Chapter 4 Working Animals as Humanitarian Aid

Europa and the Bull

Cattle are mammals that belong to the order Artiodactyla, meaning they have an even number of toes on each foot and walk on their hoofs. They are ruminant herbivores that are part of the bovid family (Bovidae); sheep, goats, and antelope are part of this family as well. Modern cattle are descended from a wild species of ox called the aurochs, which reached Europe a quarter of a million years ago.¹ In the fifteenth century, there were few aurochs remaining in Europe, with the last of the species concentrated, as it happens, in what is now central and eastern Poland, in the Jaktorów Forest in the Mazowsze region; the Polish Crown had given aurochs in the forest legal protection. The eventual extinction of aurochs, despite these protected lands, was the result of what are now familiar causes for species extinctions: habitat depletion to provide space for other species (in this case for domestic cattle pasture and human expansion), overhunting (notwithstanding the fact that the Crown had restricted hunting), and disease.²

The history of modern domestic cattle is intertwined with human history. Cattle had and continue to have economic value as work animals and as “moveable wealth,” and cattle were one of the first forms of exchange that humans used.³ Castrated mature male cattle, or oxen, were particularly valuable because they were strong enough to pull the plow that farmers needed to cultivate fields and develop agriculture. This animal species’ reliable labor capacity in turn was one of the factors that allowed sedentary communities to develop. Though they were not as powerful or fast as horses, oxen were relatively inexpensive and easy to acquire. Cattle could also be slaughtered for meat once their ability to work efficiently diminished, and thus their utility lasted throughout their life cycle.⁴ Female cattle in turn were prized (and even revered in some cultures) for their ability to provide “maternal nourishment” through their milk. Cattle manure, moreover, was vital for crop fertilization and therefore formed another crucially important factor in the development of agriculture. Cattle hides, too, proved useful for making clothes and shoes and other everyday items. For all of these reasons, cattle had come to signify “civilized life”; their presence was essential to the development of stable and settled societies.⁵ The expression “civilization follows the cow” encapsulates these and other reasons for the enormously significant role that cattle have played in human history.⁶

Cattle’s economic importance has been reflected symbolically over the centuries in art, literature, and myth. Indeed, it is a bull (an uncastrated male bovine) that is at the center of the founding myth of the European continent itself. The story goes that the Greek god Zeus was so enamored of Europa, a beautiful Phoenician princess, that he transformed himself into a gentle white bull and, using this animal form, charmed Europa. Europa’s trust was misplaced, however, and as soon as the princess climbed onto the white bull’s back, she was whisked away to the sea. Together Europa and the bull reached the island of Crete, and there Europa gave birth to three sons of Zeus, including Minos, the legendary ruler of Crete and founder of what is regarded as Europe’s first advanced civilization. Minoan civilization spread from Crete across the Aegean into what is now mainland Greece, foreshadowing the later spread of civilizations even further north and west across the European continent. Ancient Greeks referred to these lands as “Europa”—and thus the continent came to be called Europe after Europa.⁷

This ancient myth of the continent’s founding has been a part of European culture for centuries, and it remains well known to this day. Notably, Europa Riding the Bull is the name of a sculpture that sits in front of the European Parliament building in Strasbourg, France, and similar iconography appears in other European Union art and advertising. The Greek design on the two-euro coin features Europa sitting on a bull and recalls the ancient past that links “old Europe” with the new Europe represented by the European Union.⁸

Part of what makes the Europa-and-the-bull metaphor so enduring is its malleability. Scholar Ian Manners has suggested a distinctively postwar reading of the myth in which Zeus raping Europa recalls the violence of the Third Reich while it also evokes the idea of rebirth; Europe became a phoenix rising from the ashes of war. Just as Europa’s ordeal with Zeus signaled a new beginning, so it was that the foundations for European unity began to take shape once the war’s destructive force was subdued. An alternative reading of the relevance of the Europa myth, as Manners has also suggested, is to understand Zeus and the bull as the United States. America crosses the ocean, comes to Europe’s rescue during the war, and liberates the continent from years of violence and oppression while showering it with gifts as it creates the conditions for a new and better life.⁹ The bull brought peace, prosperity, and civilization.

