12thcenturycavalry

8/2/2019 12thcenturycavalry

1/39

Scapegoat Arm: Twentieth-Century Cavalry in Anglophone Historiography

Author(s): Gervase PhillipsReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Military History, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Jan., 2007), pp. 37-74Published by: Society for Military HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4138029 .

Accessed: 10/03/2012 11:35

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Society for Military History is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal

of Military History.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=smhhttp://www.jstor.org/stable/4138029?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/4138029?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=smh


2/39

Scapegoat Arm:Twentieth-Century Cavalry inAnglophone Historiography1

Gervase Phillips

AbstractThe cavalry has not been treated kindlyby militaryhistorians. Por-trayed as an anachronismon the twentieth-centurybattlefield,thearmbecame a convenientscapegoat forfailuresinwarand the slowpace of modernisation n peacetime. This article traces the debateover cavalryover the course of the last hundredyears, drawingbothon contemporarysources and later historical analysis. It is sug-gested that a reassessment of the capabilities of early twentieth-century soldiers and an interest in the militaryhistory of easternEurope has led, inturn,to a more positive interpretation f the cav-alry's role in modern warfare.

NEITHER contemporary critics nor later historians have been kind tothe cavalry. Arrogant blunderers run ragged by Boer mounted rifle-men; anachronistic, armoured cuirassiers staring in horror and disdain attrenches and barbed wire; foot-dragging technophobes holding back theprocess of mechanisation; these are the prevailing images of twentieth-century cavalrymen in Anglophone historiography. The arm has servedas a convenient scapegoat for military setbacks in wartime and soldiers'alleged reactionary impulses in peacetime. This dismissive attitude isdeeply entrenched in military historiography. Robert Citino's recent,highly regarded study of the evolution of European warfare in the early

1. The author wishes to thank the journal's anonymous readers for their invalu-able comments on an earlier draft of this essay.Gervase Phillips is Principal Lecturer in the Department of History, ManchesterMetropolitan University. He is the author of The Anglo-Scots Wars, 1513-1550(1999) and has published articles in such journals as War and Society, Technol-ogy and Culture, and War in History.The Journal of Military History 71 (January 2007): 37-74 ? Society for Military History 37


3/39

GERVASE HILLIPStwentieth century confidently opined that "as for cavalry, it was increas-ingly clear that the man on horseback represented nothing on the mod-ern battlefield so much as a huge, hard-to-miss target for the rifle-armeddefender." For Citino, defence of the horse soldier was the mark of the"military conservative.'"2Yet much discussion of cavalry over the course of the last century hasbeen shallow and tendentious. Although less talented as self-publiciststhan many of their critics, cavalrymen were often more astute as com-mentators on the impact of technological and tactical developments onthe battlefield. This is now being recognised by historians, leading to theemergence of a more positive view of horse soldiers. Revisionism regard-ing the capabilities of the generation of military professionals who pre-pared for, and waged, the First World War and the increasing interest inthe Russian and Soviet military experience have, in particular, affectedperceptions of the mounted arm. A survey of the literature associatedwith twentieth-century cavalry, therefore, provides a useful insight bothinto the history of mounted warfare itself and into the assumptions thathave informed the writing of military history over the last hundred years.

South Africa, 1899-1902: Fire and l'arme blanche on the VeldtAt the beginning of the twentieth century, the role of cavalry on thebattlefield was one of the most bitterly contested questions of the day.For the British, the debate hinged on the events of the South AfricanWar,1899-1902. Ostensibly, the continued viability of shock tactics withl'arme blanche (sword or lance) was the central issue at stake, yet thistactical debate concealed a more personal clash between Sir JohnFrench, who had commanded the British cavalry in South Africa, and hisCommander-in-Chief, Lord Roberts. British cavalry's lack of pace andlacklustre performance in several engagements (most notably at Poplar

Grove, 7 March 1900) had drawn substantial criticism. French defendedhis men, pointing to the weakened state of their horses due to lack offodder, much of which had gone to the large numbers of semitrainedMounted Infantry units Roberts had raised. Roberts, in turn, blamed thecavalry for inadequate horsemanship, faulty doctrine, poor training, andlack of enterprise.32. RobertM.Citino, Questfor Decisive Victory:From Stalemate to Blitzkrieg inEurope, 1899-1940 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 42, 137.3. Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Royal Commission on the War inSouth Africa, Chaired by Lord Elgin, 2 vols. (London: HMSO,1903) [hereafterElginCommission], 2: Evidence of Field Marshal Lord Roberts, 66. Leo Amery, ed., TheTimesHistory of the War in South Africa, 1899-1902 (London: Sampson Low, 1902),2:564. Stephen Badsey, "MountedCombat in the Second Boer War,"Sandhurst Jour-nal of Military Studies 2 (1991): 17.

38 * THE JOURNAL OF


4/39

- Scapegoat Arm

It was against this background that discussion of the future of Britishcavalry took place. One of the most valuable contemporary sources onthis topic is the Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Royal Commis-sion on the War in South Africa in 1903. It is interesting to note that wit-nesses did not reject the possibility of cavalry undertaking shock tacticson the battlefield. The focus was on weapons more than tactics. Forexample, R. S. Baden-Powell advocated the use of rifles (and even rifleand bayonet) from horseback. Sir Ian Hamilton, whilst dismissive ofedged weapons as "medieval toys," thought they should be retained inthe interests of morale "to keep up the daring spirit of the cavalry." Oth-ers argued for a cavalry fully proficient with both firearms and edgedweapons. Douglas Haig suggested that "the ideal cavalry is one that canfight on foot and attack on horseback. . . . We must conclude . . . thatcavalry must be armed with the best firearms obtainable, and with eitherthe lance or sword." The latter remained vital in Haig's view because"the very soul of cavalry action lies in its power to rapidly assume theoffensive. Mounted rifles do not possess this power. The recent warshows that a sudden unexpected charge shatters the morale of theenemy. "4The literature suggests a broad consensus that cavalry had a future,possibly supported by mounted riflemen (trained horsemen whose pri-mary weapon was the rifle) or mounted infantry (infantry mounted onponies or mules in the interest of mobility but unable to take on all theduties of trained horse soldiers).5 Yet the question of cavalry's armamentremained moot. C. S. Goldman, a former special correspondent in SouthAfrica and a devoted partisan of the cavalry (he would later edit the TheCavalry Journal in the United Kingdom), produced an early defence ofFrench's conduct of operations in South Africa. Not unexpectedly, thisstudy concluded that cavalry troopers should be armed and equipped tofight both mounted and dismounted and, thus, of necessity, shouldretain l'arme blanche.6

4. Elgin Commission, 2: Evidence of R. S. Baden-Powell, 423-34; Sir Ian Hamil-ton, 104-19; Douglas Haig,401-22.5. The tactical distinctions between these three classes of mounted troops areusefully discussed in E. C. Bethune, "The Uses of Cavalry and Mounted Infantry inModernWarfare,"Journal of the Royal United Service Institute 50 (1906): 619-36.Contemporary sources, however, lack consistency and precision in the use of theseterms. This article will follow the definitions given in Stephen Badsey, "Fire and theSword:The British Army and the Arme Blanche Controversy 1871-1921" (Ph.D. the-sis, University of Cambridge,1981), iv.6. Charles Sydney Goldman, With French and the Cavalry in South Africa(London:Macmillan,1903), 405-27. For a similarly laudatory account, concentratingon the period up to the capture of Bloemfontein on 13 March 1900, see J. G. Maydon,French's Cavalry Campaign (London: Arthur Pearson, 1902).MILITARY HISTORY * 39


5/39

GERVASE HILLIPSThis model of a trooper armed and equipped to fight both on foot andfrom the saddle had been dismissed throughout the nineteenth centuryas a "hybrid." In 1897, Sir Evelyn Wood had repeated Antoine-HenriJomini's strictures against trying to make cavalry into effective foot sol-diers.7 More progressively minded cavalrymen had, however, sought todo just that. In 1892 Douglas Haig had noted that "cavalry that cannotfight on foot is not up to the requirements of the present day."8This posi-tion owed a great deal to the example of the American Civil War and themanner in which the lessons of that conflict had been disseminated byG. F. R. Henderson, who taught at the British Staff College. He had notedthat American cavalry "used fire and l'arme blanche in the closest andmost effective combination, against both cavalry and infantry."9Cavalry's critics still rejected the possibility of the hybrid. GeorgeDenison, a Canadian militia colonel, was the author in 1877 of A Historyof Cavalry from the Earliest Times with Lessons for the Future. He pub-lished a second, revised edition in 1913, to encompass the lessons ofSouth Africa and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. A leading advocateof the mounted rifleman, Denison argued for two separate mounted arms,with "cavalry proper" retained for purely shock action and armed solelywith edged weapons or revolvers.'0 This was essentially a very reactionaryposition, echoing the ideas of other nineteenth-century theorists such as

Henry Havelock. He, like Denison, had believed that mounted riflemenwould provide a useful auxiliary to cavalry and that their fire supportwould allow for cavalry to undertake shock action against infantry andartillery." In the aftermath of the South African War,some veterans con-tinued to advocate the model of two mutually supporting mounted arms,rather than one arm that could fight mounted or dismounted as required.A. W. Andrew, who had commanded New Zealander mounted rifles dur-ing the war, argued that "a force of cavalry and mounted rifles, with a pre-ponderance of the latter, and with a proper appreciation of how to fighttogether, is the best combination for war, [and] one regiment of cavalry,to three of mounted rifles is ample." The arme blanche could be retainedin some proportion but "must play second fiddle to the rifle."12

7. Sir Evelyn Wood, Achievements of Cavalry with a Chapter on MountedInfantry (London: George Bell, 1897), 244.8. "Notes on Dismounted Action of Cavalry, 1892," Acc 3155/6A, Haig Papers,National Libraryof Scotland, Edinburgh,Scotland.9. G. F. R. Henderson, The Science of War (London: Longmans, 1913), 55.10. George Denison, A History of Cavalry From the Earliest Times with Lessonsfor the Future, 2nd ed. (1877; reprint, London: Macmillan, 1913), 421-22.11. Sir Henry Havelock,The Three Main Military Questions of the Day (London:Longmans, 1867), 33-115.12. A. W.Andrew,Cavalry Tactics of To-Day(Bombay: Thacker and Co., 1903),7, 109.40 * THE JOURNAL OF


