Horses in World War I
Encyclopedia
The use of horses in World War I marked a transitional period in the evolution of armed conflict. Cavalry
units were initially considered essential offensive elements of a military force, but over the course of the war, the vulnerability of horses to modern machine gun and artillery fire reduced their utility on the battlefield. This paralleled the development of tank
s, which would ultimately replace cavalry in shock tactics
. While the perceived value of the horse in war
changed dramatically, horses still played a significant role throughout the war.
All of the major combatants in World War I
(1914–1918) began the conflict with cavalry forces. The Central Powers
, Germany and Austria–Hungary, stopped using them on the Western Front
soon after the war began. They continued to be deployed in a limited fashion on the Eastern Front
well into the war. The Ottoman Empire
used cavalry extensively during the war. On the Allied side, the United Kingdom used mounted infantry and cavalry charges
throughout the war, but the United States used cavalry for only a short time. Although not particularly successful on the Western Front, Allied cavalry did have some success in the Middle Eastern theatre
, possibly because they faced a weaker and less technologically advanced enemy. Russia used cavalry forces on the Eastern Front, but with limited success.
The military mainly used horses for logistical support during the war; they were better than mechanized vehicles at traveling through deep mud and over rough terrain. Horses were used for reconnaissance and for carrying messengers, as well as pulling artillery
, ambulances, and supply wagons. The presence of horses often increased morale among the soldiers at the front, but the animals contributed to disease and poor sanitation in camps, caused by their manure and carcasses. The value of horses, and the increasing difficulty of replacing them, was such that by 1917 some troops were told that the loss of a horse was of greater tactical concern than the loss of a human soldier. Ultimately, the Allied blockade prevented the Central Powers from importing horses to replace those lost, which contributed to Germany's defeat. By the end of the war, even the well-supplied U.S. Army was short of horses.
Conditions were severe for horses at the front; they were killed by artillery fire, suffered from skin disorders, and were injured by poison gas. Hundreds of thousands of horses died, and many more were treated at veterinary hospitals and sent back to the front. Procuring equine food was a major issue, and Germany lost many horses to starvation through lack of fodder
. Several memorials have been erected to commemorate the horses that died. Artists, including Alfred Munnings
, extensively documented the work of horses in the war, and horses were featured in war poetry. Novels, plays and documentaries have also featured the horses of World War I.
Early in the war, cavalry skirmishes occurred on several fronts, and horse-mounted troops were widely used for reconnaissance.Willmott, First World War, p. 46 Britain's cavalry were trained to fight both on foot and mounted, but most other European cavalry still relied on the shock tactic
of mounted charges. There were isolated instances of successful shock combat on the Western Front, where cavalry divisions also provided important mobile fire-power. Beginning in 1917, cavalry was deployed alongside tanks and aircraft, notably at the Battle of Cambrai, where cavalry was expected to exploit breakthroughs in the lines that the slower tanks could not. But, this plan never came to fruition due to missed opportunities and the use of machine guns by German forces. At Cambrai, troops from Great Britain, Canada, India and Germany participated in mounted actions. Cavalry was still deployed late in the war, with Allied cavalry troops harassing retreating German forces in 1918 during the Hundred Days Offensive
, when horses and tanks continued to be used in the same battles. In comparison to their limited usefulness on the Western Front, "cavalry was literally indispensable" on the Eastern front and in the Middle East
.
Great changes in the tactical use of cavalry were a marked feature of World War I, as improved weaponry rendered frontal charges ineffective. Although cavalry was used with good effect in Palestine
, at the Third Battle of Gaza
and Battle of Megiddo
, generally the mode of warfare changed. Tanks were beginning to take over the role of shock combat. The use of trench warfare
, barbed wire and machine guns rendered traditional cavalry almost obsolete. Following the war, the armies of the world powers initiated a process of mechanization in earnest, and most cavalry regiments were either converted to mechanized units or disbanded. Historian G.J. Meyer writes that "the Great War brought the end of cavalry". From the Middle Ages
into the 20th century, cavalry had dominated battlefields, but from as early as the American Civil War
, their value in war was declining as artillery became more powerful, reducing the effectiveness of shock charges. The Western Front in World War I showed that cavalry was almost useless against modern weaponry, and it also reinforced that they were difficult to transport and supply. British cavalry officers, far more than their continental European counterparts, persisted in using and maintaining cavalry, believing that mounted troops would be useful for exploiting infantry breakthroughs, and under the right circumstances would be able to face machine guns. Neither of these beliefs proved correct.
Britain had increased its cavalry reserves after seeing the cavalry feats of mounted Boers during the Second Boer War
(1899–1902). Horse-mounted units were used from the earliest days of World War I: on August 22, 1914, the first British shot of the war in France was fired by a cavalryman, Edward Thomas of the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards
, near Casteau
, during a patrol in the buildup to the Battle of Mons
. Within 19 days of Britain beginning mobilization for war, on August 24, 1914, the 9th Lancers, a cavalry regiment led by David Campbell
, engaged German troops with a squadron of 4th Dragoon Guards against German infantry and guns. Campbell obeyed his orders to charge, although he believed the more prudent course of action would have been to fight dismounted. The charge resulted in a British loss of 250 men and 300 horses. On September 7, Campbell's troops charged again, this time towards the German 1st Guard Dragoons, another lancer cavalry regiment. In the same year, the British Household Cavalry
completed their penultimate operation on horseback—the Allied retreat from Mons
. Upon reaching the Aisne River
and encountering the trench system
, cavalry was found to be ineffective. Although cavalry divisions were still being formed in Britain, cavalry troops quickly became accustomed to fighting dismounted. Britain continued to use cavalry throughout the war, and in 1917, the Household Cavalry conducted its last mounted charge during a diversionary attack on the Hindenburg Line
at Arras
. On the orders of Field Marshal
Douglas Haig
, the Life Guards
and the Blues
, accompanied by the men of the 10th Hussars, charged into heavy machine gun fire and barbed wire, and were slaughtered by the German defenders; the Hussars lost two-thirds of their number in the charge. The last British fatality from enemy action before the armistice
went into effect was a cavalryman, George Edwin Ellison, from C Troop 5th Royal Irish Lancers
. Ellison was shot by a sniper as the regiment moved into Mons
on November 11, 1918.
Despite their lackluster record in Europe, horses proved indispensable to the British war effort in Palestine, particularly under Field Marshal Edmund Allenby
, for whom cavalry made up a large percentage of his forces. Most of his mounted troops were not British regular cavalry, but the Desert Mounted Corps
, consisting of a combination of Australian, New Zealand, Indian units and English Yeomanry
regiments from the Territorial Force
, largely equipped as mounted infantry
rather than cavalry. By mid-1918, Turkish intelligence estimated that Allenby commanded around 11,000 cavalry. Allenby's forces crushed the Turkish armies in a running series of battles that included the extensive use of cavalry by both sides. Some cavalry tacticians view this action as a vindication of cavalry's usefulness, but others point out that the Turks were outnumbered two to one by late 1918, and were not first-class troops. Horses were also ridden by the British officers of the Egyptian Camel Transport Corps
in Egypt and the Levant during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign
s.
and 2nd Indian Cavalry Division
s were active on the Western Front, including in the German retreat to the Hindenburg Line and at the Battle of Cambrai. A charge by the 5th (Mhow) Brigade of the 1st Division ended successfully at the Battle of Cambrai despite being against a position fortified by barbed wire and machine guns. This successful ending was an unusual occurrence during the war. Several Indian cavalry divisions joined Allenby's troops in the spring of 1918 after being transferred from the Western Front.
, a Canadian cavalry regiment, was mobilized and sent to England for training. The regiment served as infantry in French trenches during 1915, and were not returned to their mounted status until February 16, 1916. In the defense of the Somme
front in March 1917, mounted troops saw action, and Lieutenant Frederick Harvey
was awarded the Victoria Cross
for his actions. Canadian cavalry generally had the same difficulties as other nations in breaking trench warfare deadlocks and were of little use on the front lines. However, in the spring of 1918, Canadian cavalry was essential in halting the last major German offensive of the war. On March 30, 1918, Canadian cavalry charged German positions in the Battle of Moreuil Wood
, defeating a superior German force supported by machine gun fire. The charge was made by Lord Strathcona's Horse, led by Gordon Flowerdew
, later posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions during the charge. Although the German forces surrendered, three-quarters of the 100 cavalry participating in the attack were killed or wounded in the attack against 300 German soldiers.
The Anzac Mounted Division
(Australian and New Zealand Mounted Division) formed in Egypt in 1916 and was composed of four Australian and New Zealand Army Corps
(ANZAC) mounted brigades three from the Australian Light Horse with the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade
. All had fought at Gallipoli as infantry. In August the division's dynamic capabilities were effectively combined with the static 52nd (Lowland) Infantry Division at the Battle of Romani
, where they repelled an attempted Ottoman attack on the Suez Canal. This victory stopped the advance of Kress von Kressenstein's Expeditionary Force (3rd Infantry Division and Pasha I formation) towards the Suez Canal
and forced his withdrawal under pressure. An Ottoman garrison at Magdhaba
was defeated in December 1916 by the division with the Imperial Camel Corps Brigade attached and the other major Ottoman fortification at Rafah
was captured in January 1917. They participated mounted in the First
, and Third
Battles of Gaza (Battle of Beersheba) and dismounted in the Second Battle of Gaza
in March, April and October 1917, and in 1918 conducted raids across the Jordan River
, and as part of the Battle of Megiddo
finally captured Amman
(capturing 10,300 prisoners in nine days). After the Armistice
they participated in the reoccupation of Gallipoli in December.
The Anzac and Australian Mounted Divisions carried rifles, bayonets and machine guns, generally using horses as swift transport and dismounting to fight. Troops of four men were organised, so that three were fighting while the fourth held the horses. Sometimes they fought as mounted troops: at the Battle of Beersheba during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign
in 1917, the Australian Mounted Division's 4th Light Horse Brigade
made what is sometimes called "the last successful cavalry charge in history", when two regiments successfully overran Turkish trenches. They formed up over a wide area, to avoid offering a target for enemy artillery, and galloped 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) into machine gun fire, equipped only with rifles and bayonets. Some of the front ranks fell, but most of the brigade broke through, their horses jumping
the trenches into the enemy camp. Some soldiers dismounted to fight in the trenches, while others raced on to Beersheba, to capture the town and its vital water supplies. The charge was "instrumental in securing Allenby's victory [in Palestine]".
The Australians primarily rode Waler horse
s. The English cavalry officer, Lieutenant Colonel RMP Preston DSO
, summed up the animals' performance in his book, The Desert Mounted Corps:
French cavalry had similar problems with horses on the Western Front as the British, although the treatment of their horses created additional difficulties. Opinion generally was that the French were poor horsemen: "The French cavalryman of 1914 sat on his horse beautifully, but was no horsemaster. It did not occur to him to get off his horse's back whenever he could, so there were thousands of animals with sore backs ...". One French general, Jean-François Sordet, was accused of not letting horses have access to water in hot weather. By late August 1914, a sixth of the horses in the French cavalry were unusable. The French continued to eschew mounted warfare when in a June 1918 charge by French lancers the horses were left behind and the men charged on foot.
