29. 29. Peggy Reiff Miller, “Meeting Heifer Recipients in Poland, Part I,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), March 11, 2016.
  30. 30. L. W. Shultz, “Mission to Poland,” Gospel Messenger, February 23, 1946; L. Shultz, “Report to Heifer Committee,” January 19, 1946, 1945–53, folder 1, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA. The cowboys are named in this report. See also Reiff Miller, “Meeting Heifer Recipients.”
  31. 31. Shultz, “Mission to Poland.” Shultz also recounts seeing Joy in Lawrence W. Shultz, People and Places, 1890–1970: An Autobiography (Winona Lake, IN: Life and Light, 1971), 105. See also “Bringing Joy to Poland,” Poland Today, January 1947. Poland Today was the paper of the Polish Embassy in the United States.
  32. 32. “Report on Field Trip to Baltic Port Area and Bydgoszcz,” February 12, 1946, UNRRA—Poland Mission, 1944–49, Food and Agricultural Rehabilitation Division, Warsaw, file 7, S-0527-1064, UNA. See also “Brethren Overseas Relief: How It Is Distributed,” Gospel Messenger, November 24, 1945. George Willoughby wrote about his field trip in letters to his wife Lillian. See “Letters to Lillian,” March 31–May 1, 1946, Foreign Travel, Involvement and Contacts, series D, part 1, George and Lillian Willoughby Papers, 48–50, DG 236, SCPC.
  33. 33. Shultz, “Mission to Poland”; Shultz, People and Places, 105; Kreider, Cup of Cold Water, 135.
  34. 34. Peggy Reiff Miller, “Okanogan County Sea-Going Cowboys and Their Errands of Mercy,” Okanogan County Heritage, Winter 2014, reposted in https://seagoingcowboys.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/okanagan-seagoing-cowboy-article_2014.pdf.
  35. 35. See entry from July 20, 1946, in David. H. White, “My Trip to Poland in 1946 Working on a UNRRA Ship,” Seagoing Cowboys, accessed July 26, 2024, https://seagoingcowboyswebsite.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/stories_davidwhite.pdf.
  36. 36. See entry for July 18, 1946, in Arthur Meyer, “Art Meyer’s Cattle Boat Experience: Introduction to Planned Book, Dated January 1991,” Seagoing Cowboys, accessed February 13, 2020, https://seagoingcowboyswebsite.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/stories_artmeyer.pdf.
  37. 37. Shultz, “Mission to Poland.”
  38. 38. Many letters of thanks are found in Thank-You Letters 1948, folder 31, box 1, series 4/1/6, POW, BHLA.
  39. 39. Heifer Letters, 1946–55, folder 1, box 3, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA. Additional letters of thanks, with photographs, are in Brethren Service Committee, S-1268-0000-0039, pp. 17–34, UNA.
  40. 40. Robin Patric Clair and Lindsey B. Anderson, “Portrayals of the Poor on the Cusp of Capitalism: Promotional Materials in the Case of Heifer international,” Management Communication Quarterly 27, no. 4 (2013): 543–44. The article includes examples of Heifer International’s modern-day promotional materials.
  41. 41. “Witold Tanski to Thurl Metzger,” January 15, 1948, and “Antoni Lewandowski to the BSC,” April 22, 1948, Thank-You Letters 1948, POW, BHLA.
  42. 42. “Letter from ‘The Small Blind Children from Laski’ to Thurl Metzger,” December 15, 1946, Relief Work (FOR): Brethren Service Committee and Heifer Project, 1945–48, box 13, series E, JNS, DG 117, SCPC. The institute also received two horses from UNRRA. See “Woj. Urząd Ziemski w Warszawie to Powiatowy Urząd Ziemski w Warszawie,” May 24, 1946, Sprawa przydziału inwentarza, WUZW, 72/509/0-542, APW.