Far away from Europe, on the other side of the ocean in the middle of the twentieth century, the Brethren had their own understandings of cattle’s symbolic and concrete importance. Cows’ ability to produce a constant supply of tasty milk, and thereby to deliver much-needed fat, protein, vitamins, and minerals (especially to children), cemented female cattle’s high status in Brethren communities. Many Brethren were dairy farmers whose livelihoods depended on healthy cattle populations and high milk yields, and Brethren confidence in milk’s nutritional value had largely motivated the formation of the Heifer Project. It was therefore no surprise that in rural communities in the Midwest, in the heart of dairy country, enthusiasm for the Heifer Project was very high.¹⁰

Like the Brethren, UNRRA, too, believed that the solution to postwar “hunger problems” rested with female cattle. UNRRA’s strategy, as scholar Frank Trentmann states plainly, “can be summarised in one word: milk.”¹¹ Given this, we turn in the next section to the story of milk specifically, to examining how and why milk became so important to Americans, to the Brethren, to the Heifer Project, and to UNRRA.

Cattle and the Mid-Century “Gospel of Milk”

Milk is “fun to think with.”¹² All mammals produce milk for their young. But humans are the only species that drinks the milk of another species and the only one that drinks it past the weaning stage. The human consumption of milk from other species developed in ancient times along with the domestication of milk-producing animals like cows, sheep, goats, and camels. The milk of these animals gave humans relatively easy and portable access to nutrition, which was especially important in times of scarcity. Milk consists mostly of water (85 percent), and the remainder is made up of fats, milk sugars (like lactose), proteins (like casein), and various vitamins and minerals.¹³

Conditions in America, particularly the availability of vast amounts of space for pasture lands, had long favored cattle, and dairying operations had expanded throughout New England and the Midwest as the United States formed. Moreover, cattle’s status as “clean” animals in Judeo-Christian (and Islamic) traditions, and the relative ease with which cows could be milked, raised their value further still.¹⁴ Milk thus became a nourishing American food staple.¹⁵

Preference for milk carried a nationalist element, too. Abigail Adams, for example, who was married to President John Adams, supported the colonial boycott of “foreign tea” as early as 1777 explicitly in favor of milk from local dairy cattle.¹⁶ Milk was celebrated for its abundant health properties as well. In the mid-nineteenth century, milk enjoyed the status of a “liquid food,” and some contemporaries referred to milk as “white meat” that would even bring wounded soldiers back to health. In other contexts, milk was known simply as “the chief food of sick folks.”¹⁷

Milk in the early days was unpasteurized and came with risks, however: it spoiled quickly, particularly in warmer regions and in an era before reliable refrigeration was widely available. Far from healing the sick, milk could cause serious illness. Sometimes it was adulterated deliberately with cheap and dangerous substances by unethical traders eager to increase volume and thereby increase profits. In other cases, poor hygiene standards and improper handling could lead to milk being contaminated with dangerous bacteria, such as those that cause typhoid fever and scarlet fever.¹⁸ Adulterated or spoiled milk was an important cause of infant mortality well into the nineteenth century. Some people, moreover, were unable to digest the lactose in milk and as a result were made sick when they consumed it.¹⁹

In addition, milk was initially available only when female animals were lactating, usually in the spring and summer months. This meant that for much of history milk was scarce and expensive, in addition to being occasionally hazardous. That changed in the late nineteenth century with the commercial availability of canned milk; the canning process took a natural product and prepared it in a controlled, regulated, and hygienic environment, thereby stabilizing supplies. Most importantly, the process of pasteurization killed harmful bacteria and disease pathogens. By the time of the Second World War, nearly all commercially available milk in the United States and Britain was pasteurized, making it consistently and reliably safe to consume.²⁰ This was revolutionary and made milk, as contemporaries frequently said, “pure.”²¹ The debate about milk as either a “white poison” or a “white elixir” had finally been settled very clearly in milk’s favor.²² Milk had become the king of foods.

