What the World War Did for Cavalry

, Jr.. Third Cavalry Although much progress has been made since our ideas of the tactics of dismounted action were epitomized in the command “TO fight on foot,” we are still very far from being proficient in the art of handling men in the presence of the enemy.

Colonel Sir Thomas Cunningham, while an instructor at the A. E. F. Staff College, said, in a lecture: “The characteristic of war is its constant change of characteristic.” An incessant change of means to attain unalterable ends is always going on; we must take care not to let these sundry means loom with undue eminence in the perspective of our minds; for since the beginning, there has been an unending cycle of them, and for each its advocates have claimed adoption as the sole solution of successful war. Yet the record of all history shows that the unchanging end has been, is, and probably ever will be this: predominant force of the right sort, at the right place, at the right time; or, as Forrest is credited with putting it, “Getting there fust with the mostest men.”

Predominant force has been effected by the phalanx of Greece, the legions of Rome, the columns of Napoleon, by walls and ditches, wire and machineguns, artillery and tanks, and countless other means, successful or not, according as they were applied at the right place at the critical moment.

We, as subordinates, have little choice in the selection of our force. So far as it is concerned, our chief responsibility rests in consenring its magnitude by avoiding dispersion and waste. But we are deeply interested with the place and time of its application. A mistake of yards or minutes in these respects may blight our career and butcher our men. Hence the vital necessity of mastering, in as complete a manner as possible, the mechanism of its application - orders, maps, and tactics. While I do not hold with those who consider the World War as the sealed pattern of all future efforts to maintain peace, it is, nevertheless, our most recent source of information, and the tactical tendencies shown will most certainly color to a considerable degree our initial efforts in the next war.

As soon as the first battle of the Marne was won, the World War became a special case, due principally, in my opinion, to two reasons: Fixed flanks, which prevented maneuver, and the splendid rail and road net on both sides, which permitted a very heavy concentration of men and a relatively easy ammunition supply. Without these good roads and short hauls, it would have been impossible to have fed and supplied the vast armies, and the war would have taken a different course. Predominant force, after the Marne, first appeared in the well-sited and constructed German trenches. This was countered by increased expenditure of artillery ammunition. The single line was pierced only to again have force desert the guns and appear in concentrated reserves for the counterattack. More and heavier guns adjusted the balance, only to again have it disrupted by the defense in depth with machineguns. This was answered by the tank and countered by more elastic defense, with greater depth, and we were back, almost, to pre-Marne conditions of open warfare; but with many more and complicated engines of destruction and excessive potentialities in guns, ammunition, airplqnes, and accurate intelligence - excessive, is, in comparison with other possible theaters of war -and all due to the roads.

So much for a hurried survey of what has occurred. Now, to safeguard our perspective of the relative importance of these happenings, let us analyze certain features which are bound to crop up in the future with undue emphasis, since they have been grasped by the popular mind and have filled the writing of many thoughtless critics and historians, both civil and military.

The restricted area, long deadlock, and vast resources permitted the employment of masses of guns and ammunition which probably, during our lifetime, cannot be duplicated, certainly not in any other theater of operations. The great results, apparent and real, accomplished by these guns has so impressed the majority of people that they talk of future wars as gun wars. To me, all that is necessary to dispel such dreams, or at least limit their sites to western Europe, is a ten-mile drive along country roads in any State of the Union, except perhaps a favored half dozen along its coast. Tactics based on a crushing artillery are, then, impossible except in one place. But, even where roads permit its use in mass, the effect of artillery alone is negative, so far as offensive victory is concerned. Sufficient shells concentrated at the right time and place will, as at Rheims, stop any attack; but all the artillery ever built cannot defeat an enemy unaided; for that the personal touch of the infantry (with bayonet) is needed. The guns are the greatest auxiliary, but only that. Infantry without them cannot beat infantry with them. The great range of the present gun has helped both the attack and the defense by making concentrations of great density possible at widely different places from the same gun positions. The same increased range has made it possible to place the artillery in depth, which in turn has made turning movements less deadly and more expensive.

