May 21, 1919. The birth of Wyoming's cavalry.

Bundling newspapers, May 21, 1919.

The Casper paper reported on this day in 1919 that Wyoming's National Guard would become cavalry now that the Great War was over.

And it was correct.

One of the popular myths of history is that "World War One was the end of the cavalry".  It wasn't. We dealt with that old saw previously here in a couple of posts, those being:

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.

And

Persistent Myths XI: The World War Two Horsey Edition.

The World War Two Horsey Edition.Following on item VI above, its also commonly believed that the retention of horse cavalry in any army, or horses in general, during World War Two was just romantic naivete.Actually, it wasn't.  Every single army in World War Two had some mounted forces they used in combat. Every single one.  There are no exceptions whatsoever.  The simple reason was that there were certain roles that still could be preformed in no other way.One of the major combatants, the Germans, attempted to eliminate independent cavalry formations while retaining organic formations in infantry units and found the need so pressing that it ended up rebuilding its independent cavalry formations and incorporating irregular ones.  The United States and the United Kingdom both ended up creating "provisional" mounted formations in Italy, as they couldn't fill the reconnaissance role there in any other fashion.  One army, the Red Army, had huge numbers of cavalrymen throughout the war.The last mounted combat by the United States, prior to Afghanistan, actually took place in the context, with a mounted charge of sorts being done in late 1944 or early 1945 by a mounted unit of the 10th Mountain Division. The last German charge was in the closing weeks of 1945, when a German cavalry unit charged across an American armored unit, in part of their (successful) effort to flea the advancing Red Army. When the last Soviet charge was I do not know, but the USSR kept mounted cavalry until 1953.In terms of transportation, the Germans in fact were more dependent upon transport draft horses in World War Two than in World War One, which is also true for artillery horses.  Germany, the USSR, China, Japan, France, and Italy (at least) all still used horse drawn artillery to varying extents during the war.

As I've noted elsewhere on this blog, the reestablishment of National Guard unis after the Great War was very badly handled, as the Federal Government simply discharged all of the men in Guard units and didn't actually return them to state control.  This left the Guard having to rebuild without its existing structure intact.  Some states handled it better and more quickly than others.

But something else that did occur, and which was more structured, is that the Federal Government played a greater role on what the post war Guard units would be, thereby making them more useful upon mobilization.  In the case of Wyoming the Guard had been infantry when mobilized for the Punitive Expedition and then infantry again when first mobilized for World War One, but it soon became artillery and transport during the Great War.  

After World War One, and apparently as early as 1919, the decision was made to make the post war Wyoming National Guard cavalry.  That unit became the 115th Cavalry Regiment at some point after its introduction in the early 1920s.  It remained that until it became the 115th Cavalry (Horse Mech), a horse mechanized cavalry unit, shortly before World War Two.  Horse Mech was an experimental cavalry organization which featured both horses and vehicles and which was supposed to combine both types of transportation.  That's what the 115th was upon mobilization in 1940 for World War Two, but the use of the unit for cadre purposes meant that it did not deploy until late in the war, by which time it was the more conventional mechanized cavalry of the post 1943 pattern.

The Wyoming Army National Guard, which it became after the creation of the Air Force, retained cavalry into the 1950s, but by that time artillery units were being reintroduced to the Wyoming Guard.  Cavalry, by which we'd mean armored cavalry at that point, was phased out of the Wyoming Army National Guard at some point after the Korean War.

But from the 20s up until some point during World War Two, it was a horse featuring unit.  While it certainly could be disputed and probably should be, to some extent, that was its glory years.