Pasteurization and government regulation of milk production, including inspections of farms and milk-processing facilities, played a significant role in increasing milk’s popularity, but other factors also contributed to its growth. Milk had influential backers. The National Dairy Council had been established in the United States in 1915, for example, with the intention of celebrating milk’s nutritional value and recommending dairy foods to the public. During the First World War, the United States exported condensed milk to a hungry and desperate Europe, and this further raised milk’s status as a unique food staple with awesome life-saving potential.²³ Herbert Hoover, head of the American Relief Administration and later president of the United States, regarded milk as an essential relief product.²⁴ The League of Nations also became a powerful champion of milk. Milk, a report from the League said, was “the nearest approach we possess to a perfect and complete food, and no other single food is known that can be used as a substitute.”²⁵ Not surprisingly, dairy farms in both the United States and Britain expanded dramatically during the interwar period to meet consumer demand, and dairying operations became larger and more mechanized. All of this had profound implications for the lived experiences of cows as large-scale milk production paved the way for increased human interventions into cattle breeding.²⁶ Humans established cycles of impregnation, calving, and lactation, which required the relentless and physically demanding labor of cows.²⁷

Nutritional scientists of course also played a central role in these developments that drove the popularity of milk. As we have seen, it was during the first few decades of the twentieth century that nutritional science started providing metrics for measuring and comparing the nutrients in different foods.²⁸ Leading nutritionists calculated that foods derived from other animal bodies, like milk and dairy, offered human bodies the best combination and range of vitamins (A and D), minerals, and amino acids that promoted “good” physiological growth and function.²⁹ The prominent biochemist and nutrition scientist Elmer V. McCollum called milk a “protective food,” and he actively encouraged Americans to drink it in pursuit of good health. McCollum went even further and linked milk to wealth, modernity, and achievements in culture, politics, and social life; milk consumption was integral to civilization itself. According to McCollum, milk consumption explained why Europeans and North Americans surpassed Asians and “people of the Tropics” (who generally did not drink cow’s milk) in a variety of measures, like lifespan, stature, and infant mortality.³⁰

Nutritional science established that milk offered beneficial nutrients for all age groups. But milk was absolutely critical for children’s development and essential for pregnant and lactating women as well. A 1927 study from the Rowett Research Institute—a prestigious international nutrition research center—found that poor children in Scotland who consumed half a pint of milk daily grew better and were healthier overall; real-world studies confirmed that milk was doing what science said it would do.³¹ As a result, government-funded milk programs for children became popular on both sides of the Atlantic during the interwar years.³² From 1940 the National Milk Scheme in the UK gave pregnant women and new mothers extra milk, and school milk programs that provided a daily dose of milk rose in popularity.³³ John Boyd Orr, the Nobel Prize–winning biologist and “crusading nutritionist” who led the Rowett Institute and was a strong advocate for milk consumption, would go on to become the first director general of the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which formed after the Second World War. He and Dan West—who of course had been motivated to start the Heifer Project because there had not been enough milk for children in Spain during the civil war—met on at least one occasion to discuss world hunger.³⁴

For all these reasons, when Winston Churchill said over a radio broadcast during the Second World War that “there is no finer investment for a community than putting milk into babies,” his listeners did not need further explanation or convincing.³⁵ By this time the “gospel of milk” had been preached for years in the US, the UK, and Canada—the countries that would go on to have the dominant roles in UNRRA—and people had grown accustomed to thinking of milk as a nutritious and essential health-giving food source. Here we return to one of the founding documents of the United Nations: the Anglo-American Atlantic Charter from 1941, which, as we have seen, identified “freedom from want” as a fundamental right and as one of the ideals for which the Allied Nations were ostensibly fighting. Milk and the bovine bodies that produced the milk became the symbols of meeting this goal. The cow and her milk evoked material comfort; they were gifts from the prosperous and politically stable to the politically chaotic and to the war-ravaged. As historian Deborah Valenze has argued, milk had become “the emblem of the people’s entitlement to basic sustenance.”³⁶