Still, guns in moderation or in excess will not win a war. And the more open the war, the more uncivilized the country where it is fought, the less will they affect the issue; for in war of movement there will be less guns, 8 less time to bring up ammunition, less time to hide batteries. Airplanes will locate them more easily, and they will have to use their limited ammunition supply shooting at each other and less of it shooting infantry. Get all the guns you can, and then steal or otherwise procure all the shells possible, but don’t deceive yourselves with fancied zero hours and barrages. Another feature resulting from the war, and which also has left its mark, is the evolution of the specialist. His birth is the result of an unholy union between trench warfare and quick training. Fighting in trenches was more or less stereotyped; hence men apt at bombing, shooting rifle grenades, using automatic rifles, etc., had time and opportunity to ride their hobbies. Further, it was easier and quicker to make a good grenade-thrower than a good soldier. Time pressed, so one-sided men were evolved who knew little and cared less for anything but their one death-dealing stunt. But the evil did not stop here; these one-idea gentry could be more quickly produced by instructors of alike ilk. These instructors and their pupils assembled in schools, with the result that unit commanders did not train their men, did not learn to know them; leadership suffered, and, as one drink leads to another, so the evil grew. The only way to fight such collections of specialists was to devise “set-piece” attacks, where each did his little stunt in his little way. This made necessary voluminuous orders defining in detail the littlest operation, and in consequence taking all initiative from the fighting officers. All that was left to them was to set heroic examples; and this they did.

Now, so long as the specialists could ply their sundry trades behind the barrage and scavenge in the wake of the shells, they were efficient; but when they either lost the barrage or progressed beyond the range of the guns, they were lost. Untutored courage was useless in the face of educated bullets; so when the barrage was gone, officers and men felt naked and at a loss. They had no confidence in the rifle which they had never used; for confidence is the result of habit. Fire and movement, as taught by the Field Service Regulations, were forgotten or never learned.

Our own men, thanks to the genius of General Pershing, were less troubled by the specialist disease than were our allies; but, due to lack of time, many of ours were not, and could not have been, well-rounded open-war soldiers.

Now, the moral of this story of the specialist is this: The combat officer must be the combat instructor of his own men; not only must he know his own tactics, but he must know how to use the various instruments with which his unit is equipped to ply its trade, and he must know each better than any of his men. Further than this, he must have taught and practiced the use of his complicated instrument, so that it plays equally well under his hand the simple one-step of the set-piece attack or the complicated tango of the open-war fight. He must think, teach, andpractice the tactics of his arm. Still another development of the war, and one from which we shall surely hear in the future, was the enthusiast of the special arm -- the man who would either bomb, gas, or squash the enemy into oblivion, according as he belonged to the Air, Gas, or Tank Service. All these men, and I was one of them, were right within limits; only they were overconfident of the effectiveness of their favorite weapon. In the future there will be many more such, and we must accept all they say and give them a trial, for some may be right; but we must not plan our battles on the strength of what they think they will do until we have more than oral proof.

Whether we or the Germans first realized the futility of trench warfare is open to discussion. In the winter of 1917 German and American infantry practiced open-war formations, while the rest of the world still clung to trenches. But, whoever first originated the idea, there is no doubt that the Germans first practiced it, and 1918 saw in its colossal struggles the results of that training. First, in Artois, in Flanders, and in the first phase of the 1918 Marne, the mighty German attacks met with great success. Here the time and place of the attacks were not so much a surprise as were the methods used in pressing them.

Next, east of Rheims a similar great attack was a complete failure, and again due to surprise as to method; but this time as to method of defense by the French under Gouraud.

Followed an allied attack south of Soissons, using open-war methods, where a complete success was prevented by the fact that the attack was not a surprise. Then came the British attack with tanks, on a limited front, at Villers Bretonneux, with complete success, as a result of surprise as to both method, time, and locality. And finally our great surprise attack in the Meuse-Argonne.

