The Problem of the Horse
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From the beginning of recorded history and into the 20th Century, armies have relied on horses for mobility and food, providing advantages for both mounted troops and armies with large horse populations that were difficult to overcome. While the advantages of having horses were many, those benefits came at a tremendous cost, eventually translating those assets into liabilities that were only too readily discarded when alternatives became viable.
The Favored Old World: Horse Domestication and Training
Science is unclear, and history is silent, on exactly when, and how equine domestication began, but historical evidence suggests that the concept was well in place by the 4th Millennium BC. The first domesticated horses were probably not much larger than modern Great Danes, if heavier. Lacking the stature to carry adult humans, and with no means for positive control, they likely served as pack animals. Thus, their use in hunting and prehistoric warfare was probably logistical, extending the effective range of hunting parties and raiding bands. As later events would prove, humans with greater mobility would have a clear advantage.
In time, horses got bigger
Innovations like the bit and the collar allowed horses to be controlled well enough to pull carts and chariots. The saddle appeared in central Asia by the 3rd Millennium, by which time Egypt and the Nile Valley were using large numbers of chariots for combat. We have descriptions of a battle on the field of Megiddo/Armageddon with large numbers of chariots bearing spearmen and archers. On the Asiatic steppes, the large band of grass allowed for practically unlimited grazing nearly year round. Provided with adequate water and grass, horse and ass populations—and consequently mule—grew in both size and number. Soon it became apparent that the donkey (genetically unrelated to the Old World ass but genetically somewhere between the horse and the reindeer) was a gentler and smaller version of the hard-to-train (and now nearly extinct) ass.
Outside of Eurasia and northern Africa, there were few horses
In Africa and the Pacific/Indian Ocean areas, the scarce evidence suggests that humans hunted the few species there were to extinction early. The zebra, distantly related to the Eurasian ass, is violently resistant to training or domestic breeding. The New World boasted horses and camels that were hunted to extinction ten thousand years before Columbus, but kept the llama and alpaca—the hemisphere’s only beasts of burden—in the remote Andes. When Eurasians arrived in the Americas, they brought animals the aboriginals had not seen in generations.
Mounting the Soldier: The Practicalities of Mounted Warfare
Up to about the 3rd Millennium BC, people harnessed the horse to a chariot, using it as a sort of battle taxi. That or an adventurous soul on the animal’s back hanging on for dear life precariously rode—and barely controlled—the animal and could fight only in the crudest sense. Large chariots or carts bearing multiple warriors were rare and expensive, as the horses simply weren’t that big and the control technology was unsure. Elephants, domesticated by the middle of the 1st Millennium BC, were better battle mounts because they could carry an operator (mahout) and a fighter.
Then came the bit and saddle
Simultaneous development of the under-tongue bit in India and the arched saddle on the central Asian steppes at the beginning of the 2nd Millennium BC made horses more usable as weapons of war or simple transportation. Saddles helped the rider stay balanced on the horse; the bit provided more positive control. The stirrup, developed in multiple places between the 1st Millennia BC and the 6th Century AD, joined horse and rider as a unit.
And along came the wagon
The axletree wagon, developed at about the same time, revolutionized transportation. A two-wheel cart can only carry what can be balanced over its single axle. The number of horses needed to pull the cart diminishes its efficiency rapidly, and controllability even faster. A controllable four-wheel wagon is a much more versatile vehicle than a cart, one that can use not only more, but larger horses, and that can carry an operator using complex harnesses and bridles. With a greater carrying capacity, larger horses became more important in areas that had the industrial base to build both wagons and harnesses. In Asia, wagons were rare and only used by merchants, and smaller horses were the norm. Europe, where wagons were common, bred horses to great size.
When East met West in war, the mounted arms of both were decidedly different in strength and endurance.