Milk and Children

The language of entitlement and fundamental rights was most evident when it was directed at children. The idea that children, as special victims of war, deserved relief before others was already reflected in the First International Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which had been adopted by the League of Nations in 1924. By the Second World War, the child had become a universal figure of innocence that evoked the brutality of conflict and illustrated the war’s effects on the most vulnerable in society. Children inspired compassion, and their suffering constituted a special call to action.³⁷ This was well reflected in Herbert Hoover’s 1941 pamphlet, “Can Europe’s Children Be Saved?” There Hoover described children’s enormous suffering and wrote of the Allies’ obligation, as he said, to “prevent a holocaust of death and stunted bodies and minds” in what had been German-occupied areas.³⁸ In 1945 UNRRA Director Herbert Lehman also spelled out what was at stake by highlighting the needs of children in particular: “The future of the liberated Allied countries and their place in the family of United Nations depends in great measure upon restoration of strength and vigor of the child victims of World War II.”³⁹

That is where milk again came into the equation. Nutritional science had already established that milk was essential to children’s development, such that milk shortages in target countries weighed heavily on UNRRA administrators from the beginning. Dr. H. A. Holle, the chief medical officer of the UNRRA mission to Poland, raised concerns that insufficient milk supplies in the country jeopardized the healthy development of the nation’s children; this, in turn, threatened broader rehabilitation goals.⁴⁰

Photographs reinforced just how important milk was to helping war-ravaged children. One such photograph was taken by the American photographer John Vachon. Since the 1930s Vachon had been part of the Farm Security Administration’s very active photography unit. The Farm Security Administration was an agency of the US government that had been created in 1937 as part of the New Deal; its goal was to alleviate rural poverty through the provision of loans to families in need and the establishment of assorted training programs and educational initiatives. Just after the war, Vachon was hired by UNRRA’s Public Information Office, which included a Visual Information section, to document UNRRA’s accomplishments in Poland specifically. Arguably one of the most iconic photographs from the UNRRA period was taken by Vachon (see fig. 1). It depicts three young children standing on the dock in Gdańsk in 1946 or 1947.⁴¹ Each child has lifted a large cup of milk to their lips. The cow that has provided milk to these children has presumably just arrived from America on the ship that fills the background of the image. The ship connects the Polish children and the cups of “white elixir” that they hold in their small hands to the monumental humanitarian efforts of America and the United Nations.

The importance of milk to children was reflected in Brethren relief advertising too. In an article in a 1945 issue of the Brethren’s Gospel Messenger, Dan West warned people against being stingy with heifer donations. He evoked the specter of starving children when he wrote, “The children who might be saved by one heifer held back—their blood will be on your hands.” West thus encouraged people in his community to give “all the heifers you can spare” to the Heifer Project, and he reassured his audience that a single animal “placed right” could save the lives of “ten babies this winter.”⁴²

Milk’s unique importance to children was well reflected in other examples of the Heifer Project’s advertising materials as well. In one pamphlet we see a drawing of a cow and three obviously hungry children approaching the animal. The accompanying text confidently tells the reader that a single cow gives enough milk to maintain twelve children.⁴³ Here the content of the illustration also reinforced a special imagined bond between children and animals; both were innocents at the mercy of the choices that others made for them.

The connections between cows’ milk, children, and the postwar aid effort ran deeper still. Children were portrayed as the most deserving beneficiaries of life-giving aid, to be sure, but the Heifer Project also cast American children as potential givers of aid and therefore as providers of milk to foreign children. Even before the Brethren partnership with UNRRA was confirmed and before the war was formally over, the Heifer Project Committee published a short illustrated booklet called Heifers for Relief: A Primer. This booklet was designed to explain and promote the Heifer program to American kids specifically.

