Of all the mountains I have seen, the Owen Stanley range is the most fear-inspiring. . . . New Guinea is very rough country and we were constantly warned of the diseases we could catch . . . but I did not give a damn, any more.

I’ve been a’ wanderin’ in the Owen Stanleys. Mid-1990s. It’s brutal. I cannot imagine doing Infantry work in that country, with someone like the Japs trying to kill me. There were a few times when it almost killed with no outside help at all. We’ve all heard how hard Merrill’s Marauders had it, but I’m guessing the allied forces in PNG had it infinitely worse.

As the Germans and Soviets showed, horse cavalry was not quite obsolete during WWII–The 1st Cav would have been an ideal tool to use in Italy, for example. Unfortunately, the faddish disdain for the horse and fascination with motorization put paid to that potential, and the 1st Cav wound up taking all of its experienced horse and mule handlers to war in the Pacific. Where they didn’t get used–The Army wound up reconstituting a lot of mule-borne logistics in the Italian mountains, and had to do it absent the actual, y’know, trained and experienced men that had gravitated to the 1st.

I’m not sure that they should have done what they did, with that unit. If anything, they should have retained the capability, and been able to reconstitute it as needed–But, as with everything else, the Army is short-sighted as hell, and essentially ahistorical.

Similarly, when they went to reconstitute the mine dog units during the early 2000s, they discovered that nobody had retained shit, in terms of documentation. Everything had to be reinvented from the word go, because the Army library system didn’t even have the Vietnam-era manuals preserved in any way, shape, or form. Government archives? LOL… They had no idea, either. The poor bastard tasked with reconstituting those units had to resort to asking long-retired Vietnam veterans for anything they had, and actually had to raid a museum display for a piece of the manual that had survived.

Fun times, for him. When I was talking to him about it, before I retired myself, I didn’t have the heart to tell him I had a pristine copy of that manual stuck in my Route Clearance files, and had I but known…