Harnessing the Airplane

The success of military aviation and the atrophy of horse cavalry to the point of ceremonial irrelevance, suggests Lori Henning, has inclined us to assume that the cavalry’s response to the airplane in the early years of the twentieth century can only be understood as an irrational rejection of technological inevitability. Henning’s own portrait, however, recorded in this volume, of cavalry’s interaction with military aviation in this period is a more sympathetic one, suggesting that where cavalrymen resisted aviation’s encroachment on their roles and missions, this resistance was grounded in common sense given the limitations of aviation at the time. One of the very great virtues of Henning’s book is to demonstrate that cavalrymen in the inter-war years were not, for the most part, Colonel Blimps. Using a range of materials, particularly the professional journals of the British and American cavalry arms, Henning explores their interaction with the new military

Aeronautics · Art history · Aviation · Management · Portrait · Resistance (ecology · Sociology · Engineering · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Military History and Strategy · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact