I'll do this. For me, and for Becky. "I'll take the assignment," Barbara said emphatically.
"Then you are to report immediately to Lieutenant Milland at AAF Headquarters, Special Services. I can't spare an ATA car. Take a taxi. Don't the Yanks know there's still a war going on? We really don't have time for this horsing around."
Barbara stifled a laugh as she saluted, then left the room thinking, She's obviously not a horse lover!
Within a quarter of an hour, Barbara was at US Army Air Force headquarters, standing at attention before Lieutenant Howard Milland of Special Services. She thought the lanky red-haired officer looked just slightly older than the senior cadets at Glenview Military Academy.
"Please, be at ease," Milland said, then invited her to sit in the leather chair across from his desk. "Thank you for taking the assignment. Cigarette?"
She needed one, badly, and accepted.
"First, we know you can fly a bomber. We have to have a woman who can fly a B-17 because of its cargo hold. But have you flown one at night and without radio communications?"
"That's how I've flown most of them. It's a piece of cake."
He smiled. "Good. Now, a bit of history, unless you know it about the Lipizzaners."
"Not really. I'd like to know."
"I would too, if I were going to risk my neck to save one."
Just one? That's okay. I'll still do it, for Becky, and to fly in a war zone.
"The horses are a very old and pure breed, going back four hundred years to when Emperor Maximilian the Second of Austria visited a riding school in Spain. He decided his knights needed one like it, so he imported some Arabian stallions and crossed them with Spanish mares. Their descendants became the white Lipizzans, named after Lipizza, the Austrian town where they were foaled near the Adriatic Sea. He had the Spanish Riding School built on the palace grounds in Vienna and commanded that only the stallions be trained there. The mares are never ridden, and their foals live a life of freedom.
"The Lipizzaners and the Spanish Riding School survived every war since then. But after the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, they hid the mares and foals in Czechoslovakia.
"Even though Hitler hated horses, he ordered that the stallions remain at the riding school in Vienna. The horses and their trainers became part of the German army. The Nazis kept the riding school open, and the horses even had their own air-raid shelters. The reason was, Hitler intended breeding the Lipizzaners as 'super horses' for his 'super Aryan people' of the New World Order."