CHAPTER 4

FALSE DAWN

THE INTERWAR PERIOD, 1918–1933

In the wake of 1918, the horse still loomed large in European society. Despite the increasing mechanization of all European armies during World War I, horses remained important in all military establishments, and of course in civilian society as well. Clear indications of that importance manifested themselves in the treaty of peace presented to Germany at the end of the Paris Peace Conference in June 1919. Annex IV of the Treaty of Versailles dealt, among other things, with specific numbers, and in some cases specific types, of horses and other livestock that Germany would have to surrender and to whom. The French Government, for example, stood to receive 500 stallions of unspecified breed aged three to seven years, along with 30,000 fillies and mares. In contrast to the stallions (though presumably they would be similar), the fillies and mares had to be specifically of Ardennais, Boulonnais, or Belgian stock, all three types being very large draft-horse breeds weighing up to 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg) and standing between sixteen and seventeen hands. Similarly, the Annex called for Germany to surrender to Belgium 200 stallions aged three to seven years and 10,000 fillies and mares aged eighteen months to three years. In the case of Belgium's haul, all of the horses were to be of “large Belgian type.” All animals were to be “of average health and condition.” In both the French and Belgian cases, these animals were presumably ones that had been confiscated by the German army during the war. However, “to the extent that animals so delivered cannot be identified as animals taken away or seized [during hostilities], the value of such animals [i.e., those delivered by Germany] shall be credited against the reparation obligations of Germany” as detailed elsewhere in the Treaty.1

This clear recognition of the horse's continued value to the civilian economy also found a certain parallel in military circles. The assumption that the horse might still play a part in future wars was not uncommon in Europe and elsewhere after World War I. As late as 1926, British general Sir Douglas Haig wrote that he “believ[ed] that the value of the horse and the opportunity for the horse in the future are likely to be as great as ever. Aeroplanes and tanks…are only accessories to the man and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse—the well-bred horse—as you have ever done in the past.”² In the post-1918 U.S. Army, too, occasional voices were raised in favor of the horse cavalry. No less keen an observer of the incipient armored idea than George Patton continued his informed speculation after the Armistice that mounted forces still had a role. In the January 1924 issue of the Cavalry Journal he acknowledged the importance of motorization for the future of warfare; but he also continued—as did his German counterparts—to envision a place on the battlefield for mounted forces. Thus he wrote that armored cars should be equipped to operate alongside, but not to replace, horse-mounted troops. “It is the duty of [the horse] cavalry,” he said in a speech of the same year to the 11th Cavalry Regiment in Boston, “and should be its pride to be bold and dashing.” Not only was such sentiment inherent in Patton's character, but it had also been reinforced by his two earlier stints at the French Cavalry School in 1912 and 1913. Furthermore, like many of his counterparts in Germany and Great Britain, Patton went into the postwar period still advocating the retention of edged weapons for the cavalry, in his case the colloquially named “Patton sword” (U.S. Saber M-1913).³ Indeed, as late as 1941, Patton responded affirmatively to the Cavalry Board's enquiry as to whether the saber should be retained. “A cold steel weapon,” he maintained, “is not only desirable but vitally necessary.”⁴ Nevertheless, Patton did not advocate retention of the horse to the exclusion of the U.S. Cavalry's mechanization, as did some others. His equine advocacy was driven by practical considerations such as the limits of technology, as well as a by a certain military romanticism.5