  43. 43. “Report on Field Trip,” UNA; letters from John Vachon to Penny, February 12, 1946?, in Poland, 1946: The Photographs and Letters of John Vachon, ed. Ann Vachon, with an introduction by Brian Moore (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 31–33. In the letter to his wife Vachon does not get the details about the Brethren Service Committee or the Heifer Project quite right.
  44. 44. “Assurance of Good Treatment Given by Director General Lehman,” National Humane Review, April 1946.
  45. 45. “Questionnaire of Wilbert Kropf of Oregon,” Completed Questionnaires, folder 5, box 76, MGP, Hist. MSS 1–129, MCA.
  46. 46. Metzger, “Report of Work in Poland,” BHLA.
  47. 47. Clarence H. Rosenberger, “A ‘Cowboy’ Evaluates the Trip to Europe with Relief Cattle,” Gospel Messenger, September 22, 1945. See also “Russians Are Not Stealing Polish Livestock,” Gospel Messenger, November 30, 1946.
  48. 48. Norman E. Thomas, ed., Horses for Humanity: A Report on a Mission to Poland by Eleven Ministers (St. Johnsville, NY: Enterprise and News, 1949), 17. The chapter titled “The Government” is all about the difficult political situation in Poland and how it affected aid delivery.
  49. 49. Allen L. Eagles (FOR), “National Heifer Project Committee Meeting,” March 29, 1947, Relief Work (FOR): Brethren Service Committee and Heifer Project, 1945–48, box 13, series E, JNS, DG 117, SCPC.
  50. 50. “Menshikov to M.R. Zigler,” September 1, 1945, file 34, S-0527-1080, UNA. See also Robert Ebey, “A Trip to Poland with Brethren Service Heifers,” box 1, JEN, Hist. MSS-1-893, p. 2, MCA.
  51. 51. “UNRRA Aide Denies Obstacles in Poland,” New York Times, January 9, 1946; Amanda Melanie Bundy, “There Was a Man of UNRRA: Internationalism, Humanitarianism, and the Early Cold War in Europe, 1943–1947” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2017), 40. For general distribution problems and irregularities, see George Woodbridge, UNRRA: The History of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 2:212–14.
  52. 52. Jessica Reinisch, “‘We Shall Rebuild Anew a Powerful Nation’: UNRRA, Internationalism and National Reconstruction in Poland,” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 3 (2008): 453.
  53. 53. Metzger, “Report of Work in Poland,” BHLA.
  54. 54. “Report of the Council of Foreign Voluntary Relief Agencies,” MPiOS, 2/402/0/6/351, pp. 3–17, AAN.
  55. 55. On the Quakers, see Lyndon S. Back, “The Quaker Mission in Poland: Relief, Reconstruction, and Religion,” Quaker History 101, no. 2 (2012): 1; David S. Richie, “American Friends Service Committee in Poland: Color and Background Material No. 11,” 1–27, box 38, series B, JNS, DG 117, SCPC. On CARE, see Susan Levine, “CARE Packages and the Business of Food Aid,” Food, Fatness and Fitness: Critical Perspectives (blog), September 22, 2015, http://foodfatnessfitness.com/2015/09/22/care-packages/. On charities in Poland generally, see Łaptos, Humanitaryzm i polityka, 442; Dariusz Jarosz, “Zapomniani przyjaciele: Zagraniczna pomoc charytatywna w Polsce Ludowej (1945–1949),” in Społeczeństwo, państwo, modernizacja, ed. Włodzimierz Mędrzecki (Warsaw: Neriton, 2002), 163–75; Aleksander Juźwik, “Zagraniczna pomoc charytatywna dla dzieci i młodzieży w Polsce w latach 1945–50,”Polska 1944/45–1980: Studia i Materiały 11 (2013): 97.
  56. 56. Examples of letters requesting aid can be found in “Applications 1948,” folder 26, box 1, series 4/1/6, POW, BHLA.