6/39

ScapegoatArmYet cavalry on the hybrid model, as advocated by Haig and French,would not need a separate fire-support arm. Furthermore, the use of

quick-firing guns by the horse artillery and the adoption of the machinegun as a cavalry support weapon had enhanced the integral firepower ofcavalry units to such an extent that the need for an auxiliary source ofmobile firepower was wholly questionable. The idea of supporting shockaction with machine guns positioned to the flank of the attacking line (atactic later practised to devastating effect in Palestine) was widely prop-agated in British tactical manuals of the 1890s.13 Lacking such support,mounted troops who habitually dismounted to fight sacrificed theirmobility; they could not perform their functions of screening, recon-naissance, or exploitation whilst on foot. Nor could they prevent enemymounted troops from manoeuvring around them, and the vulnerabilityof their horse-lines made them far warier than infantry of threats to theirflank or rear. This lesson had been clearly illustrated in South Africa;cavalry's ability to cut off a less-mobile force, and pin it down until theinfantry arrived, had been the key to the British victory at Paardeberg on27 February 1900.14 Careful reading of literature by advocates ofmounted rifles reveals that, postwar, they had largely conceded thispoint and were veering towards acceptance of the hybrid concept.Andrew wrote "men must fight with the horse as well as the rifle, other-wise the great advantages that mobility confers will be lost. They shouldnot therefore be encouraged to fight too much away from their horses."15However, the hybrid model proposed by the cavalry was not accept-able to some, because it encouraged the retention of edged weapons. Themost obvious manifestation of Roberts's continued antipathy towardsl'arme blanche was his abolition of the lance on active service in 1903and the preface he wrote to Haig's Cavalry Training in 1904, whichemphasised, primarily, reliance on the rifle. Yet Roberts's influence wasshort-lived. The revised 1907 cavalry manual, excised of his influence,was a handbook for a tactically versatile arm on the hybrid model. Haig'sbelief that cavalry's most important characteristic was its mobilityreceived due emphasis: "the power to move with rapidity and cover longdistances in a comparatively short time . .. gives cavalry its great moraland actual effect, and enables it to combine both attack and surprise tothe best advantage." In regard to the use of firearms, the manual wasunequivocal: "thorough efficiency in the use of the rifle and in dismounted

13. See, for example, Wilkinson Shaw, The Elements of Modern Tactics, 8th ed.(London: Kegan Paul, 1894), 319-20. On horse artillery, see E. S. May, Guns andCavalry: TheirPerformance in the Past and Their Prospects in the Future (London:Sampson Low, 1896).14. R. S. Baden-Powell,"WhatLies Before Us,"Cavalry Journal [U.K.]1 (1906):9. 15. Andrew, Cavalry Tactics, 111.MILITARY HISTORY * 41


7/39

GERVASE PHILLIPStactics is an absolute necessity." Yet it also stressed that "when opportu-nities for mounted action occur," the rifle "cannot replace the effect pro-duced by the speed of the horse, the magnetism of the charge, and theterror of cold steel."16

Manchuria, 1904-5: Failure of the Mounted Rifleman Concept?The Manchuria conflict between Russia and Japan failed to providedefinitive answers to the questions concerning the future of cavalry. TheJapanese cavalry, poorly mounted and badly outnumbered, played a usu-

ally cautious, low-key role, but won praise for its efficiency and disci-pline, especially in reconnaissance. Russian cavalry, notwithstanding itssix to one numerical superiority, failed to make much impression on thedirection of the war in any capacity. Yet, despite this lack of actual activ-ity by the mounted arm, both sides in the debate over fire and the armeblanche managed to find plenty to say about the war.Cavalry's partisans had an impressive line of defence for themounted arm. One of the most powerful expressions of this was a dis-patch by the military correspondent of The Times, Colonel Charles 'tCourt Repington. Published on 23 August 1905, this dispatch openedwith the premise that mobility was cavalry's prime asset but that theRussian troopers, armed with rifle and bayonet and trained to fight onfoot, had simply thrown away that asset by dismounting at every oppor-tunity, and getting bogged down in lengthy firefights from which theyusually then withdrew. As Repington put it, "they failed as cavalry andthey failed as riflemen, and the reason they failed was that they are nei-ther flesh, fowl, nor good red herring."17Taking this view, therefore, pre-sented the war as a failure not of cavalry, but of the mounted riflemanconcept. So pleased were British cavalrymen with this analysis thatRepington's dispatch was reprinted in the first volume of The CavalryJournal, a publication whose raison d'dtre was the defence of themounted arm.18Two years later the journal published an English trans-lation of the revised Japanese cavalry manual, which incorporated thelessons of the war and vindicated the hybrid concept favoured by seniorBritish cavalry officers, emphasising both that troopers should be trainedto fight dismounted and that "in mounted action cavalry have only one

16. General Staff,Cavalry Training (London: HMSO,1904); General Staff,Cav-alry Training 1907 (London: HMSO,1907), 186-87.17. Charles ' Court Repington, "The Cavalry Lessons of the War," Times, 23August 1905.18. Charles ' Court Repington, "The Cavalry Lessons of the War,"reprinted inCavalry Journal [U.K.] 1 (1906): 56-59.42 * THE JOURNAL OF


8/39

- Scapegoat Arm

way of fighting, i.e. attacking with the sword."19A British cavalry officer,writing under the pseudonym "Notrofe," argued that the war had provedhow excessive emphasis on the use of dismounted tactics enervated thespirit of cavalrymen, with cautious faith in firepower replacing a dashingwillingness to take chances: "the Russian cavalry in Manchuria [demon-strated that] a blind faith in the rifle appears to have, as a natural corol-lary, the atrophy of the sense of mobility."20British cavalrymen were not alone in interpreting events inManchuria in this light. Two influential Continental studies, both ofwhich were translated into English, echoed the conclusions of those whosaw the war as a damning indictment of the mounted rifleman concept.A German officer, writing under the pseudonym "Asiaticus," produced adetailed study of the reconnaissance and raiding operations that hadtaken place. He noted the low quality of the Cossack formations com-mitted to the east: "the men, brave, steady, tough, and contented, boreall fatigues and privations with patience, but had little initiative, andrequired leading." Worse still, "on the appearance of the enemy theysought their highest salvation in instinctive recourse to their rifles." Indoing so, they too readily sacrificed mobility. Asiaticus concluded that"the whole force and strength of cavalry rest as before on the horse as itsprincipal weapon, beside which the arme blanche and the rifle are onlymeans to an end."21

Similarly the Austrian Count Gustav Wrangel accounted for the poorperformance of Russian cavalry in that they "gave preponderating careto the training for dismounted action." Yet Wrangel's work also encapsu-lated a fundamental difference in opinion from that prevalent amongsenior British cavalry officers. Whereas Haig and French had argued forcavalry troopers to be trained and equipped to fight with equal profi-ciency both mounted and dismounted, Wrangel rejected this notion asunrealistic: "The ideal would perhaps be for [cavalry] ... to be equallyefficient with the carbine as with the arme blanche. . . . The attainmentof this ideal is, in our opinion, practically impossible." Wrangel gave tworeasons for this opinion. First, it was not realistic to expect a short-ser-vice conscript to be "a clever rider, swordsman and shooter," for therewas not enough time to train him sufficiently. Second, he felt that "thesword and carbine are such different masters that the cavalryman sim-ply cannot serve both with the same love ... [and] cavalry, which seeks

19. "Japanese Cavalry Training (Provisional) 1907," trans. R. A. Steel, CavalryJournal [U.K.]3 (1908): 271-348.20. "Notrofe," n Cavalry Taught by Experience: A Forecast of Cavalry underModern Conditions (London: Hugh Rees, 1910), 62-64.21. "Asiaticus,"in Reconnaissance in the Russo-Japanese War,trans. J. Mont-gomery (London: HughRees, 1908), 14-15, 147.MILITARY HISTORY * 43


9/39

GERVASE HILLIPSits salvation in the rifle, easily loses the impulse to charge home on theenemy.'"22

British Cavalry 1905-14: The Debate over the Hybrid ConceptThe British army, composed of volunteers, did have the option of

training men well to ride, shoot, and use an edged weapon. Combinedwith the lessons of South Africa, this circumstance reinforced the com-mitment to the hybrid model. For French, it was simply a question ofbalance. As he asserted in 1905, "cavalry soldiers must, of course, learnto be expert shots; but the attainment of this desirable object will bebrought no nearer by ignoring the horse, the sword or the lance."23 In1910, in the preface to an English translation of Friedrich von Bern-hardi's Cavalry in War and Peace, French reiterated his commitment toa tactically versatile arm: "Ihave endeavoured to impress upon all ranksthat when the enemy's cavalry is overthrown, our cavalry will find moreopportunities of using the rifle than the cold steel, and that dismountedattacks will be more frequent than charges with the arme blanche [forwhich] opportunities will occur comparatively rarely." This did not pre-vent French from invoking "the moral force of cold steel" or talking of a"cavalry spirit" to which "mobility and the cult of the offensive" werecentral, yet he still insisted that training for mounted action should notbe accorded "undue prominence ... to the detriment of much more solidadvantages which may be gained by other means."24Douglas Haig's Cavalry Studies: Strategical and Tactical was less atheoretical work, and more a guide to the staging of staff rides and wargames that would develop the "power of decision" in officers. However,an introductory chapter reminded readers of the didactic significance ofmilitary history and offered a brief overview of the lessons of recent warsin regard to cavalry. Haig was particularly keen to emphasise the impor-tance of holding manoeuvres for cavalry divisions and even cavalrycorps, since, in his view, "the war of masses necessitates mass tactics."To emphasise this point, he contrasted the opportunities that had beenmissed by a dispersed Prussian cavalry in 1870-71 with the resultsachieved by the Army of the Potomac's Cavalry Corps in 1863-65.25

