CHAPTER 6

BUCKING THE TREND

THE CAVALRY RIDES TO WAR, 1939–1940

“No one wants to see horses go to war, but they always go just the same to do the work no machine can do, wallow around in the mud, scout through forested and hilly country and bring up supplies where nothing else can get through.”1 Though written in the United States, these words still applied to warfare in Europe in the late 1930s. Despite the experience of World War I and the interwar years, the internal-combustion engine had not yet been married with wheels or tracks sufficiently well or in sufficient numbers to supplant the horse in every circumstance. In Germany and elsewhere, horses still played an important military role, particularly as draft animals. The German army's doctrine throughout the period from 1918 to 1939 certainly envisioned their use to pull artillery, supply wagons, field kitchens, and other vehicles; and even though the Truppenführung still countenanced a horse-mounted cavalry, the question remained whether the latter had any real role to play on the modern battlefield.

In 1939 the head of the Transport Department of the General Staff, Colonel Rudolf Gercke, noted that “as regards transport, Germany is at the moment not ready for war.”² Coming as it did from the General Staff's expert in the matter, such an assessment could only reinforce the assumption that literal horsepower was going to be crucial for the army's war effort. Of course, Gercke referred only to transport and logistics. Nevertheless, his statement also implied that if motor vehicles couldn't be had in sufficient numbers for the army's logistics trains, then they might also be lacking in the combat arms. If and when a war between Germany and her neighbors became a war of attrition, as indeed it did as of 1942, the matter would only become more acute.

Gercke's concerns touched upon the crucial matter of military means and political ends. Balancing the relationship between military strategy and foreign policy in Hitler's Germany constituted a crucial gamble for the dictator and the Reich. As in any State, Nazi Germany needed sufficient armed strength to make its policy's realization by force credible, if force were required. The Wehrmacht, in turn, required an organizational structure suitable to accomplish whatever missions were determined by the regime's foreign policy.3 As events developed, serious imbalances between the two elements of this calculation caused equally serious problems for the realization of Hitler's ambitions. The longer Hitler remained firmly in power, the greater his ambitions grew. Similarly, the more he consolidated his authority, the greater became his apparent certainty that he and only he could achieve the goals he set for Germany. By 1939, he would repeatedly tell his military commanders, Foreign Ministry diplomats, and Nazi Party bosses that he was literally irreplaceable: no other German, whether military commander or politician, had ever possessed or would ever again possess his competence and daring.⁴ The subsequent early victories between 1939 and 1941 only dramatically increased his hubris. Ultimately, he came firmly to believe in his own infallibility. Surrounded by an inner circle of military officers and party insiders who either could not or would not stand up to him—admittedly no easy thing, wielding as he did all the corrupting and murderous power of a popular, one-party dictatorship—he ultimately plunged headlong into the abyss. With him he took Germany, the rest of Europe, and untold millions of innocents.

Notwithstanding the regime's incessant propaganda, the armed forces generally and the Heer specifically were not the completely modern, battle-ready forces they appeared to be. Their readiness, or the lack thereof, largely depended upon the economic policies pursued after the Nazis' accession to power. To be sure, Hitler inherited an army that was professionally competent and highly motivated. The views of individual officers notwithstanding, the Heer as an institution did not suffer from monarchist longings. At the same time, however, its interwar officer corps had not generally arisen in the same milieu as the civilian leadership of the defunct Weimar Republic. Instead, as a consequence of its now famous status as a “State within the State,” the interwar army had focused its professional attention on its institutional competence, especially as regarded armaments and training.5 In this respect, the Heer that Hitler's government relied upon can perhaps be regarded as the first truly professional army of the modern era.⁶ How this professional competence and its attendant readiness would be affected by the new government's drive to war remained to be seen.

In the six years before the invasion of Poland, the Nazi government had achieved apparently spectacular economic successes. Nevertheless, harnessing the national economy efficiently to the production of war matériel never succeeded as thoroughly as the regime asserted. At the time of the Nazis' accession to power, the party had no coherent economic program.⁷ Of course, Hitler had campaigned for the chancellorship partly on the basis of his intention to reduce Germany's severe, Depression-era unemployment. He also promised to secure the country's agrarian resources and to restore Germany's military strength. These generalities he made very clear. Attaining these goals was another matter, and he had no fixed plan. To the extent that he did state his government's economic objectives, several seemed inherently contradictory. Since the early 1920s, for example, the Nazi party had stressed a sort of lower-middle-class anti-capitalism and a desire to achieve agricultural autarky. Having now come to power, however, Hitler and his regime clearly required not only the economic but also the political support of Germany's traditionally export-oriented heavy industry.⁸ Absent such support, there could be no re-armament. Without re-armament, there could be no reassertion of Germany's role in Europe. Certainly there could be no avenging the loss of World War I, no reacquisition of German lands surrendered in the hated Treaty of Versailles, and no conquest of anything more. Germany would not, so Hitler believed, be able to feed herself, and unemployment (affecting some 5.6 million people by the end of 1932) would not be tamed. Therefore on land, on the sea, and in the air, the aim of re-armament under the Nazis was the alteration to Germany's advantage of the European balance of power, and that as rapidly as possible.9

As early as 8 February 1933, Hitler insisted in Cabinet that “every publicly sponsored measure to create employment had to be considered from the point of view of whether it was necessary…to rendering the German people again capable of bearing arms for military service. This had to be the dominant thought, always and everywhere.”¹⁰ “The main principal,” he went on to emphasize, “was everything for the armed forces. Germany's position in the world depended decisively upon the position of the German armed forces. The position of the German economy in the world was also dependent on that.”¹¹ Hitler flogged rearmament along at a furious pace and not without the support of the generals and admirals. As seen in the preceding chapter, the total strength of the armed forces was something over 100,000 men in January 1933, as mandated by Versailles. By spring 1935, conscription, though banned by the treaty, had been re-introduced, and the ceiling of the army alone had risen to thirty-six divisions. The well-organized police regiments of the Rhineland were incorporated into the army when the Rhineland was remilitarized one year later. Austrian units were added with that country's annexation in early 1938. By the fall of that year, fully 52 percent of the German government's expenditure and a whopping seventeen percent of the Reich's gross national product flowed into armaments. These percentages constituted sums greater than those for Great Britain, France, and the United States combined. In that same year, the German army's nominal strength had risen still further to some forty-two active and twenty-nine reserve and Landwehr (third-line) divisions. Yet, there was still more to come. At the time of the invasion of Poland, the army's order of battle for field divisions was an almost unbelievable 103 divisions of all types. Of course, these figures did not include the extraordinary growth of the Luftwaffe since 1933 or the admittedly slower but nonetheless remarkable increase in the Kriegsmarine.¹²

