Harnessing the Airplane: American and British Cavalry Responses to a New Technology, 1903–1939 by Lori A. Henning (review)

This book breaks a stereotype. The author argues that horse cavalrymen in the four decades before World War II suffered from an unfair portrayal as hidebound, anti-technological zealots clinging to their mounts and ignoring the world changing around them. They were often portrayed in popular media as “backward and conservative,” cartoonishly satirized as Colonel Blimp, for example, in British media (p. 142). Henning rehabilitates them instead as progressive but prudent pragmatists who “enthusiastically tested” the promises of emerging technologies (p. 155). As “cautious technological examiners,” they sought to capitalize on the strengths and compensate for the weaknesses of aircraft and mechanized vehicles as they integrated them into the traditional missions of mounted cavalry (p. 5). Henning thus fashions an intriguing lens for examining the complex interrelationship of technological and institutional change, and she encourages historians to examine further the motives of those deemed, sometimes unfairly, as naysayers and resisters.

Henning’s first chapter contrasts American and British cavalry reactions to aviation and the industrialized carnage of the Great War. She revisits the United States-United Kingdom comparison throughout the book, thus creating insights into how both institutions adapted to modernity. Although some cavalrymen, particularly among the British, were unswervingly devoted to mounted battle—seeking always the knee-to-knee horseback charge into historical glory—many displayed a rational response to aircraft and mechanized vehicles. In the second chapter, we see how horsemen willingly outsourced the tedium of long-range reconnaissance to airmen. Nevertheless, aviation’s brisk advances posed a growing threat, and chapter three discusses how cavalrymen on both sides of the Atlantic interpreted the lessons of the Great War and a decade of postwar exercises and operations, always seeking to defend their value in military journals, Army regulations, and the popular press while bridling the optimism of airplane advocates.

Henning pivots in the fourth chapter to political and economic maneuvers in the cavalry-aviation debate of the 1920s and 1930s. She assails the myth that the British practice of air policing was “cheap and effective,” emphasizing its notable expense and reliance on ground support (p. 101). Cavalry proponents in the interwar era were nevertheless undermined by aviation’s capture of the popular imagination. In the stringent interwar economy, “the myth of airpower won” due to the unproven promise of technology over manpower-intensive alternatives (p. 110). In the final chapter, Henning describes how cavalrymen grasped for an alternative that would preserve their identity while airplanes and tanks usurped cavalry roles. Rather than rely on a bomber-focused U.S. Army Air Corps or an independent Royal Air Force, American and British cavalry pursued their own organic air capability: the autogiro. Readers would profit from an image of this oddity, a helicopter-airplane hybrid that was extensively tested yet not adopted. The autogiro effort, in Henning’s analysis, inoculated cavalrymen from claims of being anti-technological; they just craved preservation of institutional autonomy and identity. Ultimately, mechanization proved a “transformative threat” in an environment of technological enthusiasm and limited budgets, dismounting the British by 1939 and the Americans by the end of the war. (p. 145)

The overall argument would benefit from sharper focus in some areas and broader scope in others. It misses the opportunity to describe deeply and colorfully the cavalry’s traditional arme blanche tactics rather than assuming readers are familiar with them. It could also amplify the lessons of the 1916 Punitive Expedition against Pancho Villa in terms of aviation’s growing pains. And since much of the argument relates to evolving public attitudes and institutional priorities, Henning could invoke other scholarship concerning social construction and technological momentum and the general technological enthusiasm of the era in both Britain and the United States.

Still, there is much to value in this book, including modern relevance. The cavalryman’s faith in man (and horse) over machine informs current issues about identity...