22. GustavWrangel,The Cavalry in the Russo-Japanese War:Lessons and Crit-ical Considerations, trans. J. Montgomery(London: Hugh Rees, 1907), 55-56.23. Sir John French, preface to Cavalry in Action in the Wars of the Future,trans. John Formby (London: Hugh Rees, 1905), vi.24. Sir John French, preface to Cavalry in War and Peace, by Freiherr Friedrichvon Bernhardi, trans. G. T.M. Bridges (London: Hugh Rees, 1910), vii, ix, xvi-xvii.25. Douglas Haig, Cavalry Studies: Strategical and Tactical (London: HughRees, 1907), 1-19.44 * THE JOURNAL OF


10/39

ScapegoatArmIn terms of cavalry's role in combat, Haig pointed to four factors thathe felt would ensure the significance of the mounted arm in future con-flicts: the extended nature of the battlefield, the "moral exhaustion" of

infantry resulting from exposure to firepower from modern weapons,mounted troops' rapidity of movement, and the limited "stopping power"of the small-bore rifle against a horse.26 This was potentially contentiousground. The proliferation of "arms of precision," beginning with breech-loading rifles, from the mid-nineteenth century had produced in manyarmies a tangible pessimism regarding the prospects of cavalry operatingon horseback whilst under enemy fire. Some theorists, such as F. N.Maude, had stressed that more dispersed infantry formations might actu-ally work in cavalry's favour, especially if (as evidence from the Franco-Prussian War suggested) properly conditioned horses could sustain acharge over longer distances than had been normal.27 However, given thetheoretical firepower of the new weapons, most soldiers were scepticaland the cavalry arm had been treated accordingly. For example, in theaftermath of the Italian War of Independence in 1859, the Austrians sub-stantially reduced their cavalry, believing them unable to contend withrifle-armed infantry and now only fit for reconnoitring.28

Haig's assertion in 1910 that cavalry could operate in the fire-sweptzone and had increased scope for action thus flew in the face of muchcontemporary wisdom. It is rather surprising, therefore, to note theextent to which one of cavalry's most influential critics, the novelistErskine Childers, agreed with Haig on this point, and cited evidencefrom South Africa to prove it. Childers had served as a driver with theCity Imperial Volunteers during the war. It is worth dwelling on his bookWar and the Arme Blanche (1910) at some length, since it created a con-siderable stir at the time and, as shall be noted, has been of considerableinterest to later historians of cavalry. Much of its credibility rested on anintroductory chapter penned by Lord Roberts. In this, Robertsreasserted his belief that edged weapons must be relegated to a sec-ondary role, suggesting that the sword should be retained only for "usein the assault at night, in a mist, or on other occasions when a fire-fight

26. Haig, Cavalry Studies, 8-9. For evidence of the effect of Mauser bullets onhorses in South Africa, see A. S. Head, "The Wear and Tear of Horses During theSouth AfricanWar," ournal of Comparative Pathology and Therapeutics 16 (1903):301. 27. F.N. Maude, Cavalry: Its Past and Future (London: Hugh Rees, 1903); andF.N. Maude, Military Letters and Essays No.1 (Kansas City, Mo.: Hudson-Kimberley,1895), 22-23, 211-16.28. Gunther Rothenberg, The Army of Francis Joseph (West Lafayette, Ind.:PurdueUniversity Press, 1976), 63. Anon., "Sixty Yearsof the Austro-HungarianCav-alry,"Cavalry Journal [U.K.]4 (1909): 244-45.MILITARY HISTORY * 45


11/39

GERVASE HILLIPSmight be impossible." For tactical offence generally, Roberts believedthat cavalry should attack the enemy like infantry.29In point of fact, though, Childers himself emphasised the extent towhich cavalry had ridden into combat in South Africa. At Klip Drift, on15 February 1900, French's cavalry division had forced a passagethrough 900 Mauser-armed Boers in a good defensive position, suffering,at the most, twenty casualties.30 Childers had concluded that "mountedmen not only can pass through a fire-zone unscathed, but make genuinedestructive attacks against riflemen and guns."31 He would go on to note"a great number of episodes" in South Africa when mounted troops rodeunscathed or with light loss through a fire-zone. Childers, therefore,agreed with cavalrymen that mounted combat remained possible; hespoke aggressively of "bold riding into a firezone" as a basic tactical prin-ciple. Where he disagreed with cavalrymen was over the question ofarmament. Like the nineteenth-century theorists, he rejected the possi-bility of an effective hybrid trooper. For Childers, it was impossible totrain a trooper to use both steel weapons and rifle effectively. Instead, heargued that cavalrymen should abandon lance and sabre completely, andbe trained to use Boer-style "saddle-fire," despite the difficulties inher-ent in using firearms from horseback.32Whilst accepting the necessity of cavalry continuing to prepare formounted combat, Childers nevertheless proclaimed himself a critic of"shock" tactics. Mounted attacks should be made by "mounted riflemen,trained to rely upon rifle and horse combined and purged of all leaningstowards shock." Yet here, Childers simply set up a straw man to knockdown. He defined "shock" as "a physical effect on the defence" and listedfour preconditions for "the production of genuine shock": the horsemenin dense formation; the target of the charge to be in a "tolerably" denseformation; the ground to be smooth, level, and open; and the horses freshenough to gallop.33By this narrow definition, Klip Drift was not an exam-ple of "shock," because the British troopers had attacked in an open for-mation, with files spaced at wide intervals. However, Childers had ignored,or did not know, that cavalry had traditionally employed "skirmish"(open) order in shock actions against dispersed enemy infantry or guns.34

29. Lord Roberts, introduction to War and the Arme Blanche, by ErskineChilders (London: EdwardArnold, 1910), x, xii.30. Haig claimed just four. "Cavalry Division War Diary," November 8,1899-March 13, 1900, Acc 3155/34, HaigPapers.31. Childers, War and the Arme Blanche, 105-6.32. Ibid., 105, 257, 354-71.33. Ibid., 25-27.34. For example, in 1853 Lewis Nolan had written that "artillery may beattacked advantageously in skirmishing order, and with very few men." Lewis Nolan,Cavalry: Its History and Tactics (London: Bosworth and Harrison, 1853), 241-42.46 * THE JOURNAL OF


12/39

- Scapegoat Arm

Furthermore, cavalrymen stressed the psychological impact of "shock"over the physical effect that Childers thought central, hence the emphasisin Cavalry Training 1907 on "the magnetism of the charge, and the ter-ror of cold steel."35 The stipulative definition of "shock" employed byChilders was simply wrong.What was frustrating for Childers and Roberts, though, was the num-ber of experienced commanders of mounted infantry and mounted rifleswho rejected their position and favoured the hybrid. One of the mostinfluential of these was General Sir Beauvoir De Lisle, who had com-manded mounted infantry in Egypt and South Africa before taking com-mand of the 1st Royal Dragoons in 1906. In March 1910, Roberts wroteto De Lisle, asking him to accept that Childers's book was not "an attackupon the cavalry service." Yet two months later, in a further communi-cation, he denounced "senior cavalry officers" for "their archaic doc-trine," whilst clearly stating his own rejection of the hybrid: "I cannotshare your belief that it is possible to make our cavalry 'very efficientmounted riflemen,' as well as good swordsmen."36 De Lisle's responsedemonstrated that, in the opinion of veteran officers, Roberts andChilders had lost the argument. He accepted that opportunities for shocktactics would occur rarely on the modern battlefield and that marks-manship was an essential qualification for the cavalryman. However, heargued for the retention of edged weapons since "occasions will arisewhere a charge of a cloud of horsemen will be of inestimable value." Headded that, on the basis of his own experiences, "I am confident our cav-alry would be more useful in the field as Mounted Rifles if they had asword.""7In print this viewpoint was well represented by M. F. Rimington.Rimington was an officer of the 6th (Inniskilling) Dragoons, but hadcommanded irregular horse with great success during the South AfricanWar.Like French and Haig, Rimington knew that fire action would occurmore frequently than shock, but that the capacity to undertake mountedcombat remained important: "We feel that the very fact that there aremany more occasions suitable for fire action than for shock action mustnot make us lose sight of this, namely, that though we may use fire action

35. Established authorities, such as Lieutenant-Colonel C. Francis Clery, authorof a standard British textbook on tactics, had long recognised that "the shock of col-lision" was "moral,as well as physical." See C. Francis Clery,Minor Tactics (London:KeganPaul, 1880), 121.36. Roberts to Beauvoir De Lisle, letters, 11 March 1910 and 16 May 1910,4/13/1/A, 4/13/2/B, GB99 KCLMADe Lisle, Liddell Hart Centre for MilitaryArchives,King'sCollege, London,37. Beauvoir De Lisle, "British Cavalry: Its System of Peace Training and thePossible Requirements It Will Have to Fulfil in Future Wars,"4/2, GB99 KCLMADeLisle;De Lisle, letter to LordRoberts, 7 June 1910, 4/13/3/A, GB99 KCLMADe Lisle.MILITARY HISTORY * 47


13/39

GERVASE HILLIPS-when we meet the enemy nine times out of ten, it is on the tenth occa-sion, and then because shock action takes place, that something definite,something which affects the result of the campaign, is seen to happen."38In Britain, therefore, the hybrid concept (that a cavalry trooper shouldbe trained and equipped to fight both mounted and dismounted, withl'arme blanche and modern rifle) emerged triumphant from the debatesover cavalry's future that had taken place since the South African War.

