LAST EDITED ON Dec-15-15 AT 02:48 PM (EST)
 
>> This is mildly ironic given that cavalry were pretty
>>conclusively shown to be of no military value in WWI,
>
>The men on both sides of the Kaiserschlacht in 1918 would be surprised
>by that. The main reason it failed was that almost all of the German
>cavalry was in the east and it was stopped by the ability of British
>and Canadian cavalry to quickly deploy.
>
>However, it is true that there was no longer much of a need to have
>the full anti-cavalry bayonet: By WWI cavalry forces generally
>dismounted to fight, the horses were primarily for redeployment.

Well, yeah, exactly. By that point, those were cavalry units, but they were no longer fighting as cavalry—that is, from horseback, with saber charges and all the rest of it—because that kind of thing was basically over. They had become, though they would probably have stabbed themselves before they would ever admit it, infantry that moved around between battles on horseback. The way I see it, saying that's cavalry is like conflating airmobile infantry with helicopter gunship pilots. (And yes, I do know that the US Army calls its airmobile infantry "air cavalry"; this to me is terminologically silly, since they don't fight from the helicopters, but don't go by me.)

As an aside, it's a common trope in some circles to use the example of the Polish cavalry at the outbreak of World War II as a shorthand for basically pointing and laughing at the Polish Army. Oh, those noble but stupid Poles, attempting cavalry charges against German tanks, lol. The thing is, as far as I can tell from the current scholarship, that didn't happen. There was a Polish cavalry unit that conducted a full-on, old-school charge, probably the last one ever made, during the German invasion in 1939, but it wasn't against armor; it was against a German infantry unit that they'd found without armored support or heavy machine guns. And because the German infantry didn't have armored support or heavy machine guns, it was a rout. Cavalry always was quite good at that sort of thing. It was only the opportunities to do it that went away.

The habit of Anglo-American historians to diss the Poles in postwar analyses is an interesting one; probably stems from lingering cultural guilt about throwing them under the bus in 1939, and again in 1945. But that's another matter for another time.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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