Cavalry and chariots against infantry

[Domen]

as the account of an accidental confrontation

"Accidental" being the crucial word here.

Accidental means that cavalry was unprepared and surprised. Accidental means that cavalry had no momentum of the charge, because it was not an organized charge, but marching column.

Also the account you quoted refers to 1880 - so cavalry could die from modern firearms:

http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=27507

There are available casualty figures for Polish-Lithuanian hussars that in some battles show very low casualties compared to casualties suffered by enemy infantry and cavalry in those battles.

A good (and well-documented in primary sources) example is Kircholm - over 100 Lithuanian-Polish dead and well over 7000 Swedish dead (number of buried dead men after the battle was 8300 - but some of them could be local peasants as well as camp servants from both armies, rather than soldiers).

Then we have Klushino - also a well-documented battle when it comes to casualties:

http://www.romanarmytalk.com/rat/17-roma...=60#331187

http://s13.postimage.org/6rua6a6pz/Kluszyn_losses.png

At Klushino 21 out of 23 units of hussars which fought in the battle lost ca. 82 dead men (and casualties for the remaining two are unknown), including 26 dead suffered by hussars who fought against the Swedish component of the Russo-Swedish army (which was smaller than Russian) and 56 or more dead (this includes the 2 units with unknown losses) by those who fought against Russians.

By comparison Swedish dead at Klushino numbered hundreds, and Russian dead a few thousands.

Of course there were also wounded men and casualties among horses on both sides.

Losses among hussar horses were higher - for example 600 cavalry who charged 3840 Swedish infantry of the 1st echelon at Kircholm, lost some 150 horses (so 25% of cavalrymen lost horses).

While at the same time, only 30 up to 40 men were lost among those 600.

Those 600 carried out a frontal charge though - hussars who charged enemy flanks suffered less.

Kircholm was won by a frontal charge (those 600) combined with charges against both flanks.

At Klushino 180 hussars under Strus who carried three charges against 400 infantry under Taube lost just 5 killed men, 12 wounded men, 20 killed horses, 7 wounded horses and 1 missing horse. On the other hand, Taube's infantry lost over 50 killed soldiers alone (not including wounded soldiers).

Ratio of killed people in that infantry vs cavalry fight was 1 : 10 in favour of cavalry. Of course when including casualties among horses, then ratio was less in favour of cavalry, but still.

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The suggestion of getting horses to trample defenceless mannequins as a way of proving a point deserves total ridicule.

Not really - Robert, you entered the discussion late and apparently did not read the thread.

I suggest you read the entire thread (or at least take a quick glance at each post), because apparently you don't know what exactly was disputed here by some posters.

Some posters claimed that majority of horses can't be forced to run into something solid.

They said that - no matter armed or unarmed - horses won't run into a wall of people.

So suggested experiment with a wall of mannequins is not ridiculous at all.

We were also originaly talking about the effectiveness of cavalry against drawn up infantry, not the greatness or non-greatness of Roman civilisation set against High Middle age European society. So could we please move back to the original topic within the original timeframe, the Roman army and its known adversaries.

Ok. I agree.

But from that short OT about the greatness of Rome it seems that some people on this forum are to some extent biased in favour of praising the Roman Empire in all aspects (hence some posts describe it as "almost industrial", with "super high living standards of entire population", etc.). This partially explains why the same posters also tend to overestimate the power of infantry and underestimate the power of cavalry. After all the Roman army initially relied chiefly on heavy legionary infantry.

But later - after experiencing combat against enemies relying on cavalry - Romans increased the proportion of cavalry in their army and introduced units of heavy shock armored cavalry.

Somehow the same was done by Sweden in 17th century after experiencing charges of Polish-Lithuanian cavalry - Gustavus Adolphus improved the tactics of Swedish cavalry, increasing its reliance on shock charge and abandoning the caracole tactic. He also increased numbers of Swedish cavalry.

In the Thirty Years War Sweden had the best cavalry, that could not be matched by any other Western European cavalry. It was also not infrequently capable of charging enemy infantry.

That was the result of experiencing bloody lessons from Lithaunian-Polish cavalry.

The importance of cavalry in the Swedish army during the Thirty Years War, is shown for example by composition of the Swedish army and the proportion of cavalry to infanrty within it.

For example in early 1648 (last year of the war) the Swedish army in Germany included:

Total strength:

- 39,760 infantry
- 2,645 dragoons
- 20,736 cavalry

Including Swedish field forces:

- 22,821 cavalry and dragoons
- 14,690 infantry

And forces assigned to garrison duty:

- 25,070 infantry
- 560 cavalry and dragoons

As you can see, cavalry was 60% of the Swedish field army in 1648.

While in the battle of Kircholm in 1605 - cavalry was 22% of Swedish forces.