Given these staggering numbers, the retention of a single horse-mounted cavalry brigade (subsequently expanded to a division) on the eve of war would seem superficially unimportant. One must, however, also consider that the Heer's infantry divisions in 1939 still retained horse-mounted cavalry reconnaissance formations, one cavalry troop (essentially equivalent to a company) being assigned to each infantry regiment. Thus each division had three troops of horse-mounted cavalry, as well as a mounted squadron in the divisional reconnaissance element. Furthermore, the infantry divisions also relied on horses to pull artillery pieces, heavy machine guns, ambulances, field kitchens, and supply wagons. Consequently, each infantry division of 17,200 men would include 5,375 horses in its TOE at the time of the invasion of Poland in September 1939.13

Of course, as early as 1934 certain officers had noticed the inefficiencies inherent in a too-rapid expansion of the army. Colonel Georg Thomas, then-head of the Defense Economy and Weapons (Wehrwirtschaft und Waffenwesen) Bureau, complained directly to Hitler. In a strongly worded memorandum dated 20 June of that year, Thomas complained of the economic friction and industrial wastage caused by the often vicious rivalries among Nazi Party bosses, competing industrial firms, and “misguided interventions and opinions of individuals.” The result, as he bluntly put it to the Chancellor, was that “no decisions are made.”¹⁴ Consequently, he wrote, the economy, and implicitly Germany herself, would not survive the “coming struggle” if the economic chaos continued.¹⁵ Hitler eventually responded to these and similar concerns not through administrative efficiency but by adding another layer of bureaucracy. Nevertheless, he certainly did not slacken the pace.

If re-armament were to continue and to be more effective, so Hitler reasoned, then greater economic centralization would be necessary, though he envisioned no State ownership of property per se, as in the Soviet Union. Similarly, he came to demand the greatest possible autarky in foodstuffs and strategic raw materials. His demands, however, were driven at least as much by strategic considerations as by mere economic concerns: the Allied blockade during 1914–1918 had demonstrated how vulnerable Germany could be if foreign sources of food and vital materials were interrupted.¹⁶ In August 1936 Hitler ordered the establishment of a new national authority to coordinate the economics of rearmament. This coordination came to be embodied in a program known as the Four-Year Plan. To direct the effort and thus head the office of the Reich Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan, Hitler named one of his oldest henchmen, the commander of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring.

With Hitler's constant urging and under Göring's direction, maximum speed and breadth, but not depth, of re-armament remained the watchwords. In theory, nothing would be allowed to hinder rearmament's pace. The plan placed particular emphasis on the greatest possible domestic production of several key industrial raw materials, including synthetic oil, gasoline, and diesel fuel; synthetic rubber; non-ferrous light metals; and iron and steel. Whether the processes were cost-effective or not was irrelevant, at least to Hitler and Göring. Nor was it particularly important to them whether great stocks of surplus matériel were collected before the outbreak of war. What mattered to them was having the weapons and matériel to hand when they decided to go to war. And as Hitler said in concluding the memorandum establishing the Four-Year Plan, the German economy and the German armed forces were to be ready for war by 1940.17 Besides, as Hitler sometimes pointedly reminded his officers, Germany would go to war more or less when he decided, where he decided, and against whom he decided. As he quite baldly put it to his commanders in chief, everything depended upon him, upon his personality, upon his authority, upon his very existence.¹⁸

In May 1939 Thomas, by then promoted to general, presented his assessment of the economy and the state of re-armament in a presentation to personnel of the Foreign Ministry. In general terms, he praised the regime's accomplishments regarding re-armament, though he also pointed out that the depth of the regime's re-armament program in spare parts and material reserves did not match the program's breadth. Referring to the army, he noted with evident pride the successful creation of the new armored formations. Interestingly, however, he also specifically noted the establishment of what he called “the modern battle cavalry.” Like the armored formations, he said, these cavalry units were “completely new” and had been developed only in the preceding five years.¹⁹ His statement, of course, contradicted the record of steady efforts since Seeckt's day to adapt the cavalry to Germany's post-World War I military doctrine. Nevertheless, Thomas' reference to the cavalry in such a setting constituted at least an indirect indication of horse-mounted forces' continuing operational relevance. Any Foreign Ministry staffers interested in military affairs and worth their pay would have been fully aware that the Polish army at the time fielded some eleven cavalry brigades of its own, while the French army included three full cavalry divisions.20 Furthermore, such diplomats, like their military counterparts, would have at least assumed that Poland would be Germany's likeliest enemy in the event of war. France would probably follow. Great Britain's inclusion in such calculations remained at that point a matter of some uncertainty. Subsequently, and only fourteen days before the invasion of Poland, General Thomas briefed, among others, the chief of the OKW General Wilhelm Keitel, on the state of Germany's war economy. Thomas stated, evidently rather bluntly, that the Reich's economic preparations for war did not suffice. Germany “could not last through a war on the grounds of its war economy.”²¹ Insofar as the cavalry was specifically concerned, if Germany went to war with horses still on the army's TOE, and of course they were, then it would in all likelihood still have horses soldiering on when the end came (however that might be) for the good and simple reason that there was no way to replace them with machines.

Thomas' laudatory comments and simultaneous reservations notwithstanding, and despite the Four-Year Plan's relative successes, the Reich's economic mobilization was certainly not complete when Hitler launched the invasion of Poland:

The war that broke out in 1939 cut across all [of Germany's economic] preparations. Neither foundation nor superstructure was complete; despite the growth of state planning and control, the transformation of the German economy into the instrument of super-power status was slower than expected. If war had not started until the mid-1940s Germany might well have proved unstoppable. In 1939 the whole military-industrial complex was still in the throes of expensive and lengthy construction.²²

This condition had immediate implications for the cavalry's continued existence not least because economic inefficiency affected the army's motorization.

Incomplete motorization on the eve of war was, in turn, a consequence of the Wehrmacht's inefficient growth after 1933. This growth was too rapid to be effectively managed, a situation exacerbated by the inevitable competition for resources among the three services. Hermann Göring and the navy's commander, Admiral Erich Raeder, both enjoyed direct access to Hitler. Ludwig Beck, the chief of staff of the army, did not. He had to go through not only the office of the army's then-commander in chief, General Walther von Brauchitsch, but also, after early 1938, through Keitel and the OKW. By attempting to create the largest and strongest possible Wehrmacht in the shortest possible time, Hitler in effect forced the army to rely upon much greater numbers of horses than might otherwise have been the case had re-armament been pursued with a steadier pace and clearer intent. As it was, shortages of materials and an increasingly fierce struggle among the services for what resources were available prevented a complete motorization and mechanization of the army. When combined with a certain traditionalism on the part of the cavalry itself, these factors resulted in the army's retention of large mounted forces not only for logistics and combat-support but also for the combat arm.23

