All The Tropes

Mounted Combat/Useful Notes: Difference between revisions

← Older editNewer edit →
Content deleted Content added
VisualWikitext
m Mass update links
m Mass update links
Line 10:
On the flip side, however, a horse is a big target. Archers on foot have a much bigger target to aim at than their mounted counterparts, and if the horse was felled, the horse's rider faced a painful tumble, after which still had to get up before some infantryman could finish him off. If the horse fell ''on'' its rider, it was over. Furthermore a horse is not as stable a fighting platform as solid ground, and riders were vulnerable to being toppled; the heavier the armour of the rider, the worse this was for him. Not to mention the number of accounts of wounded horses charging off the battlefield as their bemused rider was carried off the field with the terrified animal!
 
Horses, however, are generally used en-masse in battle. The horse began to supplant the chariot around the 9th century BC as Iranian tribes were recorded using bows in battle, but it wasn't until the invention of the [http://en.[wikipedia.org/wiki/:Saddle |saddle]] and later [http://en.[wikipedia.org/wiki/:Stirrup |stirrups]], both of which make it way easier to stay ''on'' the horse during maneuvers, that the cavalryman could fight in melee or on the charge with some degree of stability. Horsemen were initially used as fast-moving archers, evolving into flank-screening forces. It was Phillip of Macedon's military reforms that really turned the cavalryman into the shocking, battlewinning formations, the picturesque large body of cavalry slamming into disordered infantry and driving them off the field. His son Alexander would go on to win entire battles based around this use of cavalry as the hammer with which to break the enemy army upon an infantry anvil.
 
Cavalry remained relegated to judiciously timed flank assaults and archer support, however, until the coming of the late Roman period, when the Huns proved that heavy cavalry could beat heavy infantry. (This was one of the factors, incidentally, which sealed the still infantry-heavy Roman army's fate... though the Eastern Romans managed to adopt a much more cavalry-heavy army.) After the collapse of the Western Roman and Hunnic empires, the Normans initially were amongst the first mounted soldiers who had a decent chance of giving an infantry formation serious pause for thought from the front, breaking the dominance of the infantry soldier through Europe's dark ages, though they preferred to soften such formations up with hails of javelins from horseback and, when that failed, archer support, before punching through the weakened lines. As time wore on and armour (and possibly more crucially, the archer component) got better, this light javelin was replaced by the couched lance, the iconic arm of the medieval mounted knight.
Line 26:
That said, The [[Polish Soviet War]] and the [[Red October|Russian Civil War]] before that, had considerable use of cavalry / dragoons. In general eastern Europe was more cavalry country then western, and the age of the cavalry reached its conclusion later there.
 
All that said, mounted cavalry has continued to be used off-and-on into the 21st century, though later examples end up being cases of [[Schizo -Tech]] (the civil war in Afghanistan before the Americans invaded featured images such as men riding horses and carrying AK-47s). If you lack easy access to motor vehicles or aircraft, but you have horses, their mobility advantages still apply. During the early days of [[World War II]], the Poles had an anti-tank rifle that could be transported on a horse and quickly removed and set up for firing. It would be more accurate to say that horses can be used in some modern situations as ''dragoons'' rather than ''cavalry''. The difference being that while a Cavalry trooper is trained to fight from horseback, Dragoons are trained to fight on foot, mainly using the horses to quickly get near their objectives (although around the 18th century, the word "Dragoon" evolved to mean "Light Cavalry").
 
Also, it is a common spelling error to refer to men riding horses in battle as "Calvary". [[You Keep Using That Word|Calvary is a hill in Jerusalem]]. Easy way to remember the spelling: In the war movies, you always hear them talk about "Armored Cav" or "Airborne Cav", or talk about "Cav Troopers". Never "Cal".
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Mounted_Combat/Useful_Notes"