Quote:
Originally Posted by John Dudek
After spending weeks aboard ship, those horses will barely be able to walk, let alone swim. You can torture them all you want, but sick horses with atrophied muscles won't respond like Secretariat running in the Kentucky Derby. They will simply collapse and die. The US Army tried a like-minded manuever during the Spanish-American War, during the Invasion of Cuba, where they threw their horses over the side of the transports, expecting them to swim to shore. A very large percentage of the horses drowned, or started swimming back towards Florida where they too drowned. Even eating those drugged horses could make your own troops sick.
The horses that do make it to shore will need weeks of rehabilitation before they will be capable of any work.
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John, it seems that while you were composing a reply for !0:48am I was editing at 10:33am. As per my slightly altered message, the Japanese horses would only be on-board my 3 big cargo-liners for some 7 days, not for weeks.
I believe that you exaggerate the consequences.
In any case, we do know that the IJA used more horses during the Pacifc War than they did trucks, and still somehow managed to beach land on and capture island after island from their Allied defenders for the first 6 months. It seems to me that the IJA well knew how to take care of it's horseflesh.