The Army High Command also played a role in the horse's retention. In the period between Hitler's accession and the invasion of Poland, it did not foresee a coming war's being won on the roads of Europe. The war, when it came, “was [envisioned] to be a railway war, just as 1870 and 1914 had been railway wars.”²⁴ Not unreasonably, the army saw railways as the most efficient means of moving the most men and matériel in the least amount of time. This view persisted despite the fact that the railways themselves constituted fixed, high-value targets for long-range interdiction either by fast-moving, horse-mounted or mechanized ground forces or, increasingly, aerial bombardment.²⁵ Before 1939, when the army's leadership fretted about the transport sector, it was the railways that those leaders had in mind, not canals, air transport, or motorized road-haulage, the latter of which represented an equivalent of about only 0.5 percent of potential rail-borne capacity.²⁶ Not even Hitler's vaunted project for the Volkswagen, the “People's Car,” met the army's motorization requirements. A military prototype entered testing only in 1940, and the army disliked it, even though it eventually entered service known as the Kübelwagen owing to its tub-shaped body. The vehicle lacked sufficient all-terrain capability and was underpowered with its air-cooled engine. The armed forces were also reluctant to commit to a single machine. Instead, they continued to allow automotive manufacturers to produce too many designs of cars and trucks. By 1942 the forces employed at least twenty-nine different types of automobiles and twenty-three types of trucks. This lack of standardization had unfortunate effects in the supply of spare parts and vehicular mass-production, effects that were not even partially remedied before 1944.27 Whether in laying out the Autobahnen, producing the Volkswagen, or constructing and running the factories to build them, the automotive industry and the army did not coordinate their efforts in any way that corresponded to the Nazi regime's propaganda. On the contrary, “for most of the period [from 1933 to 1942] motorization and rearmament give the impression of being in competition not co-operation.”²⁸ At the same time, there were never sufficient numbers of drivers and mechanics. The regime's two principal means of such training by 1939, the motorized units of the Hitler Youth and the National Socialist Drivers Corps (Motorisierte HJ and NSKK), never produced enough personnel. Those who did eventually complete the sequential training of the HJ and NSKK were for the most part siphoned off by the army's armored divisions. That demand was compounded after 1940 by the Waffen-SS, whose well-equipped mechanized divisions sucked up even more of the organizations' graduates. Simply put, there were not enough drivers and mechanics left over to meet all of the army's requirements, not to mention those of the navy and the air force.²⁹

Thus the army that went to war in 1939 suffered from a great disparity between what it wanted to do and what it could do in terms of motorization and mechanization. This discrepancy only grew between 1939 and 1944, as attested by the chief of the Organization Department of the Army General Staff, Colonel Walter Buhle.³⁰ In general terms even Germany's victory over Poland, one of the most lopsided campaigns of the war, saw vehicular losses of 50 percent of machines deployed. Though the breathing space preceding the invasion in the west in 1940 allowed some expansion of reserves, especially of armored vehicles, the demands on motorized vehicles of all sorts would always outrun the Reich's ability to replace them.³¹

The army's expansion after 1933, as well as the rapid growth of the air force and the navy after 1936–1937, never constituted the perfectly organized, centrally directed, bureaucratically efficient process trumpeted so loudly by the Nazi regime. Propaganda notwithstanding, the desire to expand the army as rapidly as possible both numerically and qualitatively always remained hamstrung by Nazism's chaotic organization and by Germany's relatively limited resources. These were problems the regime never resolved, particularly when one considers the fact that the expansion of the other armed services and the Waffen-SS, when combined with that of the Heer, more than doubled the raw-materials demands of the Wehrmacht as a whole.32

The cavalry's retention, therefore, might reasonably be regarded as an anachronism, though a necessary one. The necessity becomes evident when one considers that the numbers of cavalry, whether in the independent cavalry formations or in the horse-mounted squadrons organic to the infantry divisions' reconnaissance battalions, went up throughout the war. They did not go down. “The speed and almost unrestricted and unco-ordinated [sic] armament of the armed services along with political factors led to the complete disregard of the lessons learned from the First World War which had earlier [i.e., in the 1920s] found total acceptance.” The lessons referred to here applied to the management of Germany's national economy for war. Nevertheless, the mismanagement accompanying re-armament after January 1933 necessarily affected how the army procured vehicles, what types it procured, and how they might be employed. Thus, in addition to the army's peacetime complement of horses, 14,870 more had to be conscripted for the annexation of Austria in early 1938 and a further 4,539 for the occupation of the Sudetenland later that same year.³³ Not only did the cavalry and horse-drawn transport and logistics still exist at the beginning of 1939, the army could not execute even a major non-combat operation without them. Under the conditions prevailing in that year, horses simply could not be eliminated, and under the eventual demands of the coming war, the need for them would only grow.

Even the later panzer commander Heinz Guderian's detractors were proven wrong by these events. Early in his career when he'd been assigned to the army's Motorized Transport Department, he'd expressed the hope that one day truck-borne troops would become part of the combat arm. His immediate superior, a Colonel von Natzmer, brought Guderian up short. “To hell with combat!” snapped Natzmer. “They're supposed to carry flour!”34 Not only was Guderian's hope largely thwarted by events, so was Natzmer's. Instead of trucks, it would be the army's horses that would continue to haul flour and a great many other things. Very often those other things included considerable numbers of combat soldiers.

Consequently, the German army would undergo a “de-modernization” during World War II, particularly on the Eastern Front. While the causes were many, including prewar economic mismanagement, combat losses, breakdowns, and eventual disruption of replacements owing to the Allies' strategic bombing offensive, the results for the troops on the ground were profound in any case. “Armoured divisions,” writes one noted author, “began the war with 328 tanks apiece; by the summer of 1943 they averaged 73; by the end of the war the figure was 54. The German army fell back on the use of horses. During 1942 German industry turned out only 59,000 trucks for an army of 8 million men, but the same year 400,000 horses were sent to the Eastern Front. The German forces concentrated their air and tank power on a few elite divisions; the rest of the army moved like those of the Great War, by rail, horse, or foot.”³⁵

Organizing and re-arming the Heer to include a relatively small number of mechanized and motorized formations has been described by another author using what he calls the “Lance Comparison” (Lanzenvergleich). That is, the army by May 1940 would possess a “steel point on a wooden shaft.”³⁶ Ten armored divisions would constitute the sharp end. These would be backed up by six mechanized infantry divisions whose personnel would eventually be known as Panzergrenadiere. Following on the organizational table and in the field were sixty-one ground-pounding infantry divisions. These, like the armored and mechanized infantry formations, were deemed fully operations-capable (voll einsatzfähig) both offensively and defensively. A further twenty-nine infantry divisions were designated as only conditionally capable (bedingt einsatzfähig) of offensive and defensive operations, and another twenty-eight divisions were designated for defensive combat only. However, one must always bear in mind that, in addition to the dedicated cavalry brigade still in service in 1939, each infantry division had horses in its organic reconnaissance element, usually referred to as a “detachment” (Abteilung). The standard TOE of such a detachment included 623 men, at least 260 horses (most, about 213, for the officers and men of the mounted squadron), 5 horse-drawn vehicles, and 130 motorized vehicles. Of the latter, only 2 or 3 were armored cars. Counting only the fully operations-capable infantry divisions—but not including any of the horses in those divisions' vast logistics trains—the total number of horses reached a nominal sum of 15,860. If one includes the army's 29 conditionally operational infantry divisions' reconnaissance units (again leaving out all draft horses and all of the 1st Cavalry Brigade/Division's horses), one adds a further 7,540 horses for a grand total of at least 23,400 mounts for combat personnel.37

