I have been down an internet rabbit hole with this one.

I was reading an Italian novel (in translation) and it mentioned the last Italian cavalry charge as taking place in 1942 at Poloj, in what is now Croatia, where an Italian cavalry unit was encircled by Yugoslav partisans and mounted a charge to escape.

What surprised me is that they were still using cavalry that late in the war – soldiers mounted on horseback to cover the rough trackless terrain yes, but full grown cavalry?

But then both the Italian and Greek armies made use of mounted soldiers during the war in Albania and northern Greece, but then if you had trained cavalry, it probably made sense to use them to patrol trackless terrain.

There’s a good article in Wikipedia on cavalry, which includes an extract from a book by Erich Kern, in which he describes an attack by mounted Hungarian hussars with parade ground horses on a Soviet position, something that caused the Soviet defenders to break and run when charged by ton after ton of top quality Hungarian horseflesh.

If you’ve ever heard the ground thud under racehorses, you might just be able to get a glimpse of just what a terrifying thing a cavalry charge was with ton after ton of seemingly unstoppable horse coming towards you.

But Poloj?

It was if anything a Pyrrhic victory – the break out succeeded but at tremendous cost with many of the men and horses going down to the partisans’ machine guns in much the same way that at Balaklava the pride of the British cavalry was destroyed by Russian cannon in the Charge of the Light Brigade…