Beyond such advocacy, and in terms of actual European military operations, cavalry played a prominent role in the brief but large-scale Russo-Polish War of 1919–1920. Hostilities, in fact, began with a Polish cavalry patrol stumbling upon a Russian camp in Byelorussia early on the morning of 14 February 1919. This conflict, which the Germans no doubt watched intently, was a “vast war of movement” with upwards of two million men sweeping back and forth across the plains of east-central Europe in 1920. One Polish cavalry division in the drive on Kiev in April 1920 covered more than 125 miles (200 km) in thirty-six hours. At Koziatyn on the road linking Kiev and Vinnitsa, later the site of one of Hitler's command posts during World War II, Polish cavalrymen captured, among other things, eight thousand prisoners, three thousand railway cars, five hundred horses, twenty-seven artillery pieces, and—oddly—three airplanes. On 5–6 May, other Polish cavalry actually occupied Kiev itself, admittedly in the absence of effective resistance.⁶ Despite these serious setbacks at the Poles' hands, the Red Army's cavalry spearheaded a counteroffensive that drove the Poles out of the whole of the Ukraine in May and June, the Bolshevik commander boasting that his horses would be riding through the streets of Paris before summer's end. In this case the cavalry in question constituted the First Cavalry Army (Pervaya Konnaya Armia or Konarmia I), a massive force of four full cavalry divisions including some 18,000 mounted troopers, 52 field guns, 5 armored trains, 8 armored cars, and even a squadron of 15 aircraft. Possessing a fearsome reputation born of its Cossack regiments and its service against the Whites in the Russian Civil War, Konarmia I operated under the command of General (later Marshal) Semyon Budenney. It considered itself the elite of the Red Army and produced a generation of Red Army officers believing fiercely in the idea of mobile warfare.⁷ In the fighting around Kiev in late May and early June 1920, Konarmia I broke through the Polish defenses and raised havoc in raids on Koziatyn, Berdichev, and Zhitomir. Budenney's horsemen wore down the fiercely resisting Polish Cavalry Division reserve in a number of classic cavalry engagements but also fought dismounted in cooperation with artillery and armored cars. Kiev subsequently fell to the Red Army's infantry, and a general Polish withdrawal from the Ukraine followed. By mid-August, Soviet cavalry had reached the bend on the Vistula at Thorn, only some five days' foot-march—and a much shorter ride—from Berlin itself. There followed, however, the storied “Miracle of the Vistula.” Beginning on 15–16 August, a Polish counterattack annihilated three entire Russian armies. It also saw what one writer has called the “last great cavalry battle of European history” in the “Zamosc Ring,” also known to history as the Battle of Komarow, on 31 August. Some 20,000 horsemen fought here as the retreating Konarmia I attempted to break free of encircling Polish infantry and cavalry in the stretch of forested hill country between the Rivers Wieprz and Bug. Charging and countercharging, the two cavalry forces clashed in Napoleonic style until the Polish uhlans and lancers carried the day and forced the Russians to withdraw. Moving faster than the Poles could pursue, however, large portions of Budenney's army managed to escape destruction and cross the Bug, thus reaching the safety of Soviet-controlled territory.8

With such a conflict raging just to the east of post-1918 Germany's frontiers, officers in Berlin could not help but ponder the matter of what military role the horse might yet play. Not surprisingly, in the German army, too, commanders assumed that the horse would still have a place and not merely as a draft animal. The army (das Reichsheer; after 1935 das Heer) constituted the largest element of the now famous “100,000-man Reichswehr” mandated by the Treaty of Versailles. Article 160 of the treaty specifically directed that the army possess no more than seven divisions of infantry and three of cavalry. Such a number constituted a tremendous decline in force-structure for an army that had been one of the world's largest between 1914 and 1918. From an already imposing figure of some 840,000 in 1914, the army in 1917–1918 had numbered some six million, a force of 241 divisions deployed across Europe from the Channel Coast to Courland and the Black Sea.⁹ However, the treaty not only specified absolute numbers for the post-1918 army. It also implicitly determined what relative place in the army the various arms would have by prescribing that the army “be devoted exclusively to the maintenance of order within the [national] territory and to the control of the frontiers.”10 General Hans von Seeckt, effectively the army's chief of staff in 1919–1920 and its operational commander in chief as head of the General Troop Office (Allgemeines Truppenamt) from 1920 to 1926, played a pivotal role in shaping what post-1945 generations of planners would call the army's “vision.” In such a capacity, he and his immediate subordinates necessarily confronted the vexing question of whether and to what extent horse-mounted forces could be retained.