Of course, once the war began, and especially in the victorious years between September 1939 and December 1942, Germany and the rest of the world seldom saw the foot-slogging, horse-supported infantry divisions. Instead, the regime's mass-circulation propaganda organs such as the very successful “German Weekly Newsreel” (Deutsche Wochenschau) and the lavishly illustrated magazine Signal, typically and effectively depicted just the opposite. One saw seemingly endless columns of “mobile troops” (schnelle Truppen) of which the cavalry were a part: trotting or galloping horses and, much more frequently, tracked and wheeled vehicles. Then, too, there were beguiling images of soaring fleets of bombers and fighters, majestic warships, lurking U-boats, audacious infantrymen, and daredevil paratroopers.³⁸ Whenever the equine reality predominated in still photography or newsreels, it tended toward the sentimental or the militarily romantic: depictions of mounted trumpeters, officers taking victory salutes, or intrepid cavalrymen by twos and threes in the depths of Russia.³⁹ Notwithstanding such images, the assignment of horse-mounted reconnaissance units to each nonmechanized/motorized infantry division; the continued existence of the 1st Cavalry Brigade/Division; and the hundreds of thousands of horses assigned the mundane but absolutely crucial jobs of pulling everything from ammunition wagons to ambulances to field kitchens, meant that the army simply could not have gone to war without the horse. And in light of the economic problems already discussed, not to mention the wartime dislocation eventually caused by the Allies' strategic bombing campaign, the horse's importance to the army's war effort would only ever increase.

Poland—1939

In September 1939 the army's 1st Cavalry Brigade had a mobilized strength of some 6,700 officers and men and nearly 5,000 horses. Its principal units (as also later in the SS Cavalry Brigade) were two mounted regiments, the 1st and 2nd Reiter Regiments. Stationed respectively at Insterburg and Angerburg in East Prussia, they maintained the unit traditions of such storied Prussian regiments as the 1st Dragoons, 4th Uhlans, and 5th Cuirassiers. As will be seen, these two Reiter regiments had been allowed to remain largely unaffected by the interwar decision to parcel the cavalry regiments out among the army's infantry divisions. Instead, the 1st and 2nd Reiter were tasked with the mission of determining whether and to what extent horse-cavalry could still actually operate in combat as a large maneuver element. Consequently, they were brigaded and had assigned to them a bicycle-mounted infantry battalion, the latter including a motorized signals platoon. The brigade's heaviest weapons lay in a horse-artillery battalion. It comprised three horse-drawn batteries, two of which were activated for the Polish campaign. Each of the horse-artillery batteries included four 75-mm guns. Other heavy-caliber weapons could be found in the brigade's motorized antitank company. It consisted of twelve 37-mm guns and a motorized antiaircraft company of twelve 20-mm guns. Neither of these companies was activated for the invasion. Supply and administration, also not fully activated for Poland, included two light motorized and two horse-drawn supply columns; one light, motorized refueling column; a motorized medical company; ambulance, workshop, and supply platoons; and the critically important veterinary company. In its inclusion of motorized anti-tank, anti-aircraft, and signals elements, cyclist infantry, and so forth, the brigade somewhat resembled certain of the army's light divisions. On the other hand, in its horse-artillery it recalled the army's infantry divisions. Of course, the great difference between the brigade and any other unit in the army was its inclusion of two full, mounted regiments.40

For the opening campaign of World War II in Europe, the brigade, commanded by Colonel Kurt Feldt, was assigned to the 12th Infantry Division. The horsemen had the mission of guarding the extreme left (eastern) flank of the division, and thereby the whole of General Georg von Küchler's Third Army's advance southward from East Prussia toward the Polish capital of Warsaw. Prussia—and East Prussia in particular—represented the heartland of the German cavalry tradition. This was the land of the Trakehner horse, and it was here that the German cavalry had executed the famous delaying action in 1914 by screening German forces as they retreated and regrouped in the face of the Russian advance prior to the Battle of Tannenberg. Now, in 1939, the 1st Cavalry Brigade performed the German horsemen's classic missions of screening the advance and serving as flank-guard as set down in the 1860s by the elder Moltke, missions that began on the morning of the invasion's first day, 1 September. 41

After a preliminary artillery bombardment, 1st Brigade advanced on and seized the small Polish town of Myseinice. At that time, Myseinice lay about twenty miles (32 km) southeast of the Prussian railway junction of Ortelsburg and about five miles inside the Polish frontier. Two Polish cavalry units, the Novogrodska Brigade and, more immediately, the Mazowiecka Brigade, were operating in the German horsemen's vicinity. It was evidently the latter's uhlans whom the 1st Brigade's troopers encountered and drove off in an actual cavalry battle on 3 September near the hamlet of Frankowo.⁴² In the same three-day period, the brigade executed another classic mission of the cavalry. Determined Polish forces had unexpectedly held up the advance of Third Army's right wing at Mlawa, a town about fifteen miles (24 km) down the railway running southeastward into Poland from the former Prussian Soldau (Dzialdowo). This resistance, in turn, blocked any further advance by Third Army toward the larger and more important objective of Modlin and thence to Warsaw. Küchler therefore ordered Third Army's left wing to swing southwestward through Przasnysz, take the Polish positions in flank on their (the Poles') right, and then push on to Ciechanów. The country through which the cavalry and other German forces would have to pass lay along both banks of the Omulew and Orzyc Rivers, two southward-flowing tributaries of the Narew. Characterized by scattered, large forests and marshy terrain, the land proved tough going and not merely for the cavalrymen. Nevertheless, the encirclement succeeded. It effectively pried the Polish defenders out of their positions at Mlawa and permitted Third Army's advance on Modlin to continue. Screening and guarding this entire operation, at the furthest and most exposed end of the line, was the 1st Cavalry Brigade.43 The brigade's campaign, along with that of much of the German effort, effectively ended by mid-September with the horsemen continuing to guard the eastern flank of the corps to which the 12th Infantry Division was attached in the advance up the valley of the Vistula. During the subsequent siege of Warsaw, the cavalrymen effectively used their horses' mobility to patrol the river's eastern bank and intercept scattered Polish units attempting to break through to the southeast.⁴⁴

