HKK – Höherer Kavallerie Kommandeur – part one
Just about everyone who is a fan of World War I has the wrong understanding of corps sized cavalry units in the German army in 1914. Hopefully, this book will help the reader understand what we are dealing with. – Check Amazon book is now available on Kindle.
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The HKK(Höheren Kavalleriekommandeure) was a corps-sized unit but not an army corps. Many works refer to these as cavalry corps based on an easy but inexact English translation. Some works used the word Heereskavalleriekorps.That is incorrect and gives the wrong impression. Heereskavalleriekorpsdescribes what the HKK became in 1915, after the organization received a staff and a logistical function. Later renamed, they became much more like normal corps—but that is not what they were in 1914.
In contrast to the regular army corps, the ad hoc cavalry HKKs possessed neither corps troops nor trains, nor full staff or logistic columns. Instead, cavalry HKKs consisted of two or three cavalry divisions. Although the divisions possessed a small staff to cover all necessary functions and departments, the HKKs did not even have a staff. As a result, the commander was not designated a commanding general but rather a senior cavalry commander. This meant HKK authority extended only into the area of tactics and strategy, not logistics. A chief of staff was assigned to the HKK but had no logistical role—all logistics were at the division level. Thus, the HKK was a reporting HQ that established tactical and operational parameters, much like the US Army’s corps in World War II. Within that umbrella, the division commanders had to provide for their own supply and administration.
Little official information on the HKK structure exists. It is not even explained in the General Staff Officer’s Pocket Book, which informed the reader of everything about everything—except the HKK. Writing after the war, even Gen. Maximilian von Poseck in his seminal work on the German cavalry did not discuss the structure. The only source that mentioned mobilization of HKKs was the cavalry reconnaissance manual from 1914 (issued before mobilization) issued not by the War Ministry, but by the General Inspection of the Cavalry with permission of the War Ministry. The manual described the role of the HKK as a weak intermediate command position, with the function to coordinate the operations of several cavalry divisions temporarily formed to accomplish a joint mission. The HKK commander (here again named Commanderand not Commanding General) had a purely coordinating function that was aided along if he joined one of his cavalry division staffs and then made use of their staff command and communications infrastructure.
The task of the HKK commander was to keep the cavalry operations in line with the overall situation of the army they supported and to follow the army commander’s intentions. The manual emphasized that this role was not to slow delivery of reconnaissance results to the army commanders. If necessary, important messages were to be delivered from the cavalry divisions directly to the army commands, bypassing the HKK. Thus, the HKK commanders found themselves in a weak and ambiguous position when operations started in 1914.