Unsurprisingly, the cavalry divisions under Seeckt's overall command did not initially exhibit tremendous capability. As with the army as a whole, the former Allied Powers wouldn't permit that. On the table of organization and equipment (TOE), each cavalry division of 1919 numbered six mounted regiments. Each regiment included four squadrons, a machine gun section, and a signals platoon.¹¹ In addition to the mounted regiments, the German cavalry's divisional TOE of 1919 also included a pioneer battalion, a signals battalion, and an artillery battalion of three light horse-drawn batteries. Total divisional establishment was 5,300 men. Still, the question remained: what would the cavalry do? In defining the cavalry's mission, Seeckt drew upon not only his considerable intellect but also his own experiences during World War I, and his observations of the immediate post-1918 period. Having served on the immense Eastern Front, largely devoid of the fixed entrenchments so characteristic of the war in France and Belgium, he appreciated firsthand the continuing, crucial importance of an army's mobility. Whereas the fighting in the west had become largely immobile after September 1914 and was destined to remain so until at least the Battle of Cambrai in November and December 1917, campaigns in the east throughout the war had regularly ranged over scores and hundreds of miles. Generals on the Western Front, particularly Allied generals, had simply not been able to make use of the cavalry forces at their disposal. In the east, generals on both sides never suffered such a restriction. Seeckt therefore retained not only a keen interest in the mobile operations arising from such physical circumstances but also how to execute those operations in a German army functioning under the limitations imposed by Versailles. The upshot of his considerations was that, after 1918, he brought to his new responsibilities a continuing interest in maintaining a strong cavalry component in the army.¹²

Seeckt thought that the cavalry's equine horsepower might still have a place in a world of internal-combustion engines. He reasoned, quite naturally, that the massed charge with cold steel had in all likelihood become irretrievably a thing of the past. In this he shared the presumption of certain other Prussian and German military leaders going back at various points to Helmut von Moltke the Elder and his assessment of the Austro-Prussian War. Even before the war with France in 1870, Moltke had concluded that the cavalry's primary (and perhaps only) real functions would be reconnaissance, screening, security, and pursuit, but always ideally as part of a combined-arms force. As we've seen, those were precisely the German cavalry's roles in 1870–1871, notwithstanding the “Death Ride” at Mars-la-Tour. Again, in 1914–1918 the German cavalry had assumed largely the same missions and, when actual combat occurred, often fought dismounted.

Since 1914, however, European armies had experienced dramatic technological and, in some quarters, organizational changes. Motor vehicles were crucial to these changes but so were weapons possessed of ever-longer ranges and ever-greater lethality. Seeckt nevertheless thought that horse-mounted cavalry, as part of a combined-arms light division, were still capable of executing independent operations. They could play a useful part, he thought, at the level of the military art above the tactical engagement but below the strategic outcome in missions as specified by Moltke. Presuming their own incorporation of newer weaponry and vehicles, horse-mounted troops could even still be a force capable of tactical success at the small-unit level. When they fought, they would do so as infantry, but they would require more infantry combat power to be truly effective. In such light divisions, sometimes also referred to as mixed divisions, cavalry would therefore require the added firepower of organic infantry assets, notably absent from the cavalry's TOE of 1919. That infantry, in turn, would require bicycles, motorcycles, and/or motorized transport in order to keep pace with the horsemen. Trucks and bicycles, however, would have only limited cross-country capability. They were bound to the roads, whether paved or not. Further, since the proposed divisions' objectives would be varied and reached only over long distances, the cavalry would also need mobile artillery, whether horse-drawn or motorized; effective wireless communications; wheeled armored cars; and, perhaps, tanks. Foreseeing things to come, Seeckt also considered cooperation with the air arm to be of particular importance to the cavalry's effectiveness. Therefore, he even advocated placing aerial units under a cavalry division's command. The airplane's primary value to the cavalry lay in its function as a reconnaissance platform. It could extend the cavalry's line of sight by flying over the battlefront well beyond the cavalry troopers' reach. Significantly, however, neither Seeckt nor his Inspector of Cavalry, Lieutenant-General Maximilian von Poseck, saw the airplane replacing the horsemen. On the contrary, Seeckt, Poseck, and others envisioned aircraft as supplementing the cavalry by providing a true over-the-horizon reconnaissance capability. Absent effective air-to-ground radios, however, and in light of the airplane's relative frailty and limited endurance even in the early 1920s, not to mention the vagaries of the weather aloft, the cavalry's champions refused to see aerial observation as inevitably relieving the horseman of the important reconnaissance role.13