"The American Idea": The Legacy of the Civil WarIn the United States, contemporary articles in the Journal of theUnited States Cavalry Association reveal both a lively interest in Euro-

pean thought and a confidence in established American practise.39 Thisconfidence was rooted in the lessons of the Civil War. In an 1896 volumeedited by Arthur Wagner, French and German accounts of mountedcombat in the war of 1870-71 were presented alongside a study of cav-alry operations during the Gettysburg campaign. Wagner noted howpoorly continental European cavalry had performed, particularly in"screening and reconnoitering duty," compared to Federal troopers in1863. "American cavalry," he concluded, "approached more closely tothe present European ideal in arms, training and strategic handling thandid the famous German cavalry in 1870."4'' Few American soldiersdoubted the viability of the hybrid concept, since their cavalry haddeveloped along precisely that line during the Civil War. Indeed, theAmerican hybrid was expected to master three weapons, for in additionto rifle and sabre, he carried a pistol, for use in open order, skirmishingformations. As Captain Lincoln Andrews put it, in a 1914 textbook forthe National Guard, "with the new sabre, and particularly with the Coltautomatic 45 calibre revolver, [the U.S. trooper] is the best armed cav-alryman in the world."41

The continued significance of the Civil War experience in Americancavalry theory is well illustrated by Alonzo Gray's 1910 textbook on cav-alry tactics. Gray believed "it to be true that there is no modern princi-ple of cavalry tactics, which is accepted today as correct by any

38. M. F. Rimington, Our Cavalry (London: Macmillan, 1912), 51-52.39. See, for example, J. A. Gaston, "Notes on the Works of General von Bern-hardi," Journal of the United States Cavalry Association [hereafter JUSCA] 24(1913): 191-201; and Anon., "Mountedand Foot Combat in American and EuropeanCavalry,"JUSCA 22 (1912): 637-42.40. Arthur Wagner,ed., Cavalry Studies from Two Great Wars (Kansas City,Mo.:Hudson-Kimberley,1896), 6.41. Lincoln C. Andrews, Basic Course for Cavalry (Albany, N.Y.:J. B. Lyon,1914), 228. In contrast, most European cavalrymen rejected the handgun as too inac-curate. See Rimington, Our Cavalry, 15.48 * THE JOURNAL OF


14/39

- Scapegoat Armfirst-class military power, which was not fully illustrated during the Warof the Rebellion."42 His fascinating work consisted of a series of extractsfrom accounts of battles and campaign life from the Civil War period,each illustrating particular aspects of cavalry's handling in the field:"Arms and their uses-Revolver vs. Saber," "Mounted Fire Action-Car-bine," "Combined action-Mounted and Dismounted," "Security andInformation," and so forth. Gray acknowledged the introduction of newtechnologies but did not feel they negated the basic lessons of the Warbetween the States. He suggested that the range of modern infantryweapons and the introduction of the machine gun increased "the sphereof action of, and necessity for, well-organised cavalry." He also saw a rolefor motorcycles and automobiles as "auxiliaries" for cavalry and evenmade an early hint at the possibilities afforded by co-operation betweencavalry and "flying machines."43Lincoln Andrews's textbook showed a similar awareness of the likelyconsequences of technological development on warfare and argued thatthey heralded more work, not less, for the arm of manoeuvre: "addedmeans of aerial reconnaissance and of quick transmission of informa-tion, the increased size of modern armies and the great extent of mod-ern battlefields all combine to increase the necessity for mobility in thefighting forces." For Andrews, such an environment clearly demandedthe tactical versatility of the "hybrid" trooper: "the first weapon of thecavalryman is his horse; and an opportunity to charge home is his chiefdelight." Yet troopers must be ready "to dismount and with their riflesfight as skilfully as infantry" when necessary. Like his British counter-parts, Andrews had also noted carefully the potential of automaticweapons used in close support of mounted troops and advocated that thecavalry officer should exploit "the best opportunity to the machine gunsor artillery for delivering their fire as he charges."44Wagner's assertion that the poor showing of European cavalries inrecent campaigns was the result of failure to heed the lessons learned in1861-65 was widely echoed in the American literature. Brigadier-Gen-eral Theodore Rodenbough, in his essay "Cavalry of the Civil War: ItsEvolution and Influence," noted that a belief in the impossibility ofundertaking shock action had led some to advocate that European cav-alry should degenerate "into mere mounted infantry." In contrast, hedrew attention to those European theorists, such as French, who had, atlast, recognised what Americans had already established: "that it wasquite possible to turn out a modern horse-soldier, armed with saber and

42. Alonzo Gray, Cavalry Tactics as Illustrated by the War of the Rebellion(Fort Leavenworth, Kans.: U.S. CavalryAssociation, 1910), 3.43. Gray,Cavalry Tactics, 3-4.44. Andrews,Basic Coursefor Cavalry, 228-30.MILITARY HISTORY * 49


15/39

GERVASE HILLIPSrifle, who will be equally efficient mounted or dismounted."45 For Roden-bough, this versatile trooper was "the American idea," and he invokedexamples from both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 to fur-ther demonstrate both the lineage and the value "of the dual armamentof saber and rifle."46 The notion of a distinct American tradition inmounted warfare was evident in popular histories, too. The final chap-ters of Charles Johnson's 1908 romp "through the ages with the heroesof sabre, spur and saddle" were dominated by American cavalry men:Francis Marion, Jeb Stuart, Philip Sheridan, and George ArmstrongCuster. Only two nineteenth-century European soldiers were consideredworthy of inclusion: Napoleon's marshals Ney and Murat.47While clearly confident of their distinctive tactical heritage, Ameri-can cavalrymen could, equally, be reflective upon the mistakes of thepast. In 1911, Major Henry Allen made a plea for the reform of the U.S.cavalry arm, stressing the need, in particular, for the organisation oflarger formations, "since the Civil War officers of Cavalry have rarely hadan opportunity of seeing a division, or even a brigade, of Cavalry in oper-ation in our country."48In pointing to the dangers of neglecting the mounted arm in peacetime, Allen was frank about the shortcomings of the extemporised for-mations of 1861-65. He highlighted, for example, the shocking wastageof mounts, losses at "a rate of five horses per man per annum" in theArmy of the Potomac, and concluded "these facts indicate that the quin-tessence of Cavalry lore and good practice is not always to be found inthe system pursued during the Rebellion."49 Overall, the impressiongiven by the works of U.S. cavalrymen before the First World War is ofprofessional soldiers interested in developments in Europe, alive to theimpact of new technologies on warfare, confident in their own distinctivetactical heritage, but aware of the problems that their small, peacetimearmy would face should it be called upon to fight in a major conflict.

The First World War: Troopers and TrenchesWorld War I saw the impact on warfare of aviation, the internal com-bustion engine, and the emergence of the tank, all developments which

45. Theodore F Rodenbough, "Cavalryof the Civil War: Its Evolution and Influ-ence," in The Photographic History of the Civil War,ed. Francis Trevelyn Miller, 10vols. (New York:Review of Reviews, 1911), 4:18.46. Rodenbough, "Cavalry,"21-22.47. Charles H. L. Johnson, Famous Cavalry Leaders (Boston: Page and Com-pany, 1908).48. Henry Allen, Cavalry Notes (Washington:WarDepartment, 1911), 3.49. Allen, Cavalry Notes, 6-7.50 * THE JOURNAL OF


16/39

Scapegoat Arm

would naturally further call into question the place of horse-mobiletroops on the battlefield. But it was not yet possible to substitute whollymachines for horses. Ultimately, most of the Great Powers would, in fact,choose to retain significant cavalry forces after the 1914-18 conflict.Indeed, most continued to see a need for horse-mobile units as theyembarked on the next great global conflict twenty years later. Germanywould field no fewer than eight cavalry divisions over the course of WorldWarII, only three fewer than in World War I. France would go to war withthree cavalry divisions in 1939; the Soviet Union would deploy thirtycavalry divisions in Europe in June 1941.50 The norm, therefore, was thesurvival of horse-mounted units alongside the development of armourand mechanized formations. The exceptions were the armies of theBritish Empire and the United States, who would "mechanize" their cav-alry, despite powerful arguments for the retention of the horse-mountedtrooper.Initially, in the aftermath of World War I, American and British cav-alrymen produced a considerable body of literature in defence of theirarm. This literature continued the prewar tradition of a didactic use ofrecent military history, but now with an added agenda: the question wasnot just how cavalry should be armed and employed, but was it to sur-vive at all as a combatant arm. The most insightful texts on mountedwarfare in 1914-18 were produced by the U.S. Cavalry School, FortRiley, Kansas. Two volumes, in particular, stand out: J. M. Wainwright,ed., Studies of the Use of Cavalry During the World War; and FentonStratton Jacobs, ed., Cavalry Combat. Drawing heavily on Europeanprofessional periodicals such as the British Cavalry Journal, the FrenchRevue de Cavalerie, and the German Militar-Wochenblatt, they wereintended, primarily, to be instructional. Each chapter covered a particu-lar sphere of cavalry duty, such as reconnaissance, delaying action,mobile reserve, or exploitation of a breakthrough, and drew on therecords of the war to furnish examples of successes, failures, and lessonslearned.The scope of cavalry actions described in these two books remains auseful counter to the old assertion that mounted troops played little orno role in the First World War. In all, the combatants fielded in excess ofone hundred cavalry divisions during the course of the conflict, in addi-tion to numerous independent brigades and regiments assigned as divi-sional or corps cavalry. From 1915 to 1917, circumstances on theWestern Front had largely militated against the widespread use ofmounted troops in that theatre, but a broader view of the war revealed adifferent picture. Drawing on examples from all four years of the war,

50. For an overview of the use of mounted troops in the Second WorldWar,seeJanus Piekalkiewicz, The Cavalry of World War II (London: Orbis, 1979).MILITARY HISTORY * 51


