EPILOGUE

WHITHER THE HORSES?

The day of the European military horseman appears gone forever. Done is the age when horses played a major, even central, role in Europe's wars and affairs of state. Except for ceremonial units in some European countries, many of which antedate World War II in one form or another—for example, the Queen's Household Cavalry in the United Kingdom, the Irish Defense Forces Equitation School, France's Republican Guard, or the King's Royal Guard in Spain—horses in large numbers have not had a significant military or political role for nearly three-quarters of a century. Never again will a monarch travel in a cavalcade requiring 30,000 horses, as Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg is said to have done in 1701 on his way to being crowned King Frederick I in Prussia. Never again will a ruler have 5,000 horses in one stable, as Louis XIV is reputed to have had at Versailles. And certainly never again will a fortress such as the Alcázar of Toledo be built with subterranean stables to house 2,000 cavalry mounts.1 One might safely paraphrase Shakespeare and say that the horse has done his duty; the horse may go.

One also has to admit, however, that if the history of military equitation begins at a point five thousand or six thousand years ago some-where on the Eurasian steppe, then ending that history's European progress in 1945 is not a bad run. As has been shown, the military horse was written off many times before he actually left the stage. The idea that the horse no longer had a useful place on the modern battlefield arose many times. In the 1890s, in 1918, and in the 1930s, critics dismissed the horse as a romantic obsolescence at best and, at worst, an actual hindrance to military effectiveness. Time and again horses nonetheless proved themselves useful, sometimes exceedingly so. In the case of the German army they were crucial to Prussia's victory over France in 1870, a victory sealing the establishment of a German Empire. In World War I, horses served in every theater where German and other troops took the field. Not least, between 1939 and 1945 they ended up being literally irreplaceable, and they materially helped secure many of the German army's victories before the end of 1942. This remained so throughout the war in the cavalry arm, the logistics trains, and more often than not for the artillery. Whether in Germany or elsewhere, technological promises regarding motorization and mechanization repeatedly showed themselves to be premature. Until vehicles of whatever sort became sufficiently numerous and sufficiently reliable the horse would stay. It made no real difference whether vehicles' deficiencies lay in faulty design, political leaders' ineptitude, military commanders' operational mistakes, combat losses, or domestic industrial bottlenecks caused by strategic aerial bombardment. Whatever the reason, as long as machines could not do the job, horses would have to. In Germany this meant not only that horses would continue to pull supply wagons, field kitchens, ambulances, and guns after 1939 but also that horse-mounted cavalry would soldier on. In confronting this reality, Germany was by no means alone. Poland, France, Rumania, Hungary, Italy, and, most dramatically, Russia all employed horse-cavalry, though not always with the same results.

The military horse thus survived Europe's rapid nineteenth-century industrialization and went on to serve in huge numbers throughout the period from 1900 to 1945. Though their specific cavalry service largely disappeared on the Western Front after the First Battle of the Marne, horses (and mules) nevertheless served valiantly there and in every theater of World War I, particularly in East Prussia, Poland, the Baltic States, and Rumania. They carried on in the interwar period, and they served faithfully once again when a second war came in 1939. Between that year and 1945, approximately seven million horses saw active duty in the armed forces of European countries directly involved in World War II.2 In the German armed forces alone, the number reached at least 2,800,000 during the same period. Of course, the vast majority was assigned to the army, but the Luftwaffe's field units and even the Kriegsmarine used minimal numbers of horses as well.³ But just as horses served in unprecedented numbers, so they died. The General Staff of the army reported that for the period between the beginning of the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 and 31 December 1944, the army's and Luftwaffe's average monthly loss of horses to all causes was approximately 30,000, 90 percent of which were horses from the army's units on the Eastern Front, the Ostheer. According to the same report, by the latter date the armed forces' total losses in horseflesh amounted to 1,558,508 animals.⁴ As demonstrated throughout this history, and particularly in the two world wars, losses could mount with frightening rapidity and in the most appalling fashion. Like their human counterparts, those horses not dying from exposure, illness, or malnutrition were killed and maimed by the bombs and bullets of machines whose triumph no horse-mounted or horse-drawn army could prevent.

In his Victory Report of 1 September 1945, General George C. Marshall, then chief of staff of the U.S. Army, alluded to this sort of technological supremacy when he wrote that “the greatest advantage in equipment the United States has enjoyed on the ground…has been in our multiple-drive motor equipment, principally the jeep and the 2½-ton truck.”⁵ In the U.S. Army, as well as in other armies (though not always to the same extraordinary degree), these mundane vehicles had given American forces unprecedented mobility. Especially once ashore in France after D-day, the mobility of these vehicles and the troops riding in them became “strikingly clear.” The German army, continued Marshall, was “completely outclassed.” He went on to observe that “the Germans discovered too late the error of the doctrine a member of their general staff expressed to General [Albert C.] Wedemeyer, then in Berlin, in the late thirties: “The truck has no place on the battlefield.”⁶ This was, of course, the very same attitude expressed so sharply to a young Heinz Guderian when he was told emphatically that trucks were supposed to carry flour, not troops. It was, however, these same very ordinary jeeps and trucks, possessed of an extraordinary crosscountry capability, that spelled the real doom of the military horse in Europe.

