Horses on Wheels

One week last fall, many a U. S. armchair general, vicariously glorying in the dash and glamor of Stuart, Forrest and Sheridan, thought he saw cavalry go down forever with the evening sun. That first week in September the famed Polish cavalry threw itself into the path of the German mechanized columns, and was swept out of the way like rubbish. But hard-boiled military men, especially the Germans, knew that cavalry was still a long way from being scrap-heaped. The Poles' mistake had been to use cavalry as striking forces rather than as screens and feelers. The Germans, no slaves to military tradition, used cavalry in the Lowlands and France, reportedly had a ratio of one horse to every three men.

The modern mission of cavalry is reconnaissance, screening advances, protecting flanks and rear in retreat. Men on horses still travel fast through woods, swamps, across streams where mechanized equipment cannot go. Last week, on the tree-fringed parade ground at Fort Oglethorpe, the U. S. Army's one modern cavalry regiment with full equipment showed its paces before leathery Brigadier General Charles L. Scott.

Past the reviewing stand trotted the Sixth Cavalry's first squadron (cavalry-talk for battalion): 424 horses carrying troopers armed with Garand rifles and automatic pistols, 48 pack horses loaded with machine and anti-tank guns. After them in a cloud of blue smoke snorted the second squadron: 68 armored scout cars, no motorcycles, trucks, rolling kitchens, ambulances. Spectators found the motor squadron old stuff. More interested in the horse squadron, they watched it trot up to 58 truck-trailer combinations, unsaddle, walk its mounts up inclined tail gates, tie them inside. Within 10 1/2 minutes horses were loaded eight to a trailer, troopers were aboard, the train pulled out.

More pleased than anyone at this exhibition was the Army's Chief of Cavalry, long-legged, polo-playing Major General John Knowles Herr. Few weeks ago John Herr lost two of his crack outfits when the First and Thirteenth, long since mechanized, were transferred from the Cavalry to the new Armored Corps (TIME, July 8). Last week the National Guard Bureau announced that its 19 cavalry regiments would shortly trade in their hay-burners for gas-eating trucks and guns.

But this week the Sixth (60 officers, 1,132 men) showed what a newfangled horse outfit could do in maneuvers in Louisiana; and the lean troopers of the Fourth, now about three-fourths equipped, were doing the same thing in Minnesota. Still to be brought up to strength are eleven more regular Army regiments. Equipped to travel 130 miles in six hours on tires, able to cover 40 miles a day, weeks on end, under their own power, the Army's modern horse outfits have many a spot in the hemisphere they can still call their own. For service in the swamps and woods of the southern U. S., in the arroyos of the Mexican border, in the Rockies and the Appalachians, the man in the McClellan saddle thinks he can wipe the eye of any carburetor trooper, may yet have a chance to prove it.

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