Indeed, as late as 1930, Seeckt would write that neither aircraft nor motorization had made the cavalry irrelevant. “The solution to the problem [of the cavalry's role],” he wrote, “lies…in making full use of the products of technical science to extend and modernize what already exists, but not by substituting something dead for something alive. The living arm, i.e., our cavalry, should be developed to its fullest perfection on modern lines without loss of its characteristics.” Of the latter, the essential one was the cavalry's inherent mobility.¹⁴ That mobility, when combined with newly mobile artillery and motorized infantry, he maintained, still permitted the “modern Seydlitz” not only rapidly to outflank the enemy but now materially to contribute to the “annihilating victory which is the aim of all military thinking.”¹⁵

Notwithstanding becoming proficient with new weapons and vehicles, the cavalryman's real training lay in military equitation and daily horse-care. Otherwise, said Seeckt, all one ended up with was a “mounted yeomanry.” Poseck emphatically agreed. He wrote that mounted infantry were nothing more than riflemen riding badly. Their inability at horsemanship would only nullify their mounts' most important advantage: mobility in pursuit, retreat, and surprise attacks on the enemy's flanks and rear. On the contrary, the post-1918 cavalry had to ensure that the trooper always remained not only a good marksman but also a wellschooled rider. Interestingly, Poseck drew upon the post-1918 French cavalry regulations when he affirmed, as they did, that the modern cavalryman had to have all of his military ancestors' skills in equitation while remaining the equal of the infantryman in dismounted combat. The ideal result would be to exploit the horse's natural strengths in effectively bringing modern weapons to bear without the trooper's running the creature into the ground. That could only come from combining firearms training as good as the infantry's with proper equitation, stabling, and regular and competent veterinary care.16 Thus properly trained, equipped, and mounted, the cavalry's roles would include frontier defense; screening the advance; intelligence-gathering; reconnaissance; dislocation of the enemy's lines of communication and supply; and constant probing for a weak flank to turn or attack.¹⁷

Certain specific elements of the cavalryman's training aimed at enabling him to accomplish these varied missions. Before 1935, for example, horsemen of the German army were expected to receive as many as three thousand hours of equitation over the course of the twelve-year enlistment specified for common soldiers in the Treaty of Versailles.¹⁸ River crossings also played a major role in the cavalry's training both with and without the support of combat engineers. Consequently, all mounted regiments were expected to conduct at least one large-scale river-crossing exercise per year.¹⁹ Despite such rigorous requirements, and somewhat surprisingly, most personnel in the cavalry and artillery evidently did not earn the badge constituting the outward recognition of the horseman's skill. The Horseman's Badge, depicting a horse and rider performing a classical levade facing the viewer's left and wreathed in oak leaves, was presented by the National Association of Breeding and Testing of German Warm Bloods and worn on the left breast pocket of the uniform blouse. Awarded in bronze, silver, and gold, the Horseman's Badge recognized the recipient's relative level of riding skill and theoretical knowledge on the basis of civilian and military tests. Cavalry and artillery officers holding the rank of captain (Rittmeister in the mounted regiments and horse-artillery; Hauptmann in the horse-drawn field artillery) were expected to pass the required examinations. Many serving officers in these groups, however, tended not to wear the award even if they'd earned it. Apparently, they considered proper equitation and theoretical knowledge of their horses to be a given in their profession of arms and consequently didn't feel it necessary to wear an outward civilian expression of the fact.20