The American automotive industry not only made the horse redundant for all practical purposes in the U.S. Army, it also helped complete the motorization and mechanization of the British ground forces and did a great deal to put Stalin's legions on wheels and tracks. Fully 76,737 jeeps and 98,207 trucks went to the British army and 28,356 jeeps and 218,888 trucks to the Red Army. Still more remarkable was the fact that, in addition to these deliveries and the outfitting of U.S. forces literally around the globe, “almost all of the equipment used by the revitalized French Army, which had 12 fully equipped divisions in action at the time of Germany's surrender, came from the United States.”7 As if such American production alone were insufficient, Great Britain also produced nearly a million wheeled vehicles during the war, not to mention 109,500 armored vehicles. In comparison to these prodigious Allied figures, Germany produced approximately 800,000 military trucks and automobiles of all types and perhaps 68,000 armored vehicles. Though by no means paltry figures, these numbers represent a German industrial base that simply could not keep pace, particularly when wartime attrition, normal wear-and-tear, resistance in the occupied countries, and the Allies' strategic bombing campaign are taken into account.⁸ Consequently, even if sentimental attachment contributed to the German army's retention of the cavalry in 1939—and the evidence cited makes clear that this was not a dominant factor—keeping the horse in service after that date in both the combat and noncombat arms became ever more a matter of sheer necessity.

As a semblance of peace returned to the charnel house that was Europe in 1945, no serious thought appears to have been given to retaining the military horse beyond its ceremonial function, if that. Nevertheless, horses lingered on in an official military capacity after V-E Day and would remain on active duty beyond the parade ground in several European armies even at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Interestingly, the U.S. Army itself initially raised a small mounted force in the American Zone of Occupied Germany in the immediate postwar years. As a part of what was called the U.S. Constabulary,9 this force consisted of both horse-mounted and vehicle-mounted patrols for internal security missions. Furthermore, and more directly germane to the present subject, almost immediately after the Federal Republic of Germany established the Federal Armed Forces (Bundeswehr) in 1955, an equine pack-animal unit was raised for the Heer's alpine troops at their training center at Mittenwald in the Bavarian Alps. Another such unit followed in 1960 at Bad Reichenhall near Berchtesgaden. Since 1981, Bad Reichenhall has been the only location where pack animals are based. In 2008 Mountain Pack Animal Company 230 (Gebirgstragtierkompanie 230) constituted the sole remaining unit in the Heer with horses and mules on its regular TOE. Training in the operational use and keeping of the animals, both mules and Haflinger horses, is the task of the Pack Animal Mission and Training Center (PAMTC), co-located at Bad Reichenhall and established in 1993. According to the Bundeswehr, all plans for the elimination of the animals from military service have long since been shelved for the same reasons that cavalry originally survived the advent of the first motorization of German armies at the beginning of the twentieth century: horses and mules can frequently go where vehicles can't roll and helicopters can't land, and they're cheaper than either. By the Bundeswehr's current reckoning, each pack horse or mule can do the work of four soldiers. That fact only adds to equids' advantages as force multipliers.¹⁰

In 2009 the PAMTC included fifty-four mules and Haflinger horses. In a notable development, mounted training has also recently been reinstated for that unit's personnel. The mounted training's purpose is to provide better coordination with the reconnaissance elements of the Army's 23rd Mountain Rifle Brigade (Gebirgsjägerbrigade 23). Furthermore, and curiously reminiscent of the practice established during World War II, especially on the Eastern Front, German troops of the PAMTC purchased Bosnian “ponies” during their first foreign deployment involving the actual operational use of the animals. This deployment occurred in Kosovo between 2002 and 2004. Though the German troops did not take their own horses, the stock they purchased evidently rendered outstanding service in Kosovo supplying outposts over terrain and in weather conditions that made use of vehicles impossible.¹¹ This same expertise, though once again not the PAMTC's own animals themselves, subsequently found its way to northern Afghanistan as part of the Bundeswehr's contribution to NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) operating in that troubled country.12

Other European armed forces also recognized the horse's continuing potential utility in the period after 1945. When the Austrian Federal Army (Bundesheer) was established in 1958, for example, horses were called upon to outfit three pack-animal companies whose initial missions were planned to be entirely combat service support. As with their German counterparts, these missions included keeping alpine troops equipped with weapons, ammunition, and other supplies.¹³ Even though the three companies were eventually reduced in the 1970s to four platoons based at Hochfilzen, Landeck, Lienz, and Spittal/Drau, horses were retained for these tasks. Furthermore, a remount station was established in 1983 to keep the units supplied with trained stock. In 2005 these numbered 47 remounts and foals in training out of a total of 116 horses in the Bundesheer overall. As in the Federal Republic of Germany, the Austrian horses and their handlers also regularly received mounted training. They put this training to use for the first time between fall 1994 and summer 1999 when they executed mounted patrols along Austria's eastern borders, a mission they replicated in 2004 and 2005.¹⁴ Both the German and Austrian armies' employment of horses in such missions, whether in Kosovo or along Austria's own frontiers, were in keeping with what are called the “Petersberg Missions”: tasks undertaken by the member States of the Western European Union, a defense association of a number of European countries, to use their armed forces for crisis management, peacekeeping, and humanitarian assistance in loose conjunction with, or even wholly outside of, NATO.

