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2025-01-05 Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
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'Draw your swords! Attack, march, march!': 105 years ago the 1st Cavalry Army was formed.
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
A useful article about a period of Russian military history that is mostly shrouded in politics.
by Yuri Aquilyanov
[RedStar] In 1919, the Civil War raged throughout the territory of the former Russian Empire. Troops of the Armed Forces of the South of Russia under the command of General A.I. Denikin launched a broad offensive on Moscow. General P.N. Wrangel's combined group captured Tsaritsyn (now Volgograd), and the cavalry corps of Generals K.K. Mamontov and A.G. Shkuro operated in the Voronezh region.
In order to combat the mounted masses of the Red Army, it was necessary to create something new, capable of opposing the professional cavalry, which consisted mainly of experienced cavalrymen of the Don and Kuban-Terek Cossack troops. This new formation was the 1st Cavalry Army - an operational-strategic association of the Red Army, designed to combat the enemy's mounted masses in the steppe expanses of southern Russia.
On November 17, 1919, the Revolutionary Military Council (RVS) of the Republic, at the suggestion of the RVS of the Southern Front, decided to create the 1st Cavalry Army, and already on November 19, the order for the troops of the Southern Front stated: "... the 1st Cavalry Corps of the Southern Front in its current composition is to be renamed the Cavalry Army of the RSFSR." S. M. Budyonny was appointed commander of the Cavalry Army. It included four cavalry divisions, a separate Caucasian special-purpose brigade, an armored motor detachment, four armored trains, and an air group (a total of 16,000–17,000 fighters).
The 1st Cavalry Army played a decisive role in the Donbass offensive operation. At the end of 1919, the Red Army faced a critical task: to liberate the Donetsk coal basin; the republic’s economy was in dire need of coal. On December 12, the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front set the tasks for its troops: the 1st Cavalry Army, which, together with the 9th and 12th rifle divisions attached to it, constituted the front’s strike group, was to advance on the Donbass and cut off the Volunteer Army’s retreat routes to the Don region.
The battle for the Donbass began on December 25, 1919. On the approaches to Donbass, the strike group dealt a stunning blow to Denikin's forces and immediately captured the crossings over the Seversky Donets. The 1st Cavalry Army routed the enemy's cavalry group consisting of the cavalry corps of Mamontov, Shkuro and Ulagay. On January 1, 1920, the troops of Budyonny's strike group and the 13th Army completely cleared Donbass of the enemy. They accomplished their task brilliantly. Soviet Russia received the largest coal and metallurgical base in the country at that time, with a population that overwhelmingly supported the Bolsheviks.
In January 1920, the 1st Cavalry Army, in cooperation with the troops of the 8th Army, liberated Taganrog and Rostov-on-Don. During these battles, the main forces of the White Guard Volunteer Army were routed, the enemy front was split into two parts, which allowed the Kuban and Don lands to be separated.
At the end of January 1920, the 1st Cavalry Army became part of the Caucasian Front. In February, operating in the Tikhoretsk direction, it carried out the Yegorlyk operation together with the 20th, 34th and 50th Rifle divisions of the 10th Army attached to it, during which the 1st Kuban Infantry Corps of the Whites and General Pavlov's cavalry group were routed.
In his book "Whites against the Reds", the white emigration activist Dmitry Lekhovich gave the following assessment of the commander of the 1st Cavalry Army: "He (S.M. Budyonny) turned out to be a resourceful and dashing cavalry commander, who knew how to grasp the main thing. For him, a horse was not so much a means of transportation as a weapon, and when he formed the cavalry corps, which later expanded into the First Cavalry Army, the horses in his units were the best, specially selected from the stud farms of Central Russia."
The 1st Cavalry Army, being a powerful strategic strike maneuver force as part of the Southwestern Front, made a significant contribution to the fight against the Polish intervention
The actions of the 1st Cavalry Army in the war with Poland in 1920 were a classic example of the use of a large cavalry unit for strategic purposes. In connection with the attack by Poland, the 1st Cavalry Army was transferred from the North Caucasus to Ukraine and included in the Southwestern Front. The cavalry made a thousand-kilometer march in mounted formation along the route Maikop - Rostov-on-Don - Yekaterinoslav - Uman. During the march, units of the 1st Cavalry Army routed rebel detachments operating in the rear of the troops of the Southwestern Front.
