CRITICAL THINKING
FROM HORSES TO TANKS
Lessons from the Army’s struggle to mechanize the cavalry. by Heather B. Hayes I
t’s hard to believe that in September 1941, more than two years after Nazi Germany unleashed its Panzer tanks and armored vehicles in a surprise attack on Europe, the U.S. Army was still trying to figure out which mobile combat force would be most effective on the battlefield: horses or tanks?
Tis ideological struggle between mounted cavalry traditionalists and those pushing armored mechanization had been going on since World War I. Ten, horse and rider as a combat weapon had been largely sidelined by the stationary Western Front and its trench warfare, machine guns and mustard gas. By contrast, the tank, which made its first ever battlefield appearance in May 1918, seemed to excel under such brutal conditions. Tough rudimentary in design and painstakingly slow, the steel-armored and tracked vehicles were able to help break the stalemate by rumbling their way across no-man’s land into enemy territory.
Te reality was that both horses and tanks could successfully perform the key military tasks of a cavalry unit: ground reconnaissance, security, exploitation, offensive operations and infantry support, including cover for retreat and pursuit. For the next two decades, the question that would dominate conversations at all levels of the Army—from the horse stables at Fort Riley in Kansas to the General Staff at the War Department—was which type of cavalry could do those tasks best under modern conditions.
Tere were extreme views on both sides of the issue and plenty in the middle. Te debate was further chal- lenged by the fact that during its “lean years” in the 1920s and 1930s, the Army had little money and not much inclination to spend the dollars it did have on the tank, a technology that remained relatively slow, guzzled too much gas and broke down too often. Horses and their riders, by contrast, were a known entity that “had stood the acid test of war,” as Gen. John K. Herr, the newly appointed chief of cavalry, put it during congressional testimony in 1939.
And yet by the time America finally entered the war in December 1941, the question of horses or tanks had been suddenly and decisively answered. Mechanization had won, and by the end of the decade, the horse cavalry would be relegated to history.
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