Map 2. The Invasion of Poland, September 1939

In its initial action, and more particularly in the turning movement near Mlawa, the brigade itself was not the only unit executing a classic cavalry mission. The entire corps (Corps Wodrig, after its commander) was acting, as it were, in the manner of the cavalry: executing wide, rapid, sweeping movements; outflanking the enemy's fortified positions or strongly held fronts; operating against his lines of communication; and either forcing him to withdraw or fixing him in position for the battle of annihilation. The German cavalry had done precisely this in 1870 as the French retreated from Metz. The result was Mars-la-Tour and the “Death Ride” of Bredow's horsemen. Subsequently, in 1914, the German cavalry had tried the same thing on the then-still-fluid Western Front, only to fail in the misnamed “Race to the Sea.” Somewhat later, in 1916, German and Austrian mounted and motorized forces, accompanied by hard-marching infantry, had forced the passes of the Carpathians and carried out yet another such movement in the Rumanian lowlands, resulting in the conquest of an entire country in slightly more than a month. Now, in 1939, the army's post-1918 experimentation with what were then new technologies bore fruit in a sort of “cavalryzation” of warfare in Poland. The great and murderous difficulty of World War I, the recurrence of a war of fixed positions (Stellungskrieg), seemed finally overcome. War of movement (Bewegungskrieg) had apparently returned. The tradition stretching backward from Seeckt, via Alfred von Schlieffen of 1914 fame to von Moltke the Elder was restored.45 The soon-to-be panzer armies would expand this practice to a vast scale in France in 1940 and, even more dramatically, in Russia in 1941. For the moment, the cavalry brigade seemed to be only a small part of that tradition and a superficially anachronistic one at that. Nevertheless, the cavalrymen would ride on.

Of course, both the German and the Polish armies employed horse-cavalry in 1939. One German panzer commander, F. W von Mellenthin, recounted in a memoir of his wartime experiences that the best units in the Polish army in 1939 were “undoubtedly their cavalry brigades.” These, he wrote long after, “fought with magnificent gallantry,” and he went on to add, as have many others, that “on one occasion they charged our panzers with drawn sabers,” a report also later noted by the commander of the 7th Armored Reconnaissance Regiment, Hans von Luck.⁴⁶ Though this oft-told story still makes the rounds in the history of the Polish campaign, it does not appear to accord with the facts on the ground in 1939. Certainly it resonates with the cavalryman's traditional sentiment. Even so, historian M. K. Dziewanowski states flatly that no such attack ever occurred, though something like it may have been the result of a meeting engagement, in other words a chance encounter between Polish cavalrymen and German armored units. Instead, Dziewanowski maintains that the story, however tragically endearing it may be for the tradition of the Polish cavalry, was the product of the Nazi propaganda ministry's efforts to convince neutral European States, as well as Great Britain and France, that further resistance to Germany's military might was futile. This version is supported by a recent history of the war that pays special attention to the Eastern Front. There the tale is of a Polish cavalry regiment hiding in a forest and subsequently attempting to escape but being encircled by German mechanized forces. Unable to break the ring, the Polish riders are decimated by German tank guns, and the account is then spun into the propaganda myth of Polish cavalry stupidly attacking German tanks. This individual incident aside, Dziewanowski nevertheless concedes the obvious: namely that the Polish army of 1939, though unfailingly brave, sorely lacked sufficient motorized transport and possessed “only two recently organized armored brigades.”47 Even so, the Polish cavalry was never so benighted as some have thought. They had, for example, experimented with the mixed divisional organization just as the Germans and French had done between the wars, and in 1939 each Polish cavalry brigade had an armored troop on its TOE.⁴⁸

The tragic consequence of the technological disparity between the Polish army and the Heer, so far as cavalry was concerned, was the destruction of the Pomorske Cavalry Brigade, the very incident referred to by Dziewanowski. Within about three days of the invasion's beginning, the Pomorske Brigade and a number of other units were cut off in the corridor that had separated Germany proper from East Prussia since 1918. Whether the horsemen of this famous unit actually charged German tanks in massed assault or were ground up in a series of meeting engagements is of much less consequence than the final result, for in the general and desperate attempt to break out southward, the brigade was destroyed. Much the same end awaited other Polish cavalry formations, the “pride of the army” as the New York Times described them, as they retreated along with the remaining Polish forces toward the line of the Rivers Narew and Vistula.⁴⁹ One of these cavalry formations was the 18th Lancer Regiment commanded by Colonel Kazimierz Mastelarz. In an action that may well have been the genesis of the entire story of horsemen versus tanks, the 18th Lancers attacked and overran a weak German infantry position during the fighting in the Corridor. The lancers rode on, only to encounter several German armored cars whose gunners made short work of the cavalrymen. Notwithstanding such losses, the Polish horsemen during the campaign always hoped to have a better chance at least against German motorized columns and infantry, if not against mechanized formations, in the low-lying, often sodden, and frequently forested watersheds of the Vistula and Narew, precisely the sort of ground that the 1st Cavalry Brigade had successfully negotiated in its advance toward Mlawa.50 Despite their many reverses, Polish horsemen did occasionally score successes against the invaders. On the night of 1–2 September, for example, Polish cavalry had panicked the staff of the German 2nd Motorized Division into hastily ordering a retreat from its assault into the Tuchel Heath between the Prussian towns of Firchau and Grunau. Only a direct intervention by the corps commander, General Heinz Guderian of XIX Panzer Corps, rectified the situation when he berated the divisional commander and tartly asked whether the latter had ever heard of Pomeranian Grenadiers being broken by enemy cavalry.⁵¹

In the final analysis, overall German superiority against Poland in 1939 meant that localized Polish successes and occasionally heroic Polish resistance could not stave off German victory, especially given the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland on 17 September under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of the preceding August. Thus what the Germans unofficially called the “campaign of eighteen days” didn't really seem to give the German cavalrymen a chance to prove whether they could still fight effectively on the modern battlefield. The Pomorske Brigade's fate seemed to represent the fate of all mounted forces in the dawning age of truly mechanized and motorized warfare. Nevertheless, if that fate were already sealed, then it is worth noting the irony that the invasion “left half the German tanks and motorized vehicles out of action”⁵² against a foe not possessing a truly effective anti-armor capability. Under the circumstances, therefore, OKW still did not yet know how the Germans' own cavalry would ultimately fare. Perhaps an expansion of the cavalry was necessary in order to provide the potential for the horsemen's true operational independence. To try to determine the answer to this question, the 1st Cavalry Brigade was reorganized after the end of the fighting in Poland. It was augmented with troopers from other mounted regiments whose personnel had been assigned to various infantry divisions' reconnaissance battalions in keeping with the army's doctrine from the late interwar years. Thus were added two new mounted regiments, eventually designated the 21st and 22nd Reiter Regiments. Additional elements, such as a second horse-artillery battalion, increased the brigade's strength to that of a full division.

