Starting with:
The Horsey World War One Edition
U.S. Remounts, World War One.
It's commonly stated that the First World War demonstrated what any competent observer should have been able to know by simple deduction, that being that the age of the horse in war, or more particularly cavalry in war, was over. This appears again and again in everything from films to serious academic histories.
It's also complete bunk.
In reality, cavalry served effectively on every front during the war and the Army that acted to keep its cavalry fully separate to the extent it could, rather than folding cavalry elements into infantry divisions, had the most effective cavalry, that being the British. There are numerous examples of cavalry deployments from every front in the war in every year of the war, with some being very effective deployments indeed. Generally, properly deployed, cavalry proved to be not only still viable, but extremely effective. And it was also shown that not only did the machinegun not render cavalry obsolete, but cavalry was less impeded by machineguns than infantry, and it was more effective at deploying light machineguns defensively than infantry was.
This doesn't even touch, of course, on the heavy reliance on horses by the artillery and transportation corps.
An excellent book on this topic can be found in Horses In No Man's Land, which addresses very effectively the British cavalry. Less has been written on the cavalry of other armies, although a good book on the general topic was published by the U.S. Army shortly after World War One. Nonetheless, even with what is readily at hand, its pretty plain that the role of the horse wasn't diminished in World War One. Indeed, the Germans lost the war in 1918 as they lacked cavalry by that point in the war.
The World War One Trenches Edition
We all know that the miserable wretches in the Allied trenches stayed in them, in the Great War, until they were killed or injured, or driven mad.
Except they didn't.
Don't get me wrong. World War One was truly horrible. In comparison to the wars of the last half century, World War One was so awful its nearly unimaginable.
But the armies did not commit troops to the trenches until they were killed or injured. They rotated them out.
The British, for example, rotated troops out every four weeks. At any one time, a large number of troops were off the lines, and for that matter, even those at the lines were not necessarily in the foremost trench, but often in a reserve trench.
Again, this is not to say that the whole thing wasn't bad, it was. But the common idea that the soldiers were in the trenches for months on end with no relief is wrong.
For that matter, as an aside, the idea that cavalrymen were idled, in the British Army, in the rear for the whole war, except when actually deployed mounted, is wrong. They rotated them up to the front as infantry.
The World War One Parachute Edition
It's well know that World War aviators didn't wear parachutes, but less known why. Its sometimes stated that parachutes of the era couldn't fit in the small cockpits of the planes then in use.
Yes, they could. World War One aviators didn't wear parachutes as their superiors forbid it on the thesis that it would encourage pilots to bail out at the first sign of trouble. That was an absurd idea, but that's what the idea was.
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