UNRRA & the Dunkers

Baltimore stockyards rang with the impatient bellows of 337 cows, the whinnies of 396 restless mares. A ship stood empty in the harbor, ready to load. And across the water, Yugoslavia, Poland, Greece, Albania and Czechoslovakia (with more than five million farm animals lost in the war) waited hungrily for replacements.

But UNRRA was stumped. The ship was ready. The animals were ready. But there were no livestock hustlers to herd the beasts overseas.

Into the breach stepped brisk, friendly Benjamin G. Bushong, dairy farmer, cemetery owner, and chief red-tape cutter of the 226-year-old pacifist Church of the Brethren ("Dunkers" -- because they practice baptism by total immersion). For months Dunker Bushong had been pushing his church's own overseas relief program (TIME, July 24, 1944), only to strike a snag. City Dunkers had raised money for calves and feed. Country Dunkers had fed and fattened the animals into fine bulls and heifers. The Dunkers had the cattle but they had no ships.

Dunker Bushong made a suggestion: if UNRRA would provide shipping space for Dunker cows and bulls, the Brethren would rustle up seagoing hustlers to herd the UNRRAnimals. UNRRA was delighted and agreed to pay volunteers $75 monthly expenses, token salaries of i-c- daily.

Expediter Bushong promptly rallied his people and submitted to volunteers what is probably the war's shortest, most-to-the-point . questionnaire: "Who are you? What can you do?" He picked 100 (preachers, teachers, students, and a shrewdly chosen handful of veteran dirt farmers) as herders.

Last week UNRRA was busy fulfilling its half of the bargain. As 100 more Dunker volunteers set sail for Europe, six fat Dunker Brown Swiss bulls were safe in Greece, 150 Dunker heifers awaited passage to Poland. Said pleased Pacifist Bushong: "Perhaps shootin' isn't the only way out of this world mess."

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