Any advance on the Charge of thre Heavy Brigade at Balaclava in 1854. The power of artillery & the rifle, as opposed to the musket made the horseman an increasingly ineffective means of waging war. Actually Balaclava is nonsense, I think we'd better scuttle off to Omdurman (1898) before anyone notices....... No disrespect to the Heavy Brigade, Jeff, but the charge of the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba in 1916 can also be regarded as the last successful cavalry charge, almost twenty years after Omdurman, and against a Turkish-German army with modern firepower. The Light Horse, a division under the British General Allenby, was technically a mounted infantry unit. They had no sabers, so they drew their Lee-Enfield bayonets and charged with them, and won the battle. There may be other examples since. In the Gulf War, a US cavalry unit with a few Abrams tanks and Bradleys charged through a much larger Iraqi armored unit, but only as a means of survival. They stumbled upon the Iraqi armor, and to run would have meant certain destruction.
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