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Battle of vienna 19451/3/2024 It was the toughest assignment Stewart had faced since landing in Normandy the previous year, but his most important. Surrounded deep inside hostile territory, the small force was tasked with baby-sitting the world’s most precious horses. ‘Stewart’s Foreign Legion,’ as they jokingly were calling themselves, had fought its first battle and won. The first SS attack had been beaten back, but the enemy would return. Gripping his Thompson sub-machine gun, Stewart, already a grizzled veteran at the age of 29, scanned the field warily. Leading this curious coalition that found itself in action near the Czechoslovakian town of Hostau was a tall, strikingly handsome U.S. German Wehrmacht soldiers cradled Mauser rifles, while fur-hatted Russian Cossacks grinned fiercely through their beards as British and Polish ex-POWs stared grimly ahead. Huddled inside their positions with them was a strange group of comrades. American GIs quickly reloaded their weapons. When the shooting died away the snowy field was littered with dead and dying Waffen-SS soldiers. Here, Felton himself takes us through the story. This unbelievable true-story was the inspiration for Ghost Riders, a new non-fiction book by author and historian Mark Felton. troops, along with a motley collection of liberated Allied POWs, a bona fide Cossack aristocrat and a platoon of turn-coat German soldiers race the clock to drive a herd of priceless horses to safety, all the while fighting off attacks by a legion of crack troops from the Waffen-SS bent on their destruction. The mission, which was dubbed Operation Cowboy, would see U.S. A cavalry unit in Patton’s Third Army leapt at the chance to save the legendary Lipizzaners. Army promised to get the beasts out of harm’s way. Fearing for the horses’ lives, the German officer in charge of the stud farm sent word to the Americans that he and his men would surrender en masse if the U.S. The famous and extremely rare animals, which had been seized by the Third Reich as part of a bizarre wartime livestock breeding program, were now in the path of the advancing Red Army where they faced almost certain destruction. The settlement, which was still in the hands of a detachment of Wehrmacht soldiers, was home to some remarkably valuable treasure: several hundred prized Lipizzaner horses. More than 350 American GIs had just fought their way through enemy lines to reach the town of Hostau. The war in Europe was just days away from ending when one of the strangest episodes of the entire conflict played out along the German-Czechoslovakian border. “The efforts to rescue the Lipizzaners would end with battle-weary American GIs standing shoulder-to-shoulder with German troops to fight a common enemy – the Waffen-SS.” American GIs, with the help of German soldiers and Allied POWs, drive a herd of priceless Lipizzaner horses out of the path of the advancing Red Army while fending off attacks by Nazi die-hards.
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