Riders of the Apocalypse: German Cavalry and Modern Warfare, 1870-1945

[David R. Dorondo] disagrees. Cavalry was neither obsolete nor the vestigial remnant of a once dominant arm, but rather an integral part of the story of modern warfare. From the Wars of Unification under Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, through World War I, and all the way up to the end of World War II in 1945, German cavalry played a vital role on the battlefield. The missions were fairly consistent over time, including flank security, wide-ranging reconnaissance, the screening of friendly formations on the march, and the use of turning movements to lever opponents out of fortified lines. They even still occasionally launched charges, which always incurred bloody losses but sometimes got the job done anyway-as did General Friedrich Wilhelm von Bredow's famous Totenritt ("death ride") at the battle of Mars-la-Tour in 1870. As to the trench warfare of World War I, Dorondo points out quite rightly that the image of a helpless cavalry was only applicable to the crowded Western Front. In the vastness of the East, cavalry saw action aplenty for the entire war. And, although we tend to associate World War II with tanks, the Germans kept cavalry in the field for the entire conflict. Even in the modern age, there are many places that a truck cannot navigate, but a horse can: the swamps of eastern Poland, the forests of Byelorussia, or the Pripet Marshes, for example-three places in which the Wehrmacht happened to be campaigning. In other words, cavalry stayed alive because it was still useful, not because old-school officers, Colonel Blimps, and military reactionaries of every possible stripe defended it against all better reason.