Chapter 6 Cowboys and Animals at Sea

UNRRA Live Animal Transport

Plans to secure ships that could accommodate large numbers of animals that weighed many hundreds of pounds each and that could make many runs across the ocean quickly started even before the war ended. UNRRA worked with the Ocean Shipping Division and the War Shipping Administration to repurpose American military and merchant marine ships that had been used to move troops and supplies during the war. Retrofitting the ships to accommodate live animals was expensive—about $6 million in total—and was covered entirely by UNRRA.⁴ Conversions took about three weeks per ship, and the technical skills needed were provided by the War Shipping Administration. The work consisted, in part, of building hundreds of stalls in the holds and on the decks and installing ventilation systems. Larger ships often had two rows of stalls and smaller ships just one.⁵ Veterinarians were called in to advise on design, and the Bureau of Animal Industry, which was responsible for animal care in the UNRRA program, signed off on all conversions and approved both stall configurations and ventilation systems.⁶ In the end UNRRA’s livestock fleet consisted of just over seventy ships, though the exact number fluctuated depending on the point in the program.⁷ At any rate UNRRA itself regarded this number as insufficient.⁸

Animals were transported—at a cost of about $185 per head of cattle—on two main types of ships: Liberty and Victory.⁹ The United States Marine Commission had authorized the construction of 2,710 Liberty ships from 1941 to 1945 to meet the immediate and emergency demands of wartime. The ships were designed to be built quickly (in just over two months) and cheaply. The Liberty was a small cargo and logistical support ship, with its primary purpose during the war having been the delivery of supplies to destinations where they were needed. Liberty ships were also used to transport mules and sometimes men.¹⁰ The UNRRA relief worker Kathryn Hulme, who worked in UNRRA Displaced Persons camps after the war and later wrote a memoir about her experiences, was employed during the war as a welder in a shipyard in San Francisco building Liberty vessels and was known to have “signed” her work with a drawing of a small crocodile under a hatch end beam.¹¹ Of the almost three thousand Liberty vessels that had been built during the war, twelve were retrofitted for the UNRRA relief program, with each ship designed to carry from 335 to 400 animals, depending on the species. Each Liberty vessel also carried approximately four thousand tons of other cargo, which consisted of various other forms of UNRRA aid, from nonperishable food items to clothing. A special type of heavy Liberty vessel that had been used to transport tanks and crated planes during the war was also repurposed for the aid effort after the war; there were twelve of these heavy Liberty ships (known as Zecs), with each able to accommodate between 800 and 850 animals.¹²

Liberty vessels plus three retired army cattle ships were the first ship types used in the UNRRA program. The cattle ships were SS F. J. Luckenbach (with a capacity of 500 animals but no space for general cargo), SS Mexican (with a capacity of 625 animals plus cargo), and SS Virginian (the oldest ship in the fleet, having been used in World War I, with a capacity of 700 animals plus cargo). These ships first sailed as part of the UNRRA live animal aid program in late June 1945. Victory vessels began sailing a little later, in October 1945. The US had started building Victory ships in 1943 to supplement the Liberty vessels and to address some of the quality issues that had plagued the Liberty brand. Victory ships were larger and faster than the Liberty ships and could accommodate approximately 800 animals each, again depending on the species. In total, forty-one Victory ships were retrofitted for the UNRRA program. UNRRA generally used the faster and larger Victory ships when it could; these ships were expected to make approximately six round trips per year. A smaller type of Victory ship that carried animals only on deck sailed as well; there were five of these, and each had a capacity of two hundred animals.¹³

The largest ship in the UNRRA fleet was a C-4 class cargo vessel, SS Mt. Whitney, with a capacity of 1,500 horses or 1,600 cattle; this was enormous by contemporary measures yet very small by today’s standards. Mt. Whitney’s inaugural sailing as a livestock ship was on July 28, 1946, from Newport News, Virginia. Mt. Whitney was also the fastest ship in UNRRA’s fleet; return trips took about a month on Mt. Whitney as compared to up to six weeks for Victory vessels and two to three months for Liberty ships. Ultimately, the length of the trips depended, of course, on the exact destination, on the weather, and on factors that often had little to do with the ships themselves. Not surprisingly, cowboys generally found faster sailings more appealing, though of course they were not able to choose their ship type when they signed on to the seagoing cowboys program.¹⁴

The logistics of which ship would be used when and on what route were handled by the Ship Operations Section of the Ocean Shipping Division. The Port Reception Section serviced the ports and procured the supplies needed for loading all of the cargo, animals included, onto the ships.¹⁵ Preparing the cattle crew for each sailing was the job of the Brethren Service Committee, as we have seen. The exact number of men required for each sailing depended on the type of vessel assigned to the given sailing, the number of animals on board, and the species being shipped.¹⁶ The larger ships needed about twice the number of cattle attendants as the smaller ships; there were roughly thirty attendants for a loaded Victory ship and half that number for a Liberty vessel. On a sailing of SS Woodstock Victory that left Newport News for Gdańsk in March 1946, for example, there were 770 heifers and 79 horses aboard with 33 attendants to care for the animals, meaning that each attendant was responsible for about 26 animals, mostly cattle. The average number of animals assigned to each attendant was generally in the low to mid 20s.¹⁷ Smaller sailings—like one in November of 1946—consisted of 16 seagoing cowboys and 331 head of cattle, or approximately 21 animals per attendant.¹⁸ The large SS Mt. Whitney traveled with the largest number of cowboys: at least a few dozen. Whatever the exact number on specific sailings, the ratios were always far better than the ones commonly seen on modern-day livestock ships, which travel with very few animal handlers and leave much of the animal care to mechanized processes, and to fate.¹⁹

In all cases the arrival of the animals at the ports had to be timed for when space was available on the ships and when maritime schedules permitted. Coordination was difficult yet very important because the “living cargo” could not simply wait unattended for conditions to be right; animals needed constant care. The other major logistical challenge was ensuring that the attendants were ready to begin work as soon as the animals boarded the ships. The animals’ and the men’s arrivals at ports were affected by many factors including rail schedules and anticipated port space at the destination, and it depended too, of course, on port traffic in the United States and, again, on the weather.