17/39

GERVASE HILLIPS--from the Western Front, the Eastern Front, from Africa and the MiddleEast, the wide-ranging duties of cavalrymen, on foot and on horseback,were amply illustrated by Wainwright and Jacobs. These duties were notlimited to patrol or reconnaissance work. Wainwright's volume discussedfour examples of mounted exploitation of breakthroughs in 1918: theBritish Cavalry Corps at Amiens in August, the Desert Mounted Corps inPalestine in September, the Italian cavalry pursuit after Vittorio-Venetoin October-November, and, perhaps most significant of all, the Frenchcavalry drive through Macedonia to Uskub, also in September.51Whilst discussing British and French cavalry's performance as amobile reserve during the German Spring Offensives of 1918, Jacobsdescribed how the French II Cavalry Corps covered 125 miles in justsixty hours, reinforcing the hard-pressed British Expeditionary Force(BEF) and, for the next fifteen days, fighting the vaunted German storm-troopers to a standstill. The mounted arm's strategic mobility wasmatched by its tactical daring. Most fighting was done dismounted, butthe validity of the "hybrid" concept was highlighted in accounts of twoastonishing (and successful) uses of shock action during the same des-perate phase of the war: the Canadian Cavalry Brigade's charge atMoreuil Wood on 30 March 1918, and the French 10th Chasseurs nearChaudun on 10 May 1918. As Jacobs noted, only cavalry could have car-ried out these operations: "the congestion of the area in rear madeimpossible a rapid movement of troops on roads, but the cavalry, by itsability to move rapidly across country, was able to arrive in time and incondition to fight."52These two works were more than the mere chroni-cles of an obsolete arm's obscure "last hurrahs." They pointed to the cav-alry arm's genuine achievements, its versatility, and its possible future inwars which, Jacob was sure, "would be characterised by movement"rather than the aberrant "state of stabilization" which had persisted forso long on the Western Front.53

Jacobs was particularly interested in cavalry's relationship to emerg-ing weapons technologies and included a discussion of co-operationbetween mounted troops and aircraft, illustrated with examples fromBritish operations around Megiddo, Palestine, in September 1918. Healso devoted a chapter to the use of armoured cars in augmenting thefirepower of cavalry units, identifying important precedents in suchactions as that fought by the French 1st Cavalry Division and the 7thArmoured Car Group, on 27 March 1918, near Tilloloy. Noting, too, that

51. J. M.Wainwright,ed., Studies of the Use of Cavalry During the World War(Fort Riley, Kans.: U.S. CavalrySchool, 1933), Chaps. 10, 11, 13, and 14; and FentonStratton Jacobs, Cavalry Combat (Fort Riley, Kans.: U.S. Cavalry School, 1937).52. Jacobs, Cavalry Combat, 10, 164-76, 394-403.53. Ibid., 10-11.52 * THE JOURNAL OF


18/39

- Scapegoat Arm

the British Medium A Tank, or Whippet, of 1918 was designed specifi-cally for use with cavalry, Jacobs envisaged a role for horse and mecha-nized mobile units to work together to "prevent stabilisation in modernwar and create flanks." The clear conclusion was that the continued useof horse cavalry and the mechanisation of the army were not antitheti-cal to each other. Horse cavalry, still the most mobile arm over rough ter-rain or in areas without a well-developed transport infrastructure, couldbenefit from having its own logistics mechanized, and its offensive capa-bility augmented with specialist light, armoured vehicles.54These views were not unique to Jacobs. George S. Patton, Jr., wrotea number of articles in the 1930s for The Cavalry Journal in the UnitedStates, later reprinted in The Cavalry Journal in the United Kingdom,which stressed that horse cavalry was still needed for operations such astactical or close reconnaissance and benefited from its ability to avoidroads, swim rivers, and live off the country. He predicted that "in generalmechanized and horse cavalry will operate together" and speculated on"the possibilities of a combat car charge exploited by horsemen."55Given that the most probable employment of U.S. cavalry would be thepolicing of the Mexican border, the emphasis on cavalry's ability to copein difficult terrain is unsurprising. A cavalry manual of 1930 observedthat "although there are many means of transport more rapid than thehorse, none of them can completely replace him. Mud, snow, and shell-torn roads still hold their terrors for the motor vehicle, while fog and lowvisibility often render impotent the best efforts of the air force."56In Britain, beleaguered cavalrymen were making the same points astheir American counterparts. R. M. P. Preston, in his classic account oftwentieth-century cavalry warfare, The Desert Mounted Corps, assertedthat General Sir Edmund Allenby's campaign in Syria and Palestine,1917-18, was "the most important ever undertaken by cavalry." ForHarry Chauvel, who had commanded the Corps, Preston's work servedto "demonstrate to the world that the horse-soldier is just as valuable inmodern warfare as he ever has been in the past."''57he sapper R. P. Pak-enham-Walsh noted that those who had served in Palestine were farmore inclined to see a future for cavalry than those who had fought on

54. Ibid., 497-505.55. George S. Patton, "MechanizedForces," Cavalry Journal [U.K.]24 (1934):225. Emphasis in original. "Combat Car"was the euphemistic name given to the firsttracked, armoured vehicles supplied to the cavalry, to circumvent Congress's stric-tures on the use of "tanks."56. Anon., Tactics and Techniques of Cavalry, 8th ed. (Harrisburg,Pa.:MilitaryService Publishing, 1937), 14.57. R. M. P. Preston, The Desert Mounted Corps: An Account of the CavalryOperations in Palestine and Syria, 1917-1918 (London: Constable, 1921), vii, xii.MILITARY HISTORY * 53


19/39

GERVASE HILLIPSthe Western Front,58 yet it was not just in the desert that cavalry hadproved its worth. For Haig, the mounted arm's cross-country mobilitywas still its vital characteristic, as had been demonstrated during theSpring Offensives of 1918 in France, "when rapidity of movement was ofparamount and vital importance."59 However, all recognised that mod-ernisation was essential. In 1927 Haig wrote, "the equipment of cavalrywith anti-tank weapons, armoured cars and tankettes [light tanks] oftheir own is a necessity."60In the same year, H. V. S. Charrington published a slim volume oncavalry's performance in the Great War and its prospects for the future.Charrington, keen that the army as a whole should mechanize, and keenthat armoured vehicles be integrated into cavalry formations, neverthe-less argued that a proportion of mounted troops should be retained.Bearing in mind the mechanical unreliability of contemporary tanks andtheir limited cross-country ability, any army operating in forests, moun-tains, or marshes was still going to need horse-mobile troops. To rein-force the point, Charrington singled out potential theatres of war wheremobile operations would benefit from the presence of cavalry: theArdennes, Poland, Western Russia, Palestine, and Transjordania.61Inter-estingly, cavalry units were indeed deployed in every one of these areasduring World War II.

Continental authorities were, by and large, in agreement with theAmerican and British cavalrymen. In Germany, Lieutenant GeneralMaximilian von Poseck had written a three-volume study of his army'scavalry at war. The first volume covered the campaigns in Belgium andFrance in 1914; the second, the operations in Courland (Latvia) in 1915;the third, operations in Poland, 1914-15.62 Von Poseck's conclusionsechoed those of Jacobs: the "war of positions" had militated against thewidespread use of cavalry in the west for much of the war, but there wasno reason to assume that the next war would follow this pattern. It wasimperative that cavalry "adopts all modern devices of battle," in order todevelop its fighting power "in conjunction with its mobility."63

58. R. P.Pakenham-Walsh,Elementary Tactics or The Art of War,British School(London: Sifton Praed, 1926), 24.59. Douglas Haig, foreword to History of the 6th Cavalry Brigade, 1914-1918,by J. B. Bickerstaff (London: Baynard Press, c.1920), v.60. Ace 3155/346h, HaigPapers.61. H. V. S. Charrington, Where Cavalry Stands Today (London: Hugh Rees,1927), 44-63.62. Only the first volume was translated into English:Jerome Howe, ed., The Ger-man Cavalry 1914 in Belgium and France, by Maximilian von Poseck (Berlin: E. S.Mittler for the U.S. CavalryAssociation, 1923). Many useful summaries drawn fromthe contents of the other volumes can, however, be found in Jacobs, Cavalry Combat.63. Howe, German Cavalry 1914, 221-23, 235-36.54 * THE JOURNAL OF


20/39

- Scapegoat Arm

There were, of course, outspoken German critics of the mountedarm, too. Heinz Guderian was particularly scathing about cavalry's per-formance in the First World War, but his approach to recent history wasrather selective. He ignored all theatres apart from the Western Front,and his analyses of engagements fought in France and Belgium, werehighly tendentious. His account of the German 4th Cavalry Division'sfailure to force a crossing of the Gette River at Haelen, Belgium, on 12August 1914 stressed the futility of pitting men and horses against mod-ern firepower and ended with an indictment of those misguided trooperswho adhered to "the battle tactics of [the eighteenth-century comman-der Friedrich Wilhelm] von Seydlitz" and who "believed that they couldbrush aside all the intervening developments which had been dictated bythe accelerating march of technology."64 In fact, one suspects that vonSeydlitz would have been appalled by the tactical mishandling of theGerman cavalry at Haelen; their charges were launched against anunshaken enemy in prepared positions, without adequate fire support,co-ordination or, crucially, tactical reconnaissance. Most were halted notby firepower but by physical obstacles (such as hedges, ditches, sunkenroads, and fences) before they got close to the enemy positions. Haelenwas evidence of bad tactics, not cavalry's obsolescence. Indeed, the vic-tors that day were the troopers of the Belgian 1st Cavalry Division:Lancers and Guides trained on the "hybrid" model, ably supported bycyclists and horse artillery.65Many experienced German soldiers were not convinced of the case

against cavalry; the most significant of these was Hans von Seeckt. VonSeeckt, widely credited by military historians with laying the founda-tions of the German military's early tactical success in World War II,advocated the retention of cavalry throughout the interwar years. AnEnglish translation of his Thoughts of a Soldier was published in Londonin 1930.66 In it, he devoted a lengthy chapter to modern cavalry, notingthat the positional warfare of the Western Front had been untypical andthat cavalry could, in future, work effectively with mechanized forcesand aircraft. The modern battlefield presented cavalry with great chal-lenges. The solution, von Seeckt suggested, lay "in making full use of theproducts of technical science to extend and modernise what alreadyexists, but not by substituting something dead for something alive. Theliving arm, our cavalry, should be developed to its fullest perfection onmodern lines without loss of its characteristics."67

64. Heinz Guderian, Achtung-Panzer! The Development of Tank Warfare,trans. Christopher Duffy (London: Cassell, 1999), 31.65. Wainwright,Studies of the Use of Cavalry During the WorldWar,29-32.66. Hans von Seeckt, Thoughts of a Soldier, trans. Gilbert Waterhouse (London:Ernest Benn, 1930).67. Von Seeckt, Thoughts, 81-107.MILITARY HISTORY * 55


