Calvary Fights in Afghanistan

["Terry W" <blazingsaddles@rraz.net>]

Calvary Fights in Afghanistan
Afghanistan – The Daily Mail carried a story on November 17, 2001 by Glenda Cooper about the role of horses in the war in Afghanistan:

IT is more like a scene from the Wild West than a 21st century battlefield.

This extraordinary photograph, showing U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan, illustrates that even the world's greatest military power still has a use for the warrior horse.

Dressed as locals, they have joined anti-Taliban fighters in the saddle for ease-of-movement in unforgiving mountain terrain.

The Northern Alliance has achieved remarkable successes with cavalry charges.

But the idea of the most advanced forces in the world reverting to such primitive warfare must be one of the most unlikely aspects of the campaign.

Horses have served their human masters in times of conflict for perhaps 4,000 years. A nomad tribe called the Hyksos (Desert Princes), thought to have come from Asia, invaded the mighty kingdom of Egypt using an early form of chariot some time between 2000 and 1000BC. The effect on the surprised Egyptians, said archaeologist Muhammed Abdel Masqood, was 'equivalent to a Scud missile today'.

The Egyptians fought back by inventing bigger and better chariots, drawn by two horses and carrying three men.

It was Alexander the Great, however, who exploited the advantage of cavalry after becoming devoted to his steed Bucephalus which finally died in the Battle of Hydaspes against the King of India in 321BC.

The invention of the saddle enabled the terrifying tribe of Huns to terrorise the Roman Empire in the 5th century.

It took the weight off the horse's backbone and stirrups gave the rider greater stability and more freedom to use any weapon.

The Romans and the Europeans followed suit.

But with the invention of the crossbow and then the even more deadly longbow, riders and their horses needed heavier armour to protect them. As a result bigger horses known as destriers were needed. By the 12th century their loads were as heavy as 30st.

The arrival of gunpowder in the mid-14th century meant the heavy horse's reign was over.

At the Battle of Crecy in 1346, 8,500 English infantry with primitive cannon and longbows routed a French army of 50,000, bringing their horses crashing to the ground.

And although Napoleon was a great military leader, in the 1812 retreat from Moscow he lost a horrifying 30,000 horses which either froze or starved to death.

In the late 19th century rumblings of public disapproval about the treatment of warhorses began to be heard.

In the Boer War, out of 520,000 horses, 326,073 died. At sieges of Ladysmith and Mafeking, the cavalry were forced to shoot their horses to feed the starving garrisons.

In 1902, a parliamentary committee was set up to investigate and a year later the Army Veterinary Corps was founded to keep animal suffering to a minimum.

In World War I more than 250,000 horses died on the Western Front alone.

By World War II, horse power had largely been swapped for tank power but some cavalry charges still took place.

Half a century on, China, Russia, India, Pakistan and South Africa still use the horse to patrol their threatened frontiers.

And in the Falklands, British soldiers use them to police the snowbound hills unpassable by Army trucks.