Upon reaching the port, animals were given a final check and were directed one by one through a chute that led to a “flying box stall” or a “flying lift” operated by a crane; the crane then lifted the animals over the ship before quickly lowering them into position. This method was preferred over forcing the animals to climb a steep ramp onto the ship. While the livestock attendants did not participate in this process—the War Shipping Administration hired stevedores for this work—they did assist in setting up the animals’ stalls in preparation for the voyage. Eighty animals could be loaded per hour if there were several cranes available.²⁰

The American Humane Association, as we have seen, indicated that it was satisfied with what it described as the generally high animal welfare standards in place at the ports. But of course there were exceptions. Cowboy J. Olen Yoder from Indiana, for example, described a loading accident with one of the 744 horses that were supposed to sail on the Poland-bound SS Clarksville Victory at the end of 1945. According to Yoder some of the longshoremen—whom Yoder described as “foreigners and senseless”—forgot to secure one end of a horse crate: “When the horse was high over the ship it toppled backwards out of the crate, hit the rim around the hold opening on its middle. Then plopped over backwards again and down on the floor of upper tween! The poor horse jumped up—but no soap. Its legs went out in all directions, fell to the floor, sprawled out and died.” The Bureau of Animal Industry investigated this accident, according to Yoder. An inspector had a “healthy conflab” with the loading crew and “condemned most of the crates.”²¹ There is no evidence that the American Humane Association was aware of or had investigated this specific case.

Daily Lives of Men and Beasts

It was unlikely of course that any of the nonhuman animals had ever been on a ship before this moment. But many of the attendants had never been aboard a ship either, and most were unlikely to have had any experience with ocean sailing; the ship and ocean environments were thus “unfamiliar and precarious places” to all of the species involved in the aid program.²² Many of the men were struck first by what they could see from the ship’s decks: the beauty of the ocean, the awesome force of the swells, the brilliant sunshine beaming down on the Azores, or the magnificence of the White Cliffs of Dover and Gibraltar. When, as sometimes happened, the ships made brief stops before their final destination to pick up additional UNRRA cargo (including, from time to time, animals), the men reflected excitement at having yet another new experience and glimpsing yet another part of the world that thus far they had only imagined.²³

But the men also recalled the physical discomforts, for themselves and the animals, of being at sea for so many days and the need to adjust quickly to awkward physical conditions aboard the ships. The problems started from the very first day, when many of the men experienced seasickness and were therefore unable to perform the job they were there to do—care for the animals—or even to eat their meals (though generally they remembered the food as being quite good, varied, and plentiful on board). During this initial adjustment period, the men who were not seasick would have to cover for those who were; they picked up the slack and, as they said, learned their jobs all the more quickly. Cowboy Dwight Smith wrote in his memoir that there was a great deal of food left over during a sailing’s earliest days because so many men were ill and had no appetite. This had some unexpected consequences for the animals. During Smith’s sailing it meant that a cow quartered just outside the mess room door got the men’s leftovers: “She ate whatever was put before her—beefsteak, mashed potatoes, gravy, chocolate cake and all. She even drank the leftover coffee.” Smith joked that “some farmer in Poland received ‘coffee in his cream!’”²⁴ Here humans were cheered by the presence of a nonhuman species in their midst, just as the cow in this case was no doubt satisfied by the advantages that her proximity to humans provided, and by the interactions that they could have with each other.

Space on the ship was of course limited. The specially constructed animal stalls were located on the upper and lower decks and were described by cowboys as small, crowded, and uncomfortable. Ships simply could not reflect the best of animal confinement design that, by the 1930s, had become part of the milk- and meat-producing industries. While contemporary dairying paid ever more attention to optimal space distribution for working cattle as well as to the need for proper ventilation and the ability to regulate temperature, the UNRRA animal ships compromised—UNRRA would have said by necessity—on all of this.²⁵

Typically, horses were “packed tightly against each other” in their stalls. The aim was to maximize the use of limited space, but it was also to prevent the animals from turning around and moving forward or backward; the intention was to make them more or less immobile for the entire voyage.²⁶ While horses can sleep standing up—in the wild this makes them less vulnerable to predators because they can take off quickly when confronted with danger—they need to be able to move around in order to process their food properly.²⁷ The ship conditions were therefore far from ideal and resulted in colic and stress, as the cowboys themselves recognized and repeated many times in records of their experiences.²⁸ In contrast, cattle could lie down during the trip, and they tended to do so especially when the sea was rough. Cattle reacted to stressful environments by eating and drinking less and by acting what one cowboy referred to as “droopy.”²⁹

In general horses were known to be the most delicate travelers of all animal species because of how susceptible they were to colds, pneumonia, and other lung diseases; these illnesses were sometimes referred to in a generic way simply as “shipping fever.”³⁰ In his official history of UNRRA, George Woodbridge paints a rather grim picture of what life was like for the horses aboard a particularly difficult sailing: “Conditions on the ships were bad. Most of the horses were standing in two or three feet of manure, their backs rubbing against ceiling fixtures.” The threat of “spontaneous combustion from the piles of smoking dung” was a real concern.³¹ Woodbridge’s description is unusually frank and stands in marked contrast to his otherwise (sometimes overly) positive assessments of most other aspects of UNRRA’s work. Perhaps he did not regard criticism of the animals’ physical conditions as especially damning to UNRRA or to the international aid effort. And besides, as Woodbridge points out, from a financial standpoint UNRRA had an obligation to taxpayers to move quickly, to be responsible custodians of public funds, and thus to pack as many animals as could fit into a single sailing. The animals’ discomfort was to be expected. Humans, not surprisingly, made choices for the animals according to human priorities; keeping costs down was a crucial one.

The cowboys recognized the massive logistical challenges that formed part of the UNRRA animal aid program, and they understood that sometimes the ships themselves undermined the main goal of their jobs, which was to deliver the animals safely to their destinations. They frequently described problems with the physical layout of the vessels: “Our ship wasn’t built with horses in mind, and everything was unhandy,” recalled one cowboy on a sailing to Greece.³² Another cowboy, Byron Royer from Kokomo, Indiana, who sailed on SS Zona Gale, a Liberty ship, offered the following detailed description of what was wrong with the horses’ stables: “The stables on the ship are not right. They are built so that a horse, when it is down, gets its back legs under the partition and its front legs out through the front of the stall, making it almost impossible for the animal to help itself. In addition to this, it is almost impossible to clean the manure out of anything except the back two or three feet.” Royer marveled, too, at other construction choices. The floors of the stables were constructed out of first-grade lumber, for example, and this, he said, “makes the whole thing a mess. This lumber gets very slick from the manure and if the mare gets the least bit out of balance she goes down just like she would on ice. The floors should be made out of native timbers with crossbars, maybe, running in both directions.”³³ Cowboy J. Olen Yoder had a similar criticism of ship design. In his memoir Yoder described how one horse on his sailing died because she got caught in an awkward part of the stalls: “This one must have been pushed or lurched forward—her head under the breast rail and probably broke her neck and died instantly.”³⁴ At least in their diaries and letters, the men were not afraid to be critical of the choices made by UNRRA planners and ship retrofitters and to exert knowledge in a specific domain.