The early encounters between the Mongols and Europeans of the 12th century pitted two different approaches to warfare, and the Mongol horse archers maintained a decided edge. The big European horses dominated mounted encounters between Muslims and Christians in North Africa and Iberia, but again, different combat styles obscured this. Camels, used primarily for transport and infrequently for fighting, were awkward and testy to use as weapons of war, especially against the more nimble and less cantankerous horse. As time passed, the European industrial base grew while that of the rest of the world stagnated or shrank. And with that growth, the development of Europe’s mounted arms and land transport couldn’t help but improve.
Gods and Men: Non-Horse Cultures Encounter Horses
When Europeans began to explore and colonize outside the Eurasian landmass, they encountered indigenous populations to whom the horse was an object of mystery. In the Americas, the natives met mounted soldiers with some wonder at first, which soon passed into envy and, gradually, nonchalance. In Mexico, the Aztecs countered cavalry with larger numbers of warriors; early Spanish explorers brought only a few horses, which quickly sickened and died. However, in the Americas, horse breeding went wild, creating vast horse herds in a matter of decades.
The Indians of the North American plains readily adapted the horse and mounted combat.
Plains Indians, using leather tanned from the bison, could make whatever tack they needed, and their buffalo hunts became more and more successful with each passing generation. The horse was slower to catch on east of the Mississippi, where denser populations and more farming limited the size of the pasturages. The woodland Indians appreciated the horse for transport, but had little use for them in their style of prisoner-taking warfare. Yet, the horse became revered as a status symbol around the Great Lakes, and once again became a source of food. In South America, the horse herds introduced were much smaller, and there were fewer nomadic hunter-gatherer cultures there.
It wasn’t until the 19th century that sub-Congo Africans saw horses in appreciable numbers.
Early encounters showed no substantial challenges to the little mounted combat they saw. The style of mass warfare used by the Zulu and their Xotha rivals underwent a change in tactics influenced more by the massed firepower from breech-loaded rifles than by mounted warriors. Southern African aboriginals didn’t adapt the horse or mounted combat, perhaps because there simply wasn’t time: the major encounters were over and their semi-nomadic society completely transformed within a century.
The End of an Epoch: Artillery, National Armies, Rifles and Mechanical Motive Power
The biggest challenge to the horse came gradually at first, but in time built up into a perfect storm of causality. Smoke clouds from firearms initially confused the horses, but with training, they took it in stride. Artillery was another matter entirely, simply because guns killed quicker and at greater range. While larger herds could accommodate those losses, for a time, trained horse losses remained a problem. With the French Wars of the late 18th and early 19th century, national armies strained the culture of cavalry.
Horse logistics were a quartermaster’s nightmare.
Down through the centuries, horses have needed more and more caring, tack, saddlery, shoeing and above all, fodder. By the 19th Century, a typical horse needed twenty pounds of fodder and roughage to work a six-hour day. A six-horse 9-pounder foot artillery limber needed a third of a ton of horse chow every three days; ten times the required weight of rations for the gunners and four times the weight of ammunition. And a single gun needed at least one ammunition caisson to be serviceable, so double the gun limber’s needs; three times more for horse artillery, where the gunners rode to battle. As the armies grew larger, the demands for horses grew with them; a ten-horse team hauling a two-ton supply wagon needed a minimum of two tons of shoes and nails every month. Because of their slower pace and difficulty in training, supplymen use oxen for the heaviest loads and the longest hauls. An ox can graze in a weed patch every other day and still be able to work. A horse can’t work more than a few hours on a day’s fine grass grazing, and 500 horses (a full lancer regiment in Europe, or two batteries of foot artillery) could strip an acre of grass in a few hours.
The rifled musket changed the battlefield in more ways than one
Rifles changed not only the heavy/light infantry equation and demanded larger caliber artillery, it also eliminated the shock value of cavalry on infantry. Although the pike and bayonet had already influenced horse operations, the percussion-cap-equipped rifled musket emptied saddles faster and at greater range, making cavalry less useful as a shock weapon. Pursuit operations still needed cavalry, but these became fewer as time went on. By the mid-19th Century, cavalry was at its most effective when fighting other cavalry, performing reconnaissance, screening and when rounding up stragglers.
