Renegade Champion

“If you buy that horse, you’re buying your daughter’s death warrant,” Jane Pohl’s father was warned at the army barracks in the spring of 1941. But the potential that his teenage daughter Jane saw in the small, temperamental Thoroughbred was enough to convince him otherwise.

Earlier that year, when Fitzrada arrived at the army base where Jane’s family lived, the horse was stubborn, unpredictable, a...