21/39

GERVASE HILLIPSCavalry in the Age of Mechanisation

Yet, unlike their continental European counterparts, neither Ameri-can nor British cavalry were to be allowed to develop to this "fullest per-fection." The process of mechanisation began in Britain in 1928 whentwo cavalry regiments converted to armoured cars. The only Britishhorse cavalry that survived to see service in World War II were the Yeo-manry regiments and elements of the Household Cavalry dispatched tothe Middle East. Only one American mounted regiment, the 26th Cav-alry (Philippine Scouts), would see combat during the conflict. The cav-alry theorists, who argued not against mechanisation but only for aretention of a proportion of the mounted arm, with its own integralarmour and motorised logistics, never really got a chance to prove theircase. During the British army's summer manoeuvres of 1927, unsup-ported mounted troops were pitted against mechanized units. Writinglater that year, Haig was rightly critical: "I submit . . . that to put anarmoured brigade with its enormous firepower against a cavalry brigadeunequipped with any 'mechanised weapons' is an unreal and misleadingcontest."68That "misleading contest" was henceforth to be a central motif of theEnglish language literature concerning cavalry. The dominance of theWestern Front experience (and in particular the focus on the grim, andstatic, years of 1915-17) in shaping perceptions of the war amongst theEnglish-speaking nations exaggerated this trend. Most of all, the reactionto the horrific casualty lists of the war would influence the way the cav-alry arm was depicted both in popular histories and in works of militarytheory. Cavalrymen, and cavalry generals in particular, would come tosymbolise the alleged incompetence that had permeated the militaryestablishments that had fought the war. Portrayed as an obstacle to tech-nological progress and a repository of reactionary doctrines, the cavalrywas to be established at this point as the scapegoat arm.

Leading the assault on the reputation of the cavalry were thosevisionaries of future war who were convinced that flesh and bone werenow to be replaced by steel and tracks, as part of the natural progressionof tactical evolution. The case was made forcefully by J. F. C. Fuller, whopredicted the demise of not just the cavalier but the foot-slogger too: "Iffor the purposes of war, fire has not rendered the horse obsolete, gasmost certainly will do so and the Infantry soldier will disappear as suchwith the trooper. The doom of all muscular warfare has been sealed."69This was a powerful notion: that progress demanded the replacement of

68. Ace 3155/346h, HaigPapers.69. J. F. C. Fuller, "Tanks and Cavalry Tactics," Cavalry Journal [U.K.] 10(1920): 527.56 * THE JOURNAL OF


22/39

ScapegoatArmcavalry by its natural successor, the tank. Any defence of cavalry couldbe dismissed as reactionary or as a rejection of technology.Amongst the most influential of those who assaulted cavalry's warrecord was Basil Liddell Hart. In a scathing attack on the preparation forthe war, Liddell Hart accused Haig and French of "discoursing" on the"paramount value of the arme blanche," and "implying that so long asthe cavalry charge was maintained all would be well with the conduct ofthe war." This was a gross travesty of the prewar tactical debate withinthe mounted arm, and one which simply ignored the fact that Frenchand Haig had largely been responsible for creating the tactically versa-tile, rifle-armed British cavalry of 1914. Scoffing at the mass of cavalryunits deployed by all the armies at the beginning of the war, Liddell Hartdismissed them as causing "more trouble to their own sides than to theenemy" and asserted that from 1915 onwards, "their effect was trivial."He did not simply write cavalrymen out of the history of the war though;he also made them into objects of ridicule. Accusing the presence ofBritish cavalry in France of "aggravating the submarine menace," LiddellHart sneered that "despite the relatively small number of British cavalry,forage was the largest item of supplies sent overseas, exceeding evenammunition."70This was pure mischief making. The cavalry's horses consumed onlya small proportion of the fodder shipped to France and Flanders (fodderthey surely earned in 1914 and 1918). The bulk had gone to the gunteams of the Royal Artillery, and the horses and mules used in abun-dance by the infantry, engineers, and all ancillary arms. It was a horse-powered war and could not have been waged without fodder.71However,Liddell Hart's objective was not to scrutinise the intricacies of logisticsbut to associate the cavalry, and in particular cavalry generals, with thehigher misdirection of the war. In this he was successful. His case, afterall, had a powerful appeal for those searching for scapegoats for the tollin British war dead. Thus, in his war memoirs, would former Prime Min-ister David Lloyd George seize upon the notion that the casualty lists ofthe Western Front could be explained by "the cavalry obsession whichpervaded the hearts and minds of the horse soldiers who commandedthe British Army."72Lloyd George would level two allegations at the war record of thecavalry arm which would subsequently become commonplace: first, that

70. Basil Liddell Hart,History of the First World War (London: Pan, 1972), 35.Originallypublished as The Real War (London: Faber and Faber, 1930).71. For the BEF'sdependence on horses and mules, see Sidney Galtrey, TheHorse and the War (London: George Newnes, 1918); and John Singleton, "Britain'sMilitaryUse of Horses, 1914-1918," Past & Present 139 (1993): 178-203.72. David Lloyd George, WarMemoirs, 6 vols. (London: Ivor Nicholson and Wat-son, 1933-35), 3:1521.MILITARY HISTORY * 57


23/39

GERVASE HILLIPSit was useless on battlefields dominated by the machine gun andartillery; second, that the desire to fight "breakthrough" battles, result-ing in a wide gap for the cavalry to exploit, precluded the developmentof "infiltration" tactics on the German model, and thus contributed toheavy losses amongst the infantry. By way of illustration, Lloyd Georgechose the engagement at Monchy-Le-Preux, which was captured by the3rd Cavalry Division on 11 April 1917 during the Battle of Arras. Thecavalry had suffered horrendous casualties, chiefly from shell-fire, dur-ing this exploit, and the wisdom of sacrificing so many men and horsesto take the shattered village was certainly questionable. Nevertheless,the troopers had actually done all that had been asked of them. The cav-alry had not "charged"; it had used its mobility to occupy a position fromwhich the Germans had been driven by fire, with more rapidity than theinfantry could have managed. Monchy had been seized at the gallop andthen held by dismounted troopers.73 In the Lloyd George version,though, a charge had been attempted and failed: "the infantry had to becalled in to capture the village," because the cavalrymen "were mowndown by a few machine gunners as soon as they came within range."74The Lloyd George version passed into history. Many infantrymenwho had fought at Arras recalled the awful sight of mounds of dead cav-alry horses, and popular histories of the war were soon full of "eye wit-ness" accounts of the futile "charge" at Monchy. D. W. J. Cuddington, aprivate in the Scots Guards, saw the cavalry pass his position, and thensaw a number of riderless horses and dismounted men return, andassumed a charge had taken place. Deeply affected by the suffering ofinjured horses, careering past him in agony, Cuddington condemned thedeployment of mounted troops that day as "sheer madness.""75Onceagain, a powerful image was created: the doomed sabre charge thrownagainst lethal, modern firepower. It even found its way into the BritishOfficial History; Sir James Edmonds quoted approvingly an (unnamed)American officer as saying, "you can't have a cavalry charge until youhave captured the enemy's last machine gun."76As editor of the Official History, Edmonds, had he put his mind to it,might have recalled some of the occasions on which cavalry did suc-cessfully charge, despite the presence of enemy machine guns, during

73. Bickerstaff,History of the 6th Cavalry Brigade, 55-60.74. Lloyd George, WarMemoirs, 3:1521-22.75. D. W. J. Cuddington, "Senseless Slaughter of Men and Horses: Blood andConfusion at Monchy," in I Was There! The Human Story of the Great War of1914-1918, ed. Sir John Hammerton,4 vols. (London: Waverley, c.1930), 3:1082-85.76. J. E. Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1918 (London:HMSO, 1947), 5:197.58 * THE JOURNAL OF


24/39

ScapegoatArmthe war.7 What prompted Edmonds to join in the rising chorus of voicesdenigrating the cavalry is not clear, possibly his personal animositytowards Haig, possibly the professional animosity of a sapper towards themounted arm. Hans von Seeckt, pondering on the widespread dislike ofhorse soldiers, noted "the natural ingrained antipathy of the pedestrianin the dust for the horseman who trots past apparently without troubleor care" and that "the nimbus which has enveloped horse and rider fromthe earliest times irritates many."78Certainly, by the 1930s, cavalrymenhad few allies in Britain or America. With the debate dominated byevents on the Western Front, the achievements of postwar cavalry out-side western Europe made little or no impression. Russia's Civil War in1918-20 and the Soviet-Polish conflict of 1920 had both been charac-terised by wide-flanking movements and deep penetration of enemy ter-ritory by mass cavalry forces, such as the raid undertaken by the WhiteGeneral K. K. Mamontov's three Cossack divisions, in July 1919. Yetanalysis of these campaigns was largely restricted, in the West, to thecavalrymen's own professional publications and thus seems to have beenignored by the wider military audience.79Instead, from the pens of former prime ministers and former pri-vates, from official historians and the prophets of future war, the folly ofcavalrymen was denounced. As the process of mechanisation trans-formed cavalry regiments into armour formations, the continued utilityof mounted units was denied and their recent history traduced. In theEnglish-speaking world, cavalry had ceased to be a matter for seriousconsideration by military analysts. Military historians, for their part,would largely inherit the prejudices of cavalry's most vehement critics.

The Cavalry of World War IIA thorough consideration of the military history of World War II

might have led to some reassessment of those troopers who had arguedfor the retention of cavalry. After all, every major combatant army77. Bavarian Uhlans at Lagarde, 11 August 1914; the Dorset Yeomanry at Aga-gia, 26 February 1915; the AustralianLightHorse at Beersheba, 31 October 1917; theWarwickshire Yeomanry at Huj, 9 November 1917; the Dorset, Buckingham, andBerkshireYeomanryat El Mughar,13 November, 1917; elements of the British 6 Cav-alry Brigade at Villeselve, 24 March 1918; or the Jodhpur Lancers at Haifa, 23 Sep-tember 1918, to name but seven.78. Von Seeckt, Thoughts, 81.79. See, for example, Captain Hinterhoff, "General Mamontow'sCavalry Raid,"Cavalry Journal [U.K.]25 (1935): 209-22. Similarly, the exploits of the Nationalist1st CavalryDivision duringthe Spanish Civil War seem to have been entirely ignoredin the English language historiography. See Antonio Gasc6n Ricao, "Alfambra 1938:La Ultima Carga,"Historia y Vida 21 (1988): 95-101.

