The British colonies provided the war’s colonial forces. The four primary colonial forces were African, Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian. Eventually, the English colonies provided two-fifths of the mounted troops used in the war, the largest contingents coming from South Africa, followed by Australia.
Probably the most distinguished colonial unit of the war was the Imperial Light Horse (ILH). The unit members were uitlanders, mostly from Transvaal. The two founders were the South African-born Aubrey Wools-Sampson and the Australian Walter Karri Davies. Both men were advocates of uitlander rights. They began their unit by recruiting 500 picked men from the more than 5,000 who applied. They selected the initial squadron based on knowledge of the veldt, horsemanship, and marksmanship. The Natal colonial government sponsored the unit, and the British government sanctioned it for service at a standard rate for colonial troops. It immediately became one of the elite units of the war, eventually growing to a regimental strength of 1,200, and ultimately formed a second regiment. Commanders specifically asked for the ILH, and it fought in many of the important battles in the first year of the war. After the war, it became the premier unit of the South African colony, and its descendant remains a part of the national army of South Africa.40
Australia offered units for service before the war began. Each of the Australian colonial states raised units. They would eventually number more than 16,000 troops. Though small in number, the Australian contingent contributed capability out of proportion to its total numbers. This was because most of the Australian contingent was mounted and made up almost 20 percent of the total mounted force. In addition, the Australian mounted forces came from a similar climate as found in South Africa and could match the Boers in horsemanship and fieldcraft. Thus, the quality of the Australian force was exceptional and ideally suited to the war. As the war progressed the British authorized independent companies from the same colonial state to unite in battalion size contingents under a major. These units were approximately 400 to 600 men strong. In 1901 Australia became a sovereign nation, and the subsequent mounted units provided to serve in the Boer War were designated Australian Commonwealth Light Horse. A Boer described the abilities of the Australians:
For the first time in the war, we were fighting men who used our own tactics against us. They were Australian volunteers and though small in number we could not take their position. They were the only troops who could scout our lines at night and kill our sentries while killing and capturing our scouts. Our men admitted that the Australians were more formidable opponents and far more dangerous than any other British troops.41
Though not skilled in the art of conventional combat, the Australian contingent, and other colonial forces, gave the British mounted forces the fieldcraft, marksmanship, and horsemanship skills that were essential to successful antiguerrilla warfare.
Yeomanry units were volunteers from the British home guard. They were not mobilized for the war but individual volunteers were taken into service and formed into units specifically for deployment to South Africa. These units were poorly trained and notorious for their poor horsemanship and horse mastership. The final type of unit formed for the war were the mounted infantry. These units formed by mounting battalions of regular infantry regiments. Though poor riders, they were a valuable tactical tool once they arrived at the place of battle and dismounted.
Weapons and Equipment
The British cavalry began the war armed and equipped in typical nineteenth-century European fashion: swords and carbines for all cavalry, plus lances for those regiments. During the war the issue carbine became the Lee-Enfield six-round magazine carbine, which was 40 inches long and weighed 7.5 pounds. The cavalry sword was the Model 1890 pattern, now in keeping with the trend to field utility, painted drab. Another new innovation was the new sword scabbard was fitted with frogs and not carried on the trooper’s person. Instead it fitted into a holder that buckled to the saddle on the near side below the cantle. A bandolier of five ten-round pouches carried ammunition for the carbine.42 Yeomanry units were equipped similar to the regular cavalry.
Unlike cavalry, colonial units as well as mounted infantry only carried rifles and bayonets. In October 1900, the cavalry began to reequip to better meet the needs of the war. First they turned in their swords and lances. The only exception was that the regular cavalry regiments of General French’s cavalry division retained their swords. Carbines were also turned in. Cavalry armed with carbines had a maximum range of 1,200 yards but an effective range of only about 200 to 300 yards. They needed rifles to duel with the Boers. As replacements, the army issued all cavalry units the infantry pattern Lee-Enfield .303-caliber rifle with bayonet. This permitted the cavalry to match volleys with the Boer riflemen armed with Mausers. The Lee-Enfield, like the Mauser, was a bolt-action magazine-fed rifle. It had twice the magazine capacity of the Mauser, 10 rounds, but each round had to be loaded individually, thus making it slower to reload. Mounted troops carried the rifle slung over the shoulder. Arming cavalry with the rifle required retraining of cavalry in dismounted tactics and shooting. By June 1901 the reequipping process was complete.
Tactics
During phase one of the war, British cavalry were used primarily as auxiliaries and rarely played an important part in operations. In the second phase of the war, under Lord Roberts, British cavalry operations began to improve considerably. Part of the reason was the formation of a cavalry division under the able leadership of Major General John French. This division, using the speed and mobility inherent in a mounted organization, was the key to the successful offensive that eventually captured Pretoria in 1900. The most decisive action, which began the string of tactical success that marked the offensive, was the relief of the British garrison at Kimberly by French’s division. French’s cavalrymen then defeated and captured Boer General Conje ‘Cone’s large commando of 4,105 men at Paardeberg on February 27, 1900.