Supported thus by Poseck and others, with a suitable training syllabus in hand, and with a clearly self-confident officer corps at his disposal, Seeckt's considerations resulted in a revised TOE for a cavalry division. The revision appeared in the Army Service Regulation (Heeresdienstvorschrift) of 1923 and proposed a significantly different organization from that of four years before. As in 1919, the number of mounted regiments remained at six, but they were now to be grouped in three brigades of two regiments each. Internally, each regiment also now possessed a machine gun company instead of the earlier, smaller machine gun section. To increase each regiment's long-range hitting power, a section of two horse-drawn guns was added. It was other additions to the cavalry division, however, that transformed it in keeping with Seeckt's and his supporters' ideas. The division now also included a separate infantry battalion, a bicycle battalion (of three bicycle companies and two motorized anti-tank batteries of three guns each), and a machine gun battalion. This was the equivalent of adding a full regiment of infantry. Poseck called this addition of “chasseur” or infantry battalions to the cavalry “exceptionally useful.” This usefulness, he maintained, had been amply demonstrated between 1914 and 1918, particularly when the infantry was truck-mounted so as to be able to intervene early in an encounter battle. He felt the same could be said of the bicycle-mounted infantry, though he admitted that such had not been the case on the Eastern Front with its paucity of paved roads. The divisional artillery was also augmented to the level of a regiment through the addition of a second, fully motorized battalion of twelve guns. To provide protection against aerial attack, a motorized flak battalion of four batteries was also added. Here again, Poseck's views supported Seeckt's. Poseck maintained that the war of 1914–1918 had clearly shown the importance of the “loyal fraternity of arms” existing between cavalry troopers and the horse-artillery, which had fulfilled all the demands made upon it. He wrote that increasing the number and weight of the cavalry's field pieces and adding anti-aircraft guns would only deepen this fraternity. Similarly, he believed that continuing technical improvements to the cavalry's carbines, machine guns, and artillery, when combined with better “fire training,” would steadily increase the cavalry's fighting power just as had been the case in other arms. This fighting power, in turn, would “more surely enable the cavalry divisions to overcome enemy resistance and thus take full advantage of their horses' legs.”21 A battalion of twelve armored cars also found its way into the new TOE, and even a squadron of twelve observation aircraft and a motorcycle platoon were attached to the divisional headquarters. Rounding out the division's strength were the less glamorous but nonetheless critical support elements: a pioneer battalion, a signals battalion, a truck-transport battalion, a horse-drawn wagon battalion, a medical battalion, and a veterinary detail. To the extent that trucks and wagons maintained the cavalry divisions' logistical independence, Poseck deemed them “absolutely indispensable” based upon the lessons learned from World War I.²²

This organization reflected the experience gained from the occasional attachment of infantry and armored cars to cavalry units in the German Army on the Eastern Front during World War I, a practice Seeckt would have seen firsthand. Interestingly, the Rumanian army had effectively employed cavalry and armored cars together against the Germans in 1916. For their part, the Germans in Rumania had also used armored cars in independent units in the same theater. Meanwhile, in the Baltic States in spring 1919, several Freikorps formations using trains, armored cars, and truck-mounted infantry had executed wide-ranging movements to good effect against the Bolsheviks. While the addition of such motorized units would increase the cavalry's mobility, the doubling of divisional artillery and the addition of large combat-support and logistics elements theoretically permitted the cavalry divisions to execute truly independent operations. The doctrinal development of this new organization would be under the aegis of the Cavalry School in the city of Hannover. Eventually, in 1937, the school would be transferred to Krampnitz just outside of Berlin as the army expanded rapidly under the Nazi regime.²³ The relocation would put the Cavalry School not very far from one of the most famous battlefields and one of the most famous homes in Prussian military history. To the northeast of Krampnitz lay the neighboring towns of Fehrbellin and Wustrau. In June 1675 Fehrbellin had been the site of a victorious battle against the Swedes, an event sometimes regarded as the birthplace of the Prussian army. Interestingly enough, that victory under Elector Friedrich Wilhelm was fought and won almost entirely by the cavalry. For its part, Wustrau was the ancestral home of the Ziethens. Field Marshal Hans Joachim von Ziethen, “Papa” to his men and “ancestor of all hussars,” had been one of the most famous cavalrymen in German military history and had commanded the Prussian Life Guard Hussars during the Seven Years' War. No German cavalryman worth his salt could overlook these associations. Be that as it may, even while the Cavalry School was still located at Hannover, the academy's location was not accidental. The Hannoverian State Stud at Celle and its branches in the adjoining regions had been producing high-quality horses for the army and for German agriculture for many generations. Indeed, one of the great European breeds, the Hanoverian, takes its name from that very locale. Therefore, in terms of both personnel and horses, the needs of the army's new-style cavalry divisions would be enormous, given that each mounted regiment alone required more than a thousand mounts, not counting the parent division's needs for horse-drawn transport.24

