Perhaps it’s better to ask whether any such “pure infantry” units were used in a combat role in Gulf I. The claim, as I recall it, was that Gulf I was the first war in which the US did not employ infantry. I don’t think the person would make a distinction between the guys who rode around in APCs or helicopters or Humvees.
Now that I’ve given it some more thought, I would guess this claim is likely wrong. IIRC, the 101st Airborne was one of the first elements committed to the theater, and even if they deployed by aircraft, I would guess that many of them functioned exclusively as infantry for quite a while thereafter. They don’t airdrop in enough vehicles to transport the entire division on the ground, do they?
The 101st attacked far into Iraq during Desert Storm. They certainly didn’t walk there. The claim is that no pure infantry were used. Meaning no one walked in. The 101st jumped out of their helicopters and fought. Other units jumped out of their APCs and fought. They fought as infantry but they didn’t march in. The 10th Mountain Division is designed as light infantry. They have a lot fewer transportation assets and are expected to carry what they need. They were not deployed during Desert Storm.
Oh, here’s one: I talked with a Marine PFC a few months ago who was a dog handler. He told me that dogs are given a rank that is one grade higher than the handler, I guess to let the handler know who is really doing the work.
Not sure if that is true for military working dogs in other services.
I believe you about what the 101st did later on, but weren’t they also dropped in within a few days of the Kuwait invasion to defer any Iraqi incursion into Saudi Arabia? Would they have been mechanized at that point?
OTOH, I don’t really know if that operation is even considered a part of Desert Storm.
The legendary DC-3 is justly famous as being rugged enough to take almost anything. In 1941, circumstances dictated that a DC-3 with a damaged wing be repaired with the much smaller wing of the long-obsolete DC-2. The resulting chimera (known, inevitably, as the DC 2-1/2) actually flew and transported full (and slightly over full) loads before reaching base and having the -2 wing replaced with a new -3 wing.
I was stationed in Germany when this was happening. They was a very real fear that the elements of the 101st and 82nd Airborne would be overrun if there was an attack south. They were most definately not mechanized. But they could be deployed quickly. This problem was one of the reasons why the Army has been transformed from its previous heavy division past to the current “modular” army.
Speaking of mounted cavalry, the Poles have the dubious reputation of trying to attack German tanks with sabers from horses during World War II, symbolic of a nation that couldn’t keep up with the times.
Fact is, that part was German propaganda. The Polish cavalry actually attacked the Germans with anti-tank guns they carried with the horses. They were also apparently quite the menace for German infantry, being able to attack suddenly, escape into the woods quickly, and move to attack them from another prepared place.
And THEN there is the small contribution to the war effort the Poles made where they cracked a little German code known as “Enigma” (at least, they cracked an early version of it. Their work was the basis of much of the British code-cracking work done later in the war).
There’s a film of Polish lancers attacking a German amored unit. It makes the Poles look like fools. But what the film doesn’t say is that that Polish cavalry unit had been cut off and surrounded by the Germans. The Poles were fully aware that cavalry attacking tanks was a bad idea but their only options were to try to charge and break through to escape or to surrunder in place.
Also worth noting, the Germans weren’t laughing a few years later when they faced the Polish cavalry again, when they, now driving Sherman tanks, cut off the German escape from the Falaise pocket after the Battle of Normandy.
On a different subject: Do you know when the first aircraft carriers saw combat? The First World War. The first carrier strike was launched by the Japanese in the Battle of Tsingtao in 1914, with the seaplane carrier Wakamiya using seaplanes against German command/communications posts and a minelayer in the harbour.
In probably one of the most famous carrier raids of the First World War, the HMS Furious launched 8 Sopwith Camels to strike a German airship base near Tondern. Because they hadn’t figured out how to safely land the planes back on the carrier (for one thing, they had the ship’s superstructure in the middle of the flight deck), the pilots had to either ditch in the sea near the mothership or try to fly to Denmark.