In the third phase of the war, the mounted forces played the all-important role of pursuing the raiding Boer commandos, while infantry units provided security of static positions and manned the growing lines of blockhouses. The tactics intended to keep unrelenting pressure on the Boer commandos, trap them between the pursuing columns and a static infantry force or a natural terrain feature, and then destroy them. Many of the columns that pursued the Boer commandos were all-arms columns that had no hope of finding the fast-moving Boers. The best column commanders formed all mounted subunits that detached from the main column. The best of these pursuit units, and the ones that were most successful, adopted the field manners of the Boers.
Colonel Harry Scobell’s force represented mounted pursuit units at their best. Scobell lived like his men and insisted that subordinates keep horse loads to a minimum. In Scobell’s column food was a luxury, and the troopers ate well only when they captured Boer stores. Pack mules carrying three days of food for a six-day expedition provided the column’s logistics support. He did not permit wagons. He led a mixed force consisting of 1,100 men and horses of the 9th Lancers, the Cape Mounted Rifles (a colonial unit), and British yeomen. On the night of September 5–6, 1901, in the midst of pouring rain, he led his men on a night march. Following the lead of Afrikaner scouts, they planned to attack the laager of a 100-man Boer commando. The commando had taken shelter for the night in a sheep shed on an abandoned farm. In the darkness, the British cavalry surrounded the position and waited until dawn. However, they didn’t realize the Boers were in the shed and not the stone house that was also on the property. Just as the sky was beginning to pale, the Boers in the sheep shed surprised a squadron of mounted lancers approaching the farmhouse. The exchange of fire took down the first rank of lancers, but then the massed fire of the surrounding British tore into the shed. The Boers, surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered, surrendered as quickly as they could. The British suffered 10 killed, mostly among the lancers. The Boers lost 13 dead, 46 wounded, and 107 captured. None escaped. The British later executed the eight leaders of the com
mando.43 This small sharp success by Scobell’s force represents the characteristics of British mounted antiguerrilla columns at their best: good reconnaissance and intelligence, stealthy movement and surprise, hard riding and speed, and overwhelming combat power.
Only the best British mounted units could match Scobell’s capability. Rarely were the British regular cavalry or yeomen a central part of the best mobile columns, though their performance improved dramatically over the course of the war. The colonial units were the best suited for mobile operations. New tactics, colonial support, and improved performance by the British regulars gave the British a relatively effective mounted force by the end of the war. As one Boer described the British mounted forces: “the enemy has adopted our methods of fighting. . . . He is making night raids all over the country, and practicing our own stratagems upon us.”44
The tempo and scope of British mounted actions in the Boer War was tremendous. The area of operations was half the size of Europe. Men and horses were pushed to their limits. The British tactic of continuous pressure by multiple mounted columns, though effective, strained British resources of men and horses. These tactics, combined with a general lack of knowledge of horse care on the part of many British mounted units, contributed to a phenomenal loss of horses during the course of the war.
Horses and Horsemanship
The type of horse preferred for cavalry operations changed drastically over the course of the British experience in South Africa. Many characteristics of previous British cavalry operations, however, remained unchanged. The British remount system proved itself as efficient as ever. Unfortunately, British horse management in the field was also as derelict as it had ever been.
Horses
At the beginning of the war, the British standard for cavalry horses remained what it had been for over a century: a relatively large horse, over 15.2 hands tall, and of the Thoroughbred hunter type. By the end of the war, the preferred type had changed dramatically. In the summer of 1901 the army ordered purchasing officers in the United States not to buy any more cavalry horses and to only buy cobs. Cobs were a short stocky horse type, generally in the 14 hands range that the army saw as the ideal mount for the mounted infantry. However, their endurance and their ability to stand up to the poor diet and strains of campaigning caused their migration from the army into the cavalry ranks. As their reputation grew, Kitchener reduced the preferred size of cobs from 14.3 to 14.1 hands.45
To meet the needs of the mounted forces, the army imported horses and cobs from all over the world. There was little unanimity of opinion among British mounted leaders regarding the quality of the numerous types of horses brought to South Africa. Imported Russian cobs stood up to the conditions of the theater well, but some cavalrymen thought them too slow for effective operations. Others thought they were the best of the imported horses. Few regarded Hungarian, Australian, and Argentine imports very favorably. English horses were too big and required too much care. Indian Walers were a quality remount. But, for every knowledgeable opinion, there was an equally knowledgeable opposite view. This was a function of the different officers seeing different groups of remounts under different conditions and after different transport experiences.46
The South African horse was the horse that received the highest praise from British cavalry leaders. This horse had the advantage of going into service without undergoing the hardships of travel and acclimation. The South African horse had considerable Arab and Thoroughbred influence. An officer of the Rimington Scouts, a colonial unit, described some of the qualities which made the South African horse a favorite:
The South African pony, wretched little brute as he looks. [He] will triple and amble on, week after week and month after month, with a heavy man on his back, and nothing to eat but the pickings of sour, dried-up veld grass and an occasional handful of Indian corn. . . . All the imported breeds will gradually languish and fade away and drop and die, worn down by the unremitting work and the bad, insufficient food; but your ragged little South African will still amble on, still hump himself, or make an occasional hearty meal off the straw coverings of a case of whisky bottles. With an action that gives the least possible exertion; with the digestion of an ostrich and the eye of a prairie dog for any stray morsel of food; with an extraordinary capacity for taking rest in snatches and recouping himself by a roll whenever you take his saddle off.47
Perhaps no war in history saw a wastage of horses on the scale as those that suffered and died in service to the British army in South Africa. Where the American Civil War saw perhaps as many as 50 percent of the animals in service die, in the Boer war British army horses suffered a fatality rate of almost 70 percent—350,000 of 500,000 perished. British commanders in the field blamed the remount system for British horse losses. In fact, when the British government did a detailed investigation of the British remount system after the war, they discovered that the very small remount service responded extremely well to the totally unanticipated and extraordinary demands placed upon it. By January 1902, the British remount system was able to supply 14,000 horses and 2,000 mules a month to South Africa.48 Some knowledgeable contemporaries determined that Major General Thurman, the Inspector General of cavalry who oversaw the remount system, was most responsible for the military success on the battlefield. Perhaps the only somewhat legitimate critique of the remount system was that, like the Union system in the American Civil War, it was so efficient providing remounts that the system encouraged units in the field to neglect the mounts they had.
