Argeus the Paladin said:
FrisianDude said:
If I read 'samurai cavalry' I tend to assume horse archers, tbh.
I doubt that, to be honest. As far as I know, historically East Asian horse archery is more like a showoff of skills by exceptional fighters - nobles, generals, what-have-yous - or as a side weapon rather than a practiced and proliferated art in the Mongolian style. It's like a rifleman packing a Desert Eagle as a sidearms because he
might need it at some point, rather than because he intends to fight with a DE as a mainstay. If that analogy makes sense.
The first samurai
were horse archers, "Mongolian style". The O-yoroi is not very well suited for dismounted combat. The bow was never at any point the
side weapon, but the main weapon throughout Japanese history, and the very symbol of the samurai until the sword gradually assumed that role -- though the bow never lost its status as a weapon most proper for a samurai to master.
And a bow would make a horrible side arm. If you carry a bow, you're an archer. You never, as in ever, carry a bow as a
secondary weapon. What good would that do? In case the enemy you're fighting up close is suddenly further away? Why on earth would you carry a bow, which is very unwieldy to carry unless you can store it somewhere, as well as a bunch of arrows (which in bundles are pretty heavy), if that is not indeed the
primary weapon? A bow is never a "just in case weapon"; I don't care what kind of bow it is. Bows allow you to soften up the enemy
before you crush them in melée.
There is also the fact that samurai put excessive focus on one-on-one melee combat, after declaring a challenge and citing the adversary's five generations of ancestral heritage anyway. Doubt they'd just ride around and shoot each other in the head at 14.4 difficulty with that mindset.
This sort of ritualistic warfare has been blown out of proportion. For one thing, they stopped doing it at around the time of the first Mongol invasion. For another, there was never "excessive focus" on it. Archery still dominated the battlefields, before and after.
One thing was that samurai sought to find a "worthy opponent", but they also sought to kill as many as possible. "One against a thousand". And on top of that they prided themselves on marksmanship. Samurai, like the human beings they were, were 3-dimensional people. They had several ideals to live up to, and several goals to aspire to. And the samurai culture was frought with inconsistencies. Loyalty, for example, was the most important quality of a samurai. Yet samurai history is brimming with tales of treachery and deceit. The samurai were supposed to face adversity stoically, yet form demanded emotional outbursts of all kinds at times.
As for cavalry, while it is true that the Japanese horses at the time were very small, it does not follow that Japanese cavalry was "crap". Cavalry is
very, very expensive to field, and if they were CRAP, they simply wouldn't use them. This rule of thumb is applied vigorously by most who have posted in this thread with regards to
Western warfare -- but it applies in equal measure in the East, and everywhere else for that matter: if it is crap, it won't be used, because it is crap, as crap gets you killed in battle. War is nothing if not pragmatic.
The Mongols didn't have any bigger horses than the Japanese, either, and they did pretty ok for themselves.