  57. 57. “Robert Zigler to E.M. Hersch,” May 21, 1947, Correspondence 1947, folder 10, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA. A blank application form for potential cattle attendants is contained in this file as well. The application asks some interesting questions about whether the applicant believes in racial equality, considers himself a pacifist, participates in world peace efforts, and believes enemy nations should also be given relief supplies.
  58. 58. “Report of the Council of Foreign Voluntary Relief Agencies,” MPiOS, 2/402/0/6/351, p. 31, AAN; Roger E. Sappington, “Social Involvement,” in Church of the Brethren: Past and Present, ed. Donald F. Durnbaugh (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1971), 102.
  59. 59. Opal D. Stech, “Brethren Service in Poland,” in To Serve the Present Age: The Brethren Service Story, ed. Donald F. Durnbaugh (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1975), chap. 12; Ralph M. Delk, “Heifer News,” July 30, 1947, 1945–53 Project Committee Reports, 1945–53, folder 19, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  60. 60. Martin F. Strate, “H.P.C. News,” May 25, 1948, Relief Work (FOR): Brethren Service Committee and Heifer Project, 1945–48, box 13, series E, JNS, DG 117, SCPC.
  61. 61. “Heifer Project Committee in Warsaw to the Ministry of Agriculture in Poland,” February 16, 1948, Dary bractw kościelnych, 1946–48, MRiRR, 2/162/0/2.4/528, p. 13, AAN.
  62. 62. “Summary of Shipments by Countries 1944 to 1953 Inclusive” and “Shipments Made by Heifer Project Committee as of January 1, 1949,” in 1945–53 Project Committee Reports, folder 19, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  63. 63. Ralph M. Delk, “Heifer News,” July 30, 1947, 1945–53 Project Committee Reports, HP, BHLA.
  64. 64. Bierut himself articulated this position about the inadequacy of UNRRA aid. See “Prezydent Bierut i prezydent Truman o zwiększeniu pomocy UNRRA dla Polski,” Głos Ludu, March 21, 1946. See also “W imię sprawiedliwości,”Gazeta Lubelska, March 30, 1946; “Pomoc otrzymywana od UNRRA nie jest dostarczająca,”Gazeta Lubelska, March 31, 1946.
  65. 65. Piotr Jachowicz, “Działalność UNRRA w Polsce w latach 1945–1948,”Zeszyty Naukowe2, no. 2 (1998): 49; Marek Żak, “Sytuacja Aprowizacyjna Legnicy w latach 1945–1945,”Szkice Legnickie 36 (2015): 158.
  66. 66. Natasha Wheatley, “Central Europe as Ground Zero of the New International Order,” Slavic Review 78, no. 4 (2019): 900–11.
  67. 67. Grzegorz Jasiński, “Akcje władz bezpieczeństwa przeciwko środowisku luterańskiemu na Mazurach i Warmii w latach 1947–1956,” Gdański Rocznik Ewangelicki 5 (2011): 179–81.
  68. 68. Jasiński, “Akcje władz bezpieczeństwa,” 182, 184.
  69. 69. “Warsaw Branch of the Brethren Service Committee to Benjamin Bushong,” July 26, 1949, Poland 1948–49, folder 4, box 2, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  70. 70. “John Metzler, Jr. to Ben Bushong,” September 17, 1948, Poland 1948–49, folder 4, box 2, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  71. 71. John Metzler, “For Inclusion in Minutes,” August 6, 1947, Relief Work (FOR): Brethren Service Committee and Heifer Project, 1945–48, box 13, series E, JNS, DG 117, SCPC. This file contains many documents relevant to the post-UNRRA period of the Heifer Project.
  72. 72. Assorted post-UNRRA paths are discussed here: Ben Bushong, “Resume of Heifer Project,” 1951, 1945–53 Project Committee Reports, HP, BHLA.
  73. 73. Strate, “H.P.C. News,” SCPC.