MILITARY HISTORY * 59


25/39

GERVASE HILLIPSengaged in the decisive theatre of war, in eastern Europe, deployed cav-alry units at some stage. Rather than giving western commentators pausefor thought, this fact, however, was merely seen as evidence of irre-deemable backwardness. Newspaper reports of the 1939 campaign weresoon full of stories of Polish cavalry "charging" German armour. On 19September 1939, The Times of London asserted that "the heavy mechan-ical superiority of the enemy broke [Polish] morale" and that a chargeagainst German tanks had resulted only in "the useless sacrifice of bravemen." The image of gallant lancers breaking their weapons against thesides of armoured vehicles was so alluring that generations of militaryhistorians have put their common sense to one side and repeated thefable.80One war correspondent who bucked the trend and seemed to takecavalry seriously was Walter Kerr.He devoted a whole chapter in his bookThe Russian Army: Its Men, Its Leaders, and Its Battles to the RedArmy's mounted troops. Noting the Soviet use of large, independent cav-alry formations, he drew particular attention to the achievements of Lieu-tenant-General Pavel Belov's cavalry corps in rearguard actions in theopening weeks of the war and Major-General Lev Dovator's remarkabledeep raid behind German lines in August 1941. The use of cavalry onsuch raids, Kerr learned, was partially informed by Soviet officers' knowl-edge of American history: "their idea of a perfect cavalryman was ... J.E. B. Stuart." Whilst noting the firepower of Soviet cavalry squadrons,each with its own 76mm anti-tank gun, he was surprised to learn "thatthe sabre charge was not a thing of the past. ... At the end of 1941 Dova-tor's cavalry corps, operating with [Marshal Konstantin Konstantinovich]Rokossovsky's army west of Moscow, had charged into a German divisionone moonlit night and destroyed an entire regiment."81

Cavalry in Postwar Historiography: Blimps and BlunderersPerhaps unsurprisingly, given that the war ended with the twinmushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the role of the horseduring the conflict did not figure prominently in postwar historiography.The continued use of cavalry formations by the Soviet Union caused noresurgence in western military circles of a serious interest in the useful-

80. See, for example, Caleb Carr,"Poland 1939," MHQ:The Quarterly Journalof Military History 2 (1989): 62. Interestingly, the same volume contains the remi-niscences of M. K. Dziewanowski, a Polish lancer who fought in the 1939 campaign.He describes his regiment engaging German tanks, as one might expect, with handgrenades, antitank guns, and Molotov cocktails.81. WalterKerr,The Russian Army: Its Men, Its Leaders, and Its Battles (Lon-don: Victor Gollancz, 1944), 50-56.60 * THE JOURNAL OF


26/39

- Scapegoat Armness of a mounted arm. Historians, too, had accepted a paradigm oftwentieth-century warfare based upon increased technological sophisti-cation and radical tactical innovation. In this story, the anachronisticcavalryman and his horse provided a useful foil to the progressive vision-aries of armour and mechanisation who had (allegedly) invented in"blitzkrieg" a new form of warfare. In short, the cavalry would continueto be a scapegoat for the supposed failings of, in particular, the Britisharmy during the two great global conflicts that dominated the first half ofthe twentieth century.It is only fair, at this point, to mention one die-hard trooper whoknew how to make a last stand. John K. Herr, "last Chief of the U.S. Cav-alry," collaborated with Edward Wallace to write The Story of the U.S.Cavalry, 1775-1942 (New York: Bonanza, 1953). In a polemical closingchapter, Herr pointed out that senior American commanders, amongthem Patton, John P. Lucas, and Lucian K. Truscott, had made "franticpleas" for the deployment of cavalry to Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy duringthe Second World War, yet these calls had been made in vain and themounted arm had been extinguished. This was contrasted with the factthat the Soviets still had a large number of cavalry divisions, and thattheir use during the war had encouraged the Germans to reestablish twocavalry corps of their own, which had served from 1943 to 1945, on theEastern Front. Herr was bullish enough to argue that the postwar UnitedStates was paying the price for its own lack of horse units: "wars flowover all kinds of terrain, in all kinds of weather, and an alert enemy willtry to fight in the kind best suited to his resources. Korea is an exampleof this. And there are too many other areas in the world where the coun-try is too rough and rugged for anything on wheels or treads but wheremounted cavalry and pack trains can operate with ease." He suggested,therefore, that "a small cadre which can be expanded if necessary, onecavalry division, be remounted."82It would be simple to dismiss the garrulous Herr as an aging cavalrypartisan, detached by pure sentiment from the realities of the modernbattlefield. Yet his call was supported by General Jonathan M. Wain-wright, who contributed a combative foreword to Herr's book whichpointed out that "off the roads and in mountainous country, armoredtroops usually cannot operate, and the horseman can go anywhere."Wainwright was, formerly, the U.S. Cavalry's Director of Instruction,whose study of mounted operations in the 1914-18 war has already beendiscussed. He was also, however, the last senior American officer to com-mand mounted troops in action, the 26th Cavalry, during the withdrawalto the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines in 1942. His views, therefore,

82. John K. Herr and EdwardWallace, The Story of the U.S. Cavalry, 1775-1942(New York:Bonanza, 1953), 257-59.MILITARY HISTORY * 61


27/39

GERVASE HILLIPSparticularly on the value of horse-mobile troops in terrain impassable toarmour, deserved to be taken seriously.83Yet, far from causing a reexamination of the continued viability of amounted arm, the actual performance of cavalry during the World Warwas ignored in the most influential postwar histories. This is not to saythat the cavalry arm itself was ignored. Once again, and somewhatbizarrely, considering how little use the British and Americans had madeof it, the cavalry provided a convenient scapegoat to explain military fail-ures. The thesis this time was, that in Britain at least, the hideboundreactionaries of the cavalry and their allies had placed obstacle afterobstacle in the path of interwar reformers keen to modernise the army.Thus was the nation's valuable lead in armoured warfare squandered,and its armoured forces doomed to defeat after defeat right up to theWestern Desert campaigns.The chief propagandist was, predictably, Sir Basil Liddell Hart. Inboth The Tanks and his Memoirs, Liddell Hart portrayed himself, and aband of radicals including J. F. C. Fuller, George Lindsey, Percy Hobart,and Giffard le Quesne Martel, as locked in a struggle with an innatelyconservative, and generally hippophile, military establishment. Theenthusiasm which cavalrymen had actually shown for armoured vehiclesof their own and for motorised logistics inevitably did not figure much inthis version of events. Cavalrymen, cast as the opponents of mechanisa-tion, could hardly be acknowledged as having been early advocates ofarmoured mobility. Instead, Liddell Hart propagated a powerful myth:"Wellington's reputed saying that the Battle of Waterloo was won on theplaying fields of Eton is merely a legend, but it is painfully true that theearly battles of World War II were lost in the Cavalry Club."84

Unsurprisingly, given the relentless criticism to which the arm hadbeen subjected, most discussions of cavalry's historic development fromthe late nineteenth century onwards now tended to be overtly critical.Liddell Hart's influence was particularly notable in Jay Luvaas's 1959study of European soldiers' reactions to the American Civil War. LiddellHart was thanked in the acknowledgments, and his "analysis of Civil Warcavalry operations" was reproduced as an appendix. The text itself wasdamning of pre-World War I cavalrymen and their supposed failure tolearn the value of mounted infantry from the American example. DespiteDouglas Haig's well-attested interest in the American conflict, Luvaaserroneously asserted that he "made no mention of Civil War cavalry" in

83. Jonathan Wainwright,foreword to Herr and Wallace,Story of the U.S. Cav-alry, vii-viii.84. Basil Liddell Hart, The Tanks (London: Cassell, 1959); Basil Liddell Hart,Memoirs, 2 vols. (London: Cassell, 1965), 1: 77.62 * THE JOURNAL OF


28/39

- Scapegoat Armhis text Cavalry Studies.85 Luvaas's own understanding of the issues waslargely determined by his failure to appreciate how American cavalry-men had actually fought during the Civil War.They were not merely usedas mobile firepower but had been "hybrids," of the kind Haig and Frenchadvocated for Britain. Yet Luvaas's interpretation of nineteenth-centurycavalry would reign largely unchallenged until the works of Stephen Z.Starr, on Civil War cavalry, and Dennis Showalter, on the Prussian army,revealed the continued importance of shock action on the nineteenth-century battlefield, and the cavalryman's capacity for reform in the faceof the new "arms of precision."86Three other influential, and still oft-cited, essays by Brian Bond,Edward Spiers, and William Taylor were indicative of the same trendhostile to the horse soldier.87The common theme running through theseessays was that early twentieth-century cavalry should have, in Taylor'swords, "adopted dismounted tactics wholeheartedly" and that no poten-tial for shock action existed on a battlefield dominated by machine guns,where "men on horse-back . . . could not withstand the onslaught ofmodern technology."88 Erskine Childers emerges from these essays as areform-minded advocate of mobile firepower; his limited grasp of whatconstituted "shock tactics," his advocacy of "saddle-fire," and his recog-nition that, in South Africa, mounted combat had proved possible, wereall ignored.89 All three authors failed to convey the complexities of thetactical debate surrounding cavalry at the turn of the century; the"hybrid" model was unacknowledged and cavalrymen were dismissed aswilfully reactionary, guilty of "unavailing resistance to the inexorabledevelopment of modern mechanised warfare."90None of these authors really engaged with the arguments actuallyput forward by cavalrymen themselves. Whilst occasional (carefullyculled) quotes from Haig's Cavalry Studies and Cavalry Training 1907appear in these essays, they are largely based on the writing of cavalry'scritics, not its advocates: Roberts, Childers, Denison, and the infantry-