Moisture problems also plagued the horse stalls. Yoder described the stalls as “very foul and very damp. Moisture gathers on the metal beams and air ducts considerably. Alley ways and stalls are getting soaked making it very messy.” The ship’s renovated ventilation systems—at a cost of $20,000 per ship—was a part of the problem, according to Yoder: “Blowers force air into holds through the ducts and pipes above horses—instead of sucking the foul, hot air out. It is the most wrong-running affair I ever did see!”³⁵ The air quality was further complicated by the vast quantities of urine that accumulated in the hold. Although urine was pumped out as often as possible, there was always enough present to give off a strong ammonia that irritated the eyes of both the animals and the humans aboard.³⁶

Owen Gingerich, who sailed on SS Stephen R. Mallory with over eight hundred horses, described how the two long and narrow aisles of horses in the hold created a dangerous work environment for the cowboys: “When I was filling their water buckets constant vigilance was required to prevent snappish horses from biting.” Gingerich, though, was sympathetic to the animals: “But who can blame them? Snatched from their bucolic solitude, shipped by rail to a dockside corral, hoisted into a rocking ship, deprived of exercise, forced to stand with strange partners, and balancing ever more precariously as the manure built up under their hind legs, they had every reason to express frustration . . . Some of the horses were sick, and in the wilting heat and ammoniated atmosphere of the lowest holds, several died of suffocation.” To make matters worse, Gingerich’s ship ran into engine trouble shortly after leaving Newport News and therefore had to make a stop in Boston for repairs. In that short trip from Virginia to Massachusetts, several horses died. This at least precipitated some action; while the engine trouble was being sorted, modifications were made to the horses’ environments to prevent additional deaths: “Long canvas air funnels were hung between the booms to force fresh air into the lower holds, three levels down near the center of the ship.” The improvements notwithstanding, a total of sixty-five horses died on Gingerich’s sailing.³⁷

Relatively minor mechanical problems aboard the ships were not all that uncommon, and these had the effect of lengthening the trips and therefore extending the time the animals were confined to their stalls. Occasionally there was also a maritime accident or incident of some kind or other that further complicated a trip. A particularly close call came when SS William S. Halsted, a Poland-bound ship, collided with an Esso Camden oil tanker in November 1946 as it made its way from the port of Baltimore through Chesapeake Bay; there was a fire in the tanker, which in turn ignited the ship. All animals, human and nonhuman, were saved; the ship, however, needed to be repaired before sailing to Europe, and the animals had to be unloaded and then reloaded while the repair work was completed.³⁸ All told, only one UNRRA ship was destroyed completely during the UNRRA period, and that happened as a result of a mine in the Trieste harbor; all men were saved, but all animals drowned, and all cargo was lost.³⁹

Unexploded mines were a particular danger in the Baltic Sea, and many cowboys described their anxiety upon entering this region.⁴⁰ Quite often mine sweepers preceded the cattle boats to ensure safe passage through dangerous areas, including harbor entrances, and typically the ships used local guides or pilots to help them navigate through the most hazardous areas.⁴¹ Some UNRRA ships were also equipped with a special protective system that was designed to kept magnetic mines from attaching to the ships.⁴²

There was little margin for error given the importance of delivering aid quickly; the promises of mid-century humanitarianism were literally carried aboard these ships. The ships themselves were expensive, as were the general cargo and the animals too. And then there was all of the food that the animals needed while they were aboard the ships: tons of cattle feed, hay, oats, bran, salt, and water, plus straw for bedding. On top of that, there were the tools that facilitated the cowboys’ work with the animals: thousands of feet of rope, wire clippers, dozens of manure forks, brooms, shovels and scrapers, and hundreds of buckets.⁴³ Often, ships also carried an extra thirty-day supply of hay and grain, which was stored below decks and distributed at the destination point; this was meant to address feed shortages at the destinations.⁴⁴

There were other humans aboard the ships as well, notably the ship’s regular crew, including a captain, sailors, and officers.⁴⁵ Both the supervisors of the seagoing cowboys and the UNRRA-appointed veterinarians enjoyed the privileges of officers aboard the ships.⁴⁶ While it was the supervisors and cowboys and not the regular crew that had responsibility for the animals’ care, it was the ship’s captain that had final say over everything that happened on his vessel. Cowboys came under the control of UNRRA only when they left the ship; while they were on board, they were answerable to the ship’s captain.⁴⁷ This meant that in a very real sense, captains determined important elements of the cowboys’ and the animals’ experiences. The relationship between the two groups was described as positive overall: M. E. Hays, chief of the Agricultural Rehabilitation Division of UNRRA in Poland, reported back to Washington that the ships’ captains had nothing but praise for the men from the Brethren Service Committee who worked as cattle tenders on UNRRA ships. And for its part the Brethren Service Committee, as the manager of the cowboys program, did not report any serious problems with the captains.⁴⁸

There was at least one veterinarian per ship, or two for the larger ships with a greater number of animals. The veterinarians’ work started even before any animals or cowboys set foot on the ships. Before sailing the veterinarians prepared and checked the adequacy of the ship’s medical supplies, including the inventory of drugs; all veterinary supplies were purchased through the Emergency Procurement Section of the Bureau of Supply.⁴⁹ The veterinarians also conducted last-minute checks of the animals’ health.⁵⁰ Once on board, the veterinarians directed the animal care with the aim of bringing as many healthy animals as possible to their destinations. This meant preventing the spread of illnesses, tending to sick animals, and of course establishing an optimal schedule for feeding and watering. Much depended on the veterinarians’ skills, commitment to the job, and previous livestock experience. There were many attestations from the cowboys of attentive and careful veterinarians. As cowboy Harold McNett stated in an interview, from his perspective the vets “worked harder than anybody else I reckon you would say because they always had something to do.”⁵¹ But there were also examples of gross incompetence. Owen Gingerich, for example, described one of the veterinarians on his 1946 sailing on Stephen R. Mallory as spectacularly inept when he seemingly failed to recognize that one of the horses he was working on was already dead.⁵²

Each veterinarian, if indeed there were two, was in charge of approximately half of the animals. Each toured his respective section every morning of the trip plus after lunch and then again in the evening just before bed. During these tours the veterinarians inspected the mucous membranes of the animals’ eyes, nose, and mouth, and they looked for signs of congestion. They also took the animals’ body temperature, especially if there were other worrying symptoms. Part of the veterinarian’s job was to document any illnesses, and especially deaths, for UNRRA’s records. The forms were filed with UNRRA.⁵³

The veterinarians were also in charge of the cattle supervisors, who in turn both communicated the vets’ instructions to the cowboys and enforced the vets’ directives about what to feed and how much. This general structure—a veterinarian in charge of overall animal care and a supervisor who had direct authority over the men who performed the daily care rituals—was familiar from wartime animal shipments.⁵⁴ The supervisors and the veterinarians thus played very important roles aboard the ships, as their attentiveness and diligence, and their general rapport with each other and with the attendants, determined how the animals experienced their days. A good working relationship between a veterinarian and a supervisor could even compensate for a lack of experience in the cowboy crew; some cowboys themselves recognized that the “inexperienced tenders” in their group only added to the animals’ stress.⁵⁵

