Riders of the Apocalypse: German Cavalry and Modern Warfare, 1870-1945 by David R. Dorondo (review)

Every good book offers a moment of epiphany, something that makes the reader sit up and take notice. In David Dorondo's history of modern German cavalry, the epiphany is not a heroic battle—a thundering charge by the arme blanche or a last-ditch defense of an irrevocably lost position—but a moment of abject surrender. While the Treaty of Versailles has received its share of analysis, few scholars have paused to take note of Annex IV: the clauses that required Germany to surrender to France 500 stallions of unspecified breed aged three to seven years, along with 30,000 fillies and mares—the latter specified as being of Ardennais, Boulonnais, or Belgian stock, all of which had to be "very large draft-horse breeds" weighing up to 1,000 kilograms and standing between sixteen and seventeen hands.

As late as 1919, Dorondo implies, one of the measures of national power was how many horses a nation possessed. He thus places himself in opposition to one of the foundational arguments of modern military history: the "obsolescence of cavalry," usually dated to the mid-nineteenth century and the introduction of the rifled musket, but sometimes pushed all the way back to the introduction of gunpowder. As firearms became ever more efficient in the 1800's, the once-feared man on horseback gradually morphed into nothing but a big target. Moreover, in the age of mass armies, cavalry's vast supply requirements proved to be a logistical nightmare, particularly when set against its diminishing battlefield effectiveness. The horrible years of trench warfare on the Western Front from 1914-1918 were the low point, with cavalry massed behind the lines waiting to exploit breakthroughs that never came—or abandoning their horses altogether and serving in the line as infantry. The development of the tank in the postwar period, so runs the traditional narrative, put the final nail in the proverbial coffin.

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.

Dorondo argues all of this with verve and passion, and the result is a useful and readable book. It is not without its problems, however. There is already a sizable body of scholarly work dealing with modern cavalry, including Richard DiNardo's Mechanized Juggernaut or Military Anachronism? (Westport, CT, 1991), Gervase Phillips's...