The Cavalry's Role before 1933

Prior to 1933, the cavalry's training was predicated on Seeckt's original idea that the army should be a relatively small, professional force armed with the most modern weapons available to Germany under the restrictions imposed by the settlement of Versailles. While Seeckt initially envisioned an army of 200,000 to 300,000 men, the post-1918 terms limited the force to the ten divisions noted above. The manpower total of some 100,000 officers and men was well below the numbers Seeckt and others deemed useful. Consequently, the army's role had to be altered. By about 1921, Seeckt came to view the army as a sort of cadre serving a dual function. Its primary mission would be to defend the Reich and act as a military striking force. Its secondary but not unimportant function would be to serve as a foundational element for a rapid expansion to a force of twenty-one divisions. Seeckt viewed the latter strength as the minimum necessary to protect Germany from her putative continental enemies.²⁵

At the time of Seeckt's command of the army and for years thereafter, those assumed enemies did not include the Soviet Union or Great Britain. Instead, they were limited to Poland and France and perhaps Belgium and Czechoslovakia. German animosity toward Poland throughout the 1920s remained visceral. Arising in the aftermath of Germany's defeat in 1918, Poland had been re-created by the victorious Allies at the Paris Peace Conference. Large swathes of Germany's eastern territories had been ceded under pressure to help constitute the new Polish State, with Poland's eastern provinces coming from Russia. The surrendered German territories included West Prussia, Posen, and portions of Upper Silesia. The city and immediate hinterland of Danzig were also lost. Though not given to Poland, they were administered as a “Free City” under the aegis of the League of Nations. Furthermore, as a result of these cessions, East Prussia was cut adrift from the rest of the Reich and was now separated from it by the so-called Polish Corridor. On Germany's western frontiers, the Saarland, like Danzig, had been placed under the supervision of the League, and the French had been given treaty-based rights of extraction of the region's mineral resources. To the northwest of the Saarland, beyond Luxemburg, the districts of Eupen and Malmedy had gone to Belgium. Adding insult to injury, French, British, Belgian, and American troops had occupied the whole of the region west of the Rhine from Karlsruhe to the borders of the Netherlands. In these Rhenish territories, though they remained integral to the Reich, Germany was forbidden to maintain military forces or build fortifications. To cement these various changes and restrain Germany further, the French Government entered into a number of diplomatic and military alliances after 1919. Of greatest concern to someone in Seeckt's position, as well as to those who commanded the army after 1926, were alliances between France and Belgium in 1920 and between France and Poland in 1921. These, then, were the geostrategic facts confronting the army as it rebuilt under Seeckt's leadership. These, too, were the conditions for which the cavalry trained.

That training centered, of course, on the cavalry's ability to move. As has been noted, Seeckt and others recognized that mobility would be the key to the cavalry's future military viability, provided that motorization and mechanization did not make horsemen superfluous in the interim. Seeckt maintained that the future of armies, of warfare itself, lay in the employment of relatively small, highly mobile, high-quality forces capable of simultaneous mobilization of the whole for either offensive or defensive action. In other words, both tactical and operational mobility were necessary for Germany's military, and therefore political, survival. The high degree of mobility he demanded would be achieved through “numerous and highly efficient cavalry, the fullest possible use of motor transport, and the marching capacity of the infantry.” Of course, Seeckt also demanded that the most effective arms be provided and that replacements of men and matériel be continuous.26 Herein, however, resided what would turn out to be an acute problem for Germany's war-making potential, though the issue was moot in the 1920s. Given modern training, equipment, and leadership, Seeckt saw no reason why the cavalry's days in the army should necessarily be numbered.²⁷ Any war against the Polish enemy would necessarily be a war of movement. Conversely, a simultaneous or near-simultaneous war with France would be more static and defensive in Seeckt's estimation, at least until the outcome in the east became clear.²⁸ Thus, the mobility provided by horse-soldiers was still an important element in a planning and training formula that by the mid-1920s regularly included bicyclists, motorcyclists, armored cars, trucks, and early types of tracked vehicles.