The outstanding tactical features of all these great battles were, first, open-war methods, and, second, surprise, made possible by secrecy and deception. Notice that all these features are as old as war. In the Rheims battle prisoners captured the day before gave exact data as to the time and place of launching the attack, so that the resulting victory was an example of good tactical dispositions combined with peculiarly exact knowledge. The outstanding features of this momentous success were the following: The abandoning of the outpost zone and the filling of the dugouts with mustard gas; the placing of sections of determined infantry along what would have normally been the line of resistance of the outpost zone. These sections were in strong points from 350 to 450 yards apart and were well supplied with machineguns; the S. O. S. barrage was placed to fall both between and beyond the strong points. Finally, the excellent French counter-preparation, which, due to the prisoners above mentioned, fell in great density, at the exact time and place desired. This counter-preparation is a fine example of the results obtainable from amass of guns whose collection was made possible by the European road system. 9 Little of interest in purely cavalry tactics is at present available as a result of the World War in the west, although details of the defense of the Messines sector by Gough’s cavalry between the forces of General Haig and General Palteney, in November, 1914, will show splendid cavalry work. Yet, even with the locking of armies in the west and the total absence of flanks, there were chances for cavalry. High authority is of the opinion that the German failure to use their mounted arm at Artois and on the Marne probably cost them, if not decisive, at least great strategic success. In Russia and under Allenby, cavalry was as important as ever in its history. In Palestine alone there were seventeen mounted charges against infantry in position, only one of which was a failure. A general survey of the tactical tendencies at the close of the World War seems to me to point to greater, and not lessened, usefulness and importance for cavalry. The necessity, due to air observation, for most marches of concentration being made at night adds vastly to the destructive power of the mounted man, because charges with the saber or pistol or surprise fire by machine rifles will be terribly effective and most difficult to prevent. True, no such operations took place in the west; but this is accounted for by the lack of flanks and by continuous wire. In the Civil War, on the other hand, Mosby so operated against the Union wagon trains with great success and almost completeimmunity. That he did not do so against columns of infantry or guns is due to the fact that in the Civil War, marches by these arms at night were seldom necessary and hence not indulged in.

The machine-gun and automatic rifle, which at one time we considered so prejudicial to our usefulness, have in fact made us more effective. They give us the fire power dismounted which we lacked before. Our present effort must be to study using these weapons as pivots of maneuver - that is, to use their fire to pin the enemy to the ground while the mounted elements use their mobility to attack the flanks or rear of the enemy so held. I do not believe that such encircling attacks will invariably be made mounted, but the use of the horse for speedy transportation will make their prompt and judicious application possible. In this connection the cavalryman must be careful to differentiate between his action dismounted and that used by the infantry. The present infantry attack is the most deadly and powerful operation developed in the long school of war; but the very immensity of this power makes the speed of its application somewhat slow. To progressively develop its intense firepower and consummate it with the final resort to the steel, required a relatively deep formation; and since the man on foot, unlike the horse, has but one rate of speed, it takes time to get the final rearward elements into action. Further, to secure this depth, great manpower is of necessity required.

The cavalry, on the other hand, both because of its organization and the necessity of caring for its led horses, which, due to the menace of enemy airplanes, 10 ARMOR will almost always have to be kept mobile, cannot develop the manpower necessary for an attack, along infantry lines, on anything like an appropriate front, except in very special cases, where great bodies of horsemen are available; and even here only peculiar circumstances of terrain or tactical necessity would justify the cavalry in making along dismounted attack on the principle that is foolish to batter down a door if a window is quickly available for entry. Since, then, the time allowable for our dismounted action will always be short, we must study to gain effect for it by surprise, by an advantageous selection of the direction of attack, and by the prompt development of maximum firepower. In other words, we must make our maximum development early, start it at short range by the use of cover and mobility, and rush it to a conclusion, holding out only sufficient supports to give the impetus for the final charge.

Clearly, such tactics will be difficult in very open country where distant observation will prevent the employment of the mounted encircling movements on which such an attack is predicated. These considerations iead to the enunciation of a rather revolutionary theory as to what is good cavalry country. We have for years been told that open, unfenced pasture land was “ideal cavalry country”; but I believe that enough has been shown here to prove that such is no longer the case. Closed country, preferably wooded, is what we want for the cavalry. When such conditions permit cavalry to launch its attack close to the enemy, by surprise, it will be hard to stop, mounted or dismounted.

The foregoing remarks might give rise to the opinion that the usefulness of cavalry will be limited by the necessity for special country peculiar to its own needs. This would be true were it not for the fact that the increased importance of the airplane will probably make all arms seek similar country. Certainly, open prairies, where every camp, bivouac, and line of supply will be open to the ever-growing menace of air bombardment, where every movement will be seen and reported, make it seem probable that future armies will in war, at least, eschew billiard-table country, however pleasant it may be for bulletless maneuvers. Speaking generally, then, cavalry tactics seem to simplify themselves into the following: (a) Delaying or harassing action against infantry. To be effected by long-range fire of automatic weapons, and offensive by counterattacks by mounted mobility against flanks and rear; these last to be made by day if cover permits, and, failing such cover, by night. (b) Attacks against flanks or thinly held sectors. To be effected by methods similar to (a). It should be noted that in delaying actions by cavalry the essence of success lies in the use of numerous positions for short actions rather than in the strong resistance in favorable localities which the slower rate of infantry make necessary. (c) Actions against enemy cavalry - always offensive.