Heifers for Relief outlined the various ways that kids could raise money to purchase a heifer—a young animal that, like the kids themselves, was not yet fully grown but that nevertheless could still be useful. The text explained in straightforward terms why heifers were such important relief animals: “If children have no milk to drink, they often cough, and they get sick easily. . . . When children don’t have milk it isn’t easy to grow up to be tall and strong men and women.” In the United States there were plenty of farmers who raised cows to give milk, the booklet told the kids; cattle were themselves evidence of America’s unparalleled privilege in the world. But in other countries, especially those affected by war, farmers had either been killed or imprisoned and their animals had also been killed; as a result, kids there had no milk to drink. America, and American children, were thus uniquely well placed to share their plenty with the less fortunate: “Would you like to help send a heifer calf to hungry children across the ocean? Your heifer would grow into a cow and would give rich milk to make children strong and healthy.” Starting a “Heifer Club” was the simplest way to raise money. The amounts that interested children needed to raise were spelled out clearly: a heifer calf cost between thirty and forty dollars, and an older heifer (one that was ready to mate and have a calf of her own) cost considerably more. Other contemporary sources put the average cost of a heifer at around $125 (though real value was sometimes as high as $500 for purebred and registered animals). Assistance in the task of raising money for this project could be given by a Sunday school teacher, a regular schoolteacher, or an older friend. Cash contributions directly to the Heifer Project in New Windsor were also welcome and, readers were informed, were an especially attractive option when the interested parties lived far from collection farms.⁴⁴ It is difficult to gauge how successful this specific project ultimately was, but the message it delivered was nevertheless revealing. It reinforced that the Heifer Project was a community affair that actively included children too while it also spoke to the transformative powers of milk.

One Species, Two Functions

American children sharing their abundant supplies of nourishing milk with less privileged children in war-devastated regions was both visually and rhetorically compelling advertising for milk and for humanitarian aid programming. Both the Heifer Project and UNRRA agreed about milk’s value. Quite simply, milk provided a significant share of the agricultural population’s “digestible protein,” and it was a food source that was available all year long and not just after slaughtering fattened animals. The nutrients that milk provided were important for maintaining other animals’ health, too; milk by-products were sometimes fed to animals like pigs that would later be slaughtered for meat. Milk was thus crucially important to the whole economy of rural households. UNRRA estimated that half of Polish farmers’ income came from the selling of milk and dairy products. This money, which could be relied on to come in every month, even if just in small amounts (as compared to the larger profits from meat sales, for example), was typically used to cover regular household expenses, and access to this money raised the family’s overall standard of living. In this way, cows were important for supporting the wider local economy and not just the family economy.⁴⁵

All of this meant that the cattle breeds that would form part of the aid programs needed to be chosen carefully.⁴⁶ Yet it was not as simple as choosing the “heaviest milkers.” In Poland and other similarly less developed rural contexts, cattle typically fulfilled two broad purposes simultaneously: the female of the species had to provide high milk yields, and the (castrated) male of the species had to be capable of working the land as a kind of alternative draft animal. This dual-purpose approach to cattle was, according to UNRRA, “commonplace in the more primitive farming countries,” which lacked a sufficient number of horses and, especially, tractors.⁴⁷ According to the Polish journal Veterinary Medicine, Poland’s farmers would be inclined to send any smaller cattle breeds, and breeds unsuited to working in the fields, to the slaughterhouses (notwithstanding limits on animal slaughter after the war in certain regions). Farmers would simply conclude that the wrong breed was not worth the time, effort, and cost of maintenance otherwise.⁴⁸

The Heifer Project preferred to send Holstein, Jersey, Hereford, and Guernsey cattle as part of their aid program; that these were the communities’ own preferred breeds was in itself supposed to function as an affirmation of quality and utility. Holsteins in particular had been popular in Poland before the war as well. Cows from this breed were productive milkers. The males were known for having “strong constitutions”; they were good at turning feed into fats and protein and were husky enough to be useful for draft purposes. This quality was important in virtually all the target countries. Brown Swiss were popular for similar reasons. The Holstein-Friesian cross was also very popular as it was known to produce high milk yields.⁴⁹ Given that many cattle breeds that were common in the United States had originally come from Europe, sending these same breeds “back” to Europe posed no significant biological or environmental challenges (of the type that we have seen with subsequent live animal aid shipments from North America to African countries, for example).⁵⁰

