Another Lipizzaner War Story ?

From "The Telegraph" in the UK, army obituaries.  If true, it makes the other war story more creditable.

 

 

 

 

 

Squadron Sergeant Major Tom Parnell

Squadron Sergeant Major Tom Parnell, who died on January 11 aged 92, was a Chelsea Pensioner and former cavalryman who rescued Lippizaner horses of the Spanish Riding School in war-torn Austria.

In 1945 his regiment, the 10th Hussars, was at Graz. When his colonel sent him to collect four horses, Parnell, remembering the Hussars’ pre-war reputation for polo, assumed he was adding to horses already acquired for that purpose.

In fact they were Lippizaners from the Spanish Riding School which had been dispersed to secret locations because of the war. Unbeknown to Parnell, General Patton, a cavalryman, wanted to get to the horses before the Russians – whom he feared might eat them – and had enlisted the help of the 10th Hussars .

Parnell and a fellow NCO set off with two three-ton lorries; the drivers were armed, and they were joined by a guide. Two hours out of Graz, in mountainous country, they pulled off the road, following a forest track leading to a camouflaged and guarded cave. Inside was a makeshift stable and, to the men’s astonishment, four Lippizaners in good condition.

Getting the horses into the trucks called for ingenuity. Parnell managed it by backing the trucks alongside the road, cutting a bank away and using the soil for the horses to walk into the trucks. Two did, behaving well, but the others, frightened by the dark, canopy-covered interior, would not oblige. Eventually Parnell and his comrades pulled back the canvas from the frame of the lorry and the recalcitrant pair boarded. Blankets were used as protection against injury.

Much hampered by roads packed with refugees, the equines’ escort finally made it to Vienna, spending several pleasurable days with the horses at the Riding School.

Thomas Parnell, whose father won a Military Medal with the Border Regiment, was born in Bolton in 1918. Starting as a cotton spinner in the town, he became a TA soldier at 17 in the Duke of Lancaster’s Yeomanry. He joined the Royal Dragoons in 1936 but was posted to the 16/5th Lancers in India, enabling him to indulge his love of horses. He was in action, mounted, on the North-West Frontier and remembered that, under fire, the horses behaved better than the men.

On the regiment’s return from India, Parnell, drafted to the 10th Hussars, volunteered for the Middle East. He never discussed being with David Stirling’s Long Range Desert Group and was reticent about being captured. Chosen to lead the escape (with a compass sown into his trousers), he had to dispatch the sentry.

A happier memory was drinking mugs of tea with two unexpected and unnamed visitors who turned out to be Alexander and Montgomery. Wounded and blinded in his tank at Alamein, he rejoined his regiment after nine weeks, fighting with them up into Italy.

On one occasion he had to stop his tank for an arm-waving German officer. Revolver in hand, Parnell dismounted and was told of 30 wounded soldiers needing help. He immediately ordered his troop to minister to the Germans’ needs until medics arrived.

Parnell ended his war near the River Po, but continued in soldiering until 1958. His peacetime service was not without incident. When his tank’s brakes failed and the vehicle went crashing into a Wiltshire bank, its gun demolishing the manager’s wall, the terrified banker ran out, hands aloft, shouting: “Take the lot!”

Though he did not talk much of the war, Parnell’s experiences caught up with him after he became a Chelsea Pensioner in 1986. Told that someone wanted to see him, he discovered that his visitor was the very German officer – a Major Müller – whose men he had saved in wartime, and who had come to say thank you.

Parnell immediately presented his visitor with the regimental tie and blazer badge he was wearing, requesting that Müller wear them at Regimental and Afrika Korps reunions. This Müller duly did.

Nor did the Spanish Riding School forget Parnell. At a performance by the horses at Wembley in 2001, he was a guest of honour. Bemedalled and dressed in scarlet, he was spotlighted while his story was told to an admiring audience, many of whom asked him for his autograph.

The French would, no doubt, prefer not to remember him. On an official visit to a museum in Paris, where the escort lamented gaps in the sequence of Napoleonic regimental Eagles, Parnell’s enthusiastic but unwelcome contribution was: “Oh, we’ve got those at Chelsea.”

His loyalty to tradition, however, did not save him when, joining a queue of women meeting the Duchess of Gloucester, he curtsied. When they next met, she remembered, saying: “No need to curtsy, Sergeant Major.”

Squadron Sergeant Major Tom Parnell’s wife, Pearl, predeceased him. He is survived by their son.