In setting the animals’ feeding schedules, the veterinarians looked to UNRRA’s Division of Agriculture, Rehabilitation Livestock Branch. The branch’s general guidelines stated that the animals should be fed twice a day at least, morning and evening, and that they ought to be given fresh water three times a day. Horses were given bran, oats, salt, and hay (dried grass), while cattle were given alfalfa hay, timothy hay, salt, and a feed mixture. The veterinarians and the animal care crews were warned that they needed to guard against overfeeding and overwatering just as much as they had to look out for underfeeding and underwatering. All of these instructions, guidelines, and warnings were spelled out in a document called “Instructions to Veterinarians and Livestock Supervisors.”⁵⁶ The food itself was provided via the Department of Agriculture and paid for by UNRRA.⁵⁷

Feeding the animals occupied most of the cowboys’ time. Replenishing the food supply on any one deck was done using a winch to lift the bales of hay and straw and the bags of feed to the appropriate level. There were generally no troughs, so that both the grain and the water had to be delivered in cleaned-out buckets and placed in front of the animals. According to some of the cowboys, the animals would too often knock over these buckets; the cowboys of course had to clean up the mess. All of this was made more difficult, as the cowboys were quick to say, given the need to maintain one’s balance while the ship rolled and pitched through the ocean waters.⁵⁸

In his diary Arthur D. Meyer, a seventeen-year-old Mennonite from Wayne County, Ohio, who sailed on SS Robert W. Hart to Poland in the summer of 1946, during UNRRA’s busiest period, described the feeding regime on board his ship. Meyer kept a diary while he was at sea and documented what he did. On June 29 he wrote, “Most of the mares gobble their oats undaintily. Some get their big noses stuck in the bucket and give the bucket and perhaps the ring a good toss. We must retrieve the equipment and start all over. A few horses must be coaxed to eat. Some evidently don’t feel too well. The hold is very hot. I hope we can get on the high seas soon to get some cool ocean breeze for these animals. After the horses eat their oats, we water them, collect the buckets and rings, and spread hay in the aisles for munching.”⁵⁹ The routine was repeated daily.

As much as cowboys’ schedules were determined by the livestock supervisors’ and the veterinarians’ instructions, they were also shaped, more fundamentally, by the animals’ needs and by their value as humanitarian relief—or, alternatively stated, by calculations of relief and rehabilitation needs. Everyone aboard the ships—veterinarians, supervisors, cowboys, captains, and sailors—understood that the animals constituted an investment that needed to be protected. As Nancy Cushing has shown in her analysis of animals on the First Fleet, the founding ships of Britain’s colony in New South Wales in the late eighteenth century, livestock animals enjoyed an elevated status aboard the ships because they were so important to colonial ambitions: “Just as Noah’s pairs of animals were to ensure that the human order could be re-established after the great flood, the First Fleet animals were to be the progenitors of animals which would allow British life to be transplanted onto a new continent.”⁶⁰ The animals aboard the UNRRA ships carried a similarly enormous potential and responsibility: they would help reestablish the war-destroyed societies. In a more indirect sense—and if we accept the importance of agriculture to broader rehabilitation goals—it was the animals that would help realize the full potential of postwar humanitarianism.

To maximize this potential, heifers in both the UNRRA and Heifer Project programs (and sometimes mares in the UNRRA program) were typically bred before shipment so that they were pregnant en route from the United States and would give birth not too long after arriving at their destinations. This practice, it was hoped, would allow recipient farmers to get two animals for each one that left an American port. It was a question of efficiency and utility. Moreover, the recipients would get milk shortly after the female cattle arrived at their destinations and gave birth, thereby meeting local nutritional needs and providing economic benefit sooner rather than later. Lastly, increasing the number of animals as quickly as possible helped create a healthy and varied genetic pool for the long term.⁶¹

Timing the pregnancies and births was complicated, however. While cattle have a gestation period of around nine months, mares foal within a broader and less predictable range (though the average is typically 340 days).⁶² Both UNRRA and the Heifer Project considered “advanced pregnancy” a reason for disqualification from the aid program.⁶³ Yet miscalculations happened, and these resulted in animals giving birth on the ships rather than at their final destination. This carried with it significant risks for both the mother and the newborn.⁶⁴ In these cases cowboys had to learn very quickly how they could be most useful during births. They prepared spaces aboard the tightly packed ships, cleared newborn animals’ mouths and noses of mucus, and collected the placenta to throw into the ocean. Successful births could bring cowboys and the ships’ crews together in shared wonder. Melvin Gingerich remarked that even the hardest and roughest sailors were softened when they witnessed two colts born during a sailing to Poland.⁶⁵ Newborn calves would often be named by the cowboys. On Robert Ebey’s fall 1946 voyage to Gdańsk, three newborn calves were named Bob, after Ebey himself; Mary, after Ebey’s three-year-old daughter; and Joan, after the daughter of one of the other cowboys in the group. (A fourth calf died.)⁶⁶ Cowboys talked about the responsibility they felt in caring for the additional animals and the pride they felt when the newborns made it successfully to their destinations.⁶⁷

Cows that had already freshened—that had already started producing milk because they had very recently given birth—were not initially eligible for shipment to Europe as the passage was determined to be too dangerous for them.⁶⁸ Later, as a sense of urgency increased, cows who were already lactating were sometimes shipped; the risks that this posed to the animals were simply accepted. This meant, though, that the cows needed to be milked on the ships, and this added another task for which the seagoing cowboys became responsible.⁶⁹ On the other hand, it also meant fresh milk instead of powdered milk for the cowboys, and this was always regarded as a great treat by the cowboys and the ship’s regular crew.⁷⁰ That milk would be available immediately upon reaching the destination was, again, another enormous advantage.

Cowboys worked hard and were on call twenty-four hours a day for the length of the journeys: they were scheduled seven days a week from 6:30 until about 20:30, with most of the chores concentrated over a couple of hours in the morning and a couple in the late afternoon, but they could be summoned back to active duty at any time if a problem or critical situation arose.⁷¹ There was also one night watchman (or sometimes two cowboys worked together) that made the rounds every hour and whose job it was to report any strange animal behavior or signs of illness—runny noses or eyes, for example—to the veterinarians.⁷² While the objective conditions aboard the ships were far from ideal, the staffing levels were very good, and the care practices were designed to identify problems as soon as they started.

