Editor's Note

Conventional wisdom holds that one of the salient developments in twentieth-century military history was the final disappearance of horse cavalry from the order of battle of Western armies. That demise had been long predicted (and awaited) in certain circles, virtually from that long ago St. Crispin's Day when English archers demolished the flower of French chivalry on the field of Agincourt. But the mounted arm had proved remarkably resilient, surviving encounters with the pike and shot formations of the Early Modern "Military Revolution" to reemerge, in the form of the armored cuirassier, as the breakthrough arm par excellence of Napoleonic warfare. Although banned from the armed forces of the nascent American republic as a suspected redoubt of antidemocratic sentiment, great distances and the extreme mobility of its enemies quickly brought back the horse soldiers as the privileged fighting arm of the U.S. military in "the winning of the West." As the contributors to this special section of the January 2007 issue of The Journal of Military History observe, however, in the eyes of its detractors the cavalry was deemed to finally have been put out to pasture in the face of the greatly increased lethality of the battlefields of the twentieth century. And yet, critics lamented, the cavalrymen persisted in believing that charges with the arme blanche—sword or lance—remained battle-deciding tactics. Worse, the men who continued to follow this anachronistic line of reasoning were put in charge of armies during the First World War. The well-born "donkeys" who led the proletarian "lions" of the British Expeditionary Force, for example.

That there were some cavalry officers who set their faces resolutely against the future is borne out in Alexander Bielakowski's account below of the heels-dug-in resistance to change of Gen. Hamilton S. Hawkins of the U.S. Cavalry—not so surprising, perhaps, given the "long twilight of the Indian fighting army" (as one historian has put it). For the most part, however, according to our other contributors, cavalry leaders at the dawn of the twentieth century were as aware of the changes occurring in weaponry and ways of war as the rest of the military and were no less creative in finding ways to adjust to them. Gervase Phillips, in a comprehensive historiographical survey of the subject, seeks to document the extent to which the cavalry has been made the twentieth-century Western military's "scapegoat arm," and its supposedly reactionary leaders—one thinks here of Sir Douglas Haig—blamed for the long casualty lists of the First World War and the slow progress toward mechanization in the interwar years. Stephen Badsey sets out to rescue British cavalry leaders from the charge that they were still dreaming of Waterloo during the 1899–1902 Second Boer War and were forced to adopt the dismounted tactics of their Boer enemies in a desperate attempt to catch up. He shows that a cavalry reform movement in the direction of training cavalrymen for dismounted action, led by, among others, Douglas Haig, was underway well before the war began and that the problems faced by British cavalry in South Africa tended to be logistical, not tactical, in origin. Jean Bou argues that, in spite of the epitaphs being written at the time and echoed since, horse soldiers made an important contribution to Allied victory in the First World War. His focus is on the remarkable success of the traditional shock tactics employed by the Australian Light Horse in the Palestine Campaign of 1916–18.

But, surely this was the mounted arm's last hurrah. Not so, say our contributors, citing, for example, the success of Red Army horse cavalry against the Nazi invader in World War II. And, more recently, if you were watching closely you might have seen U.S. Special Operations troops on horseback during the 2002 rout of the Taliban in Afghanistan, surrounded by indigenous fighters who seemed to have stepped out of the pages of Rudyard Kipling's Kim. As Gervase Phillips puts it, "The story of cavalry rides on into the twenty-first century."