UNRRA generally sent the same breeds. As a bulk purchaser, UNRRA looked for cattle that were “representative of the breed in color and conformation” and with an optimal weight of at least eight hundred pounds. Ideally, it wanted heifers that had been bred to bulls of the same breed between nine and thirty-six months of age and that were due to calve within three to six months of delivery abroad; cattle have a gestation period of approximately nine months.⁵¹ (For its part, the Brethren Service Committee specified an ideal of two years of age for heifers.⁵²) The majority of the UNRRA cattle (58 percent) came from Wisconsin and Minnesota, and almost all of the Brown Swiss came from these two states plus Illinois.⁵³

So it was that during this early postwar period, the cattle sent to Europe from America reflected specific historical developments and trends as well as contemporary assessments of need and assumptions about milk’s nutritional value. Dairy cow bodies thus became food sources with broad economic value, to be sure. But they also became, as Michael Bresalier has said in reference to the general context of postwar food policy planning and relief programming, “political actors capable of influencing global security.”⁵⁴ For these reasons dairy cattle’s inclusion in UNRRA’s relief strategy won widespread support from the American media, the public, and of course Congress.⁵⁵

Consensus about the extraordinary nutritional value of cows’ milk remained strong after the UNRRA/Heifer Project period ended. Milk remained a cornerstone of global food policy and public health initiatives well into the second half of the twentieth century. Its status as the leading nutritious food was even reflected in the logo that represented the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF). UNICEF was a new UN body that started operations in December 1946, just as UNRRA was closing down. A Polish bacteriologist, Dr. Ludwik Rajchman, who had been a Polish representative to UNRRA and before that the director of the League of Nations Health Organization since its founding in 1921, was the first chair of UNICEF from 1946 to 1950.⁵⁶ From 1953 the UNICEF logo showed a child holding a cup of milk.⁵⁷ UNICEF shipped three million pounds of powdered milk (some of which constituted UNRRA leftovers) from the US to target countries in 1947 and beyond.⁵⁸ “The simple truth is that children of all ages need milk for their development,” a UNICEF document declared in 1948, echoing earlier claims made by UNRRA and nutrition scientists more generally.⁵⁹ UNICEF’s official historian even referred to UNICEF as a “‘gigantic organizational udder’: a proselytizer for milk, a worshipper of milk.”⁶⁰ UNICEF also worked on developing native dairy industries that to some extent had been started by UNRRA and Heifer Project cattle.

Poland as a Horse Nation

Milk-providing female cattle were the quintessential symbol of the Heifer Program, for the reasons we have examined, and they formed an obviously important part of UNRRA live animal shipments. Time and again UNRRA reports about countries’ agricultural, nutritional, and economic needs emphasized the importance of cattle and the milk that female cattle produced, and nowhere was this need quite as pressing as in Poland. As one typical UNRRA report concluded, “Without a cow the owner [of a Polish farm] is not considered to be a farmer in the full sense of the word. A peasant may not have a horse, but to be without a cow is looked upon as utter poverty.”⁶¹ Polish agricultural experts similarly referred to cows as “the most important beings in a farmer’s everyday life”; the lack of cattle spelled ruination for Polish farmers.⁶²

But cattle alone were not going to lead to relief and rehabilitation in Poland or in any other country where traditional farming practices predominated. Like cattle but in very different ways, the domesticated horse helped spread civilization and facilitated the growth of settled agricultural communities. In return for safety, food, and care, the horse submitted to human handlers and worked fields, provided transportation, and hauled heavy goods and people across significant distances. As “living machines” horses fulfilled roles that facilitated the economic activities of rural households.⁶³

Horses are perfectly suited to agricultural work: they have a temperament and intelligence that make them good at following directions from humans, and their bodies are large and strong. In addition, they are able to move very quickly, are steady, and can maintain good traction. They also have amazing stamina and burn energy at an efficient rate.⁶⁴ Moreover, the fact that horses have traditionally been expensive to procure, use, and maintain accentuated the species’ elite status and reflected positively on the owner’s socioeconomic standing. The horse, while undeniably useful, symbolized both social position and power in a way that no other domesticated species did. For these reasons, as Ann Norton Greene says in her book about the horse’s role in early American history, horses became “the natural aristocrats of the animal world.”⁶⁵