Russia possessed thirty-six cavalry divisions when it entered the war in 1914, and the Russian government claimed that its horsemen would thrust deep into the heart of Germany. Although Russian mounted troops entered Germany, they were soon met by German forces. In the August 1914 Battle of Tannenberg
, troops led by German Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg
and Lieutenant-General Erich Ludendorff
surrounded the Russian Second Army and destroyed the mounted force of Don Cossacks
that served as the special guard of Russian General Alexander Samsonov
. Other Russian cavalry units successfully harassed retreating Austro-Hungarian troops in September 1914, with the running battle eventually resulting in the loss of 40,000 of the 50,000 men in the Austro-Hungarian XIV Tyrolean Corps, which included the 6th Mounted Rifle Regiment. Transporting cavalry created a hardship for the already strained Russian infrastructure, as the great distances they needed to be moved meant that they had to be transported by train. Approximately the same number of trains (about 40) were required to transport a cavalry division of 4,000 as to transport an infantry division of 16,000.
The cavalries of the Central Powers, Germany and Austria–Hungary, faced the same problems with transport and the failure of tactics as the Russians. Germany initially made extensive use of cavalry, including a lance-against-lance battle with the British in late 1914, and an engagement between the British 1st Cavalry Brigade and the German 4th Cavalry Division in the lead-up to the First Battle of the Marne
in September 1914. That battle ended "decidedly to the disadvantages of the German cavalry", partially due to the use of artillery by the accompanying British L Battery
of horse artillery
. The Germans stopped using cavalry on the Western Front not long after the beginning of the war, in response to the Allied Forces' changing battle tactics, including more advanced weaponry. They continued to use cavalry to some extent on the Eastern Front, including probes into Russian territory in early 1915. The Austrians were forced to stop using cavalry because of large-scale equipment failures; Austrian military saddles were so poorly designed as to rub the skin off the back
of any horse not already hardened to the equipment from parade ground practice; only a few weeks into the war half of all Austrian cavalry mounts were disabled, and the rest nearly so.
began the war with one cavalry regiment in the Turkish army corps
and four reserve regiments (originally formed in 1912) under the control of the Turkish Third Army
. These reserve regiments were composed of Kurds
, rural Turks and a few Armenians. The performance of the reserve divisions was poor, and in March 1915 the forces that survived were turned into two divisions totalling only two thousand men and seventy officers. Later that month, the best regiments were consolidated into one division and the rest disbanded. Nonetheless, cavalry was used by Ottoman forces throughout 1915 in engagements with the Russians, and one cavalry unit even exchanged small arms fire with a submarine crew in the Dardanelles
in early 1915. Turkish cavalry was used in engagements with the British, including the Third Battle of Gaza
in late 1917. In this battle, both sides used cavalry forces as strategic parts of their armies. Cavalry continued to be involved in engagements well into 1918, including in conflicts near the Jordan River in April and May that year, which the Ottomans called the First and Second Battles of Jordan, part of the lead-up to the Battle of Megiddo
. By September 1918, regular army cavalry forces were stationed throughout the Turkish front, and the only remaining operationally ready reserve forces in the Ottoman military were two cavalry divisions, one formed after the initial problems in 1915.
in Mexico, which helped to prepare the US Cavalry for entry into World War I. In May 1917, a month after the US declaration of war, the National Defense Act
went into effect, creating the 18th through the 25th US Cavalry regiments, and later that month, twenty more cavalry regiments were created. However, British experiences during the first years of the war showed that trench warfare and weapons that included machine guns and artillery made cavalry warfare impractical. Thus, on October 1, eight of the new cavalry regiments were converted to field artillery regiments by order of Congress, and by August 1918, twenty National Army horse units were converted to thirty-nine trench mortar and artillery batteries. Some horse units of the 2nd, 3rd, 6th and 15th
Cavalry regiments accompanied the US forces in Europe. The soldiers worked mainly as grooms
and farrier
s, attending to remounts for the artillery, medical corps and transport services. It was not until late August 1918 that US cavalry entered combat. A provisional squadron of 418 officers and enlisted men, representing the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, and mounted on convalescent horses, was created to serve as scouts and couriers during the St. Mihiel Offensive. On September 11, 1918, these troops rode at night through no man's land
and penetrated five miles behind German lines. Once there, the cavalry was routed and had to return to Allied territory. Despite serving through the Meuse-Argonne Offensive
, by mid-October the squadron was removed from the front with only 150 of its men remaining.
used horses to pull cable wagons, and the promptness of messengers and dispatch riders
depended on their mounts. Horses often drew artillery and steady animals were crucial to artillery effectiveness. The deep mud common in some parts of the front, caused by damaged drainage systems flooding nearby areas, made horses and mules vital, as they were the only means of getting supplies to the front and guns moved from place to place. After the April 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge
, one Canadian soldier recalled, "the horses were up to their bellies in mud. We'd put them on a picket line between the wagon wheels at night and they'd be sunk in over their fetlocks the next day. We had to shoot quite a number."
Thousands of horses were employed to pull field guns; six to twelve horses were required to pull each gun. During the Battle of Cambrai, horses were used to recover guns captured by the British from no man's land. In one instance, two teams of sixteen horses each had their hooves
, tack and pulling chains wrapped to reduce noise. The teams and their handlers then successfully pulled out two guns and returned them to British lines, the horses jumping a trench in the process and waiting out an artillery barrage by German troops on the road they needed to take.
Dummy horses were sometimes used to deceive the enemy into misreading the location of troops. They were effectively used by Allenby during his campaigns in the east, especially late in the war. Evidence exists that the Germans used horses in their experimentations with chemical and biological warfare. German agents in the US are suspected of infecting cattle and horses bound for France with glanders
, a disease which can fatally spread to humans; similar tactics were used by the Germans against the Russians, causing breakdowns in their ability to move artillery on the Eastern Front.
The value of horses was known to all. In 1917 at the Battle of Passchendaele, men at the front understood that "at this stage to lose a horse was worse than losing a man because after all, men were replaceable while horses weren’t." For Britain, horses were considered so valuable that if a soldier's horse was killed or died he was required to cut off a hoof and bring it back to his commanding officer to prove that the two had not simply become separated.
ordered that no horses under should be confiscated, at the request of many British children, who were concerned for the welfare of their ponies
. The British Remount Service, in an effort to improve the supply of horses for potential military use, provided the services of high quality stallion
s to British farmers for breeding their broodmares
. The already rare Cleveland Bay
was almost wiped out by the war; smaller members of the breed were used to carry British troopers, while larger horses were used to pull artillery
. New Zealand found that horses over fared worse than those under that height. Well-built Thoroughbred
s of 15 hands and under worked well, as did compact horses of other breeds that stood . Larger crossbred horses were acceptable for regular work with plentiful rations, but proved less able to withstand short rations and long journeys. Riflemen with tall horses suffered more from fatigue, due to the number of times they were required to mount and dismount the animals. Animals used for draught work, including pulling artillery, were also found to be more efficient when they were of medium size with good endurance than when they were tall, heavy and long-legged.
The continued resupply of horses was a major issue of the war. One estimate puts the number of horses that served in World War I at around six million, with a large percentage of them dying due to war-related causes. In 1914, estimates put Britain's horse population at between 20,000 and 25,000. This shortfall required the US to help with remount efforts, even before it had formally entered the war. Between 1914 and 1918, the US sent almost one million horses overseas, and another 182,000 were taken overseas with American troops. This deployment seriously depleted the country's equine population. Only 200 returned to the US, and 60,000 were killed outright. By the middle of 1917, Britain had procured 591,000 horses and 213,000 mules, as well as almost 60,000 camels and oxen. Britain's Remount Department spent £67.5 million on purchasing, training and delivering horses and mules to the front. The British Remount Department became a major multinational business and a leading player in the international horse trade, through supplying horses to not only the British Army but also to Canada, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, Portugal, and even a few to the US. Shipping horses between the US and Europe was both costly and dangerous; American Expeditionary Force
officials calculated that almost seven times as much room was needed per ton for animals than for average wartime cargo, and over 6,500 horses and mules were drowned or killed by shell fire on Allied ships attacked by the Germans. In turn, New Zealand lost around 3 percent of the nearly 10,000 horses shipped to the front during the war.
Due to the high casualty rates, even the well-supplied American army was facing a deficit of horses by the final year of the war. After the American First Army, led by General John J. Pershing
, pushed the Germans out of the Argonne Forest in late 1918, they were faced with a shortage of around 100,000 horses, effectively immobilizing the artillery. When Pershing asked Ferdinand Foch
, Marshal of France
, for 25,000 horses, he was refused. It was impossible to obtain more from the US, as shipping space was limited, and Pershing's senior supply officer stated that "the animal situation will soon become desperate." The Americans, however, fought on with what they had until the end of the war, unable to obtain sufficient supplies of new animals.
s and annuities paid to individual horse breeders. These breeding programs were designed specifically to provide high-quality horses and mules for the German military. These efforts, and the horse-intensive nature of warfare in the early 20th century, caused Germany to increase the ratio of horses to men in the army, from one to four in 1870 to one to three in 1914. The breeding programs allowed the Germans to provide all of their own horses at the beginning of the war. Horses were considered army reservists; owners had to register them regularly, and the army kept detailed records on the locations of all horses. In the first weeks of the war, the German army mobilized 715,000 horses and the Austrians 600,000. Overall, the ratio of horses to men in Central Powers nations was estimated at one to three.
The only way Germany could acquire large numbers of horses after the war began was by conquest. More than 375,000 horses were taken from German-occupied French territory for use by the German military. Captured Ukrainian territory provided another 140,000. The Ardennes
was used to pull artillery for the French and Belgian armies. Their calm, tolerant disposition, combined with their active and flexible nature, made them an ideal artillery horse. The breed was considered so useful and valuable that when the Germans established the Commission for the Purchase of Horses in October 1914 to capture Belgian horses, the Ardennes was one of two breeds specified as important, the other being the Brabant
. The Germans were not able to capture the horses belonging to the Belgian royal family, as they were successfully evacuated, although they captured enough horses to disrupt Belgian agriculture and breeding programs. Horses used for the transport of goods were also taken, resulting in a fuel crisis in Belgium the next winter as there were no horses to pull coal wagons. The Germans sold some of their captured horses at auction. Prevented by the Allies from importing remounts, the Germans ultimately ran out of horses, making it difficult for them to move supplies and artillery, a factor contributing to their defeat.
. On average, Britain lost about 15 percent (of the initial military stock) of its animals each year of the war (killed, missing, died or abandoned), with losses at 17 percent in the French theatre. This compared to 80 percent in the Crimean War
, 120 percent in the Boer War
and 10 percent in peacetime. During some periods of the war, 1,000 horses per day were arriving in Europe as remounts for British troops, to replace horses lost. Some horses, having collapsed from exhaustion, drowned in ankle-deep mud, too tired to lift their heads high enough to breathe. Equine casualties were especially high during battles of attrition, such as the 1916 Battle of Verdun
between French and German forces. In one day in March, 7,000 horses were killed by long-range shelling on both sides, including 97 killed by a single shot from a French naval gun. By 1917, Britain had over a million horses and mules in service, but harsh conditions, especially during winter, resulted in heavy losses, particularly amongst the Clydesdale horses, the main breed used to haul the guns. Over the course of the war, Britain lost over 484,000 horses, one horse for every two men. A small number of these, 210, were killed by poison gas.