The West—1940

Whatever disparities had existed in the Polish campaign between the capabilities of the cavalry and the mechanized and motorized units of the Heer, the mounted brigade's combat effectiveness seemed to warrant expansion to divisional status in the last quarter of 1939. As earlier with the Cavalry Brigade, so now in the 1st Cavalry Division, the principal maneuver elements remained the horse- and bicycle-mounted units, with the horse-artillery still delivering the heaviest offensive punch. The recognition of the cavalry's contribution through its expansion to divisional status was no doubt gratifying to its personnel. It should also be noted, however, that others also watched keenly. The cavalry's relative success to this point in the war was not lost on the Nazi Party's SS formations. Their leadership, too, had already begun deploying horse-mounted units in occupied Poland for rear-area security duties. These units' subsequent organization and mission would in certain respects ape the Cavalry Division's own, even if SS men's ethos didn't.

Be that as it may, by the spring of 1940 and with the impending campaigns in the west, and following the unprovoked invasions of both Denmark and Norway in April, the newly redesignated 1st Cavalry Division was assigned to Küchler's new command, Eighteenth Army of German Army Group B. As had been the case in Poland, the horsemen found themselves on the far end of the line, this time the extreme right (northern) flank of the army. It remains an open question whether the division was assigned there merely to keep it out of the way or so that it could once again perform the traditional mounted troops' mission of providing security and screening the flanks of an advance. Presumably its assignment there was intended further to test the operational viability of a now-division-sized, mounted maneuver-force. However that may be, the cavalrymen's assigned frontage began at the Dollard, a bay of the River Ems lying directly to the south of the German port of Emden. From the Dollard the division's area of operations stretched some sixty-two miles (100 km) to a point just southwest of the German city of Lingen. The horsemen's mission was to break through Dutch frontier obstacles—a zone judged to be about twelve miles (20 km) deep—and occupy the northern provinces of Groningen, Drenthe, and Friesland. The cavalrymen would then face south, be shipped across the Ijsselmeer, and break into “Fortress Holland,” the quasi-official Dutch name for the core defensive area of the Netherlands.53

Map 3. The First Cavalry Division in the Netherlands, May 1940

The division's command assessed its assigned mission area as “the most unsuitable terrain imaginable” (das denkbar Ungünstigste) for mounted operations: numerous rivers, countless bridges, and virtually bottomless footing (ungangbare tiefe Gelände) made movement “almost impossible.” The fact that the Dutch forces facing them were motorized made the cavalrymen's task of maintaining contact with the enemy even more difficult.54 Nevertheless, the division reported that on the campaign's first day, 10 May 1940, things had gone well. In several areas the cavalrymen had outflanked Dutch pillboxes at the gallop and had penetrated enemy territory to a depth of several miles within the first twenty minutes of fighting, and this over terrain “impassable for motorized vehicles.” By day's end, the initial objective, a line running southwest from the city of Groningen to Meppel and roughly bisecting the whole of northern Holland, had been reached. By the end of 11 May the horses of the division's most advanced elements were being watered on the coast at Harlingen and along the northeastern shores of the Ijsselmeer, follow-on units reaching these areas over the next five days. Remarkably, the division's Reiter regiments had covered some 111 miles (180 km) in two days, a feat indicating less than fanatical Dutch resistance. On the coast, however, the division's troopers ran headlong into strong fortifications along the edge of the Ijsselmeer. At the northern end of the dike separating that body of water from the sea and linking the province of Friesland with North Holland farther to the south stood a number of modern fortifications at Kornwerderzand. Ordered to storm the casemates and gain control of the dike, the division's (cyclist) infantry, dismounted horsemen, and horse-artillery nevertheless failed to overcome the Dutch defenses despite repeated assaults on 12–13 May. Even supporting attacks by Luftwaffe dive-bombers and shelling by a battery of 88-mm guns that appeared on the scene could not blast the defenders from their positions. The point was moot in any case. Too high a sea-state and a galling fire from three Dutch naval vessels would have prevented the division being ferried across the Ijsselmeer to fight in “Fortress Holland” even if Kornwerderzand had fallen to the invaders.⁵⁵ Ultimately, however, such reverses for the cavalrymen made no difference. The invasion's outcome was decided much farther to the south where the principal fighting had occurred. On 14 May, Dutch forces capitulated.

After a campaign of only one week, the division received orders on 17 May to return to its original main assembly area around Lingen pending further assignment. By the time the Reiter regiments completed their reassembly three days later, they had ridden almost 435 miles (700 km) in ten days.56 With the exception of the fighting at Kornwerderzand, all assigned objectives had been achieved, and all of the division's vehicles had been successfully brought along. After-action analysis maintained that the division's advance would not have been possible had it been forced to rely solely on vehicles. Though difficult for horses, the sodden terrain would have been impassable for vehicles, though the same report pointedly failed to explain how the Dutch repeatedly managed to use their own vehicles to escape. On the contrary, the division's horses had made possible the initial skirting and envelopment of Dutch frontier defenses by means of tracks (Wege) that only horses could use. Even so, divisional staff deemed it particularly important that the (unspecified) casualties among men and horses be replaced and that all of the latter be reshod before any possible action in France. Where the horsemen had ridden hard-graveled roads (Klinkersteinstrassen), they found that their horses' shoes had worn badly. No one wanted worn horseshoes to interfere with the entire division's sole desire: to take part in an invasion of France. To ensure that the point was not lost on higher echelons, and perhaps to stave off army- or army group-level criticism of the division's performance, the report struck a defensive note and argued that the fighting in the Netherlands simply could not be used to determine whether a horse-mounted cavalry division was still effective.⁵⁷ Between 24 and 28 May, the 1st Cavalry Division moved by rail to the area around Aachen where it encamped and awaited its next assignment. Twice in this period, Army Group B issued orders that the division would handle the transport of POWs to Germany. The division's records dryly noted that these orders badly lowered morale (die Stimmung in der Division [sank] erheblich).⁵⁸ A reprieve, however, arrived on 28 May. Orders came that day for the division to move as rapidly as possible to Amiens for frontline service with Fourth Army, a movement that required a march of 310 miles (500 km) and an early-morning crossing of the Somme on 7 June.⁵⁹

In France the division was reinforced with an additional bicycle-mounted infantry battalion, motorized howitzer and heavy artillery detachments, and an anti-aircraft machine gun company. It now constituted a sort of reinforced division. The artillery was deemed particularly important in making the division fully operationally independent. But as the army group giveth, so the army group taketh away. Thus, at the same time that the additional units came in, important brigade-level staff elements were ordered seconded to other units, and the division's subsequent operations suffered accordingly.60

As in Poland and the Netherlands, the cavalrymen once again received a classic cavalry mission: guarding the flank of an advancing unit, this time the eastern or left flank of XXXVIII Corps. On 7 June divisional elements crossed the Somme just northwest of Amiens. Encountering no significant French forces, the horsemen drove on in a southwesterly direction. In the so-called Poix District, a task force formed around the division's own 22nd Reiter Regiment and the temporarily assigned 21st Kavallerie Regiment rode hard against increasingly heavy French resistance. In this instance the horsemen actually did what virtually everyone assumed would never again be done: they charged the enemy en masse at the gallop. The cavalrymen attacked through artillery-fire, successfully gained defilade in a streambed, and then stormed heavily defended high ground on the other side to capture six hundred French troops.⁶¹ By the end of the next day, divisional elements had reached the area around St. Omer. The following day's operation on 9 June witnessed a bitterly contested, daylong advance of about thirty-seven miles (60 km) resulting in the cavalry's destroying twenty-eight of about thirty French tanks deployed to block their march.⁶² Sporadic fighting continued over the next two days, and by the end of 11 June the division had bypassed Paris and had reached a line running roughly southwest from Pontoise to Mantes. No French forces remained north of the Seine in the division's area of operations.⁶³ At this point the 1st Cavalry Division was transferred to VIII Corps of Eighteenth Army, one of several reassignments during this hectic advance. Simultaneously, it had to give up the motorized artillery and howitzer detachments earlier attached to it. Its flank-guard mission, however, remained unaffected by the removal.