Horse-borne logistics faded in Europe and the Americas
But they held on in Asia until the 20th century. It was a combination of technological developments that doomed the horse as a means of motive power. First, the steam engine supplanted sails on inland waterways, making rivers and lakes important logistical targets. Then, trains reached every flat surface that could bear their weight, removing the heaviest wagons from the demands of the horse and ox. Then, germ theory swept through public consciousness, and the sheer volume of horse droppings became a matter of public health. In 1913, the City of New York had to dispose of over 130,000 horse carcasses; just imagine how much manure they had to shovel that year…and the years before. This alone gave the impetus to the new automotive industry to develop the truck, running on the newly invented pneumatic tire and using the internal combustion engine. Automobile infrastructure appeared practically overnight. As prime movers for armies, the automotive industry doomed the horse in a generation. The horse's role as a weapon of war was ending.
“Through Mobility We Conquer:” The End of Mounted Cavalry and Horse-borne Logistics
The horse, as an integral part of armies for six thousand years, would not leave that quickly, or that easily. World War I saw enormous numbers of mounted troops waiting for breakthroughs on the Western Front…that never happened, while in the Middle East rails, steamships, armored cars and airplanes supported mounted operations, and also supplanted them. Between the wars, armored vehicles developed to provide the same shock that heavy cavalry had provided centuries before. Still, planners saw mounted cavalry units exploiting their breakthroughs…at least for a while.
In 1942, the American and British armed forces resolved to remove the horses from their armies
They replaced horses with armor, trucks, and airplanes. They had an advantage in that between them they controlled 80% of the world’s gasoline and diesel fuel production; too, the US alone had half the manufacturing capacity on the planet. The last mounted charge of WWII was in the Philippines in February 1942. The Americans converted their Army’s 1st Cavalry Division to infantry, while retaining its size and structure.
The luxury of forgoing the horse wasn’t possible for other armies
In 1939, German Panzer divisions still needed 1,600 horses to tow their heavy artillery. As late as 1945, German anti-partisan units rode mountain ponies. Soviet armies relied on an enormous number of wagons and carts for supply operations between railheads and the fighting fronts right up to the battle of Berlin. Japanese factories in Korea still made ten thousand horseshoes a week to support their field forces when the war ended in 1945. Swedish mounted units interned German refugees on horseback at the border of Norway in the spring of 1945. Finally, there were still some mounted Arab units as late as the 1967 war with Israel, and the Swiss Army mechanized their last mounted units in 1970. American observers on horseback in Afghanistan illuminating targets for F-16 bomb runs were routine early in that 21st Century conflict.
The horse was a fundamental part of warfare for as long as we have records
Their demise as tools of war reflected the patterns of human growth and the exponential expansion of human populations in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Long our ally in peace and war, the horse is now a friend and a means of occasional transport, rather than the prime movers of war.
The Persistent Past: The Steele Diaries
How we know about the past—including about horses—is at least as important as what we know, because how we know it tells us how reliable what we know is.
The Persistent Past (formerly, Ways of Knowing) is about a scholar who finds an old trunk full of papers and pictures and diaries…and a few medals. He sorts them out and writes Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries. Verifying the truth of those contents is the job not just of the historian, but of the detective, the graphologist and, eventually, the genealogist. Available from your favorite bookseller in 2025…I hope.
Coming Up…
Six Ways to Rewrite History III
Antietam Reconsidered
And Finally...
On 24 August:
1814: British troops burn Washington, DC. The peak achievement of George Cockburn’s Chesapeake campaign, the invading British suffered higher casualties than the retreating Americans, though the Americans lost more ships and, of course, buildings, including the Library of Congress and the White House.
1979: Gordon Spence discovers the largest known prime number in Hampstead, England. If you really want to know, it’s 282,589,933 − 1, a number which has 24,862,048 digits when written in base 10. Now, if someone will just tell me what possible, practical use this or any other prime number is…
And today is NATIONAL WAFFLE DAY, commemorating this day in 1869 when Cornelius Swarthout was awarded a patent for his waffle iron in the United States. His was not the first waffle iron, just the most successful up to that date.