Feeding horses was a major issue, and horse fodder
was the single largest commodity shipped to the front by some countries, including Britain. Horses ate around ten times as much food by weight as a human, and hay and oats further burdened already overloaded transport services. In 1917, Allied operations were threatened when horse feed rations were reduced after German submarine activity restricted supplies of oats from North America, combined with poor Italian harvests. The British rationed hay and oats, although their horses were still issued more than those from France or Italy. The Germans faced an even worse fodder crisis, as they had underestimated the amount of food they needed to import and stockpile before the beginning of the war. Sawdust was mixed with food during times of shortage to ease animals' sense of hunger, and many animals died of starvation. Some feed was taken from captured territories on the Eastern Front, and more from the British during the advances of the 1918 spring offensive.
Animals bolstered morale at the front, due to the soldiers' affection for them. Some recruitment posters from World War I showcased the partnership between horse and man in attempts to gain more recruits. Despite the boost in morale, horses could also be a health hazard for the soldiers, mainly because of the difficulty of maintaining high levels of hygiene around horses, which was especially noted in camps in Egypt. Horse manure was commonplace in the battle and staging areas on several fronts, creating breeding grounds for disease-carrying insects. Manure was supposed to be buried, but fast-moving battle conditions often made this impossible. Sanitation officers were responsible for the burial of horse carcasses, among other duties.
Many horses died as a result of the conditions at the front—of exhaustion, drowning, becoming mired in mud and falling in shell holes. Other horses were captured after their riders were killed. Horses also endured poor feeding and care, poison gas attacks that injured their respiratory systems
and skin, and skin conditions such as mange
. When gas warfare began in 1915, nose plugs were improvised for the horses to allow them to breathe during attacks. Later, several types of gas masks were developed by both the Central and Allied nations, although horses often confused them with feedbags and destroyed them. Soldiers found that better-bred horses were more likely to suffer from shell shock and act up when exposed to the sights and sounds of war than less-well-bred animals, who often learned to lie down and take cover at the sound of artillery fire. Veterinary hospitals were established to assist horses in recovering from shell shock and battle wounds, but thousands of equine corpses still lined the roads of the Western Front
. In one year, 120,000 horses were treated for wounds or disease by British veterinary hospitals alone. Ambulances and field veterinary hospitals were required to care for the horses, and horse trailer
s were first developed for use on the Western Front as equine ambulances. Disease was also a major issue for horses at the front, with equine influenza, ringworm, sand colic
, sores from fly bites, and anthrax
among the illnesses that affected them. British Army Veterinary Corps hospitals treated 725,216 horses over the course of the war, successfully healing at least 529,064.
When the war ended, many horses were killed due to age or illness, while younger ones were sold to slaughterhouses
or to locals, often upsetting the soldiers who had to give up their beloved mounts. There were 13,000 Australian horses remaining at the end of World War I, but due to quarantine restrictions, they could not be shipped back to Australia. Two thousand were designated to be killed, and the remaining 11,000 were sold, most going to India as remounts for the British Army. Of the 136,000 horses shipped from Australia to fighting fronts in the war, only one, Sandy, was returned to Australia. New Zealand horses were also left behind; those not required by the British or Egyptian armies were shot to prevent maltreatment by other purchasers.
, Hampstead
, which bears the inscription "Most obediently and often most painfully they died faithful unto death." The Animals in War Memorial
in London commemorates animals, including horses, that served with the British and their allies in all wars. The inscription reads: "Animals In War. This monument is dedicated to all the animals that served and died alongside British and allied forces in wars and campaigns throughout time. They had no choice." In Minneapolis, a monument by Lake of the Isles
is dedicated to the horses of the Minnesota 151st Field Artillery killed in battle during World War I.
The men of the Australian Light Horse Brigade and New Zealand Mounted Rifles
who died between 1916 and 1918 in Egypt, Palestine and Syria are commemorated by the Desert Mounted Corps Memorial
, or Light Horse Memorial, on ANZAC Parade
, in Canberra, Australia. The original version of this monument was in Port Said
in Egypt, and was mostly destroyed during the 1956 Suez War. A piece from the original memorial, a shattered horse's head, was brought back to Australia and used as part of a new statue in the A is for Animals exhibition honoring animals who have served with the Australian military. The exhibition also contains the preserved head of Sandy, the only horse to return to Australia after the war.
War artist
Alfred Munnings
was sent to France in early 1918 as an official war artist with the Canadian Cavalry Brigade. The Canadian Forestry Corps
invited Munnings to tour their work camps in France after seeing some of his work at the headquarters of General Simms, the Canadian representative. He produced drawings, watercolors, and paintings of their work, including Draft Horses, Lumber Mill in the Forest of Dreux in 1918. Forty-five of his paintings were displayed at the Canadian War Records Exhibition at the Royal Academy
, many of which featured horses in war. Numerous other artists created works that featured the horses of World War I, including Umberto Boccioni
with Charge of the Lancers and Terence Cuneo with his celebrated postwar painting of the saving of the guns at Le Cateau
during the Retreat from Mons. During World War I, artist Fortunino Matania
created the iconic image Goodbye Old Man that would be used by both British and American organizations to raise awareness of the suffering of animals affected by war. The painting was accompanied by a poem, The Soldiers Kiss, that also emphasized the plight of the horse in war.
Writing poetry was a means of passing the time for soldiers of many nations, and the horses of World War I figured prominently in several poems. In 1982, Michael Morpurgo
wrote the novel War Horse, about a cavalry horse in the war. The book was later adapted into a successful play of the same name
. The novel was later adapted into a screenplay, with the movie
set to be released on December 28, 2011 in the United States. In January 2010, the History Channel aired a documentary entitled The Real War Horse, depicting the horses of World War I.
Cavalry
Cavalry or horsemen were soldiers or warriors who fought mounted on horseback. Cavalry were historically the third oldest and the most mobile of the combat arms...
units were initially considered essential offensive elements of a military force, but over the course of the war, the vulnerability of horses to modern machine gun and artillery fire reduced their utility on the battlefield. This paralleled the development of tank
Tank
A tank is a tracked, armoured fighting vehicle designed for front-line combat which combines operational mobility, tactical offensive, and defensive capabilities...
s, which would ultimately replace cavalry in shock tactics
Shock tactics
Shock tactics, shock tactic or Shock attack is the name of an offensive maneuver which attempts to place the enemy under psychological pressure by a rapid and fully committed advance with the aim of causing their soldiers to retreat...
. While the perceived value of the horse in war
Horses in warfare
The first use of horses in warfare occurred over 5,000 years ago. The earliest evidence of horses ridden in warfare dates from Eurasia between 4000 and 3000 BC. A Sumerian illustration of warfare from 2500 BC depicts some type of equine pulling wagons...
changed dramatically, horses still played a significant role throughout the war.
All of the major combatants in World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
(1914–1918) began the conflict with cavalry forces. The Central Powers
Central Powers
The Central Powers were one of the two warring factions in World War I , composed of the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria...
, Germany and Austria–Hungary, stopped using them on the Western Front
Western Front (World War I)
Following the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the German Army opened the Western Front by first invading Luxembourg and Belgium, then gaining military control of important industrial regions in France. The tide of the advance was dramatically turned with the Battle of the Marne...
soon after the war began. They continued to be deployed in a limited fashion on the Eastern Front
Eastern Front (World War I)
The Eastern Front was a theatre of war during World War I in Central and, primarily, Eastern Europe. The term is in contrast to the Western Front. Despite the geographical separation, the events in the two theatres strongly influenced each other...
well into the war. The Ottoman Empire
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
used cavalry extensively during the war. On the Allied side, the United Kingdom used mounted infantry and cavalry charges
Charge (warfare)
A charge is a maneuver in battle in which soldiers advance towards their enemy at their best speed in an attempt to engage in close combat. The charge is the dominant shock attack and has been the key tactic and decisive moment of most battles in history...
throughout the war, but the United States used cavalry for only a short time. Although not particularly successful on the Western Front, Allied cavalry did have some success in the Middle Eastern theatre
Middle Eastern theatre of World War I
The Middle Eastern theatre of World War I was the scene of action between 29 October 1914, and 30 October 1918. The combatants were the Ottoman Empire, with some assistance from the other Central Powers, and primarily the British and the Russians among the Allies of World War I...
, possibly because they faced a weaker and less technologically advanced enemy. Russia used cavalry forces on the Eastern Front, but with limited success.
The military mainly used horses for logistical support during the war; they were better than mechanized vehicles at traveling through deep mud and over rough terrain. Horses were used for reconnaissance and for carrying messengers, as well as pulling artillery
Artillery
Originally applied to any group of infantry primarily armed with projectile weapons, artillery has over time become limited in meaning to refer only to those engines of war that operate by projection of munitions far beyond the range of effect of personal weapons...
, ambulances, and supply wagons. The presence of horses often increased morale among the soldiers at the front, but the animals contributed to disease and poor sanitation in camps, caused by their manure and carcasses. The value of horses, and the increasing difficulty of replacing them, was such that by 1917 some troops were told that the loss of a horse was of greater tactical concern than the loss of a human soldier. Ultimately, the Allied blockade prevented the Central Powers from importing horses to replace those lost, which contributed to Germany's defeat. By the end of the war, even the well-supplied U.S. Army was short of horses.
Conditions were severe for horses at the front; they were killed by artillery fire, suffered from skin disorders, and were injured by poison gas. Hundreds of thousands of horses died, and many more were treated at veterinary hospitals and sent back to the front. Procuring equine food was a major issue, and Germany lost many horses to starvation through lack of fodder
Fodder
Fodder or animal feed is any agricultural foodstuff used specifically to feed domesticated livestock such as cattle, goats, sheep, horses, chickens and pigs. Most animal feed is from plants but some is of animal origin...
. Several memorials have been erected to commemorate the horses that died. Artists, including Alfred Munnings
Alfred Munnings
Sir Alfred James Munnings KCVO, PRA was known as one of England's finest painters of horses, and as an outspoken enemy of Modernism...
, extensively documented the work of horses in the war, and horses were featured in war poetry. Novels, plays and documentaries have also featured the horses of World War I.