Reporting illnesses—or just irregularities in the animals’ eating or drinking—formed a key and important part of the cowboys’ responsibilities.⁷³ The men surprised even themselves by how quickly they learned to spot changes in the animals’ health and how rapidly they adjusted to the daily work routines. As Mennonite cowboy (and Goshen College student) Kenneth M. Heatwole wrote in his diary about his July 1946 trip to Poland aboard SS Lahaina Victory, “If my darling would see the things I do such as wiping snot and pus from noses and eyes, etc. and could see the dirt on my hands with which we eat she’d probably faint.”⁷⁴ It was all physically demanding and exhausting work, and sometimes entire crews remained busy the whole day and night long if there was a specific medical emergency.⁷⁵ Exceptional circumstances were often highlighted in cowboys’ diary entries and reminiscences, and the anecdotes are told with a great deal of concern for the animals’ well-being. “One of our horses was down again and we spent much of the day with it,” Heatwole wrote.⁷⁶ Some supervisors made a point of telling would-be cowboys that they had to expect to work hard on the ships and to devote themselves completely to the animals; the cowboys quickly understood what it meant to say that “this is not a pleasure trip.”⁷⁷

Human-Animal Interactions

Some of the seagoing cowboys were from rural communities and had farming backgrounds, which meant that they were already familiar with the work they were asked to do aboard the ships. Providing food and water to animals, monitoring animal health, and cleaning animal living environments were usual chores. Agricultural backgrounds also meant that these men better understood how to conduct themselves around animals in general. Past experiences had taught them that it was usually more productive to work cooperatively with the animals, when possible, rather than to force them into compliance. At the very least, this meant that many of the men recognized that a sympathetic disposition made animals easier to handle and that this, ultimately, made their jobs simpler too. In the men’s own dairying communities (if indeed they came from such communities), the belief prevailed that treating animals well—naming them and handling them with tenderness and affection—produced more and better milk and was therefore an approach grounded in good economics. This thinking reflected a longer tradition in farm communities: in the late nineteenth century, Wisconsin dairy farmers advertised the motto, “Speak to a cow as you would a lady!”⁷⁸

Occasionally, cowboys encountered familiar horses on their sailings and expressed delight at having someone “from home” along on their journey. John Nunemaker, an eighteen-year-old Mennonite from Goshen, Indiana, found his family’s four-year-old mare, Queen, as part of a group of horses that had been assigned to him on his trip aboard SS Queens Victory that sailed from Newport News to Gdańsk in the summer of 1946. The ship carried a total of 770 horses and 27 livestock attendants.⁷⁹ Nunemaker’s father had sold Queen at a Goshen auction earlier that year, and the new owner had evidently sold her too; she ended up in a lot of horses destined for the UNRRA aid program. “When I said ‘Queenie’ she nickered,” Nunemaker remembered fondly after many years.⁸⁰ We cannot know for certain what Queen felt about this unexpected encounter, but it is well established that horses respond better to familiar handlers than to strangers and that familiarity reduces stress.⁸¹ Nunemaker’s affection for Queen reminds us that this can work both ways. It also suggests that the men’s on-board emotional communities included nonhuman animals as well.⁸² As we will see, this happened when the animals reached Poland, too: animals’ very presence could soften some of the brutal effects of war and displacement.

In general, the seagoing cowboys who came from denominations affiliated with the Heifer Project favored cattle over horses because the cattle were easier to handle and because horses were simply not part of the Heifer Project; horses were not “Brethren animals” and were included only in the UNRRA shipments. Nevertheless, all the cowboys attended to both species. This made some cowboys a little cranky as the horses were, in a sense, “foreign” to them. And yet the fact that horses required a greater level of commitment and more involved care meant that the men wrote more frequently about this species in their letters and diaries than they did about the cattle, who, in comparison, needed less specialized attention. There was just a lot less drama around cattle. One attendant declared that after the trip he was well and done with “the horses business.” “After all, we asked for heifers!” he complained.⁸³

Horses were indeed challenging. They were poor travelers and afraid of loud noises, and they did not cope well with being in small and tight spaces or with being approached by strangers—especially loud, nervous, and inexperienced ones.⁸⁴ The cowboys generally agreed that it took greater skill to care for the horses, and yet many of the men simply lacked the confidence, knowledge, and experience that was needed for horses.⁸⁵ This inexperience, in turn, would have made the trips more stressful for the animals, too.

In their accounts cowboys discuss the various approaches that worked—or decidedly did not work—with the horses.⁸⁶ Here again the men subscribed to the belief that kindness and patience yielded better results than a stern attitude. “To be effective, one needed to get acquainted with the horses,” wrote one cowboy.⁸⁷ The work with horses was so challenging that two of the Brethren cowboys, Russell Helstern and Ed Grater, prepared a short guide that they distributed to other cowboys who were about to make a trip on an UNRRA boat. Helstern and Grater’s guide provided basic information about horses’ eating and drinking habits but also tips for working with these animals in the very unique ship environments. For Helstern and Grater, what was important was for the cowboys to show “a natural love for animals” or, barring that, to use “a calm voice, with gentle treatment and manners, with no evidence of fear.”⁸⁸ Dave Janzen, a German-speaking Mennonite from Ontario who sailed on SS Frederic C. Howe in 1946 as part of an all-Mennonite crew, adopted such an approach in working with what he called his “equine friends.” There were nearly seven hundred horses on Janzen’s sailing plus thirty cattlemen, two foremen, two veterinarians, and one supervisor.⁸⁹ These informal and unofficial tips had to suffice as training; neither UNRRA nor the BSC offered any formal hands-on training program that prepared the men for their daily work aboard the ships.

Familiarity between men and horses could make the animals calmer, but the length of the journeys and the discomfort that the ship environment created ultimately made the animals harder to handle. Art Meyer, the seventeen-year-old Mennonite introduced earlier, described the horses as “nervous, irritable, and high-strung from their travels to the ship and treatment while boarding. They kick, bite, whinny and snort. It’s like running the gauntlet when feeding and watering the critters. Constant alertness and using the hose as a deterrent weapon seems to be our best protection.”⁹⁰ Fear of being kicked by a horse was ever-present. A cowboy who sailed on SS Luckenbach with a cargo of almost six hundred horses gave voice to this fear: “I was really scared of them at first and walking down between a double row of waving heads who can bite each other across the aisle was a real task. . . . The most nerve-wracking job is hoeing out their stalls from behind. A horse is often quite a different personality fore and aft, and although I know both ends pretty well, it’s the rear that causes the most trouble.”⁹¹