To a certain extent, this thinking embodied what might be called the lessons learned from the already-mentioned war of 1920 between Poland and Russia. Though brief, that conflict saw not only the widespread employment of massed cavalry formations but also extensive use of armored cars of varying types. They included proper armored cars made by Austin, Ford, and Renault, but also mere lash-ups constructed by putting plate-armor on converted Fiats (on the Polish side) and Putilovs (on the Russian). In fact, Poseck himself noted the effectiveness armored cars had already shown in sometimes hampering the German cavalry's reconnaissance during World War I. “They [armored cars] proved,” he wrote, “that their adoption by us would be very much worthwhile.” To the extent that the Poles' and Russians' experiences with armored cars in 1920 became widely known, they would naturally have reinforced his assessment. By contrast with armored cars, however, the tanks used occasionally by the Poles in 1920 were mechanically unreliable, prone to breakdown, and on more than one occasion actually had to be rescued by horse-mounted troopers.²⁹

It was with these strictures in mind that the army's cavalry trained throughout the 1920s. Firearms had been part of the cavalry trooper's standard equipment since before World War I, and fighting dismounted had been included in the cavalry's training since the same period. Nevertheless, the army still issued sabers to cavalrymen in the 1920s and even lances until 1927. Notwithstanding Seeckt's thoughts about the massed charge's being a thing of the past, the attraction to cold steel remained strong among the cavalry's senior regimental commanders. According to one authority on the interwar army, all of the latter insisted on the lance's retention despite many junior officers' openly expressed doubts about its usefulness.30 Similarly, equitation continued to be stressed in troopers' training, both in close formation and in open order. Such formal riding instruction constituted the equivalent of the infantryman's regular drill and ceremony and remained natural to the cavalry for routine movement, despite the recognition that massed mounted attack in formation would likely not recur. Indeed, as early as 1914, brigade and regimental columns had been replaced by the column-of-twos as the cavalry's preferred formation on the move. Also known as the double column, it remained the standard formation throughout the period from 1919 to 1939, although regimental columns were still used in fieldparades and reviews. The principal advantage of the double column and its even narrower variant, the platoon column, was that it reduced a cavalry unit's front while on the march. In the case of the platoon column, for example, the column's front was ideally only about fifteen feet (5 m). In turn, the reduced front allowed the marching cavalry column to make better use of topographical features such as defiles, swales, or forested paths for cover from hostile fire and aerial observation. The double column would continue in use during World War II. The relative traditionalism of the cavalry's training in equitation might in part be explained by the fact that the training manual in use before the middle of the decade had been issued in 1912. That manual was not replaced by a new edition until 1926.³¹ Formation riding continued in the training syllabus thereafter for the very simple reason that cavalrymen aren't cavalrymen if they can't ride tolerably well for prolonged periods. Even if they were now almost always to fight dismounted, they'd still have to use their mounts as the means to get to the battle. New training manuals would not change that fact. As a concession to modernization's inevitability, however, Seeckt's replacement as the army's commander in 1927, General Wilhelm Heye—an infantryman—ordered the lance's retirement.32 The saber, however, remained standard issue as late as 1941.

Cavalry units took full part in the army's major exercises of the mid-1920s, as commanders wrestled with how to include horse-mounted troops. In 1926, for example, elements from all three of the army's cavalry divisions—including a full-mounted brigade—participated in the maneuvers in Group 1, which encompassed East Prussia. In the Group 2 exercises in September of the same year in southern and western areas of the Reich, cavalry again took part. In both sets of exercises, “tactical maneuver and movement were stressed [and] combinations of highly mobile units were tried.”³³ Mounted troops were assigned mock tanks in addition to the mobile artillery and reinforced machine-gun elements now carried on the cavalry's TOE. They thus field-tested Seeckt's earlier efforts to maintain the mounted force's mobility while increasing its combat-power. Hearkening back to some of the early advances in the wars of 1870 and 1914, however, cavalrymen did not always ride in mass formations. Instead, they rode in small detachments as screening and reconnaissance assets to the infantry. It cannot be overlooked that this was precisely the function of the German uhlans who had gained such a fearsome reputation over the two preceding generations.