Meanwhile, on 1 June the division's 1st Reiter Regiment had attempted a forced reconnaissance across the Seine by rubber boats, all bridges having been destroyed by retreating French forces. Surprised by concealed enemy artillery on the south bank, the boats were shot to pieces.⁶⁴ A second attempt the next morning to send scouting parties across the river succeeded. The French had withdrawn during the night. Nevertheless, the division reported to Eighteenth Army that it would take seventy-two hours for all personnel and horses to cross. The latter—some 12,000 of them—had to swim the river aided by floats (die Seine an Floßsäcken durchschwimmen) while the motorized units crossed via a bridge built far to the northwest by German combat engineers at Vernon. Eventually, all divisional elements found themselves on the south bank of the Seine by sunset on 15 June.65

Map 4. The First Cavalry Division in France, June 1940

In the week leading to the Franco-German armistice, the Cavalry Division continued its advance to the south while bypassing Chartres on the city's western side as part of the larger German offensive. On 16 June alone, units of the division advanced nearly sixty miles (95 km), the bicycle-battalions in particular seeing occasionally hard fighting. When the next day passed uneventfully, commanders reckoned on the division's being withdrawn from the front in the face of the evident weakening of French resistance.66 Instead, orders arrived directing the division to advance still farther to the Loire. There the cavalrymen were to throw bridgeheads across the river in the vicinity of Saumur. The historic irony, surely lost on no one, was that Saumur housed the French army's Cavalry School.

At this stage, ad hoc divisional advanced parties of bicyclists and vehicles were followed by the Reiter regiments. French resistance was weak, and large numbers of French prisoners streamed back along the division's line of advance.⁶⁷ After a march of nearly 125 miles (200 km) from Chartres, the cavalrymen reached the north bank of the Loire on the afternoon of 19 June. Not surprisingly, most of the bridges around Saumur no longer stood, and when one of the division's bicycle-mounted units tried to a take a remaining span by quick assault, the French blew it up as the first soldier crossed it. Nevertheless, troopers of the division managed to cross the Loire to the east of Saumur, and horsemen of the 22nd Reiter Regiment even seized the bridge at Le Port Boulet when French efforts to demolish it failed. Having thus crossed the great water barrier of the Loire on 20 June, the same regiment pushed on and succeeded in crossing the Vienne, one of the Loire's eastern tributaries, by seizing an intact bridge at Chinon without loss. There they also managed to completely surprise and capture a French cavalry detachment from Saumur consisting of forty officers and two hundred men.⁶⁸ In the next two days, the division broke out of the bridgeheads south of the Vienne. Advancing in the direction of La Rochelle, the horsemen repelled several occasionally fierce French counterattacks, including ones employing armored cars, and reached the coast on 23 June. On that day at La Rochelle, news of the armistice reached divisional headquarters. The 1st Cavalry Division's war in the west was over.⁶⁹

In assessing the campaign, divisional commander Kurt Feldt, by this time a major general, maintained that his troopers' greatest successes had come in forcing the heights in the Poix District and seizing the bridges at Le Port Boulet on the Loire and those on the Vienne. By far the most notable combat victory, however, was the destruction of “an entire tank battalion” on 9 June. By temporarily stripping the division of its heavy artillery and repeatedly changing its corps assignments, however, higher commanders had constantly created disadvantages. Nonetheless, the division had “completely accomplished” (restlos erfüllt) every mission assigned to it.70 As for the division's future, Feldt wrote that the cavalry should not be regarded as a “fast force” (schnelle Truppe) in an age of motorization, even though the cavalry had been officially regarded as such in 1939. It simply could not maintain contact in places where good roads made an enemy's motorized retreat possible. On the contrary, the cavalry's principal advantage lay in its tactical mobility on the battlefield: it was independent of roads and the limiting factor of weather, bicycles notwithstanding. “As long as technology makes the leadership dependent on weather and the season of the year [Feldt might well have added “the terrain”], the horse has not lost his role.” But he also believed that the cavalry's future depended on whom Germany's next continental enemy might be. That enemy, he wrote, would always be looked for “in the East.” Given Poland's already occupied status, Feldt could only mean the Soviet Union. There weather conditions and the vast, largely open, and often roadless spaces were made for horsemen. There “the motor is not yet the sole ruler.” Even there, however, Feldt maintained that the cavalry made sense only if it were expanded to a corps of two or three divisions. That force-structure and nothing less, Feldt urged, would be capable of the true operational freedom and decisive combat effectiveness that would justify the horsemen's continued retention.⁷¹

At almost the same time that Feldt wrote these words, his French cavalry counterparts were being destroyed. In May 1940 French general Charles Huntzinger, commander of the French Second Army, had employed several large, forward-deployed cavalry units in the forested heights of the Ardennes. Though the Ardennes' highest elevation reached not much more than 2,500 feet above sea level, these often heavily wooded highlands presented to the armies of any eastern invader a rugged terrain of “deep and meandering defiles cut by myriad creeks and small rivers” that would “sharply restrict and canalize movement either along or across the grain of the land.”⁷² This was the region, claimed by some German nationalists as an integral part of Germany as early as 1813, where German and French cavalry patrols had hunted each other at the outbreak of World War I. In 1914, French general Charles Louis Marie Lanrezac was reputed to have described the Ardennes as a death trap from which, once entered, no one could return.73 Whether his observation, if made, had actually typified French attitudes toward the region at that time, the Germans in 1940 had certainly intended to test the theory in a way that they hadn't done in 1914. Rather than marching the bulk of the field armies around the Ardennes as in 1914, OKW sent a massive armored force crashing straight through the hill country in the hope of cutting off and eventually destroying French and British forces marching northeastward to meet the German invaders in the Low Countries.

To some German commanders, the prospect of success, much less a rapid one, in such a daring undertaking had seemed dim. Representing that view, General (later Field Marshal) Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, commander of German forces facing Alsace-Lorraine, noted in his diary that the French were expecting a drive through Belgium. Surprise was impossible. The invasion, he wrote, could not be waged as in Poland. The army would have to fight a drawn-out (langwierig) campaign against much more capable opponents and would suffer extremely heavy losses in the process. Even then, he feared, “the Frenchman would still not be able to be subdued.”⁷⁴ The campaign came nonetheless.

