The fascination with the last of the cavalry is enduring, perhaps partly because of the horseman’s apocalyptic links: one of the contenders for the last cavalry charge, about which there is still no consensus, is the battle of Megiddo in 1918, on the Plain of Armageddon. Now we have another question: who was the last great cavalryman?
Not that it is actually posed in this engaging biography of the British contender to the title, the little-known Sir Richard McCreery, who fought in France in the Great War on horseback, and commanded Eighth Army in Italy during the second world war from a tank and occasionally an aircraft. But it is implicit in the author’s criteria: ‘the only member of the [non-mechanised] cavalry arm after 1918 to lead a British army in wartime’.
This, too, raises an interesting question: why were there not more senior generals of that arm in the second world war? Probably because their record in the Great War was patchy. Even discounting Haig, about whom every jury is hung, and Allenby, whose successes in Palestine were brilliant (backed by a surprisingly fine chief of staff and fellow cavalryman, Chetwode), the performance of Gough alone is enough to suggest a systemic problem; and there were many non-cavalry officers in 1940 who feared a repeat.
The best commanders of armoured formations proved on the whole to be Royal Tank Regiment men, such as John Crocker, ‘Pip’ Roberts and Michael Carver. In 1940 there was only one cavalryman commanding a division in the British Expeditionary Force in France, the 54-year-old Roger Evans, who had never served in armoured vehicles but was appointed from a staff post in India to command of 1st Armoured Division when Alan Brooke was promoted to command a corps.
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