TEAM OF RIVALS
Horse cavalry and tanks that made up part of team “Blue” during the Louisiana Maneuvers in September 1941 advance in a heavy downpour of rain that turned the battlefield into “gumbo” mud. (Photo courtesy of National Archives)
(Photo courtesy of National Archives)
Lessons from the Army’s struggle to mechanize the cavalry.
by Heather B. Hayes
It’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? This ideological struggle between mounted cavalry traditionalists and those pushing armored mechanization had been going on since World War I. Then, 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. Though 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. The 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.
There were extreme views on both sides of the issue and plenty in the middle. The debate was further challenged 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. How this happened has been studied for decades by military historians. Why? Because the transformation of the U.S. cavalry from horses to tanks still holds valuable lessons for today’s military as it continues to grapple with the challenges of effectively adapting to rapid technological advancement in the face of cultural resistance and the ever-changing nature of war.
BOOTS AND SADDLES
The U.S. cavalry developed its own distinctive style that ensured “mobility, firepower, and shock” on the battlefield and would spend long days honing their horsemanship, riding, shooting, and charging skills. (Courtesy of Library of Congress)
BEATING A DEAD HORSE?
The road to mechanizing the cavalry was particularly difficult because change would ultimately require the wholesale replacement of centuries of tradition. The horse cavalry wasn’t just a means to achieve certain types of combat functions; it was a culture and a way of life. Riding to battle was both an art form and a lifelong discipline, and it also involved a bond between horse and rider that was fundamental to mission success. “To be one of the best riders in the American cavalry meant that you were one of the best riders in the world,” Elizabeth Letts noted in her book “The Perfect Horse.” Against this backdrop, the struggle to modernize began, and it involved a lot of opinions. Gen. George S. Patton Jr., who had the distinction of being both a cavalryman and a tankman during World War I, famously said, “If everyone is thinking alike, then someone is not thinking.” In the debate over the future of the cavalry, there would be much thinking and very little agreement. According to Alexander Bielakowski, author of “From Horses to Horsepower: The Mechanization and Demise of the U.S. Cavalry, 1916-1950,” there were four clear responses that emerged among cavalry officers dealing with “the evolving intellectual and cultural crisis caused by mechanization.” Probably the most extreme, passionate and intransigent in their views were the traditionalists, led by Herr, who would advocate for the utility of the horse cavalry until his death in 1955.
While the idea of the horse cavalry might conjure images of thousands of horses and their riders recklessly racing across an open field into a barrage of artillery, the U.S. cavalry had developed its own unique style and doctrine based on its experience fighting battles on the plains of North America and in the jungles of Cuba and the Philippines. “American cavalry was, in truth, mounted infantry. They rode into action, dismounted, and fought on foot,” military historian and strategist Edward L. Katzenbach Jr. wrote in “Tradition and Technological Change,” an American Defense Policy article. “The 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 reorganized the Army, the cavalry was named as a separate combat branch, while the fledgling American Tank Corps was attached to the infantry.
Though 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. Though 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. Douglas 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 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.” This stance ensured that Patton would be able to participate in either form of the future cavalry, depending on who won the debate. It also allowed him to encourage other cavalry officers on both sides of the issue to prepare themselves for change—whatever that might look like. For example, in a 1930 Cavalry Journal article co-authored with Maj. Clarence C. Benson, Patton wrote, “To bury our heads, ostrich-like, and ignore [mechanized vehicles] would be foolish,” while simultaneously suggesting that the horse cavalry could acclimate to a more modern battlefield: “If the 14th century knight could adapt himself to gunpowder, we should have no fear of oil, grease and motors.”
FATHER OF THE ARMORED FORCE
Adna R. Chaffee Jr., a dedicated horseman and gifted cavalry officer, was willing to risk his career advocating for the tank because he recognized that an armored cavalry would be the key to winning a future mobile war. (Courtesy of Library of Congress)
ACQUISITION AND POLICY MOVES
By 1939, as German Panzer tanks rolled into Poland and immediately decimated the Polish horse guard, the Army had no choice but to accelerate its decision on the cavalry question. Newly appointed Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall had already begun taking steps to ramp up tank development and manufacturing, along with every other aspect of Army readiness. Herr, who had been appointed to chief of cavalry the year prior, finally began to advocate for a mix of mounted cavalry and tanks, telling the Military Affairs Subcommittee he was convinced that “we can apply automotive machines to the execution of cavalry missions to a very considerable extent.” But he also warned that mechanization wasn’t a panacea and wanted tanks to be subordinate to the mounted cavalry. “No vehicle can go over the difficult country that a horse can,” he insisted. And thus, for a time, the U.S. Army had a Horse-Mechanized Corps Reconnaissance Regiment designed to leverage the strengths of both. A separate armored force, headed by Chaffee, was created shortly thereafter. In 1940, he began his command with a fleet of less than 1,000 light tanks, all of them still technologically inferior to the German tanks dominating in Europe.
SHOW, DON’T TELL
At some point, those advocating for their position needed to “put up or shut up,” as the old saying goes. Marshall gave both the horse and mechanized cavalry the opportunity to do just that in a series of wargame training maneuvers that took place in the fields, small towns and swamplands of Georgia and Louisiana. The exercises would test if either could live up to its own hype and prove its superiority over the other. Unfortunately, the earliest maneuvers quickly demonstrated that, even in terrain over which they had an advantage, the horses simply could not match the speed of Chaffee’s tanks. In response, Patton, then a colonel commanding the horse unit at Fort Myer, Virginia, would reach out to Chaffee about transferring to the new Armored Force. Horses would get one more chance to prove their combat worth. In September 1941, the last and largest of the maneuvers took place on 3,400 square miles south of Shreveport and in and around what is now Fort Polk. With 470,000 troops, 50,000 wheeled and tracked vehicles and 32,000 horses participating, two different “armies” were sent out to battle it out in a mock war. In the first exercise, the horses displayed all the mobility, agility, shock and courage for which they were so famous in their battle against two divisions of tanks. “Tanks were sliding off roads, getting stuck in Louisiana’s famous ‘gumbo’ mud, running out of gas—subject to all the shortcomings of motorized vehicles of the era. The horse showed none of these deficiencies,” Letts described in “The Perfect Horse.”
On the second exercise, Patton’s armored group, utilizing the innovative tactics of aggression, deception, speed and surprise for which he would later become legendary, managed to encircle the opposing Army, including the horse cavalry, and force their surrender three days before the exercise was scheduled to end. Although the horse cavalry had performed admirably, the mechanized cavalry prevailed. The maneuvers had convinced Army leadership that tanks could easily outperform horses in providing the strategic and operational speed and mobile firepower needed to succeed in a modern war. Just two months later, the U.S. finally entered the war with mechanized cavalry serving as the heart of mobile combat power. For the cavalry officers who had long advocated for a mounted force, it was a bitter moment. But dutifully, they said goodbye to their horses, hung up their stirrups and transferred to mechanized units.
CHANGING HORSES IN MIDSTREAM
Gen. George S. Patton, seen here in North Africa 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. (Courtesy of Library of Congress)
CONCLUSION
In the end, tanks ultimately won over horses not because they were superior in all aspects of cavalry functions but because they were superior in all the necessary ones. Warfare had changed, and the method by which to achieve the mission had to change with it. As hard as it was to part with the tradition and glory of the mounted cavalry, the Army chose to follow Patton’s battlefield doctrine: “Always go forward!” Although they would no longer again be the “tip of the spear” in combat operations, horses continued to have a few moments of glory advancing our warfighters. For example, in 2001, during Operation Enduring Freedom, a small team of Green Berets with the 5th Special Forces Group’s Operational Detachment Alpha 595, led by former cattle rancher Capt. Mark Nutsch, borrowed local horses and used old-style cavalry tactics like stealth and agility to outmaneuver obsolete Soviet tanks and trucks and liberate Afghanistan from the Taliban. Today, it is the tanks that are being questioned. In the face of 21st century battlefield tactics and technology, many believe that tanks are becoming obsolete and wonder whether they will soon have to cede their role as lead mobile combat power to drones and other unmanned systems. That debate between traditionalists and modernists and those in the middle will no doubt continue, even as opportunities arise to show which platform is superior. In the end, the answer will, once again, be determined by mission, not method. May the best technology win.
For more information on the transition from horses to tanks, go to https://history.army.mil/Army-Museum-Enterprise/Find-an-Army-Museum/US-Cavalry-Museum and for the latest information on U.S. Army tank modernization and sustainment, go to https://www.peogcs.army.mil/Project-Offices/PM-Abrams.
HEATHER B. HAYES provides contract support to the U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center as a contributing writer and editor for Army AL&T Magazine and JANSON. She holds a B.A. in journalism from the University of Kentucky and has more than 30 years of experience writing and editing feature articles and books.