Cavalry
Many British tacticians outside of the cavalry units realized before the war that advances in technology meant that the era of mounted warfare was coming to an end. As many senior cavalry men disagreed, they maintained cavalry regiments at the ready throughout the war, despite limited usefulness. Scarce wartime resources were used to train and maintain cavalry regiments that were rarely used. The continued use of the cavalry charge as a tactical maneuver resulted in the loss of many troops and horses in fruitless attacks against enemy machine guns.Early in the war, cavalry skirmishes occurred on several fronts, and horse-mounted troops were widely used for reconnaissance.Willmott, First World War, p. 46 Britain's cavalry were trained to fight both on foot and mounted, but most other European cavalry still relied on the shock tactic
Shock tactics
Shock tactics, shock tactic or Shock attack is the name of an offensive maneuver which attempts to place the enemy under psychological pressure by a rapid and fully committed advance with the aim of causing their soldiers to retreat...
of mounted charges. There were isolated instances of successful shock combat on the Western Front, where cavalry divisions also provided important mobile fire-power. Beginning in 1917, cavalry was deployed alongside tanks and aircraft, notably at the Battle of Cambrai, where cavalry was expected to exploit breakthroughs in the lines that the slower tanks could not. But, this plan never came to fruition due to missed opportunities and the use of machine guns by German forces. At Cambrai, troops from Great Britain, Canada, India and Germany participated in mounted actions. Cavalry was still deployed late in the war, with Allied cavalry troops harassing retreating German forces in 1918 during the Hundred Days Offensive
Hundred Days Offensive
The Hundred Days Offensive was the final period of the First World War, during which the Allies launched a series of offensives against the Central Powers on the Western Front from 8 August to 11 November 1918, beginning with the Battle of Amiens. The offensive forced the German armies to retreat...
, when horses and tanks continued to be used in the same battles. In comparison to their limited usefulness on the Western Front, "cavalry was literally indispensable" on the Eastern front and in the Middle East
Middle Eastern theatre of World War I
The Middle Eastern theatre of World War I was the scene of action between 29 October 1914, and 30 October 1918. The combatants were the Ottoman Empire, with some assistance from the other Central Powers, and primarily the British and the Russians among the Allies of World War I...
.
Great changes in the tactical use of cavalry were a marked feature of World War I, as improved weaponry rendered frontal charges ineffective. Although cavalry was used with good effect in Palestine
Palestine
Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....
, at the Third Battle of Gaza
Third Battle of Gaza
The Third Battle of Gaza was fought in 1917 in southern Palestine during the First World War. The British Empire forces under the command of General Edmund Allenby successfully broke the Ottoman defensive Gaza-Beersheba line...
and Battle of Megiddo
Battle of Megiddo (1918)
The Battle of Megiddo took place between 19 September and 1 October 1918, in what was then the northern part of Ottoman Palestine and parts of present-day Syria and Jordan...
, generally the mode of warfare changed. Tanks were beginning to take over the role of shock combat. The use of trench warfare
Trench warfare
Trench warfare is a form of occupied fighting lines, consisting largely of trenches, in which troops are largely immune to the enemy's small arms fire and are substantially sheltered from artillery...
, barbed wire and machine guns rendered traditional cavalry almost obsolete. Following the war, the armies of the world powers initiated a process of mechanization in earnest, and most cavalry regiments were either converted to mechanized units or disbanded. Historian G.J. Meyer writes that "the Great War brought the end of cavalry". From the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
into the 20th century, cavalry had dominated battlefields, but from as early as the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
, their value in war was declining as artillery became more powerful, reducing the effectiveness of shock charges. The Western Front in World War I showed that cavalry was almost useless against modern weaponry, and it also reinforced that they were difficult to transport and supply. British cavalry officers, far more than their continental European counterparts, persisted in using and maintaining cavalry, believing that mounted troops would be useful for exploiting infantry breakthroughs, and under the right circumstances would be able to face machine guns. Neither of these beliefs proved correct.
United Kingdom
Second Boer War
The Second Boer War was fought from 11 October 1899 until 31 May 1902 between the British Empire and the Afrikaans-speaking Dutch settlers of two independent Boer republics, the South African Republic and the Orange Free State...
(1899–1902). Horse-mounted units were used from the earliest days of World War I: on August 22, 1914, the first British shot of the war in France was fired by a cavalryman, Edward Thomas of the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards
4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards
The 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards was a cavalry regiment in the British Army, first raised in 1685. It saw service for three centuries, before being amalgamated into the 4th/7th Dragoon Guards in 1922....
, near Casteau
Casteau
Casteau is a village of Belgium in the French-speaking region. With the others villages Chaussée-Notre-Dame-Louvignies, Horrues, Naast, Neufvilles, Soignies , and Thieusies, they compose the municipality of Soignies....
, during a patrol in the buildup to the Battle of Mons
Battle of Mons
The Battle of Mons was the first major action of the British Expeditionary Force in the First World War. It was a subsidiary action of the Battle of the Frontiers, in which the Allies clashed with Germany on the French borders. At Mons, the British army attempted to hold the line of the...
. Within 19 days of Britain beginning mobilization for war, on August 24, 1914, the 9th Lancers, a cavalry regiment led by David Campbell
David Campbell (British Army officer)
General Sir David Graham Muschet "Soarer" Campbell GCB was a cavalry officer of the British Army, amateur sportsman, and later Governor of Malta....
, engaged German troops with a squadron of 4th Dragoon Guards against German infantry and guns. Campbell obeyed his orders to charge, although he believed the more prudent course of action would have been to fight dismounted. The charge resulted in a British loss of 250 men and 300 horses. On September 7, Campbell's troops charged again, this time towards the German 1st Guard Dragoons, another lancer cavalry regiment. In the same year, the British Household Cavalry
Household Cavalry
The term Household Cavalry is used across the Commonwealth to describe the cavalry of the Household Divisions, a country’s most elite or historically senior military groupings or those military groupings that provide functions associated directly with the Head of state.Canada's Governor General's...
completed their penultimate operation on horseback—the Allied retreat from Mons
Great Retreat
The Great Retreat, also known as the Retreat from Mons, is the name given to the long, fighting retreat by Allied forces to the River Marne, on the Western Front early in World War I, after their holding action against the Imperial German Armies at the Battle of Mons on 23 August 1914...
. Upon reaching the Aisne River
Aisne River
The Aisne is a river in northeastern France, left tributary of the river Oise. It gave its name to the French département Aisne. It was known in the Roman period as the Axona....
and encountering the trench system
Trench warfare
Trench warfare is a form of occupied fighting lines, consisting largely of trenches, in which troops are largely immune to the enemy's small arms fire and are substantially sheltered from artillery...
, cavalry was found to be ineffective. Although cavalry divisions were still being formed in Britain, cavalry troops quickly became accustomed to fighting dismounted. Britain continued to use cavalry throughout the war, and in 1917, the Household Cavalry conducted its last mounted charge during a diversionary attack on the Hindenburg Line
Hindenburg Line
The Hindenburg Line was a vast system of defences in northeastern France during World War I. It was constructed by the Germans during the winter of 1916–17. The line stretched from Lens to beyond Verdun...
at Arras
Arras
Arras is the capital of the Pas-de-Calais department in northern France. The historic centre of the Artois region, its local speech is characterized as a Picard dialect...
. On the orders of Field Marshal
Field Marshal
Field Marshal is a military rank. Traditionally, it is the highest military rank in an army.-Etymology:The origin of the rank of field marshal dates to the early Middle Ages, originally meaning the keeper of the king's horses , from the time of the early Frankish kings.-Usage and hierarchical...
Douglas Haig
Douglas Haig
Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig was a British soldier and senior commander during World War I.Douglas Haig may also refer to:* Club Atlético Douglas Haig, a football club from Argentina* Douglas Haig , American actor...
, the Life Guards
Life Guards (British Army)
The Life Guards is the senior regiment of the British Army and with the Blues and Royals, they make up the Household Cavalry.They originated in the four troops of Horse Guards raised by Charles II around the time of his restoration, plus two troops of Horse Grenadier Guards which were raised some...
and the Blues
Royal Horse Guards
The Royal Horse Guards was a cavalry regiment of the British Army, part of the Household Cavalry.Founded August 1650 in Newcastle Upon Tyne by Sir Arthur Haselrig on the orders of Oliver Cromwell as the Regiment of Cuirassiers, the regiment became the Earl of Oxford's Regiment during the reign of...
, accompanied by the men of the 10th Hussars, charged into heavy machine gun fire and barbed wire, and were slaughtered by the German defenders; the Hussars lost two-thirds of their number in the charge. The last British fatality from enemy action before the armistice
Armistice with Germany (Compiègne)
The armistice between the Allies and Germany was an agreement that ended the fighting in the First World War. It was signed in a railway carriage in Compiègne Forest on 11 November 1918 and marked a victory for the Allies and a complete defeat for Germany, although not technically a surrender...
went into effect was a cavalryman, George Edwin Ellison, from C Troop 5th Royal Irish Lancers
5th Royal Irish Lancers
The 5th Royal Irish Lancers was a cavalry regiment of the British army originally formed in 1689 as James Wynne's Regiment of Dragoons.They fought in the Battle of the Boyne and at the Battle of Aughrim under William of Orange...
. Ellison was shot by a sniper as the regiment moved into Mons
Mons
Mons is a Walloon city and municipality located in the Belgian province of Hainaut, of which it is the capital. The Mons municipality includes the old communes of Cuesmes, Flénu, Ghlin, Hyon, Nimy, Obourg, Baudour , Jemappes, Ciply, Harmignies, Harveng, Havré, Maisières, Mesvin, Nouvelles,...
on November 11, 1918.
Despite their lackluster record in Europe, horses proved indispensable to the British war effort in Palestine, particularly under Field Marshal Edmund Allenby
Edmund Allenby, 1st Viscount Allenby
Field Marshal Edmund Henry Hynman Allenby, 1st Viscount Allenby GCB, GCMG, GCVO was a British soldier and administrator most famous for his role during the First World War, in which he led the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in the conquest of Palestine and Syria in 1917 and 1918.Allenby, nicknamed...
, for whom cavalry made up a large percentage of his forces. Most of his mounted troops were not British regular cavalry, but the Desert Mounted Corps
Desert Mounted Corps
The Desert Mounted Corps was a World War I Allied army corps that operated in the Middle East during 1917 and 1918.Originally formed on 15 March 1916 as the Australian and New Zealand Mounted Division under the command of Major General Harry Chauvel The Desert Mounted Corps was a World War I...
, consisting of a combination of Australian, New Zealand, Indian units and English Yeomanry
Yeomanry
Yeomanry is a designation used by a number of units or sub-units of the British Territorial Army, descended from volunteer cavalry regiments. Today, Yeomanry units may serve in a variety of different military roles.-History:...
regiments from the Territorial Force
Territorial Force
The Territorial Force was the volunteer reserve component of the British Army from 1908 to 1920, when it became the Territorial Army.-Origins:...
, largely equipped as mounted infantry
Mounted infantry
Mounted infantry were soldiers who rode horses instead of marching, but actually fought on foot . The original dragoons were essentially mounted infantry...
rather than cavalry. By mid-1918, Turkish intelligence estimated that Allenby commanded around 11,000 cavalry. Allenby's forces crushed the Turkish armies in a running series of battles that included the extensive use of cavalry by both sides. Some cavalry tacticians view this action as a vindication of cavalry's usefulness, but others point out that the Turks were outnumbered two to one by late 1918, and were not first-class troops. Horses were also ridden by the British officers of the Egyptian Camel Transport Corps
Egyptian Camel Transport Corps
The Egyptian Camel Transport Corps were a group of Egyptian camel drivers who supported the British Army in Egypt during the First World War's Sinai and Palestine Campaign...
in Egypt and the Levant during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign
Sinai and Palestine Campaign
The Sinai and Palestine Campaigns took place in the Middle Eastern Theatre of World War I. A series of battles were fought between British Empire, German Empire and Ottoman Empire forces from 26 January 1915 to 31 October 1918, when the Armistice of Mudros was signed between the Ottoman Empire and...
s.