A number of men were indeed bitten and kicked by horses who were exercising whatever little agency they had over their circumstances. “Some cattlemen will carry scars for a lifetime for not having discerned the moods of the horses, or perhaps having disregarded their moods or warnings,” recalled cowboy Elmer Yoder. The mandatory tetanus shots the men got before sailing were intended to protect the men in these cases.⁹² Mennonite cowboy Luke R. Bomberger, who sailed on a record nine relief ships, got an unexpected souvenir from one of his trips in the form of a scar from a horse bite.⁹³ It was similar for cowboy Jerry Liepert. As Liepert wrote, “I still carry a scar on my back from a horse that lifted me right off the deck. His teeth went right through my leather jacket.”⁹⁴ Cowboy Byron Royer used a revealing war metaphor to describe such encounters between men and horses: the bitten men were “wounded in action.”⁹⁵ There was really no comparable problem with the cattle. Horned cattle—which might well have proved dangerous to the handlers—had been deemed ineligible for shipment precisely for this reason. Any animals with horns were dehorned before shipment.⁹⁶

Human and nonhuman animal tempers flared as the days wore on and as the total number of sailings on each ship increased; the equipment started to wear out, and everything became even less comfortable than it had been at the start. On his trip to Poland in 1946, Robert Ebey described deteriorating ropes, broken halters, damaged partitions between stalls, and breast plaits chewed through by horses.⁹⁷ Inclement weather and rough seas took their toll too. Sea storms and waves could be violent enough to heave animals across the decks (or in rare cases overboard) and could also topple tons of hay and straw or even break stalls and damage the ship.⁹⁸ All of this was compounded by winter conditions. Given that UNRRA’s work needed to be done as quickly as possible within a very short time frame, animals were shipped in winter as well as in the warmer months. The risks associated with this choice were clear to many, and the decision to include winter shipping was by no means uncontroversial. The National Livestock Loss Prevention Board of Chicago, through its director, Dr. H. R. Smith, had even written to the secretary of state to protest the winter shipments of animals.⁹⁹

A well-publicized incident helped make the case against winter shipping. A March 1946 sailing of horses to Poland was supposed to have lasted just under two weeks. The ship got stuck at sea for almost three weeks waiting out a storm, however; this resulted in enormous animal losses as many of the horses succumbed to pneumonia.¹⁰⁰ In other cases of bad weather—such as violent winds—ships would try to alter course to take the wind head-on and thereby create conditions for a smoother sailing that would be easier on the animals and, in turn, for the cowboys who throughout it all still needed to attend to the animals’ needs.¹⁰¹

Numerous cowboys also worried about the manure accumulation aboard the ships and warned that this jeopardized all of the animals’ good health. Manure could contaminate food and water, and it also generated masses of flies. Generally, manure was removed using the fire hose and seawater and was washed out through the scuppers. But given that the drains were narrow—often not even two by four inches down in the hold—they proved inadequate for the volume of manure that the animals produced and became clogged easily.¹⁰² Again, the quick repurposing of the vessels as livestock carriers had not always allowed for optimal choices.

At any rate, manure was valuable as fertilizer for fields, and some of the cowboys from rural backgrounds knew that it would be useful in agricultural rebuilding efforts at the destination points and as a result was worth collecting. Sometimes ships did carry the manure on to their destinations instead of dumping it into the ocean, but this was largely at the captains’ discretion.¹⁰³ Cowboy Warren Sawyer joked in an interview about his sailing to Gdańsk in 1946 that these trips were nicknamed “manure tours” because of the quantity of manure that the boats accumulated over the course of the sailings from America.¹⁰⁴

On Death and Dying

Dying and dead animals were a unique challenge for cowboys, and the men often described animal deaths in their diaries and letters home. “Four more horses kicked off last night and today,” cowboy J. Olen Yoder remarked in his diary on December 13, 1945, the second day of sailing from New York to Poland.¹⁰⁵ Animals that developed a serious illness on board the ships and were regarded as “beyond recovery” were euthanized (often with strychnine) by the ship’s veterinarian. These on-board deaths, and even instances of serious illnesses, are perhaps the best evidence we have of animals’ responses to conditions that their bodies found intolerable. The animals that died during sailings were thrown overboard, leaving no trace of their existence after the fact, other than on UNRRA balance sheets as a set of statistics.¹⁰⁶

Throwing the bodies of large animals overboard—a horse can easily weigh half a ton—was no simple task. It was a bit easier if the horse died near an opening, and sometimes, if the men noticed an obviously sick horse during loading, they anticipated its death by placing it in a “convenient” stall so as to minimize the work that would later be required to throw the animal into the ocean.¹⁰⁷ Several men worked together to slip a rope around the dead horse’s head and then to pull it into position so that the body could be hoisted (using a winch) above the deck and then swung overboard. The men who lifted dead animals by the winches were called “the pulling crew,” and the work they did was called “towing.”¹⁰⁸ The men knew not to throw animals overboard in the harbor, where patrol boats passed, but, as cowboy Yoder wrote, “out on the ocean any little or big thing won’t be noticed.”¹⁰⁹ When the large animal landed in the water, the men watched the body “bobbing up and down” as the ship sailed away.¹¹⁰ They presumed that the dead horse would make “a meal for the sharks and scavengers of the sea.”¹¹¹ But the men understood, too, that the dead animals represented “dead labor” and lost potential; the bodies reminded everyone how enormous the obstacles to rehabilitation were.¹¹²

Dead horses also became a labor issue. Cowboy Yoder reported that the ship’s sailing crew was paid $1.05 extra per hour during “horse dumping,” and as a result the sailors were not eager for the cowboys to do this work. But there was a countervailing pressure to save on operational expenses, and the captain preferred for the cowboys to do the dumping instead; the cowboys did not get paid extra, and, after all, the animals, whether dead or alive, were their responsibility. And often this is precisely what happened: the Brethren Service Committee men, and not the regular ships’ crews, disposed of the animal bodies.¹¹³

Some of the very old ships lacked the equipment needed to move a dead animal from a stall located below deck, to the deck, and then overboard; cowboys in these instances reported having to cut up the animal on the spot and then to throw smaller body parts through portholes. This gruesome task was especially tough when the cowboy had grown attached to the animal that had been in his care, as evidenced by some moving descriptions of death and loss in cowboy accounts. Art Meyer wrote in his diary, “This morning our beautiful big roan mare went down, sick. This afternoon she died of pneumonia. What a pity, and when we were almost there. On top of this a bit later another bay mare went down also. After moving her and getting medication she too died tonight. We now have 67 mares left to bring through this ordeal. We’ll do all we can to get them there!” Less sentimental cowboys took an entirely different approach to dead horses, as Meyer described: “Some of the fellows have cut rawhide from the dead animals, have tied rope to it and are dragging it through the sea water to ‘cure’ it. They hope to use the hide to make things later.”¹¹⁴