While it may in retrospect seem absurd for any army to have retained horses in the face of motorization and mechanization in the early twentieth century, technology could not always and everywhere fulfill its promise. Such would be the case even at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Interestingly enough, modern technology's limitations in at least one instance were put precisely in equine terms: the aerial Thermal Imaging Airborne Laser Designator (TIALD) pod on the Royal Air Force's Tornado GR4 attack aircraft used in Iraq in 2006–2007 found itself up against certain interesting difficulties in the counterinsurgency campaign there. The TIALD pod, said one RAF officer, could easily designate big, static targets like bunkers, but it couldn't be used “to try to spot a man on a horse with a gun.”15 The point is merely, but importantly, that high-tech systems cannot always surmount challenges presented by decidedly low-tech alternatives, whether in 2007 or circa 1940. And of course everyone is also now familiar with the image of U.S. Special Forces riding into combat against the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 alongside as many as two thousand Northern Alliance horsemen.¹⁶ Perhaps not so familiar is the U.S. Army's related horseback training program for Special Forces troops at Ft. Carson, Colorado.¹⁷

Beyond such technical considerations, any discussion of the German cavalry between 1870 and 1945 must also bear in mind that attitude called the “cavalry spirit,” an attitude stressing a commander's initiative, independence, speed, flexibility, and audacity. One noted authority, Robert M. Citino, convincingly maintains that by 1939 that very spirit had been an integral element of a “German way of war” for very nearly three hundred years.¹⁸ In the latter year, it still survived in the concept of Auftragstaktik, the ability of commanders to employ their forces essentially on their own without interference from higher command as long as they accomplished the mission. While implicit at almost every level of command, Auftragstaktik assumed particular importance at corps-level echelons and particularly in the armored forces.

Just as technology spelled the eventual doom of the horse-cavalry, Hitler's stultifying dictatorship did the same for a concept owing so much to the cavalry's traditions. Shortly after becoming chancellor, Hitler issued a “fundamental order” requiring all higher commands to submit a regular blizzard of reports on troop dispositions, supplies, movements, combat actions, status reports, and so on. These higher commands in turn had to request the same of their immediate subordinates, they of theirs, and so on down the line. In this effort, according to Citino, Hitler was aided and abetted by the army's then-chief of staff, General Franz Halder. Such paper-based micromanagement was poison to Auftragstaktik. Furthermore, Auftragstaktik by its nature was incompatible with the totalitarian character of Hitler's very much personalized regime, and his “stand fast” order in the Russian winter of 1941 inflicted a mortal wound to what was left of the tradition. His subsequent direct assumption of operational command was the coup de grace. “The dash, the impetuousness, the ability to roam free, away from higher control—all these belonged to a bygone era.”19 The reference here is to an operational concept, but the statement could just as well serve as the German cavalry's epitaph.

In the main, the German army's cavalry in the modern age, including during World War II, fought not only valiantly but honorably, though the latter simply cannot be said of the cavalry of the Waffen-SS. Between 1939 and 1945, the horsemen also fought about as effectively as one could expect in a conflict that came to be dominated ever-more completely by titanic masses of machines. As with so many other formations of the German army, however, the cavalrymen's legacy was fouled by the evil nature and conduct of the régime they served in those years. The horsemen endured much. They and their mounts suffered greatly. But they also willingly inflicted much suffering in Hitler's name. The Nazis' cause condemned them. What was said of another cause eighty years before and an ocean away thus might also apply to that of the German horsemen of World War II: it was one of the worst for which a people ever fought.²⁰

Once, some years ago, the author was asked in an interview whether he could name a horse that he regarded as the most famous horse in history. He replied by asking in turn whether he might choose an anonymous one. If so, then he felt compelled to say that the most famous horse in history would have to be the horse of the mounted warrior, whether Scythian, Sarmatian, Hun, Magyar, Mongol, Turk, European knight, U.S. Dragoon, Native American horseman, samurai, or modern cavalryman. This horse carried the fate of empires on his back. Sometimes he carried the fate of civilization itself. One would like to think that he did so largely without complaint. Without doubt, he did so while all too often improperly fed, watered, or cared for. He risked his own life and paid it in full more frequently than did his rider. This horse should be remembered.

Under the western horizon, far below where radiant Venus

Arises, meander pastures that nurture the stallions of lustrous

Sol, not by letting them graze themselves, feeding on grass throughout the night,

But with Ambrosia, restoring strength to legs, setting them aright…

Ovid, Metamorphoses IV.260–263 (translation by Cheri S. Dorondo)