India
Indian cavalry participated in actions on both the Western and Palestinian fronts throughout the war. Members of the 1st1st Indian Cavalry Division
The 1st Indian Cavalry Division was a regular division of the British Indian Army. The division sailed for France from Bombay on October 16, 1914 , under the command of Major General H D Fanshawe. The division was re designated the 4th Cavalry Division in November 1916. During the war the Division...
and 2nd Indian Cavalry Division
2nd Indian Cavalry Division
The 2nd Indian Cavalry Division was a regular division of the British Indian Army during World War I.-History:The division sailed for France from Bombay on October 16, 1914, under the command of Major General G A Cookson. During the war the division would serve in the trenches as infantry...
s were active on the Western Front, including in the German retreat to the Hindenburg Line and at the Battle of Cambrai. A charge by the 5th (Mhow) Brigade of the 1st Division ended successfully at the Battle of Cambrai despite being against a position fortified by barbed wire and machine guns. This successful ending was an unusual occurrence during the war. Several Indian cavalry divisions joined Allenby's troops in the spring of 1918 after being transferred from the Western Front.
Canada
When the war began, Lord Strathcona's HorseLord Strathcona's Horse (Royal Canadians)
Lord Strathcona's Horse is a regular armoured regiment of the Canadian Forces. Currently based in Edmonton, Alberta, the regiment is part of Land Force Western Area's 1 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group...
, a Canadian cavalry regiment, was mobilized and sent to England for training. The regiment served as infantry in French trenches during 1915, and were not returned to their mounted status until February 16, 1916. In the defense of the Somme
Somme
Somme is a department of France, located in the north of the country and named after the Somme river. It is part of the Picardy region of France....
front in March 1917, mounted troops saw action, and Lieutenant Frederick Harvey
Frederick Maurice Watson Harvey
Frederick Maurice Watson Harvey VC, CBE, MC, Croix de Guerre was an Irish Canadian rugby union player and soldier. During the First World War, while serving in the Canadian Army, he was awarded the Victoria Cross, the Military Cross and the Croix de Guerre. He was later awarded a CBE...
was awarded the Victoria Cross
Victoria Cross
The Victoria Cross is the highest military decoration awarded for valour "in the face of the enemy" to members of the armed forces of various Commonwealth countries, and previous British Empire territories....
for his actions. Canadian cavalry generally had the same difficulties as other nations in breaking trench warfare deadlocks and were of little use on the front lines. However, in the spring of 1918, Canadian cavalry was essential in halting the last major German offensive of the war. On March 30, 1918, Canadian cavalry charged German positions in the Battle of Moreuil Wood
Battle of Moreuil Wood
The Battle of Moreuil Wood was an engagement of World War I that took place on the banks of the Arve River in France, where the Canadian Cavalry Brigade attacked and forced the German 23rd Saxon Division to withdraw from Moreuil Wood, a commanding position on the river bank...
, defeating a superior German force supported by machine gun fire. The charge was made by Lord Strathcona's Horse, led by Gordon Flowerdew
Gordon Flowerdew
Gordon Muriel Flowerdew VC was a Canadian recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces, received for his actions at the Battle of Moreuil Wood.-Details:He was 33 years old, and...
, later posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions during the charge. Although the German forces surrendered, three-quarters of the 100 cavalry participating in the attack were killed or wounded in the attack against 300 German soldiers.
Australia and New Zealand
Anzac Mounted Division
The ANZAC Mounted Division was a mounted infantry and mounted rifles division formed in March 1916 in Egypt during World War I following the Battle of Gallipoli when the Australian and New Zealand regiments returned from fighting dismounted as infantry...
(Australian and New Zealand Mounted Division) formed in Egypt in 1916 and was composed of four Australian and New Zealand Army Corps
Australian and New Zealand Army Corps
The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps was a First World War army corps of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force that was formed in Egypt in 1915 and operated during the Battle of Gallipoli. General William Birdwood commanded the corps, which comprised troops from the First Australian Imperial...
(ANZAC) mounted brigades three from the Australian Light Horse with the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade
New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade
The New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade, consisting usually of four units of mounted infantry, fought in World War I and World War II. Initially a milita, under the instruction of Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Henry Banks they formed the core of the New Zealand Army following successful service in the...
. All had fought at Gallipoli as infantry. In August the division's dynamic capabilities were effectively combined with the static 52nd (Lowland) Infantry Division at the Battle of Romani
Battle of Romani
The Battle of Romani was fought east of the Suez Canal, near the Egyptian town of Romani and the site of ancient Pelusium on the Sinai Peninsula during the First World War...
, where they repelled an attempted Ottoman attack on the Suez Canal. This victory stopped the advance of Kress von Kressenstein's Expeditionary Force (3rd Infantry Division and Pasha I formation) towards the Suez Canal
Suez Canal
The Suez Canal , also known by the nickname "The Highway to India", is an artificial sea-level waterway in Egypt, connecting the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. Opened in November 1869 after 10 years of construction work, it allows water transportation between Europe and Asia without navigation...
and forced his withdrawal under pressure. An Ottoman garrison at Magdhaba
Battle of Magdhaba
The Battle of Magdhaba took place on 23 December 1916 south and east of Bir Lahfan in the Sinai desert, some inland from the Mediterranean coast and the town of El Arish...
was defeated in December 1916 by the division with the Imperial Camel Corps Brigade attached and the other major Ottoman fortification at Rafah
Battle of Rafa
The Battle of Rafa took place on 9 January 1917 at el Magruntein to the south of Rafa, close to the frontier between the Sultanate of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and the Ottoman Empire, and in the area to the north and east of Sheikh Zowaiid...
was captured in January 1917. They participated mounted in the First
First Battle of Gaza
The First Battle of Gaza was fought in and around the town of Gaza on the Mediterranean coast in the southern region of Ottoman Palestine on 26 March 1917, during World War I...
, and Third
Third Battle of Gaza
The Third Battle of Gaza was fought in 1917 in southern Palestine during the First World War. The British Empire forces under the command of General Edmund Allenby successfully broke the Ottoman defensive Gaza-Beersheba line...
Battles of Gaza (Battle of Beersheba) and dismounted in the Second Battle of Gaza
Second Battle of Gaza
The Second Battle of Gaza, fought in southern Palestine during the First World War, was another attempt mounted by British Empire forces to break Ottoman defences along the Gaza-Beersheba line...
in March, April and October 1917, and in 1918 conducted raids across the Jordan River
First Transjordan attack on Amman (1918)
The First Transjordan attack on Amman was part of the Sinai and Palestine Campaign of World War I. Between 21 and 30 March 1918, three separate engagements occurred which together form the First Transjordan attack...
, and as part of the Battle of Megiddo
Battle of Megiddo (1918)
The Battle of Megiddo took place between 19 September and 1 October 1918, in what was then the northern part of Ottoman Palestine and parts of present-day Syria and Jordan...
finally captured Amman
Amman
Amman is the capital of Jordan. It is the country's political, cultural and commercial centre and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. The Greater Amman area has a population of 2,842,629 as of 2010. The population of Amman is expected to jump from 2.8 million to almost...
(capturing 10,300 prisoners in nine days). After the Armistice
Armistice of Mudros
The Armistice of Moudros , concluded on 30 October 1918, ended the hostilities in the Middle Eastern theatre between the Ottoman Empire and the Allies of World War I...
they participated in the reoccupation of Gallipoli in December.
The Anzac and Australian Mounted Divisions carried rifles, bayonets and machine guns, generally using horses as swift transport and dismounting to fight. Troops of four men were organised, so that three were fighting while the fourth held the horses. Sometimes they fought as mounted troops: at the Battle of Beersheba during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign
Sinai and Palestine Campaign
The Sinai and Palestine Campaigns took place in the Middle Eastern Theatre of World War I. A series of battles were fought between British Empire, German Empire and Ottoman Empire forces from 26 January 1915 to 31 October 1918, when the Armistice of Mudros was signed between the Ottoman Empire and...
in 1917, the Australian Mounted Division's 4th Light Horse Brigade
4th Light Horse Brigade
The 4th Light Horse Brigade was a mounted infantry brigade of the First Australian Imperial Force serving in the Middle Eastern theatre of World War I. The brigade was formed in March 1915 and shipped to Egypt without their horses and was broken up in Egypt in August 1915...
made what is sometimes called "the last successful cavalry charge in history", when two regiments successfully overran Turkish trenches. They formed up over a wide area, to avoid offering a target for enemy artillery, and galloped 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) into machine gun fire, equipped only with rifles and bayonets. Some of the front ranks fell, but most of the brigade broke through, their horses jumping
Jumping (horse)
Jumping plays a major role in many equestrian sports, such as show jumping, fox hunting, steeplechasing, and eventing. The biomechanics of jumping, the influence of the rider, and the heritability of jumping prowess have all been the focus of research....
the trenches into the enemy camp. Some soldiers dismounted to fight in the trenches, while others raced on to Beersheba, to capture the town and its vital water supplies. The charge was "instrumental in securing Allenby's victory [in Palestine]".
The Australians primarily rode Waler horse
Waler horse
The Waler is an Australian breed of riding horses that developed from the horses that were brought to the Australian colonies in the 19th century...
s. The English cavalry officer, Lieutenant Colonel RMP Preston DSO
Distinguished Service Order
The Distinguished Service Order is a military decoration of the United Kingdom, and formerly of other parts of the British Commonwealth and Empire, awarded for meritorious or distinguished service by officers of the armed forces during wartime, typically in actual combat.Instituted on 6 September...
, summed up the animals' performance in his book, The Desert Mounted Corps:
... (November 16th, 1917) The operations had now continued for 17 days practically without cessation, and a rest was absolutely necessary especially for the horses. Cavalry Division had covered nearly 170 miles ... and their horses had been watered on an average of once in every 36 hours ... The heat, too, had been intense and the short rations, lb of grain per day without bulk food, had weakened them greatly. Indeed, the hardship endured by some horses was almost incredible. One of the batteries of the Australian Mounted Division had only been able to water its horses three times in the last nine days—the actual intervals being 68, 72 and 76 hours respectively. Yet this battery on its arrival had lost only eight horses from exhaustion, not counting those killed in action or evacuated wounded ... The majority of horses in the Corps were Walers and there is no doubt that these hardy Australian horses make the finest cavalry mounts in the world ...