Deaths were frequent and not unexpected, and cowboys often observed in their diaries and memoirs that some animals arrived on the ships already sick; these were the ones most easily weakened further by the conditions aboard the ships and therefore the most likely to die. For example, cowboy John Gingerich, who described himself as an experienced horse tender, reported that on his trip on the SS Wesley W. Barret to Gdańsk in April 1946 “most” of the 833 horses were already sick before sailing from Baltimore harbor: 13 died during the loading stage alone, 85 died en route, and, amazingly, another 15 dead horses were unloaded in Gdańsk harbor.¹¹⁵ Cowboys reported that veterinarians were regularly giving out sulfa tablets to the horses to try to keep whatever infections they might have had under control and to keep the death count as low as possible.¹¹⁶

The Brethren Service Committee, based on reports it received from the cowboy supervisors, in turn reported the high death rates to UNRRA.¹¹⁷ The ships’ veterinarians also submitted reports to UNRRA that detailed the various animal illnesses that were carried on board or that developed during the sailings and that sometimes resulted in death. The reports were matter-of-fact. One report from the veterinarian on SS Mt. Whitney that had sailed from Newport News on January 24, 1947, to Gdańsk stated that 79 of the 1,462 horses on board had died, most of them after a heavy storm that hit the ship on the first two days of February: “We attribute the majority of deaths to exhaustion and collapse of the previously sick animals as a number of them had influenza previous to shipment.”¹¹⁸

Equine influenza (or “horse flu”) and pneumonia were particularly pernicious problems; as many vets and cowboys confirmed, these infections circulated in the waiting lots before the horses even boarded the ships.¹¹⁹ One New York Times article reported that almost five hundred horses died in 1946 while awaiting shipment in the Atlantic Coast Line Terminal in Savannah, Georgia; most of the deaths were caused by pneumonia.¹²⁰ The men knew all too well what the problems were and repeated them many times in their accounts. Winter sailing was hard, they said, and pneumonia rates were typically highest when the temperatures were low. Rough seas and forceful waves made animals feel unwell and often required them to be tied, as too much movement could lead to injuries. But increased immobility, the men knew, was stressful for the animals. Bad weather meant, too, that voyages became longer than expected, with animals confined indoors for the duration; this only further increased the risk of illnesses spreading throughout the group because of poor ventilation on the ships.¹²¹

Ship veterinarians were clear, too, that it was the very fact of sailing that made an illness of one kind or another “probable.” There was little research at the time on animals and seasickness, but as one veterinarian theorized, the physical strain of bracing themselves in the holds (generally but especially during rough sailings) contributed to animals’ stress and overall weakness. While cold weather was clearly a problem, in the summer, heat stroke was a persistent threat too. Vets treated heat stroke with a saline solution and glucose (plus water poured over the body of an overheated animal), but it was often not enough. Minor surgery happened occasionally, as did deliveries and abortions. Veterinarians commonly had to deal with abscesses, too; vets placed tubes in the trachea to help horses with labored breathing that was being caused by pressure from the abscesses. They routinely gave both intravenous and oral drugs aboard the ships: sulfathiazole was administered intravenously and sulfanilamide orally.¹²²

None of this was news to UNRRA, which, as we know, had fully expected livestock losses in its animal aid program. The imperative to assemble and deliver animals quickly trumped everything else, and there was little they could do or were willing to do to improve the outcomes. As the August 1945 issue of UNRRA’s Monthly Review stated plainly, “In shipping livestock by sea a percentage of loss in transit is to be expected.”¹²³ From the start experts had estimated that losses would hover around 10 percent overall given that the shipping was planned for the whole year and not just in the better-weather months; that these losses would be expensive (UNRRA did not insure the animals or the other cargo that it shipped) was accepted.¹²⁴ In the end, as George Woodbridge states in his history of UNRRA, the livestock shipments had an overall loss rate of 3.8 percent.¹²⁵ This rate referred to the maritime part of the journey only, and as such it did not account for what happened to the animals before they boarded the ships or immediately after disembarking; these are significant omissions. In one UNRRA report, the total number of horses who died somewhere between being sold to UNRRA and the moment of loading at one of the American ports is given at over eleven thousand or 7 percent. The losses for UNRRA cattle in the US were 2 percent. Losses were heavier or smaller depending on the sailing.¹²⁶

Moreover, aggregate loss rates that count all species together hide a couple of key factors. First, the aggregate numbers conceal the fact that horses tended to die in much higher numbers than cattle: in some reports the sailing loss rate for horses was 4.6 percent as compared to 1.5 percent for cattle.¹²⁷ Second, they obscure the significantly different loss rates on different sailings. Peggy Reiff Miller has calculated that on some sailings total loss rates could be under 1 percent whereas for others that rate could jump into the double digits, especially when loads were composed mostly of horses and the sailings happened during especially cold and rough weather.¹²⁸ Generally, the faster Victory vessels had a lower loss rate, whereas the slower Liberty vessels had a higher loss rate.¹²⁹ In other words, the type of ship that an animal ended up on mattered a great deal to his or her experiences and, ultimately, to the chances for survival, as longer voyages were more difficult for the animals to bear.¹³⁰

At any rate, losses on individual sailings that were significantly below UNRRA’s stated average of 3.8 percent were celebrated as an accomplishment. When SS Mt. Whitney, which departed Newport News in 1946 with 1,499 horses, reached Gdynia eleven days later with 1,459 horses, Dr. Wilder, chief veterinarian of the UNRRA mission to Poland, praised the posted 2.8 percent loss rate. Losing only forty horses, he said, was “very satisfactory.”¹³¹ Wilder made regular trips to the ports of Gdynia, Gdańsk, and Szczecin to inspect the animals that were being delivered and to record the deaths that had occurred during the crossings.¹³² Like UNRRA bureaucrats generally, Wilder understood that horses were simply more susceptible than cattle to respiratory diseases on board the ships and that cattle generally did better in the hot and poorly ventilated ship conditions. According to Wilder this was the cost of running the livestock program.¹³³

Cowboys generally adopted this line of thinking too. While they typically regarded the deaths as regrettable, what really worried them was the possibility that their sailing might post a loss rate that was higher than the average and that this would reflect poorly on the whole crew.¹³⁴ Even the American Humane Association, which was involved (even if somewhat passively) in monitoring the UNRRA livestock program, considered losses within a certain range quite normal and acceptable; the greater cause—delivering animal aid to war-ravaged contexts—justified some nonhuman animal deaths.¹³⁵

