Cavalry Officer: Difference between revisions

If the Cavalry Officer is one of the good guys, you can expect him to be leading [[The Cavalry]] [[Horseback Heroism|as they come riding in to save the day!]] In this case, he is often a [[Supporting Leader]]. Cavalry Officers have a notoriously poor grasp of time, because they will always manage to arrive at the [[Just in Time|last possible moment.]]

 

 

In some ways the Cavalry Officer survived the death of cavalry as an important force on the battlefield, and that his heritage continued in the age of industrialized warfare. For instance, once [[World War One]] became dominated by trench warfare, quite a number of cavalry officers joined the nascent air service to become fighter pilots, the most famous one being former uhlan officer Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen, the [[Red Baron]]. This probably helped contribute to air combat acquiring its "chivalric" image. Later on, many British cavalry regiments were re-equipped with tanks instead of horses, but cavalry traditions and modes of thinking persisted. British military historian Corelli Barnett blamed these factors, which for instance led to a tendency to neglect co-operation between armour, mechanized infantry, and artillery, for many British reverses in [[World War 2]]. Other cavalry units were equipped with armoured cars or helicopters.

 

See: [[Mounted Combat]]

 

== Westerns ==

* Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Great Cavalier general of the [[English Civil War]], but even he was unable to stop his officers' and men's tendency to go off in mad pursuit after a successful charge. Because his opposite number Oliver Cromwell, a newcomer to the military, averted the Cavalry Officer trope and always maintained strict discipline, the Parliamentarian side was able to exploit the absence of the Royalist horse, e. g. in the battle of Marston Moor.

* General Hans Joachim von Zieten (1699-1786), colonel-in-chief of a Prussian hussar regiment was renowned as a leader of light cavalry; his propensity for ambushing the enemy earned him the sobriquet "Zieten aus dem Busch" (Zieten from the bush). However, he also subverted the trope somewhat, being a pious Lutheran of exemplary morals and also a competent leader of entire armies - when [[Frederick the Great]] had to leave on other business, he usually entrusted his army to him. One measure of his excellence as a ''leader'' as opposed to a mere fighter was that he is said to have drawn his sabre in anger just once during the entire [[Seven Years War]], even though he led plenty of charges, ambushes etc. (On one reconnaissance he and a few others were surprised by a group of Austrian cavalrymen, compelling him to literally cut his way through).

* Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht Prince Blücher in many ways behaved like a "typical" hussar officer; he lost huge amounts of money gambling and injured himself while participating in a horse-race at age 72, but he was also highly successful leader of operations involving all arms.

* Several cavalry generals of the [[American Civil War]], notably the flashy J.E.B. Stuart and George Armstrong Custer, conformed to the image, while some of their more business-like peers like Nathan Bedford Forrest and Phil Sheridan showed how cavalry could be successfully used at the time as mounted infantry.