Continental Europe
Before the war began, many continental European armies still considered the cavalry to hold a vital place in their order of battle. France and Russia expanded their mounted military units before 1914. Of the Central Powers, Germany added thirteen regiments of mounted riflemen, Austria–Hungary expanded their forces, and the Bulgarian army also readied the cavalry in their army. When the Germans invaded in August 1914, the Belgians had one division of cavalry.French cavalry had similar problems with horses on the Western Front as the British, although the treatment of their horses created additional difficulties. Opinion generally was that the French were poor horsemen: "The French cavalryman of 1914 sat on his horse beautifully, but was no horsemaster. It did not occur to him to get off his horse's back whenever he could, so there were thousands of animals with sore backs ...". One French general, Jean-François Sordet, was accused of not letting horses have access to water in hot weather. By late August 1914, a sixth of the horses in the French cavalry were unusable. The French continued to eschew mounted warfare when in a June 1918 charge by French lancers the horses were left behind and the men charged on foot.
Russia possessed thirty-six cavalry divisions when it entered the war in 1914, and the Russian government claimed that its horsemen would thrust deep into the heart of Germany. Although Russian mounted troops entered Germany, they were soon met by German forces. In the August 1914 Battle of Tannenberg
Battle of Tannenberg (1914)
The Battle of Tannenberg was an engagement between the Russian Empire and the German Empire in the first days of World War I. It was fought by the Russian First and Second Armies against the German Eighth Army between 23 August and 30 August 1914. The battle resulted in the almost complete...
, troops led by German Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg
Paul von Hindenburg
Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg , known universally as Paul von Hindenburg was a Prussian-German field marshal, statesman, and politician, and served as the second President of Germany from 1925 to 1934....
and Lieutenant-General Erich Ludendorff
Erich Ludendorff
Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff was a German general, victor of Liège and of the Battle of Tannenberg...
surrounded the Russian Second Army and destroyed the mounted force of Don Cossacks
Don Cossacks
Don Cossacks were Cossacks who settled along the middle and lower Don.- Etymology and origins :The Don Cossack Host was a frontier military organization from the end of the 16th until the early 20th century....
that served as the special guard of Russian General Alexander Samsonov
Alexander Samsonov
Aleksandr Vassilievich Samsonov was a career officer in the cavalry of the Imperial Russian Army and a general served during the Russo-Japanese War and World War I.-Biography:...
. Other Russian cavalry units successfully harassed retreating Austro-Hungarian troops in September 1914, with the running battle eventually resulting in the loss of 40,000 of the 50,000 men in the Austro-Hungarian XIV Tyrolean Corps, which included the 6th Mounted Rifle Regiment. Transporting cavalry created a hardship for the already strained Russian infrastructure, as the great distances they needed to be moved meant that they had to be transported by train. Approximately the same number of trains (about 40) were required to transport a cavalry division of 4,000 as to transport an infantry division of 16,000.
The cavalries of the Central Powers, Germany and Austria–Hungary, faced the same problems with transport and the failure of tactics as the Russians. Germany initially made extensive use of cavalry, including a lance-against-lance battle with the British in late 1914, and an engagement between the British 1st Cavalry Brigade and the German 4th Cavalry Division in the lead-up to the First Battle of the Marne
First Battle of the Marne
The Battle of the Marne was a First World War battle fought between 5 and 12 September 1914. It resulted in an Allied victory against the German Army under Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke the Younger. The battle effectively ended the month long German offensive that opened the war and had...
in September 1914. That battle ended "decidedly to the disadvantages of the German cavalry", partially due to the use of artillery by the accompanying British L Battery
L (Néry) Battery Royal Horse Artillery
L Battery Royal Horse Artillery are the Tactical Group Battery of 1st Regiment Royal Horse Artillery. They are currently based in Assaye Barracks in Tidworth.-Current Role:...
of horse artillery
Horse artillery
Horse artillery was a type of light, fast-moving and fast-firing artillery which provided highly mobile fire support to European and American armies from the 17th to the early 20th century...
. The Germans stopped using cavalry on the Western Front not long after the beginning of the war, in response to the Allied Forces' changing battle tactics, including more advanced weaponry. They continued to use cavalry to some extent on the Eastern Front, including probes into Russian territory in early 1915. The Austrians were forced to stop using cavalry because of large-scale equipment failures; Austrian military saddles were so poorly designed as to rub the skin off the back
Back (horse)
The back describes the area of horse anatomy where the saddle goes, and in popular usage extends to include the loin or lumbar region behind the thoracic vertebrae that also is crucial to a horse's weight-carrying ability. These two sections of the vertebral column beginning at the withers, the...
of any horse not already hardened to the equipment from parade ground practice; only a few weeks into the war half of all Austrian cavalry mounts were disabled, and the rest nearly so.
Ottoman Empire
In 1914, the Ottoman TurksSecond Constitutional Era (Ottoman Empire)
The Second Constitutional Era of the Ottoman Empire began shortly after Sultan Abdülhamid II restored the constitutional monarchy after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. The period established many political groups...
began the war with one cavalry regiment in the Turkish army corps
Turkish Army
The Turkish Army or Turkish Land Forces is the main branch of the Turkish Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. The modern history of the army began with its formation after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire...
and four reserve regiments (originally formed in 1912) under the control of the Turkish Third Army
Turkish Third Army
The Turkish Third Army is a field army of the Turkish Army and is the country's largest army.In the days of the Soviet Union the Third Army was stationed on the Caucasus border to counter any Soviet attack by the Transcaucasus Military District. When the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union broke up...
. These reserve regiments were composed of Kurds
Kurdish people
The Kurdish people, or Kurds , are an Iranian people native to the Middle East, mostly inhabiting a region known as Kurdistan, which includes adjacent parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey...
, rural Turks and a few Armenians. The performance of the reserve divisions was poor, and in March 1915 the forces that survived were turned into two divisions totalling only two thousand men and seventy officers. Later that month, the best regiments were consolidated into one division and the rest disbanded. Nonetheless, cavalry was used by Ottoman forces throughout 1915 in engagements with the Russians, and one cavalry unit even exchanged small arms fire with a submarine crew in the Dardanelles
Dardanelles
The Dardanelles , formerly known as the Hellespont, is a narrow strait in northwestern Turkey connecting the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara. It is one of the Turkish Straits, along with its counterpart the Bosphorus. It is located at approximately...
in early 1915. Turkish cavalry was used in engagements with the British, including the Third Battle of Gaza
Third Battle of Gaza
The Third Battle of Gaza was fought in 1917 in southern Palestine during the First World War. The British Empire forces under the command of General Edmund Allenby successfully broke the Ottoman defensive Gaza-Beersheba line...
in late 1917. In this battle, both sides used cavalry forces as strategic parts of their armies. Cavalry continued to be involved in engagements well into 1918, including in conflicts near the Jordan River in April and May that year, which the Ottomans called the First and Second Battles of Jordan, part of the lead-up to the Battle of Megiddo
Battle of Megiddo (1918)
The Battle of Megiddo took place between 19 September and 1 October 1918, in what was then the northern part of Ottoman Palestine and parts of present-day Syria and Jordan...
. By September 1918, regular army cavalry forces were stationed throughout the Turkish front, and the only remaining operationally ready reserve forces in the Ottoman military were two cavalry divisions, one formed after the initial problems in 1915.
United States
By 1916, the United States Cavalry consisted of 15,424 members organized into 15 regiments, including headquarters, supply, machine-gun and rifle troops. Just before formally joining the war effort, the US had gained significant experience in 1916 and 1917 during the Pancho Villa ExpeditionPancho Villa Expedition
The Pancho Villa Expedition—officially known in the United States as the Mexican Expedition and sometimes colloquially referred to as the Punitive Expedition—was a military operation conducted by the United States Army against the paramilitary forces of Mexican insurgent Francisco "Pancho" Villa...
in Mexico, which helped to prepare the US Cavalry for entry into World War I. In May 1917, a month after the US declaration of war, the National Defense Act
National Defense Act of 1916
The National Defense Act of 1916, , provided for an expanded army during peace and wartime, fourfold expansion of the National Guard, the creation of an Officers' and an Enlisted Reserve Corps, plus the creation of a Reserve Officers' Training Corps in colleges and universities...
went into effect, creating the 18th through the 25th US Cavalry regiments, and later that month, twenty more cavalry regiments were created. However, British experiences during the first years of the war showed that trench warfare and weapons that included machine guns and artillery made cavalry warfare impractical. Thus, on October 1, eight of the new cavalry regiments were converted to field artillery regiments by order of Congress, and by August 1918, twenty National Army horse units were converted to thirty-nine trench mortar and artillery batteries. Some horse units of the 2nd, 3rd, 6th and 15th
15th Cavalry Regiment (United States)
The 15th Cavalry Regiment is a cavalry regiment of the United States Army. It was one of the Expansion Units originally established for the Spanish American War, but has been a general workhorse unit ever since.-Origins:...
Cavalry regiments accompanied the US forces in Europe. The soldiers worked mainly as grooms
Groom (horses)
A groom is a person who is responsible for some or all aspects of the management of horses and/or the care of the stables themselves. The term most often refers to a person who is the employee of a stable owner, but even an owner of a horse may perform the duties of a groom, particularly if the...
and farrier
Farrier
A farrier is a specialist in equine hoof care, including the trimming and balancing of horses' hooves and the placing of shoes on their hooves...
s, attending to remounts for the artillery, medical corps and transport services. It was not until late August 1918 that US cavalry entered combat. A provisional squadron of 418 officers and enlisted men, representing the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, and mounted on convalescent horses, was created to serve as scouts and couriers during the St. Mihiel Offensive. On September 11, 1918, these troops rode at night through no man's land
No man's land
No man's land is a term for land that is unoccupied or is under dispute between parties that leave it unoccupied due to fear or uncertainty. The term was originally used to define a contested territory or a dumping ground for refuse between fiefdoms...
and penetrated five miles behind German lines. Once there, the cavalry was routed and had to return to Allied territory. Despite serving through the Meuse-Argonne Offensive
Meuse-Argonne Offensive
The Meuse-Argonne Offensive, or Maas-Argonne Offensive, also called the Battle of the Argonne Forest, was a part of the final Allied offensive of World War I that stretched along the entire western front.-Overview:...
, by mid-October the squadron was removed from the front with only 150 of its men remaining.
Logistical support
Horses were used to pull ambulances, carry supplies and ordnance, and act as cavalry mounts. At the beginning of the war, the German army depended upon horses to pull its field kitchens, as well as the ammunition wagons for artillery brigades. The Royal Corps of SignalsRoyal Corps of Signals
The Royal Corps of Signals is one of the combat support arms of the British Army...
used horses to pull cable wagons, and the promptness of messengers and dispatch riders
Despatch rider
A despatch rider is a military messenger, mounted on horse or motorcycle.Despatch riders were used by armed forces to deliver urgent orders and messages between headquarters and military units...
depended on their mounts. Horses often drew artillery and steady animals were crucial to artillery effectiveness. The deep mud common in some parts of the front, caused by damaged drainage systems flooding nearby areas, made horses and mules vital, as they were the only means of getting supplies to the front and guns moved from place to place. After the April 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge
Battle of Vimy Ridge
The Battle of Vimy Ridge was a military engagement fought primarily as part of the Battle of Arras, in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region of France, during the First World War. The main combatants were the Canadian Corps, of four divisions, against three divisions of the German Sixth Army...