The war had destroyed Poland’s horse population. This meant that in 1945 many farms were without a single horse to use for work in fields, in the distribution of produce, or for travel and communication between towns. Agricultural yields would be limited as a result, and Poland would be unable to feed its own people or, indeed, to produce livestock feed, and this loss would disrupt the human food chain. The number of horses that remained in Poland after the war were simply not sufficient to do the required work.⁶⁶ As the chief UNRRA veterinarian in Poland, A. G. Wilder, summarized, the loss of horses during the war resulted in uncultivated land after the war, which meant, in turn, “no crops to feed cattle, hogs, poultry, nor the home.”⁶⁷ This threatened the entire relief and rehabilitation program, and UNRRA reports often repeated just how dangerous the low numbers of horses were to the entire rehabilitation project.⁶⁸ UNRRA ultimately delivered approximately 150,000 horses to Poland, far short of the need but a significant investment nonetheless.⁶⁹

The low number of horses in postwar Poland was all the more worrying given the lack of mechanized cultivation in Polish agricultural practices. In short, there were few tractors in Poland, and those that did exist were old and functioned poorly. New tractors were expensive to purchase (if they were available for purchase at all), and the high costs of fuel and maintenance made them a less attractive option still. According to UNRRA estimates, there were only 1,500 tractors of various kinds in working order in Poland after the war; 1,500 tractors were the equivalent of 18,000 horses (with one tractor doing the work of twelve horses).⁷⁰ UNRRA therefore sent approximately nine thousand tractors to Poland as part of its aid packages, in addition to sending horses.⁷¹ But recipients were not accustomed to the tractors, and they were sometimes slow to learn how to operate them. Moreover, machines broke quickly as a result of inexpert handling and then were rendered useless as spare parts were hard (if not impossible) to come by.⁷² One settler in Poland’s western territories recalled seeing valuable machines consigned to scrapyards because no one knew how to operate them. In some cases the machines were just abandoned and became toys for kids to play with and climb.⁷³

The lack of tractors and horses in turn precipitated the need for relying on cattle to do farm labor, and this—using cattle as draft animals—consolidated an image of Poland as backward and vulnerable. Humans themselves sometimes became draft animals in the absence of other choices. As one UNRRA report stated, “It is a common sight in Poland to see whole families, obviously weakened from hunger, out pulling a plough or a cart for lack of farm draft animals. Or helping a single scrawny horse or cow to pull a two-horse wagon.” Harnessing dairy cows for “tractive power” was a mark of desperation and, further, threatened to cut the cows’ milk production by as much as half, thereby creating a host of other problems.⁷⁴

The precarious state of Poland’s agriculture and what this portended about its potential for broader socioeconomic recovery, as well as for political stability, was one of the most pressing problems that UNRRA’s animal shipment program had been designed to address, as we have seen. And this was precisely what President Roosevelt had been concerned about during his wartime meeting at the White House with the Polish underground courier known as Jan Karski. It was clear to Roosevelt during that meeting with Karski, and then clear to UNRRA bureaucrats, that if UNRRA was serious about agricultural renewal, then it needed to invest in horses.

Beyond the important economic arguments for keeping horses, there were also decidedly less obviously practical arguments in favor of rebuilding Poland’s horse population. Arguably, Poles and Poland had long had a special relationship with horses. In 1683, the winged hussars under King Jan Sobieski III organized an enormous cavalry charge and defeated the Ottomans at Vienna and, as the story goes, thereby saved Christian Europe from the Muslim threat at its doorstep. The memory of this battle, and of the horses’ roles in it, lived on into the twentieth century. Though World War I had destroyed Poland’s existing horse population, efforts to (re)establish breeding programs in independent Poland moved quickly. The period’s greatest success was the Arabian breeding program at the Janów Podlaski Stud in the southeastern part of the country. Horses occupied outsized roles in interwar popular culture too. Many Poles even knew by name the horses of important historical figures from the era. For example, the beloved mare of Marshal Józef Piłsudski—hero of the Polish Legions and leader of the first postpartition independent Polish state that had been created in 1918—was Kasztanka, as everyone knew.

