CRITICAL THINKING
“American cavalry was,
in truth,
mounted infantry. Tey rode into action, dismounted, and fought on foot,” mili- tary historian and strategist Edward L. Katzenbach Jr. wrote in “Tradition and Technological Change,” an American Defense Policy article. “Te semiautomatic pistol, not the saber, was the American cavalry’s weapon of choice.”
Cavalrymen saw the tank as a “deaf and blind” machine that spent more time being pulled out of trenches and shell craters than fighting the enemy—and Army leadership backed them up. In the National Defense Act of 1920 that reorga- nized the Army, the cavalry was named as a separate combat branch, while the fledg- ling American Tank Corps was attached to the infantry.
Tough tanks still had severe limitations, there were some modernizers—dedicated cavalry officers—who believed those limitations could be overcome. In 1928, Adna Chaffee Jr., while still a major, left the cavalry for a position with the War Department’s General Staff where he had an opportunity to help organize a U.S. Army experimental mechanized force demonstration. Tough he didn’t know much about tanks (he’d never even been inside of one), he was so impressed with what he saw that he wrote a landmark report, “Mechanization in the Army,” in which he called for a $4 million, four-year plan to create a “completely mechanized, self-contained, highly mobile regiment,” which he (accurately) predicted would be “a great part of the highly mobile combat troops of the next war.”
Chaffee would soon find a kindred spirit in new Army Chief of Staff Gen. Doug- las MacArthur, who ordered all combat branches to adopt mechanization. For the horse cavalry, that meant taking tanks into their ranks. Chaffee, a future general who
CHANGING HORSES IN MIDSTREAM
Gen. George S. Patton, seen here in 1943, was a notable horse lover and cavalry officer who, nonetheless, became the commander of the First Tank Corps during World War I and would later create the innovative armored tactics that helped the Allies defeat the Nazis in World War II. (Photo courtesy of Library of Congress)
would one day be known as the “Father of
the Armored Force,” managed to
work around the Army’s regulations on tank funding by requisitioning them as “combat cars.” He would later work with another modernizer, Lt. Gen. Daniel Van Voorhis, to mechanize the 7th Cavalry Brigade at Fort Knox, Kentucky. In 1933, the 1st Cavalry became the first horse unit to transition entirely to tanks.
RIDING THE FENCE In between the traditionalists and the modernizers were the pragmatists, who “either had no opinion or ‘played it safe’
by not voicing their opinion,” according to Bielakowski, who deduced that most of them probably “trusted the Army to provide the correct equipment/weaponry in time for the next war.”
Finally, there were the compromisers—or rather, one compromiser: Patton himself. Bielakowski notes that the future master of armored warfare “carved his own unique position” by being “vocally supportive of both sides in the debate between horses and mechanization.”
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