, one Canadian soldier recalled, "the horses were up to their bellies in mud. We'd put them on a picket line between the wagon wheels at night and they'd be sunk in over their fetlocks the next day. We had to shoot quite a number."
Thousands of horses were employed to pull field guns; six to twelve horses were required to pull each gun. During the Battle of Cambrai, horses were used to recover guns captured by the British from no man's land. In one instance, two teams of sixteen horses each had their hooves
Horse hoof
A horse hoof is a structure surrounding the distal phalanx of the 3rd digit of each of the four limbs of Equus species, which is covered by complex soft tissue and keratinised structures...
, tack and pulling chains wrapped to reduce noise. The teams and their handlers then successfully pulled out two guns and returned them to British lines, the horses jumping a trench in the process and waiting out an artillery barrage by German troops on the road they needed to take.
Dummy horses were sometimes used to deceive the enemy into misreading the location of troops. They were effectively used by Allenby during his campaigns in the east, especially late in the war. Evidence exists that the Germans used horses in their experimentations with chemical and biological warfare. German agents in the US are suspected of infecting cattle and horses bound for France with glanders
Glanders
Glanders is an infectious disease that occurs primarily in horses, mules, and donkeys. It can be contracted by other animals such as dogs, cats and goats...
, a disease which can fatally spread to humans; similar tactics were used by the Germans against the Russians, causing breakdowns in their ability to move artillery on the Eastern Front.
The value of horses was known to all. In 1917 at the Battle of Passchendaele, men at the front understood that "at this stage to lose a horse was worse than losing a man because after all, men were replaceable while horses weren’t." For Britain, horses were considered so valuable that if a soldier's horse was killed or died he was required to cut off a hoof and bring it back to his commanding officer to prove that the two had not simply become separated.
Allied forces
To meet its need for horses, Britain imported them from Australia, Canada, the USA, and Argentina, and requisitioned them from British civilians. Lord KitchenerHerbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener
Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener KG, KP, GCB, OM, GCSI, GCMG, GCIE, ADC, PC , was an Irish-born British Field Marshal and proconsul who won fame for his imperial campaigns and later played a central role in the early part of the First World War, although he died halfway...
ordered that no horses under should be confiscated, at the request of many British children, who were concerned for the welfare of their ponies
Pony
A pony is a small horse . Depending on context, a pony may be a horse that is under an approximate or exact height at the withers, or a small horse with a specific conformation and temperament. There are many different breeds...
. The British Remount Service, in an effort to improve the supply of horses for potential military use, provided the services of high quality stallion
Stallion
A Stallion is a male horse.Stallion may also refer to:* Stallion , an American pop rock group* Stallion , a figure in the Gobot toyline* Stallion , a character in the console role-playing game series...
s to British farmers for breeding their broodmares
Mare
Female horses are called mares.Mare is the Latin word for "sea".The word may also refer to:-People:* Ahmed Marzooq, also known as Mare, a footballer and Secretary General of Maldives Olympic Committee* Mare Winningham, American actress and singer...
. The already rare Cleveland Bay
Cleveland Bay
The Cleveland Bay is a breed of horse that originated in England during the 17th century, named after its colouring and the Cleveland district of Yorkshire. It is a well-muscled horse, with legs that are strong but short in relation to the body. The horses are always bay in colour, although a...
was almost wiped out by the war; smaller members of the breed were used to carry British troopers, while larger horses were used to pull artillery
Artillery
Originally applied to any group of infantry primarily armed with projectile weapons, artillery has over time become limited in meaning to refer only to those engines of war that operate by projection of munitions far beyond the range of effect of personal weapons...
. New Zealand found that horses over fared worse than those under that height. Well-built Thoroughbred
Thoroughbred
The Thoroughbred is a horse breed best known for its use in horse racing. Although the word thoroughbred is sometimes used to refer to any breed of purebred horse, it technically refers only to the Thoroughbred breed...
s of 15 hands and under worked well, as did compact horses of other breeds that stood . Larger crossbred horses were acceptable for regular work with plentiful rations, but proved less able to withstand short rations and long journeys. Riflemen with tall horses suffered more from fatigue, due to the number of times they were required to mount and dismount the animals. Animals used for draught work, including pulling artillery, were also found to be more efficient when they were of medium size with good endurance than when they were tall, heavy and long-legged.
The continued resupply of horses was a major issue of the war. One estimate puts the number of horses that served in World War I at around six million, with a large percentage of them dying due to war-related causes. In 1914, estimates put Britain's horse population at between 20,000 and 25,000. This shortfall required the US to help with remount efforts, even before it had formally entered the war. Between 1914 and 1918, the US sent almost one million horses overseas, and another 182,000 were taken overseas with American troops. This deployment seriously depleted the country's equine population. Only 200 returned to the US, and 60,000 were killed outright. By the middle of 1917, Britain had procured 591,000 horses and 213,000 mules, as well as almost 60,000 camels and oxen. Britain's Remount Department spent £67.5 million on purchasing, training and delivering horses and mules to the front. The British Remount Department became a major multinational business and a leading player in the international horse trade, through supplying horses to not only the British Army but also to Canada, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, Portugal, and even a few to the US. Shipping horses between the US and Europe was both costly and dangerous; American Expeditionary Force
American Expeditionary Force
The American Expeditionary Forces or AEF were the United States Armed Forces sent to Europe in World War I. During the United States campaigns in World War I the AEF fought in France alongside British and French allied forces in the last year of the war, against Imperial German forces...
officials calculated that almost seven times as much room was needed per ton for animals than for average wartime cargo, and over 6,500 horses and mules were drowned or killed by shell fire on Allied ships attacked by the Germans. In turn, New Zealand lost around 3 percent of the nearly 10,000 horses shipped to the front during the war.
Due to the high casualty rates, even the well-supplied American army was facing a deficit of horses by the final year of the war. After the American First Army, led by General John J. Pershing
John J. Pershing
John Joseph "Black Jack" Pershing, GCB , was a general officer in the United States Army who led the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I...
, pushed the Germans out of the Argonne Forest in late 1918, they were faced with a shortage of around 100,000 horses, effectively immobilizing the artillery. When Pershing asked Ferdinand Foch
Ferdinand Foch
Ferdinand Foch , GCB, OM, DSO was a French soldier, war hero, military theorist, and writer credited with possessing "the most original and subtle mind in the French army" in the early 20th century. He served as general in the French army during World War I and was made Marshal of France in its...
, Marshal of France
Marshal of France
The Marshal of France is a military distinction in contemporary France, not a military rank. It is granted to generals for exceptional achievements...
, for 25,000 horses, he was refused. It was impossible to obtain more from the US, as shipping space was limited, and Pershing's senior supply officer stated that "the animal situation will soon become desperate." The Americans, however, fought on with what they had until the end of the war, unable to obtain sufficient supplies of new animals.
Central Powers
Before World War I, Germany had increased its reserves of horses through state-sponsored stud farmStud farm
A stud farm or stud in animal husbandry, is an establishment for selective breeding of livestock. The word "stud" comes from the Old English stod meaning "herd of horses, place where horses are kept for breeding" Historically, documentation of the breedings that occur on a stud farm leads to the...
s and annuities paid to individual horse breeders. These breeding programs were designed specifically to provide high-quality horses and mules for the German military. These efforts, and the horse-intensive nature of warfare in the early 20th century, caused Germany to increase the ratio of horses to men in the army, from one to four in 1870 to one to three in 1914. The breeding programs allowed the Germans to provide all of their own horses at the beginning of the war. Horses were considered army reservists; owners had to register them regularly, and the army kept detailed records on the locations of all horses. In the first weeks of the war, the German army mobilized 715,000 horses and the Austrians 600,000. Overall, the ratio of horses to men in Central Powers nations was estimated at one to three.
The only way Germany could acquire large numbers of horses after the war began was by conquest. More than 375,000 horses were taken from German-occupied French territory for use by the German military. Captured Ukrainian territory provided another 140,000. The Ardennes
Ardennes (horse)
The Ardennes or Ardennais is one of the oldest breeds of draft horse, and originates from the Ardennes area in Belgium, Luxembourg and France. They are heavy-boned with thick legs and are used for draft work. The Ardennes is found in many colors, although black horses are very rare and are not...
was used to pull artillery for the French and Belgian armies. Their calm, tolerant disposition, combined with their active and flexible nature, made them an ideal artillery horse. The breed was considered so useful and valuable that when the Germans established the Commission for the Purchase of Horses in October 1914 to capture Belgian horses, the Ardennes was one of two breeds specified as important, the other being the Brabant
Belgian (horse)
The Belgian Draft horse or Belgian, also known as Belgian Heavy Horse, Brabançon, or Brabant, is a draft horse breed from the Brabant region of modern Belgium, where it is called the or Flemish: . It is one of the strongest of the heavy breeds...
. The Germans were not able to capture the horses belonging to the Belgian royal family, as they were successfully evacuated, although they captured enough horses to disrupt Belgian agriculture and breeding programs. Horses used for the transport of goods were also taken, resulting in a fuel crisis in Belgium the next winter as there were no horses to pull coal wagons. The Germans sold some of their captured horses at auction. Prevented by the Allies from importing remounts, the Germans ultimately ran out of horses, making it difficult for them to move supplies and artillery, a factor contributing to their defeat.
Casualties and upkeep
Battle losses of horses were approximately 25 percent of all war-related equine deaths between 1914 and 1916. Disease and exhaustion accounted for the remainder and the Germans specifically targeted horses with gunfire. The highest death rates were in East Africa, where in 1916 alone deaths of the original mounts and remounts accounted for 290% of the initial stock numbers, mainly due to infection from the tsetse flyTsetse fly
Tsetse , sometimes spelled tzetze and also known as tik-tik flies, are large biting flies that inhabit much of mid-continental Africa between the Sahara and the Kalahari deserts. They live by feeding on the blood of vertebrate animals and are the primary biological vectors of trypanosomes, which...
. On average, Britain lost about 15 percent (of the initial military stock) of its animals each year of the war (killed, missing, died or abandoned), with losses at 17 percent in the French theatre. This compared to 80 percent in the Crimean War
Crimean War
The Crimean War was a conflict fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the French Empire, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia. The war was part of a long-running contest between the major European powers for influence over territories of the declining...
, 120 percent in the Boer War
Boer War
The Boer Wars were two wars fought between the British Empire and the two independent Boer republics, the Oranje Vrijstaat and the Republiek van Transvaal ....
and 10 percent in peacetime. During some periods of the war, 1,000 horses per day were arriving in Europe as remounts for British troops, to replace horses lost. Some horses, having collapsed from exhaustion, drowned in ankle-deep mud, too tired to lift their heads high enough to breathe. Equine casualties were especially high during battles of attrition, such as the 1916 Battle of Verdun
Battle of Verdun
The Battle of Verdun was one of the major battles during the First World War on the Western Front. It was fought between the German and French armies, from 21 February – 18 December 1916, on hilly terrain north of the city of Verdun-sur-Meuse in north-eastern France...
between French and German forces. In one day in March, 7,000 horses were killed by long-range shelling on both sides, including 97 killed by a single shot from a French naval gun. By 1917, Britain had over a million horses and mules in service, but harsh conditions, especially during winter, resulted in heavy losses, particularly amongst the Clydesdale horses, the main breed used to haul the guns. Over the course of the war, Britain lost over 484,000 horses, one horse for every two men. A small number of these, 210, were killed by poison gas.
