Germany’s World War 2 Horses
I learned only very recently that during World War 2 the German army was mostly horse-drawn: something like 80% of its logistics and transport relied on the horse, with only 20% being motorised. There are stories of captured German soldiers, waiting to be transferred to POW camps after D-Day, watching with amazement as truck after truck, tank after tank, rolled off the various landing craft. ‘Where are the horses?’ they asked their guards, to the guards’ bemusement.
The British Army replacement of cavalry and draft horses with motor vehicles had begun in 1928, and by the start of WW2 all regular UK mounted regiments, other than the Household Cavalry (which was not deployed to Europe) were motorized. Something similar happened in the US Army, although here it took a couple more years: ‘in December 1939, the United States Cavalry consisted of two mechanized and twelve horse regiments of 790 horses each.’ The Chief of Cavalry John K. Herr (military historian Roman Jarymowycz calls Herr ‘noble and tragic in his loyalty to horse’) hoped to increase these to 1275 horses each, and looked forward to the animals being widely deployed in combat. But it was not to be: after 1940 all US cavalry units were reformed into Armored Corps. ‘Debates over the integration of armor and horse units continued through 1941 but the failure of these attempts “to marry horse with armor” was evident even to casual civilian observers.’
I remember reading an interview with SF author Gene Wolfe from a decade or so ago, in which he waxed indignant, in positively Herr-esque terms, at the way horses had been discontinued from military service: with modern flak-jackets suitably adapted they’d be unstoppable, he insisted. Ah, how we romanticize this beast!
When Britain and America went to war, they did so with tanks, armoured cars, trucks, jeeps, motorcycles and so on. The two World War 2 belligerents who relied on horses to a large extent were Russia and Germany. In the case of Russia this was a function of a certain backwardness and inertia in their military, although the Soviets also deployed (and lost) a large number of tanks and trucks, supplied with fuel out of the Caucasus oilfields. And this was the real problem the Germans faced: the Brits had their Middle East oilfields, the Americans the oilfields of Texas and Arizona, but German access to fuel was acutely limited. ‘The German Army entered World War II with 514,000 horses, and over the course of the war employed, in total, 2.75 million horses and mules.’ There were, at any one time, 1.1 million equines in German military service.
Now, you might think horses would be easier to maintain than trucks and tanks, since they’re living creatures and can (we might assume) graze any available field. But in fact horses are much harder to send to war:
Horses seemed to be a cheap and reliable transport especially in the spring and fall mud of the Eastern Front but the associated costs of daily feeding, grooming and handling horses were staggering. In theory horse units could feed off the country, but grazing on grass alone rendered horses unfit for work and the troops had no time to spend searching the villages for fodder. Hard-working horses required up to twelve pounds of grain daily; fodder carried by the troops made up a major portion of their supply trains. Horses needed attendants: hitching a six-horse field artillery team, for example, required six men working for at least an hour. Horse health deteriorated after only ten days of even moderate load, requiring frequent refits; recuperation took months and the replacement horses, in turn, needed time to get along with their teammates and handlers. Good stables around the front line were scarce; makeshift lodgings caused premature wear and disease. Refit of front-line horse units consumed eight to ten days, slowing down operations.
In effect, the Germans conducted their war pretty much as Napoleon had done a century-and-a-half earlier; or a perhaps better comparison (since German generals also had trains, and better artillery) would be: the Germans were still fighting the way the American Civil War had been fought.
Now that is interesting (or I find it so) — but more interesting to me is the reason why we don’t tend to think of the Wehrmacht as a predominantly horse-drawn military. There are two main reasons, it seems. One is that Goebbels wanted to project the image of the Nazi war machine as possessing the highest of high-tech, and so gave specific orders that only mechanised traffic was to be filmed and shown in cinemas. This footage, endlessly repeated in documentaries and serving as the basis for later war-film-making, gives an unrepresentative portrait of how the German army actually made war.
The second reason is even more fascinating to me. Specialists and military historians may examine primary sources, letters, newspapers, photographs and so on, but most people get their sense of WW2 from TV documentary, war movies and video games, and this last has so prodigiously boomed in popularity over the last few decades that, for a generation now, it has become the primary historical resource. Call of Duty and similar games are often very carefully researched, and could if the game-designers chose reflect the reality of the war. But where die Pferde are concerned there are several constraints. One is that horses are much harder realistically to animate than trucks and tanks, and particularly difficult to ‘fit’ into the gameplay of beaches, hedges, trenches etc of such games (as opposed to the wide open spaces of Red Dead Redemption style-gaming … and even there, horses are a limited feature). Another consideration is that games featuring animals being shot, mutilated or killed cannot be rated PG in US and UK markets, posing a restriction on sales potential. Horses, accordingly, are rare in WW2-themed video games.
I think these two factors feed into one another. It is part of the way we construe ‘Nazi Germany’ that it figures a kind of superiority. In the same way that end-level bosses are bigger and stronger and more terrifying than the gameplay characters who go up against them, so the Third Reich is more advanced, more mechanised and high-tech, than the quote-unquote ‘good guys’. It’s a gaming logic, but it also feeds into other popular culture texts. Not only was the Third Reich not horse-drawn, it was actually a spacefaring power that colonised the moon.
In this we are colluding, in effect, with the Goebellsian propaganda version of Nazi Germany. Problematic, in several ways.
One other thought occurs to me: the science-fictionalisation of the Nazi regime has informed a lot more than movies like Iron Sky (2012). The ‘Empire’ in Star Wars is, perhaps, the most celebrated and influential of these fabulations: Nazis in space wholly defined by their high-tech machinery.
… and yet, in what looks rather like a subconscious re-memorialising of the Nazi’s reliance on horses in World War 2, the most famous Imperial battle of the original trilogy sees that same quasi-Nazi empire deploy gigantic robot equines:
The repressed always returns, as a famous German-speaker once said.