On May 25, 1920, the Cavalry Army concentrated in the Uman region. By this time, it numbered 16 thousand fighters, 304 machine guns and 48 artillery pieces.
The Front Command decided to break through the Polish front in Ukraine with the 1st Cavalry Army, initially directing the efforts of the Soviet troops of the Southwestern Front against the Kiev and then against the Odessa enemy group.
To accomplish this task, the 1st Cavalry Army was concentrated in a sector 10 kilometers northeast of Novo-Fastiv. Its combat formation was multi-echelon, which ensured the build-up of the force of the attack during the offensive. The 4th Cavalry Division was in the first echelon, with the 14th and 11th Cavalry Divisions positioned in a ledge behind its flanks, and the 6th Cavalry Division and Special Cavalry Brigade in the third echelon.
By the evening of June 3, the 1st Cavalry occupied the starting line for the offensive. It was raining during these days. The Polish command expected that the bad weather would prevent the Soviet troops from starting military operations. Nevertheless, on June 5, the 1st Cavalry Army, with a powerful blow on a narrow front, broke through the enemy's defenses in the Samgorodok-Snezhna sector, and on June 7 captured Zhitomir and Berdichev deep in the enemy's rear, causing a hasty retreat of all forces of the 2nd and 3rd Polish armies.
The Soviet offensive was so rapid that by the evening of the same day, the 1st Cavalry Army broke through north and east of Kazatin and reached the rear of the 3rd Polish Army. By the evening of June 7, the 4th Cavalry Division captured Zhitomir, destroying the Polish garrison and freeing seven thousand Red Army soldiers from captivity, who were returned to duty. On the same day, the 11th Cavalry Division captured Berdichev. In addition, the 1st Cavalry Army defeated the Polish cavalry group under the command of General Savitsky in the Belopolye region, which covered the left flank of the 6th Polish Army.
By June 8, Budyonny's men finally broke the resistance of the enemy troops concentrated in the Kazatin and Berdichev region. The depth of the 1st Cavalry Army's breakthrough into the rear of the Polish troops was 120-140 km. The Polish front in Ukraine was split into two parts. Having lost control of its troops, the Polish headquarters headed by Pilsudski, which was in Zhitomir, hastily redeployed to Novograd-Volynsky.
A participant in the White movement and later an émigré, Roman Gul, described the actions of the 1st Cavalry Army in the war with the Polish gentry in 1920: “This attack by the Scythian cavalry seemed like a catastrophe to Poland. The Budyonny men tore the enemy front with an 80-kilometer gap, and rushed headlong into the Polish rear, smashing and sweeping away everything in their path.”
Perhaps the most vivid picture of the moral impact of the Cavalry Army on the Polish bourgeois state was painted by Marshal Pilsudski himself. “However, these events had the strongest impact,” he wrote, “not on the front itself, but outside it, in the rear. Panic broke out in areas located even hundreds of kilometers from the front, and sometimes even in high headquarters, and spread deeper and deeper into the rear... A new weapon of struggle, which Budyonny's cavalry turned out to be for our troops, who were unprepared for this, became some kind of legendary, invincible force."
The 1st Cavalry Army, being a powerful strategic strike maneuver force as part of the Southwestern Front, made a significant contribution to the fight against the Polish intervention at the decisive stage of military operations, proved the viability of large cavalry units, their ability to solve problems of a strategic scale...
In May 1921, the 1st Cavalry Army was disbanded, but its headquarters remained until October 1923. The experience of the Civil War was further developed in the theory of Soviet military art in the interwar period. In the 1930s, when S.M. Budyonny headed the Red Army Cavalry Inspectorate, where combat regulations and instructions for cavalry actions in modern combat were actively developed.
During exercises in a number of military districts, the possibilities of creating and using cavalry-mechanized groups (KMG) in combat were studied as part of a front-line offensive operation.
The emergence of KMGs was due to the desire to combine the mobility of cavalry with the great striking force and high protection of the emerging tank and mechanized troops. The Red Army command worked out issues of close cooperation between cavalry, tank units, and aviation. KMGs were widely used during the Great Patriotic War. They were used primarily in forested and swampy, mountainous, and mountainous-desert terrain.
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