The British cavalry, because of its preference for its own horses and its extended colonial service, was experienced with moving horses by ship. In the early months of the Boer War, a new system was designed for horse accommodation aboard ships. With the new system, the losses during transit averaged 3.5 percent. The greatest losses averaged 9.23 percent on horses coming from Britain. This was attributed to the requirement to only ship from specific home ports, and to the rough seas in the home waters. The lowest percent lost was 2.65 percent of horses crossing the Atlantic from the United States and South America. Overall, sea travel only accounted for 3.7 percent of all horse losses.49
The British ability to meet the massive requirements for horses in South Africa was a success enabled by foreign purchases. The largest overseas purchases were made in the United States. At its height, the British army was shipping more than 6,000 horses a month out of the port of New Orleans. The British set up a very elaborate remount purchase system in the United States headquartered in Kansas City. It included a 7,000 acre ranch in Missouri used to classify horses and check them for disease and soundness. Another massive operation was set up at New Orleans, where horses rested for four days before loading on ships. Horses traveled up to 3,000 miles to the port of embarkation from all over North America. This travel was on special fast horse trains, which usually moved 300 to 400 horses per train. These dedicated and efficient rail accommodations were not available anywhere else in the world. By American law, horses were required to be periodically unloaded, exercised, watered, and fed.50 The efficient American transport system resulted in few losses before embarkation.
With a plentiful supply of serviceable horses, and an efficient system for getting them to the theater of war, the cause of horse losses was traced to the theater of operations where efficient operations broke down. There, the holding depots were notoriously undermanned, which prevented the depots from breaking and training horses, and even from exercising them. Units in the theater were also chronically short of farriers. A cavalry regiment was authorized three farrier sergeants and 18 shoeing-smiths. In the first five months of the war the entire theater remount department had a total of two shoeing-smiths. The organization of the army’s veterinary services also proved to be defective. Veterinarians were withdrawn from regiments in 1887 and consolidated in the army veterinary corps. However, the corps was not organized to segregate and hospitalize sick horses. This left sick horses in the units or depots where they infected other h
orses. The one veterinary hospital in theater was used to hold healthy remounts for issue, instead of quarantining and servicing sick horses.51
Intentionally poor ration allocations resulted in the near starvation of thousands of horses that later succumbed to disease. British commanders, despite veterinary advice to the contrary, mandated a near-starvation ration for unit horses. This was because of a poor appreciation of the type of horses that the troops had, and the working conditions of the horse. Financial and transport constraints also limited the ration. Mounted commanders argued that a smaller number of horses well fed would have made a more effective mounted force than more horses who were starving. The short rations available, sometimes no hay for weeks at a time, also motivated commanders to ask for small cobs instead of full-size cavalry horses.52
Horsemanship and Horse Management
The difficulties faced by the remounts caused by the circumstances of war and administration were severe. However, upon arrival in the units many horses faced their greatest challenges. The basic requirements of mounted operations—horsemanship and horse management—were lacking in many British units. Even the cavalry units, though they knew how to ride, were terrible at taking care of their horses. One of the reasons was unprofessional and detached leadership. The historian of the 12th Lancers wrote, “It has been contended that the British cavalry officer talked more and knew less about horses than anyone else on earth.”53
The horsemanship of British cavalry was sufficient not to effect operations. Most colonial cavalrymen were first-rate riders. However, the tales of the horsemanship of the mounted rifle units and the yeomanry were reminiscent of the Union Civil War cavalry experience. An anonymous yeoman reported: “We got a draft of men and it was a pantomime when they got their horses (rough horses off the veldt). The air was full of arms and legs and saddlery. When the dust cleared there were men lying in all directions and they lost thirty horses, saddles and all!”54
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