Talk:Cultivator No. 6

Cavalry

During WW1 the General Staff, at heart cavalrymen, had held back large numbers of men hoping for the opportunity for vast cavalry charges after the infantry had cleared a way through the barbed wire. This charge never happened and in 1939 there were still cavalry officers who had been hoping for such a charge all their professional lives. In 1939 "Next time" seemed to have arrived.

Both Churchill and Ironside were cavalry men at heart and the mechanical mole project seemed to offer some promise of being able to open up a clear route for cavalry to charge.

Sir Stanley Goodall was a realist and had long arguments with the various military authorities about grandiose projects including the Admiralty who wanted to build large battleships rather than the more useful and versatile smaller warships. He seems to have been less than enthusiastic about this mechanical mole.

Churchill memoirs were written some years after the events and must inevitably be suspect for the original and real motives. Saving French lives makes more altruistic reading than clearing a path for cavalry charges.AT Kunene (talk) 07:55, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

By 1939 the British Army was entirely mechanised, so there would have been no horse-borne cavalry to perform any such charges no matter how much some cavalry officers may have wished it. By then all British cavalry regiments had become armoured, i.e., tank or armoured car, equipped, with the possible exception of a few ceremonial and some overseas establishments.