In general terms, the army seems to have been satisfied with the cavalry's performance in the various large-scale maneuvers of the mid-1920s. Tactical adjustments nevertheless occurred as a result of those maneuvers' analysis. Following the exercises of 1927, for example, the Third Cavalry Division's report to Army Headquarters stated bluntly that cavalry combat without tanks was “obsolete.” Significantly, however, the same report noted that the cross-country capability of the mock tanks available for the exercises was inadequate to the cavalry's mission. As a result, the vehicles tended to be held back. To remedy the deficiency, Third Division urged the acquisition of sturdier, more capable vehicles for use as mock-tank chassis, in this particular case a machine then being produced by the firm Hanomag. At the time, “these were the only vehicles available with the cross-country capability suitable for cavalry maneuvers.”³⁴ The mid-1920s maneuvers also demonstrated the continuing development of the army's more generalized efforts toward greater motorization and mechanization,35 a development aimed at least at this stage not so much at abolishing the cavalry as adapting it to new technological conditions. Once again, this evolution reflected Seeckt's earlier efforts.

At this juncture the cavalry appeared briefly on the verge of significant expansion. In 1927 the Interallied Military Control Commission was withdrawn from Germany. This body had been established at the end of World War I for the purpose of ensuring that Germany did not violate Versailles' disarmament clauses. Though never entirely successful in that regard, the inspectors' presence did have the effect of making the army's post-1918 efforts to rebuild more onerous. With the Commission's withdrawal, plans immediately arose to expand the Reichswehr beyond the treaty's limits. An “emergency army” (also called the “A-Army”) of sixteen divisions was designated as a sort of way station on the path to an eventual strength of twenty-one divisions. For the A-Army, the Weapons Office, which oversaw arms procurement, recommended increasing the number of cavalry divisions from three to five.³⁶ This was merely a part of the larger effort as of 1927–1928 to expand not only the army's numbers, but to increase national stockpiles of arms and ammunition for both the army and the navy; increase budgetary authority through greater cabinet-level support; and provide planning guidance for industrial mobilization.³⁷ Coming as it did from a procurement office known for its innovative approach to technology, such a proposed expansion of the mounted arm can hardly have been an expression of the cavalry's putative obsolescence. Evidently, however, the Truppenamt was not persuaded. It rejected the cavalry's expansion.

Instead, the various cavalry regiments from 1928 to 1933 began to be thought of as adjuncts to the infantry, even if they were not yet actually assigned as such. This process would be both formalized and completed during the army's breakneck expansion after 1933. In the role as it was eventually implemented, the cavalry regiments would no longer be brigaded and then combined into divisions. Instead, with one major exception to be discussed later, they would second (“chop” one would say today) squadron-sized units to the army's infantry divisions. There the horsemen would function as part of the infantry divisions' reconnaissance elements and serve alongside the other arms they'd operated with since 1919 and in some cases before: armored cars, bicycle- and motorcycle-mounted infantry, and combat engineers. Until the early 1930s, the army also envisioned attaching tanks to the cavalry when the latter needed extra firepower to hold positions for follow-on infantry forces. Indeed, from about the time of the maneuvers of 1927–1928, some cavalry officers themselves began to become more enthusiastic advocates for a progressive motorization and mechanization of the mounted arm, a position in step with the views of the then-minister of defense, General Wilhelm Groener, whose term of office had begun in January 1928 and ended in early 1932.38 Nevertheless, significant opinion still saw a useful place for the military horse in an internal-combustion German army. In the same year that Groener's term of office ended, retired lieutenant general Ernst Kabisch, a military correspondent for the Kölnische Zeitung, wrote to Groener about the cavalry's new capabilities. Citing the military exercises of the autumn of that year, Kabisch maintained that the cavalry had undergone great changes and was no longer what it had been in 1919. It had now, he wrote, become popular among cavalry officers to envision their arm as constituting a force of light divisions. They would retain their horses and the Seeckt-era armored cars and other motorized elements, but they would also now add tank formations.³⁹ Popular though armored forces were becoming on the eve of the Nazi regime's accession, the tank and the armored car had not yet fully replaced the horse in the cavalry's mind.