  74. 74. Metzler, “For Inclusion in Minutes,” SCPC. See also Kenneth I. Morse, New Windsor Center (New Windsor, MD: Brethren Service Center, 1979), 12, 46.
  75. 75. “Heifer Project Committee Meeting Minutes, Chicago,” August 6, 1947, Relief Work (FOR): Brethren Service Committee and Heifer Project, 1945–48, box 13, series E, JNS, DG 117, SCPC.
  76. 76. On the Heifer Project’s 1947 trip to Japan, see Peggy Reiff Miller, “70th Anniversary of the Ceremony of the Bulls,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), May 12, 2017.
  77. 77. Zigler is quoted in G. Yoder, Passing on the Gift, 110.
  78. 78. “Ministry of Health and Public Welfare to Heifer Project Inc.,” August 11, 1960, Clippings and Releases 2, 1940s–1960s, folder 8, box 2, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  79. 79. George W. Cornell, “Bible-Spurred Cowboys Herding Cattle into Hard-Up Nations,” in Cowboy Memories, eds. Bill Beck and Mel West (Little Rock, AR: Heifer Project International, 1994), 77.
  80. 80. “Report of the Heifer Project Committee,” March 17, 1950, 1945–53 Project Committee Reports, HP, BHLA.
  81. 81. Jake Blouch, Walt Wiltschek, and Cheryl Brumbaugh-Cayford, “Thurl Metzger: Former Executive Director of Heifer International,” Messenger, October 2006, https://www.brethren.org/messenger/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2021/02/Messenger-2006-10.pdf; Peggy Reiff Miller, “The Three Executives Who Helped Shape the Heifer Project, Part II,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), September 27, 2024.
  82. 82. Peggy Reiff Miller, “Histories Intertwined,” interview by Jason Woods, World Ark, Summer 2019. See also Metzger, Road to Development.
  83. 83. Bill Beck, “Introduction,” in Beck and West, Cowboy Memories, 5; Bill Beck, “Cowboys of the Future,” in Beck and West, Cowboy Memories, 179.
  84. 84. Morse, New Windsor Center, 36. See also Peggy Reiff Miller, “Touring Heifer Ranch with the Heifer Foundation Trustees,” Seagoing Cowboys (blog), June 8, 2018. On the archival holding at the Heifer Project headquarters in Arkansas, see Peggy Reiff Miller, “Mining for Gems in the Heifer Archives,” World Ark, Spring 2016.
  85. 85. “Heifer’s Mission,” Heifer International, accessed July 19, 2024, https://www.heifer.org/about-us/index.html.
  86. 86. For a snapshot of milk consumption in the United States in the early 2020s, see Kim Severson, “Got Milk? Not This Generation,” New York Times, April 4, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/dining/milk-dairy-industry-gen-z.html. For a criticism and a defense of the American dairy industry, see Andrew Jacobs, “Is Dairy Farming Cruel to Cows?,” New York Times, December 29, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/science/dairy-farming-cows-milk.html.
  87. 87. For an introduction to the animal rights position and to animal ethics, see Martha C. Nussbaum, Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2023).
  88. 88. There are a number of charities that argue against animal gifting in food aid programs entirely. See, for example, “A Well-Fed World,” A Well-Fed World: Plant-Based Hunger Solutions, accessed July 19, 2024, https://awellfedworld.org/.

Conclusion

  1. 1. Nancy Cushing, “Live Export Is a Centuries-Old Australian Industry, but the Cameras Are New,” ABC News, April 10, 2018, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-11/australias-history-of-animal-exports/9640502.
  2. 2. On the development of the global food economy and on meat’s place in this development, see Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 18–19.
  3. 3. Liza Verity, Animals at Sea (London: National Maritime Museum, 2004), 9–10.
