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Originally Posted by MetroMPG
Speaking of horses, I came across an interesting factoid about the year the number of automobiles (in the US) overtook the number of horses (kept for riding/work). It was much later than I would have thought. Of course I can't find the reference now, but if I'm not mistaken, it was into the early 1940's.
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That sounds about right. Everyone owning cars would have been really expensive, also cars wouldn't even run on a lot of the roads out there in 1940.
At the start WW2 the Polish army's mobile assets were mostly horse based. Axis powers also employed horses, especially at the beginning of the war.
http://groups.msn.com/2NDUSCAV/ww2germancav.msnw
The Blitzkrieg actually relied to a large degree on horse transport and in some cases cavalry advances! But the actual breakthroughs did rely largely on armored divisions followed by infantry. People who claim that Blitzkrieg is a myth and that the German army was really mostly horse based don't understand Blitzkrieg. The idea of Blitzkrieg is not that your whole army speeds along, rather that you make a fast breakthrough, confuse enemy defenses, consolidate your gains with infantry then rinse and repeat.
You don't see much WW2 footage of horses though because horses were boring and mundane, not the kind of thing you want in a propaganda movie.
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Originally Posted by Frank Lee
No insult- question of how energy conversion for oil production vs ethanol is serious. And, I suppose, horse energy conversion as well!
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None taken
. If Ethanol conversion (as well as Canadian tar sands) were driven by nuclear then it would make more CO2 sense, so the source of the energy used in conversion also makes difference.