Feeding horses was a major issue, and horse fodder
Fodder
Fodder or animal feed is any agricultural foodstuff used specifically to feed domesticated livestock such as cattle, goats, sheep, horses, chickens and pigs. Most animal feed is from plants but some is of animal origin...
was the single largest commodity shipped to the front by some countries, including Britain. Horses ate around ten times as much food by weight as a human, and hay and oats further burdened already overloaded transport services. In 1917, Allied operations were threatened when horse feed rations were reduced after German submarine activity restricted supplies of oats from North America, combined with poor Italian harvests. The British rationed hay and oats, although their horses were still issued more than those from France or Italy. The Germans faced an even worse fodder crisis, as they had underestimated the amount of food they needed to import and stockpile before the beginning of the war. Sawdust was mixed with food during times of shortage to ease animals' sense of hunger, and many animals died of starvation. Some feed was taken from captured territories on the Eastern Front, and more from the British during the advances of the 1918 spring offensive.
Animals bolstered morale at the front, due to the soldiers' affection for them. Some recruitment posters from World War I showcased the partnership between horse and man in attempts to gain more recruits. Despite the boost in morale, horses could also be a health hazard for the soldiers, mainly because of the difficulty of maintaining high levels of hygiene around horses, which was especially noted in camps in Egypt. Horse manure was commonplace in the battle and staging areas on several fronts, creating breeding grounds for disease-carrying insects. Manure was supposed to be buried, but fast-moving battle conditions often made this impossible. Sanitation officers were responsible for the burial of horse carcasses, among other duties.
Many horses died as a result of the conditions at the front—of exhaustion, drowning, becoming mired in mud and falling in shell holes. Other horses were captured after their riders were killed. Horses also endured poor feeding and care, poison gas attacks that injured their respiratory systems
Respiratory system of the horse
In biology, the respiratory system of the horse is the means by which a horse circulates air around its internal organs.-Anatomy:The respiratory system begins with the nares, commonly known as the nostrils, which can expand greatly during intense exercise...
and skin, and skin conditions such as mange
Mange
Mange is the common name for a class of persistent contagious skin diseases caused by parasitic mites. Since mites also infect plants, birds, and reptiles, the term "mange," suggesting poor condition of the hairy coat due to the infection, is sometimes reserved only for pathological...
. When gas warfare began in 1915, nose plugs were improvised for the horses to allow them to breathe during attacks. Later, several types of gas masks were developed by both the Central and Allied nations, although horses often confused them with feedbags and destroyed them. Soldiers found that better-bred horses were more likely to suffer from shell shock and act up when exposed to the sights and sounds of war than less-well-bred animals, who often learned to lie down and take cover at the sound of artillery fire. Veterinary hospitals were established to assist horses in recovering from shell shock and battle wounds, but thousands of equine corpses still lined the roads of the Western Front
Western Front (World War I)
Following the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the German Army opened the Western Front by first invading Luxembourg and Belgium, then gaining military control of important industrial regions in France. The tide of the advance was dramatically turned with the Battle of the Marne...
. In one year, 120,000 horses were treated for wounds or disease by British veterinary hospitals alone. Ambulances and field veterinary hospitals were required to care for the horses, and horse trailer
Horse trailer
A horse trailer or horse van is used to transport horses...
s were first developed for use on the Western Front as equine ambulances. Disease was also a major issue for horses at the front, with equine influenza, ringworm, sand colic
Colic
Colic is a form of pain which starts and stops abruptly. Types include:*Baby colic, a condition, usually in infants, characterized by incessant crying*Renal colic, a pain in the flank, characteristic of kidney stones...
, sores from fly bites, and anthrax
Anthrax
Anthrax is an acute disease caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis. Most forms of the disease are lethal, and it affects both humans and other animals...
among the illnesses that affected them. British Army Veterinary Corps hospitals treated 725,216 horses over the course of the war, successfully healing at least 529,064.
When the war ended, many horses were killed due to age or illness, while younger ones were sold to slaughterhouses
Horse slaughter
Horse slaughter is the practice of slaughtering horses for meat. These animals come mainly from auctions, where they're sold by private sellers and breeders....
or to locals, often upsetting the soldiers who had to give up their beloved mounts. There were 13,000 Australian horses remaining at the end of World War I, but due to quarantine restrictions, they could not be shipped back to Australia. Two thousand were designated to be killed, and the remaining 11,000 were sold, most going to India as remounts for the British Army. Of the 136,000 horses shipped from Australia to fighting fronts in the war, only one, Sandy, was returned to Australia. New Zealand horses were also left behind; those not required by the British or Egyptian armies were shot to prevent maltreatment by other purchasers.
Legacy
The horse is the animal most associated with the war, and memorials have been erected to its service, including that at St. Jude on the HillSt Jude's Church, Hampstead Garden Suburb
Saint Jude-on-the-Hill is the Parish Church of Hampstead Garden Suburb which was founded in 1907 by Henrietta Barnett to be a model community where all classes of people would live together in attractive surroundings and social harmony.-History:...
, Hampstead
Hampstead
Hampstead is an area of London, England, north-west of Charing Cross. Part of the London Borough of Camden in Inner London, it is known for its intellectual, liberal, artistic, musical and literary associations and for Hampstead Heath, a large, hilly expanse of parkland...
, which bears the inscription "Most obediently and often most painfully they died faithful unto death." The Animals in War Memorial
Animals in War Memorial
The Animals in War Memorial is located at Brook Gate, Park Lane, on the edge of London’s Hyde Park and was designed by leading English sculptor, David Backhouse...
in London commemorates animals, including horses, that served with the British and their allies in all wars. The inscription reads: "Animals In War. This monument is dedicated to all the animals that served and died alongside British and allied forces in wars and campaigns throughout time. They had no choice." In Minneapolis, a monument by Lake of the Isles
Lake of the Isles
Lake of the Isles is a lake in Minneapolis, Minnesota connected to Cedar Lake and Lake Calhoun. It is home to winter ice skating and hockey, as well as a New Year's Eve celebration featuring roasted marshmallows and hot chocolate...
is dedicated to the horses of the Minnesota 151st Field Artillery killed in battle during World War I.
The men of the Australian Light Horse Brigade and New Zealand Mounted Rifles
New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade
The New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade, consisting usually of four units of mounted infantry, fought in World War I and World War II. Initially a milita, under the instruction of Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Henry Banks they formed the core of the New Zealand Army following successful service in the...
who died between 1916 and 1918 in Egypt, Palestine and Syria are commemorated by the Desert Mounted Corps Memorial
Mounted Memorial, Canberra
The Mounted Memorial, Canberra is on ANZAC Parade, the principal ceremonial and memorial avenue in Canberra, the national capital city of Australia.-Design:The memorial shows two Australian Army horse riders...
, or Light Horse Memorial, on ANZAC Parade
Anzac Parade
Anzac Parade can refer to:* ANZAC Parade, Canberra* Anzac Parade, Sydney* ANZAC Day parades for war veterans held on Anzac Day....
, in Canberra, Australia. The original version of this monument was in Port Said
Port Said
Port Said is a city that lies in north east Egypt extending about 30 km along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, north of the Suez Canal, with an approximate population of 603,787...
in Egypt, and was mostly destroyed during the 1956 Suez War. A piece from the original memorial, a shattered horse's head, was brought back to Australia and used as part of a new statue in the A is for Animals exhibition honoring animals who have served with the Australian military. The exhibition also contains the preserved head of Sandy, the only horse to return to Australia after the war.
War artist
A war artist depicts some aspect of war through art; this might be a pictorial record or it might commemorate how "war shapes lives." War artists have explored a visual and sensory dimension of war which is often absent in written histories or other accounts of warfare.- Definition and context:A...
Alfred Munnings
Alfred Munnings
Sir Alfred James Munnings KCVO, PRA was known as one of England's finest painters of horses, and as an outspoken enemy of Modernism...
was sent to France in early 1918 as an official war artist with the Canadian Cavalry Brigade. The Canadian Forestry Corps
Canadian Forestry Corps
The Canadian Forestry Corps was an administrative corps of the Canadian Army with its own cap badge, and other insignia and traditions.The Canadian Forestry Corps was created 14 Nov 1916. The crest of the Canadian Forestry Corps consists of a circle, with a beaver on top, superimposed on a pair of...
invited Munnings to tour their work camps in France after seeing some of his work at the headquarters of General Simms, the Canadian representative. He produced drawings, watercolors, and paintings of their work, including Draft Horses, Lumber Mill in the Forest of Dreux in 1918. Forty-five of his paintings were displayed at the Canadian War Records Exhibition at the Royal Academy
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
, many of which featured horses in war. Numerous other artists created works that featured the horses of World War I, including Umberto Boccioni
Umberto Boccioni
Umberto Boccioni was an Italian painter and sculptor. Like other Futurists, his work centered on the portrayal of movement , speed, and technology. He was born in Reggio Calabria, Italy.-Biography:...
with Charge of the Lancers and Terence Cuneo with his celebrated postwar painting of the saving of the guns at Le Cateau
Battle of Le Cateau
The Battle of Le Cateau was fought on 26 August 1914, after the British, French and Belgians retreated from the Battle of Mons and had set up defensive positions in a fighting withdrawal against the German advance at Le Cateau-Cambrésis....
during the Retreat from Mons. During World War I, artist Fortunino Matania
Fortunino Matania
Chevalier Fortunino Matania was an Italian artist noted for his realistic portrayal of historical subjects, including nude women.-Life:...
created the iconic image Goodbye Old Man that would be used by both British and American organizations to raise awareness of the suffering of animals affected by war. The painting was accompanied by a poem, The Soldiers Kiss, that also emphasized the plight of the horse in war.
Writing poetry was a means of passing the time for soldiers of many nations, and the horses of World War I figured prominently in several poems. In 1982, Michael Morpurgo
Michael Morpurgo
Michael Morpurgo, OBE FKC AKC is an English author, poet, playwright and librettist, best known for his work in children's literature. He was the third Children's Laureate.-Early life:...
wrote the novel War Horse, about a cavalry horse in the war. The book was later adapted into a successful play of the same name
War Horse (play)
War Horse is a play based on the book of the same name by acclaimed children's writer Michael Morpurgo, adapted for stage by Nick Stafford. Originally Morpurgo thought "they must be mad" to try to make a play from his best-selling 1982 novel. He was proved wrong by the play's instant success...
. The novel was later adapted into a screenplay, with the movie
War Horse (film)
War Horse is a 2011 British-American war drama film directed by Steven Spielberg and is intended for release in the United States on 25 December 2011 and in the United Kingdom on 13 January 2012...
set to be released on December 28, 2011 in the United States. In January 2010, the History Channel aired a documentary entitled The Real War Horse, depicting the horses of World War I.
External links
- The Mighty Warrior – Extended story of one Canadian cavalry horse
- British Cavalry on the Western Front 1916–1918