These loss rates perhaps become starker when the percentages are translated into actual numbers: For example, during the ten-month period from September 29, 1945, to July 28, 1946, a total of 59,438 horses were shipped to Poland alone, and of these 4.4 percent—or 2,600 animals—died. That means that 65 horses died every week in just this one program and just on the ocean sailings themselves. A total of 19,281 cattle arrived in Poland during the same period, and of these 184 (or 0.9 percent) died.¹³⁶ A willingness to accept these numbers reflects a belief that animals existed to serve humans and were inherently expendable. Those animals that could not tolerate the conditions they encountered simply became part of livestock program accounting; their deaths had been factored in from the beginning. The animal deaths were measured in economic terms and in terms of impact on investment rather than on animal welfare per se.¹³⁷ Arguably, too, the loss rates reflected cultural attitudes toward waste more generally, whether that was food waste, resource waste, or indeed animal waste. Evidence suggests that the Americans and the British differed in this regard. British officials commented disapprovingly on the extent to which postwar American food policies, for example, were driven by food surpluses in the United States, and they were dismayed at how much food waste the Americans generally accepted as normal in shipping or, indeed, in everyday life. The British also believed that Americans’ postwar horse surplus meant that austerity and frugality did not need to drive (and therefore did not drive) policy choices.¹³⁸ Though we cannot directly compare American and British approaches to animal shipping (the British did not run an animal aid program whether as part of UNRRA or separately), the remarks about an American willingness to accept “more” waste does speak to the favorable economic situation in the United States at the time.

Religious Devotion and Leisure Time

After their work with the animals was completed, some of the religious cowboys tried to make time for devotion. The frequency of religious services depended largely on the overall composition of the specific cowboy group and of course on the men’s willingness to participate in prayer services. Many cowboys also remember that the type and frequency of prayer were determined by the supervisor, who was the one who often took a lead role in organizing both Sunday and midweek services, chorus groups, and Bible study. On a sailing of SS Mt. Whitney to Poland, for example, one Rev. Bury held Gospel preaching services in the mess hall every night (except for the first night) and prayer meetings in the stables at Christmas.¹³⁹ On the Gingerich-Oswald Mennonite crew, there were regular devotional and religious services in addition to organized recreational programs.¹⁴⁰

Participating in religious services aboard the ships with like-minded men was very important to many of the cowboys. Accounts describe these moments as heightening the men’s feelings of community and faith and their commitment to helping those in need. Livestock attendant E. S. Rowland from Hagerstown, Maryland, described his trip to Poland on SS Mexican in November 1945 as ultimately having given him “more faith in God, more of a desire to do relief work and a greater hope for the outlook of our Church of the Brethren abroad and at home.”¹⁴¹ Cowboy Robert Ebey said after his fall 1946 trip to Poland with a load of heifers that the experience had sparked in him a desire “to preach peace with more earnestness.”¹⁴² In contrast to the busy outbound trip, the more relaxed return journeys to North America offered far more opportunity for general “Christian fellowship,” as some of the men liked to refer to it.

On the return voyages, the major job entailed washing out and cleaning the animal stalls. In a particularly evocative description, Owen Gingerich invoked the labors of Heracles and the cleaning of the Augean stables to convey what an awesome amount of work the scrubbing of manure-encrusted stalls entailed.¹⁴³ Sometimes the cowboys also applied creosote to the pens to both disinfect and preserve them. And at other times captains came up with additional work for the cowboys to do (though they were not supposed to demand it). The cleaning of the ships could also be done at the destination port, as ships were occasionally used to transport troops back to the US and space needed to be prepared for the men.¹⁴⁴ The goal was for all the ships sailing into American ports to be ready to take on a new load of animals and goods as quickly as possible. Once the necessary work was done, the return trips afforded plenty of time to play “cards, checkers, [and] chess” and to read.¹⁴⁵ Daniel Hertzler, who had sailed in December 1945 on SS Park Victory to Poland with a crew composed of sixteen Mennonites, ten Brethren, one Methodist, one Baptist, and one Presbyterian, said it was “probably the longest ‘do nothing’ experience I would ever have.”¹⁴⁶ One Canadian cowboy described his return voyage as being all about “eating, sleeping, reading, playing games and argue [sic] with the Americans, trying to convince them that King George is not the dictator of Canada.”¹⁴⁷ And while some men complained about the small sleeping spaces—a fifteen-foot-by-twenty-foot room for twenty men—others highlighted the comradery that developed between men living in such close proximity.¹⁴⁸

Cowboy crews were also encouraged during this free time to focus on “self-improvement”—studying a map of the world, building models, singing, participating in discussion groups, and learning new skills.¹⁴⁹ Melvin Gingerich remembered his men enjoying study evenings where the topics included the history of Denmark (where their ship had made a stop) and the history of UNRRA itself. Some ship captains gave the cowboys tours of the vessel if time allowed and taught them a little bit about sailing. Other cowboys worked on their physical fitness and spent time in the improvised ship gymnasium, which had been set up in the ship’s hold (where until recently baled hay had been stored.)¹⁵⁰ Others took the time to record their experiences in diaries or letters home. By design the cattlemen’s mess was kept open at all times so as to facilitate writing as well as game playing and other social activities.¹⁵¹

Throughout their time on the ships, both outbound and inbound, cowboys and the regular ship’s crew had minimal direct or planned interaction with each other. The regular sailors were physically separated from the cowboys (they occupied a different part of the vessel) and from the relief animals. Some of the religiously minded cowboys observed the great emotional gulf that separated them from the regular crew, whom they regarded as generally vulgar and coarse.¹⁵² Owen Gingerich referred to the ship’s sailors as “hardened young men not much older than we, whose vocabulary was salted with the f-word, used several times in every sentence and often creatively inserted mid-word, in participial form. They were obsessed with sex in every waking moment and probably in every dreaming moment as well.”¹⁵³ Some of the sailors “had contracted venereal disease during shore leave,” Gingerich revealed. And in one instance, according to Gingerich, the penicillin that would normally have been given to the sailors to treat an infectious condition had gone missing; Gingerich said that he and some other cowboys suspected “Doc Solar,” one of the ships’ veterinarians, of having removed it to sell on the black market.¹⁵⁴

Some of the Mennonite cowboys went so far as to say that conditions on the ships were “intolerable” because of the presence of “immoral sailors.”¹⁵⁵ Too many of the sailors, according to one cowboy, were “slaves to alcohol.”¹⁵⁶ Nevertheless for some of the preachers and ministers, their work with UNRRA as seagoing cowboys provided a singular opportunity to get to know (even at a distance) “a cross section of life” aboard the ships; this allowed them to better understand laymen’s lives.¹⁵⁷

Cowboys’ willingness to describe their experiences in such rich detail means that we have an unprecedented opportunity to hear about what happened aboard the livestock ships, how the animals fared on their trips, and how they were cared for and why. Moreover, by stepping aboard the ships we can best grasp the degree to which the UNRRA and Brethren initiatives were enmeshed. While the sailing arrangements and the ships’ layout reflected pragmatism and efficiency, they also embodied mutual purpose and served as striking symbols of the era’s intersecting values, of a moment when secular humanitarianism and Christian charity converged in meaningful ways.