Poland’s special love for horses was further reflected in stories about the lengths that some Poles went to during the war to protect their prized animals. Asking questions about animals’ treatment during the war is a useful part of the social history of the era. Doing so can tell us about animal hierarchies, about which animals were worth taking risks for and which were not. We learn, for example, about Fliksier, an Anglo Arabian stallion born in 1920 who, in 1924, was selected to stand at the state stud. He had been bred with 1,320 mares since that time, and 924 living foals resulted from those pairings. During the war Fliksier was one of the few stallions that had been carefully and successfully hidden away from the enemy, which meant that he was still available to work as a stud after the war. UNRRA’s Dr. Wilder described other stories of stallions that had been similarly concealed during the occupation or reluctantly given up to the enemy only to be stolen or bribed back. Wilder explained, “The love for a horse is one of the Pole’s greatest emotions. It is truly said that a Pole will starve his family and go hungry himself that his horse may eat.”⁷⁵

UNRRA was well aware of the fact that before the war Poland had developed excellent breeding stock and that it had been well on its way to becoming a respected horse-breeding nation.⁷⁶ As a result, and in addition to providing horses that could work well as draft animals, UNRRA made some effort to kickstart postwar breeding programs in Poland (and elsewhere). It did this not only by delivering a number of horses that could reasonably fill this role but also by organizing lectures and demonstrations of the latest scientific developments in livestock breeding (targeting horses but also other species) and by facilitating expert partnerships to improve artificial insemination methods and breeding outcomes.⁷⁷ There were a total of fifteen state horse-breeding farms in Poland not long after the end of the war, but the hope was to increase that number substantially as quickly as possible.⁷⁸ UNRRA staff also inspected breeding facilities in Poland, including the farm where Fliksier worked, and lent professional advice to local breeders; this kind of international cooperation had long been part of breeding programs.⁷⁹ In January 1946 employees of the Requirements Branch of UNRRA visited state horse-breeding farms located in Leszno, Gostynin, and Walewice to find examples of what Poles considered an ideal horse type. The photographer John Vachon was part of this UNRRA delegation, and his job was to photograph the animal types that Poles preferred. The photos were meant to guide acquisitions for the remainder of 1946, when the bulk of UNRRA’s rehabilitation aid would be delivered.⁸⁰

Not surprisingly, during the postwar moment of crisis, the need for a large number of work-ready horses outstripped the need for high-quality breeding stock. In their communications with UNRRA, Poles specified a preference for, above all, dependable draft animals, “clean-legged” horses that could stand the rigors of labor.⁸¹ Most of them, after all, would be pulling plows and farm wagons.⁸² Poles also described wanting strong and “stocky” animals that would be relatively cheap to feed, could be expected to work for a good long time, and were “serviceably sound, gentle with no vicious habits, and without material blemishes or defects.”⁸³ The ideal age for these horses was between three and eight years, and the ideal weight was between nine hundred and one thousand pounds.⁸⁴ These were a little larger and heavier than the horses that UNRRA supplied to Yugoslavia and Greece, but they were smaller and lighter than the preferred breeds in the US and western Europe. In the end the horses that UNRRA sent to Poland conformed generally with Polish requests. The majority were female horses, mares of breeding age, and usually not older than eight.⁸⁵ The most common breeds supplied to Poland by UNRRA were Percherons, Belgians, and Morgans.⁸⁶ The majority were obtained in the United States, but a small number came from Canada and Mexico.⁸⁷

As we shall see, in the rush to assemble shiploads of horses quickly, ideals and standards were sometimes compromised, and as UNRRA itself admitted, “every common type” of animal that could conceivably “furnish the much needed horse power for the farms” was ultimately shipped abroad.⁸⁸ In the next chapter, we explore the logistics of horses’ and cattle’s transformation into “relief stock.”