  4. 4. Naomi Larsson and Tom Levitt, “‘Floating Feedlots’: Animals Spending Weeks at Sea on Ships Not Fit for Purpose,” Guardian, January 26, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/26/floating-feedlots-animals-spending-weeks-at-sea-on-ships-not-fit-for-purpose.
  5. 5. Gonzalo Villanueva, “‘Pain for Animals, Profit for People’: The Campaign Against Live Sheep Exports, 1974–1986,” in Animals Count: How Population Size Matters in Animal-Human Relations, ed. Nancy Cushing and Jodi Frawley (New York: Routledge, 2018), 100. For the importance of the Middle East to the live export trade, see Tom Levitt, “Animals Farmed: Live Exports Risk of Disease, China Goes Big on Pork, and EU Meat Tax,” Guardian, February 4, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/animals-farmed/2020/feb/04/animals-farmed-live-exports-risk-of-disease-china-goes-big-on-pork-and-eu-meat-tax. On live animal export statistics for Australia, see Susan F. Foster and Karen L. Overall, “The Welfare of Australian Livestock Transported by Sea,” Veterinary Journal 200, no. 2 (2014): 205.
  6. 6. Larsson and Levitt, “Floating Feedlots.” See also Sophie Kevany, “Exclusive: Livestock Ships Twice as Likely to Be Lost as Cargo Vessels,” Guardian, October 28, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/28/exclusive-livestock-ships-twice-as-likely-to-be-lost-as-cargo-vessels.
  7. 7. Jo-Anne McArthur, “`We Could Smell the Boat Approaching’: The Grim Truth About Animal Exports,” Guardian, December 11, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/11/we-could-smell-the-boat-approaching-grim-truth-animal-exports-israel-haifa. This article is reprinted in a slightly modified version as Jo-Anne McArthur, “The Grim Truth About Animal Exports,” We Animals, December 11, 2018, https://weanimalsmedia.org/2018/12/11/the-grim-truth-about-animal-exports/. See also Clive J. C. Phillips and Eduardo Santurtun, “The Welfare of Livestock Transported by Ship,” Veterinary Journal 196, no. 3 (2013): 309.
  8. 8. Kevany, “Exclusive”; Phillips and Santurtun, “Welfare of Livestock,” 309, 312.
  9. 9. The description in this paragraph and in the preceding three paragraphs of the on-board conditions experienced by the animals is based on “What’s It Really Like on Board a Live Export Ship?,” Animals Australia, December 3, 2018, updated May 22, 2024, https://animalsaustralia.org/latest-news/whats-it-like-on-a-live-export-ship/. On conditions, see also McArthur, “We Could Smell the Boat.”
  10. 10. Phillips and Santurtun, “Welfare of Livestock,” 309.
  11. 11. Larsson and Levitt, “Floating Feedlots.”
  12. 12. Lucy Craymer, “New Zealand Ships Last Livestock as Ban Takes Effect,” Reuters, April 21, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/new-zealand-ships-its-last-livestock-ban-takes-effect-2023-04-21/. For an earlier perspective on the ban, see Calla Wahlquist, “New Zealand to Stop Exporting Livestock by Sea,” Guardian, April 13, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/14/new-zealand-to-stop-exporting-livestock-by-sea
  13. 13. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, “Export of Live Animals Banned,” news release, May 20, 2024, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/export-of-live-animals-banned#:~:text=A%20new%20ban%20on%20exporting,leader%20in%20animal%20welfare%20standards. See also Sophie Kevany, “England and Wales to Ban Live Animal Exports in European First,” Guardian, December 3, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/03/uk-to-become-first-country-in-europe-to-ban-live-animal-exports.
  14. 14. Daniel Fitzgerald, “Livestock Shipping Company Wellard to Sell Only Remaining Vessel, Considers Delisting from ASX,” Australian Broadcasting Corporation, January 14, 2025, https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2025-01-14/wellard-to-sell-mv-ocean-drover-and-consider-winding-up-business/104814504.