Unlike 1914, however, French and German cavalry did not hunt each other in the tangles of the Ardennes. Instead, only the French cavalry were preyed upon, and they didn't face their German 1st Cavalry Division counterparts who were in the Netherlands at the time. Instead, they faced German tanks and mechanized infantry. Still, like their German horse-mounted cousins, their mission remained a traditional one for the cavalry arm: screening Huntzinger's main line of resistance running south of the Meuse from the town of Mézièrs, past the battlefields of 1870 at Sedan, and thence to Montmedy where his troops approached the westernmost extremity of the Maginot Line. Units under Huntzinger's overall command included the 2nd and 5th Light Cavalry Divisions (LCD) and the 1st Cavalry Brigade. The French 1st and 4th Light Cavalry Divisions and the 3rd Spahi Brigade were assigned to the adjoining Ninth Army under the command of General Andre Georges Corap. The 2nd and 5th LCDs were mixed divisions, the type with which the German army had experimented in the 1920s. The 5th LCD, for example, included an artillery regiment, a mechanized infantry brigade of two regiments, and a mounted brigade, also of two regiments: the 11th Cuirassier Regiment and the 12th Cavalry Regiment. In the Germans' passage through the Ardennes and their drive to the Meuse crossings at Sedan, these mounted troops were unceremoniously brushed aside by the advancing 1st Panzer Division of XIX Panzer Corps.75 In all, the French cavalry screen delayed the German advance through the Ardennes by just over two days instead of the five days envisioned by French prewar planning. As General Erwin Rommel wrote, victory in the encounter battles of the Ardennes between the advancing Germans and the Franco-Belgian defenders usually went “to the side that is the first to plaster its opponent with fire. The man who lies low and awaits developments usually comes off second best.”⁷⁶ Consequently, the results were about the same on both Huntziger's front and on Corap's. Rommel's 7th Panzer Division's tanks and mechanized infantry, for example, often advanced while conducting what U.S. soldiers thirty years later in Viet Nam would call reconnaissance by fire: maintaining as heavy and continuous a fire as possible into the woods on both flanks and to the front of every advancing column. “Into these woods, the French cavalry, horses and tanks mixed up with one another, scattered in disorder.”⁷⁷ The typical result was poignantly captured on 12 May by Lieutenant Georges Kosak of the 4th LCD of Corap's Ninth Army as French forces retreated to Dinant on the Meuse:

Towards midday, groups of unsaddled horses returned, followed on foot by several wounded cavalrymen who had been bandaged as well as possible; others held themselves in the saddle by a miracle for the honour of being cavalrymen. The saddles and the harnesses were all covered with blood. Most of the animals limped; others, badly wounded, just got as far as us in order to die, at the end of their strength; others had to be shot to bring an end to their sufferings.⁷⁸

Ultimately, a lack of proper coordination between French cavalry and the Belgian light infantry in the Ardennes prevented their using that rugged terrain to best advantage in delaying the German invaders. Conversely, when proper coordination occurred, defensive planning proved too methodical or too weak for the Germans' war of movement. The French cavalrymen, whether horse-mounted, on board vehicles, or dug in, “refrained from holding key positions as long as possible and, therefore, were never in a position to stop the German attackers for any length of time.” They “got no rest, neither during the day nor at night [and] their delaying actions frequently degenerated into wild flight.”79 One could scarcely imagine a greater contrast to General Feldt's triumphant summation of the successful campaign of the German 1st Cavalry Division.

Mounted band on parade at an equestrian tournament. Note the ornamental drum-skirts and the kettle drummers' stirrup-reins. The latter permit the rider to guide the drum horse while leaving the hands free. Close examination shows that the kettle drummers and at least one of the buglers wear the pre-1939 “cavalry helmet” with ear cut outs. (From the private collection of the author.)

Hitler presides at an international equestrian tournament in Berlin. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels is at right. (From the private collection of the author.)

German cavalry on parade. The original caption of 1940 referred to the cavalry of the “Army of the Greater German Reich,” thus implying a date subsequent to the annexation of the Sudetenland. The venue appears to be the annual Nazi party rally at Nuremberg. However, the Parteitag of 1939 was cancelled owing to the war's outbreak. Therefore, this picture may well date from 1938 or earlier. (From the private collection of the author.)

Undated photo shows the victorious equestrian team of the German army's Cavalry School. The apparently altered background hints strongly at a photomontage. Note the convex or “Roman” nose, accentuated by the white blaze, on the horse at right. (From the private collection of the author.)

A striking, late-1930s example of a Trakehner (East Prussian) mare. The Trakehner was prized by the officers and men of the Prussian cavalry from the days of King Frederick William I to the end of the World War II. Though the breed barely survived Germany's defeat in 1945, Trakehners thrive today as sport horses known for their athleticism. (From the private collection of the author.)

Horse-artillery on the march. Helmet bands, as seen here, were frequently worn on peacetime maneuvers. Note the saddle scabbards for the outriders' Mauser 98k carbines. Spoked, wooden wheels on gun carriages and caissons gave these units their nickname, “gypsy artillery.” (From the private collection of the author.)

An SS rider takes a jump. The SS aped the equestrian manners of the army's cavalry units. (From the private collection of the author.)

An evocative pre-1945 depiction of horse-breeding country in the valley of the Weser River. This area, as well as the adjoining region along the Aller River, comprised the ancestral home of Hanoverian horses. The Hanoverian became justly famous as the German army's second great type of cavalry mount. (From the private collection of the author.)

German horsemen laying telephone communications wire. Note the M1925 cavalry saddle and standard-issue, folded, woolen saddle blanket on the horse at left. The “cavalry helmet” with ear cut outs has now been replaced by the standard infantryman's Stahlhelm. (From the private collection of the author.)

German cavalrymen, not to mention army officers more generally, were expected to ride and, if possible, to compete. Here horse and rider take a combined fence-and-water obstacle in dramatic fashion. (From the private collection of the author.)

A postage stamp commemorates the “Brown Ribbon of Germany,” a major horse race run annually from 1934 to 1944 at Munich-Riem. Riem was the location of the SS Main Riding School. (From the private collection of the author.)

Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler presents awards to a victorious SS equestrian team in this undated photo. Himmler put great emphasis on sporting accomplishments and physical fitness for SS men, though he himself was no athlete, possessed only a weak constitution, and suffered from poor eyesight. (From the private collection of the author.)

First adopted in Prussia in 1796 and modified only slightly in 1916, the Light Cavalry Saber remained standard issue for German cavalrymen until 1941. Troopers of the 1st Cavalry Brigade/Division carried this weapon in Poland in 1939 and the Netherlands and France in 1940. (Saber courtesy of Cold Steel, Inc. Photo by the Office of Public Information, Western Carolina University.)