85. Jay Luvaas,TheMilitary Legacy of the Civil War:The European Inheritance(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 198-99.86. Dennis Showalter, "Prussian Cavalry, 1806-1871," MilitJirgeschichtlicheMitteilungen 19 (1976): 7-22; and Stephen Z. Starr, "Cold Steel: The Sabre andUnion Cavalry,"Civil WarHistory 11 (1965): 142-59.87. Brian Bond, "Doctrine and Training in the British Cavalry 1870-1914," inThe Theoryand Practice of War:Essays Presented to Captain B. H. Liddell Hart, ed.Michael Howard (London: Cassell, 1965), 97-123; Edward M. Spiers, "The BritishCavalry,1902-1914," Journal for the Society ofArmy Historical Research 75 (1979):71-79; and William M. Taylor, "The Debate over Changing Cavalry Tactics andWeapons, 1900-1914," Military Affairs 28 (1964-65): 173-83.88. Taylor,"Debate over Changing Cavalry Tactics," 182-83.89. Spiers, "The British Cavalry, 1902-1914," 75.90. Bond, "Doctrine and Trainingin the British Cavalry,"120.MILITARY HISTORY * 63


29/39

GERVASE HILLIPSman Ian Hamilton all figure prominently. Neither Taylor nor Bond madereference to any manuscript material by Haig at all, whilst Spiers citedjust five references to original material in the Haig Papers. The U.S. Cav-alry School's analysis of the arm's performance in the First World Warwas ignored entirely. When they did note Haig and French's oft-statedcommitment to arming cavalry with a modern rifle, and training it tofight dismounted, they were quickly dismissive of the implications. ThusSpiers downplayed the significance of Haig's 1892 "Notes on DismountedAction of Cavalry," arguing that Haig was advocating dismounted actionas a mere "ancillary," rather than as a prerequisite activity for efficienttroopers.91A misleading notion of a dichotomy between shock-obsessed,technophobic arme blanche reactionaries, on the one side, and modern,progressive advocates of the mounted rifleman concept, on the other,permeated military history, both popular and academic, for decades.Thus Leon Wolff's shallow and unsatisfactory account of Third Ypres, InFlanders Fields, airily ridiculed Haig as "a cavalry tactician ... devotedto broad concepts in the Napoleonic vein that were no longer appropri-ate. .. . He resisted innovations and in later years was to deprecate theaeroplane, the tank, even the machine gun."92 Scholarly works actuallydevoted to the mounted arm were comparatively rare, an indication ofhow unfashionable a topic the cavalry arm was with military historians.Those that were written were often as damning as the more general stud-ies. John Ellis's illustrated work Cavalry: The History of Mounted War-fare exhibited, in the chapters dealing with the modern era, a markedlack of sympathy with the horse soldier. Ellis, like so many of cavalry'scritics, placed considerable emphasis on the impact of new technologies,in particular the rifle, which, he alleged, had ensured that "cavalry werevirtually useless [and] every war in the second half of the nineteenthcentury proved it."93

To make this argument naturally required a high degree of selectiv-ity. Ellis lavished much attention on the Charge of the Light Brigade atBalaklava on 25 October 1854, but failed to explain how two brigades ofAustrian cavalry broke two divisions of rifle-armed Italian infantry atCustozza on 24 June 1866. Those cavalry victories that do merit a men-tion are dismissed as somehow aberrant. The fact that Major-GeneralWilfried von Bredow's 12th Cavalry Brigade overran artillery andmitrailleuse (a multi-barrelled, mechanical machine gun) batteries and

91. Spiers, "The British Cavalry,1902-1914," 75.92. Leon Wolff,In Flanders Fields (London: Longmans, 1959; Harmondsworth,U.K.:Penguin, 1979), 61.93. John Ellis, Cavalry: The History of Mounted Warfare (Newton Abbot, U.K.:Westbridge, 1978) 144.64 * THE JOURNAL OF


30/39

- Scapegoat Arm

forced back chassep6t-armed infantry at Mars-la-Tour on 16 August1870 is explained away by "exceptional" factors: "smoke and dust on thebattlefield" and the availability of cover to conceal the cuirassiers'approach. Having established, to his own satisfaction at least, that cav-alry was doomed by the mid-nineteenth century, Ellis was scathingabout the survival of "these obsolete and anachronistic cavaliers" intothe twentieth century. Again, where he did acknowledge success on thebattlefield, he tried to explain it away as exceptional. Thus, for Ellis, theachievements of the Desert Mounted Corps in Palestine and Syria in1917-18 were made possible only because of the inferior quality of"demoralised" Turkish infantry.94Even those few historians who were sympathetic to the cavalryseemed to share the central assumption that the arm was obsolete on themodern battlefield and its survival a matter of sentiment or conservatismrather than practical military wisdom. Leonard Cooper chose to closehis history of British cavalry in 1914 with only a few brief pages in theepilogue covering World War I. Of the interwar years, he asserted, inkeeping with the orthodoxy of the 1960s, that "prophets like Major-Gen-eral J. F. C. Fuller and Captain B. H. Liddell Hart, who foresaw the com-plete mechanisation of warfare, were at best hardly listened to and atworst derided."95 For James Lawford, Allenby's victories in Palestinewere just "an Indian Summer," rather than evidence of continued utility,and he concluded his history of cavalry by informing his readers of how"in 1939 the Polish futilely broke their lances against the iron sides ofGerman tanks."96 Former lancer James Lunt, too, seemed convincedthat in the early years of the twentieth century his arm of service "hadfailed to comprehend the fact that the vastly increased fire-power ofmodern weapons had deprived the old-style cavalry of their role as afighting arm." Lunt poignantly dedicated his "garland of cavalry exploits"to Captain Arthur Sandeman, killed, sabre in hand, leading a mounteddetachment of the Burma Frontier Force in a charge against a Japanesemachine-gun post in 1942. The content, however, was concentrated onthe nineteenth century, with just two chapters, one on Beersheba, theother on Moreuil Wood, considering cavalry on twentieth-century bat-tlefields.97

94. Ellis, Cavalry, 144-48, 175-77. For Custozza, see Wood, Achievements ofCavalry, 141-62, 193-206. ForMars-La-Tour,ee DavidAscoli, A Day of Battle (Edin-burgh:Birlinn, 2001), 167-73.95. Leonard Cooper, British Regular Cavalry, 1644-1914 (London: Chapmanand Hall, 1965), 207.96. James Lawford, ed., The Cavalry (Abingdon, U.K.:Purnell, 1976), 173.97. James Lunt, Charge to Glory! A Garland of Cavalry Exploits (London:Heinemann, 1961), 32.MILITARY HISTORY * 65


31/39

GERVASE HILLIPSCavalry in Recent Literature

Whilst cavalry remained an unfashionable topic for scholarly study, itwas largely left to those writing for the military buff readership to fill ingaps in the historiography. Much popular military history merely par-roted scholarly opinion. Thus, David Quammen, in an overview of the useof horses in warfare written for MHQ in 1989, dutifully dismissed the ser-vice of First World Warcavalrymen as "amazingly lunkheaded."98 Others,however, who understood the actual scope of mounted operations in thetwo world wars, were less prone to restating fashionable orthodoxies.Janus Piekalkiewicz's The Cavalry of World War II was translated fromthe German, free of the anticavalry prejudice that distinguished the Eng-lish historiography. Its brief text provided a limited overview of mountedoperations during the war. The narrative, however, is still useful, provid-ing, for example, one of the few accounts in English of the charge of theSavoia Cavalleria which shattered three Soviet infantry battalions atIsbuschenski on 24 August 1942.99 The chief strength of Piekalkiewiez'swork lay in its remarkable collection of photographs. From Spahis inNorth Africa, via Cossack, Italian, German, and Romanian troopers onthe steppes, to Japanese-trained Manchurian units in China, the ubiquityof cavalry in the war is documented in some truly striking images.Similarly, Klaus Richter's two illustrated histories of the Germancavalry offered an intriguing contrast to the pervasive portrayals of half-tracks, Panzers, and self-propelled artillery blitzkrieging their way acrossFrance or into the Soviet Union. Richter's observation that, over thecourse of the war, Nazi Germany fielded no fewer than eight cavalry divi-sions, only three fewer than Imperial Germany in World War I, is partic-ularly noteworthy. Another revealing look at Adolf Hitler's military wasRichard DiNardo's Mechanized Juggernaut or Military Anachronism?Horses and the German Army of World War II. Although not specificallyconcerned with German cavalry formations, DiNardo's portrayal of a pre-dominantly horse-drawn infantry force did much to dismantle the notionof a technologically cutting-edge German army committed to a new"blitzkrieg" style of warfare.100

98. David Quammen, "The Ineffable Union of Horse and Man,"MHQ:The Quar-terly Journal of Military History 1 (1989): 37.99. Piekalkiewicz, The Cavalry of World WarII, 216-18.100. KlausRichter, Cavalry of the Wehrmacht (Atglen, Pa.: Schiffer, 1995); andKlausRichter, Weapons and Equipment of the German Cavalry, 1935-1945 (Atglen,Pa.: Schiffer, 1995); Richard DiNardo,Mechanized Juggernaut or Military Anachro-nism? Horses and the German Army of World WarII (Westport, Conn.: GreenwoodPress, 1991). Two further recent works written for the enthusiast merit mention:MarkYerger,Riding East: TheSS Cavalry Brigade in Poland and Russia, 1939-1942(Atglen, Pa.: Schiffer, 1996); and Jeffrey T. Fowler, Axis Cavalry in World War II(London: Osprey, 2001).66 * THE JOURNAL OF


32/39

- ScapegoatArmAt the same time, the cavalry was at last finding its historians. In2000 Paul Wilson published a thoroughly researched account of HeinrichHimmler's SS Cavalry from inception in 1930 to its acquittal at Nurem-

berg in 1945, despite involvement in the murders of thousands of eastEuropean Jews.101The British caval

12thcenturycavalry

Documents