  15. 15. Katherine Sivert and Christine Parker, “Our Beef With `Big Meat’: The Power Perpetuating Australia’s Live Export Trade is At Play Elsewhere,” The Conversation, July 29, 2024, https://theconversation.com/our-beef-with-big-meat-the-power-perpetuating-australias-live-export-trade-is-at-play-elsewhere-235655.
  16. 16. Kevany, “Exclusive.”
  17. 17. D. W. B., “The Brethren Become International,” Gospel Messenger, November 2, 1946.
  18. 18. Józef Łaptos,Humanitaryzm i polityka: Pomoc UNRRA dla Polski i polskich uchodźców w latach 1944–1947 (Kraków: Wyd. Naukowe Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego, 2018), 395.
  19. 19. “Report on UNRRA Livestock Imported to Poland from September 29, 1945 to July 28, 1946,” July 29, 1946, UNRRA Subject Files, file 72, S-0527-1107, UNA.
  20. 20. “Thurl Metzger to Ralph Delk,” May 20, 1947, Correspondence 1947, folder 10, box 1, series 4/1/6, HP, BHLA.
  21. 21. Benjamin Meiches, Nonhuman Humanitarians: Animal Interventions in Global Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023), esp. 10.
  22. 22. “Heifer Project Committee,” August 1947, Correspondence 1947, HP, BHLA.
  23. 23. Heifer Project Committee poster titled, “She Talks in Any Language!,” Clippings and Releases 1, folder 7, box 2, series 4/1/6, HP, BLHA.
  24. 24. Bill Beck, “Introduction,” in Cowboy Memories, eds. Bill Beck and Mel West (Little Rock, AR: Heifer Project International, 1994), 5. See the advertisement in The Boston Globe for a talk titled “I Saw the World on a Cattle Boat,” May 3, 1947.
  25. 25. See, for example, “Reviving Ukraine’s Breadbasket,” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, accessed July 16, 2024, https://www.fao.org/support-to-investment/news/reviving-the-breadbasket/en/; “Cautious Optimism for the Recovery of Cattle Herds,” Association of Milk Producers, accessed July 16, 2024, https://avm-ua.org/en/post/cautious-optimism-for-the-recovery-of-cattle-herds. See also Asia Bazdyrieva, “No Milk, No Love,” e-flux Journal, May 2022, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/127/465214/no-milk-no-love/. On the “resourcification” of Ukraine, see Victoria Donovan, “Against Academic ‘Resourcification’: Collaboration as Delinking from Extractivist ‘Area Studies’ Programs,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 65, no. 2 (2023): 163–73.
  26. 26. Maximilian Luz Reinhardt and Tetiana Shyrochenko, “The Impact of the Russian War of Aggression on Ukrainian Livestock Production,” Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, accessed June 20, 2024, https://www.freiheit.org/germany/impact-russian-war-aggression-ukrainian-livestock-production. On cattle numbers, see also Tetiana Shyrochenko, “Ukraine’s Dairy Industry During the War,” Ministerie van Landbouw, Visserij, Voedselzekerheid en Natuur, accessed July 16, 2024, https://www.agroberichtenbuitenland.nl/actueel/nieuws/2024/03/28/ukrainian-dairy-industry.
  27. 27. Andrew Hunt, “Living Amid Conflict: The True Stories of Ukrainian Dairy Farmers During War,” Bullvine, June 1, 2024, https://www.thebullvine.com/the-bullvine/living-amid-conflict-the-true-stories-of-ukrainian-dairy-farmers-during-war/.
  28. 28. World Milk Day was proclaimed on June 1, 2001, by the Food and Agriculture Organization. “The Update of the Ukraine Dairy Map-2024 Infographic Dedicated to the World Milk Day,” Association of Milk Producers, accessed June 20, 2024, https://avm-ua.org/en/post/the-update-of-the-ukraine-dairy-map-2024-infographic-dedicated-to-the-world-milk-day.

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