Quote:
Originally Posted by The Colonel
As to TL6 riflemen being defeated by cold steel - okay, it's not pikemen, but I seem to recall numerous accounts from the Russian Civil War and Polish-Bolshevik Wars of infantry being cut to pieces by lance or sabre armed cavalry in the open field. You may even be able to find this happening as late as WW2, especially on the southern flank of Barbarossa where the Soviets were still using a lot of cavalry and the Axis forces contained a lot of second and third rate infantry.
|
The thing is a lot of those examples tended to come down to specific contexts that facilitated the outcome. Also IIRC yes there were certainly horsemen in those wars and in WW1 (eastern front especially) but the horse was more a means of transport* than battlefield weapon.
Yeah caught unaware TL6 rifle men could get cut down by TL4-5 horsemen. And yes if your TL6 riflemen aren't the best they're possibly more likely to get themselves into a situation where that is more likely, and yes if your TL4/5 horsemen are great they may well be more likely to engineer and capitalise on such an advantageous situation. Combine both and yep you're even more likely to get that outcome.
But it is inherently against the odds, and the greater the disparity in other areas the greater the odds fall out of balance. Ultimately even with the above examples neither sets of wars were won by horsemen with sabres and lances beating TL6 riflemen in the field. Moreover being against the odds it's high risk in that if you don't get it exactly right you end up with your elite horsemen being bullet riddled corpses (something that also happened in the first half of the C20th, as well as the C19th**). And well elite horsemen don't grow on trees.
It's a bit like the conversation about bayonets still being battle winning modern day weapons in the hands of disciplined and committed users. In that yes in certain circumstances thay can be and in fact there are a couple of oft quoted examples in recent history where they were (context being again v.important). But generally speaking you end up shot dead if you try and melee-charge riflemen in the C20th.
*it's like that famous photo of Polish Uhlans charging German panzers that got used as propaganda at the time. Only of course they didn't charge panzers with lances, they fought like everyone else with rifles, machine guns and anti tank guns etc. It's just being a cavalry unit they were fast, agile and mobile compared to infantry (even sometimes infantry in trucks). To me that's the cavalry advantage in the first half of the C20th, and yeah that can be a good one when you are moving over large areas of eastern europe or russia that doesn't have lots of nice roads etc, etc more so when your fighting a pretty fragmented affair with lots of localised action over a huge area like the Russian civil war.
**and actually I guess cavalry use in the C19th kind of tells the story, the battlefield role of cavalry got further and further truncated and the situations were you could charge at an enemy without getting shot to pieces got increasingly limited. And how elite a lancer you are will only go so far in countering bullets.