Disney was clearly more interested in tugging heartstrings than in recounting history when it released the 1963 action movie Miracle of the White Stallions, about the Allied effort to save hundreds of famed Lipizzaner horses from the Nazis in Czechoslovakia during the last days of World War II.

Now, 61 years after the event, the mayor of a small west Bohemian town and a handful of war veterans want to reframe the conventional version of the mission to honor the soldiers who lost their lives to save a piece of European culture.

"It's a very nice movie," says Gaylord Jerry Toole, a Plzen resident, Vietnam veteran and member of the Military Car Club. "But they don't say anything about the people that died. They Disney-fied the bad parts."

Belá nad Radbuzou Mayor Libor Picka and a delegation of U.S. military veterans laid the foundation stone April 28 for a monument to the two U.S. soldiers — Sgt. Owen Sutton and Pvt. Raymond Manz — who were killed outside of the town while trying to save the horses in the mild cusp of April and May, 1945.

Their memorial will be officially dedicated Sept. 16.

Picka says it is important to set the record straight and give credit to those who've been neglected by popular culture.

"People forgot about the war and about how everything really was," he says. "So we put the information together, found out the names and did something."

Operation Cowboy

In late April 1945 U.S. General George Patton's 2nd Cavalry was holed up in west Bohemia near the dividing line agreed upon earlier that year by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet leader Josef Stalin at the Yalta conference.

Meanwhile, a few miles away, on the Soviet side of the Yalta line, some 300 Lipizzaner horses from the Spanish Riding School in Vienna had been moved to a farm in Hostoun, Czechoslovakia, in 1942.

As the famished and fatigued Soviet Army approached from the east, the Germans worried that the horses were in danger.

A Wermacht veterinarian, Capt. Rudolph Lessing, thought the Lipizzaners "would have been horse burgers for the Russian soldiers," as he put it at a 2nd Cavalry reunion years later.

Knowing that the Americans were near, Lessing sneaked behind enemy lines to the U.S. side with two Lipizzaners to convince the Army to rescue them from what he feared was certain death.

U.S. Col. Charles Reed, an equestrian aficionado, immediately recognized the significance of the horses.

Austrian rulers began breeding Spanish horses in the mid-16th century. Within a few decades, they established a royal stud farm in Lipica, in present-day Slovenia, from which the breed gets its name. In that mountainous region, the white horse gained its reputation as a sturdy and highly trainable animal.

The breed became the exclusive stock of the nobility, and was used for battle and transportation by the Habsburg elite for centuries.

Reed realized that if the horses died, the famous breed would go with it. Lessing convinced Reed to launch Operation Cowboy in response.

Reed sent Alpha Troop, 42nd Cavalry Squadron, to Hostoun to gather the horses and herd them to Bavaria. Soldiers put foals, which would not have been able to walk that distance, in trucks.

Only later did Col. Alois Podhajsky, the head of the Spanish Riding School, officially ask for protection by Patton's army, which was granted. The Army returned the horses to the stables a few months later.

Sutton and Manz

Records of just how Sutton and Manz died during Operation Cowboy are muddled — the memoirs of Patton himself make no reference to casualties during the operation.

According to the 2nd Cavalry Association Historical Archive, Sutton, 28, was wounded during a German attack on the farm while the soldiers were trying to take the horses. He died a few days later at an Army field hospital in Nuremberg.

Archive records show Manz was killed while attempting to destroy a German roadblock. He died two weeks short of his 20th birthday.

Toole and several others here have created and cared for memorials throughout the country similar to the one being built for Sutton and Manz, with the help of organizations such as the Military Car Club in Plzen.

"It's my baby, so I'm going to spank it," he says. "We need to make sure the memories of the dead people always continue on."

Toole says he has helped establish about 22 such monuments in west Bohemia to commemorate Allied heroism that was erased from history books by the pre-1989 regime.

Patton pending

Last year, Plzen dedicated a museum to Patton in recognition for his army liberating the city May 6, 1945. The grandson of "Old Blood and Guts," George Patton Waters, returned this year to donate some family artifacts to the museum.

Waters saw the Spanish Riding School's Lipizzaner horses when they were toured through the U.S. recently. He was reminded of a book that Podhajsky´ dedicated to Patton's wife, Beatrice, in honor of Operation Cowboy.

Later this month, Waters will embark on a mission of his own: to return the book to the Spanish Riding School. "It really belongs in their archives," he says.