Rhino cavalry charge! How horrible would it be?

Question

There have been questions asking if rhino, hippo and other similar kinds of cavalry are feasible.

Now let's for a moment skip that and assume we have some special means, on the end of which, we get rhinos that behave almost war horse-like.

I'm asking this question for worldbuilding reasons, as I'm trying to discover standard strategies for my fantasy army.

How horribly is medieval or ancient army standing on the other side of field sc***ed by rhino cavalry charging, provided they somehow manage not to disperse in terror and hold a traditional spear or pike defencive formation?

Answer 1

The charge itself? Terrifying. The amount of food needed to feed them, the amount of care and training would be too high for any reasonable state to use them for a long time.

So if you read actual historical campaigns you will find that rarity of fodder is a huge issue and supporting even horses, big or small, was a huge issue. Sometimes you will slaughter the horses to eat them because you don't have food. Sometimes you will feed them and let your own soldiers almost starve to death.

Anyway war is won by logistics as much as pitched battles. If you need 10x more food to support an animal then the enemy can get 10x more animals to attack you with.

But anyway you also need to consider a crap ton of other elements before you start replacing horses as cavalry.

Are they comfortable to ride for long time? Most of any war is basically marching and marching.

Are they maneuverable enough?

Do they tire as quickly? This is a big point. A Cheetah runs way faster than a camel. But guess who wins in the long term?

Can you replenish them with any reasonable speed? Or are they a one usage wonder.

Can they serve other function like actual cavalry. Like mounted archers, or can they scout...etc.

And the last thing is that are they cost effective? This point is basically why 99% of technology and super duper equipment is never used for actual military usage. I won't get into into many example but I'll just write the following:

War elephants. They were awesome and fearsome. But guess what. They tended to be another tool at a general's disposal not an absolute game changer. Once faced with them you can plan and counter them. Thus they turn out to be no more different than Cataphracts or fully armored medieval knights or chariots or full plated knights or mounted archers or even gunpowder and cannons. Having a bunch of elephants used correctly can win you the battle. But so is having a bunch of cavalry, or starving your foe to death...etc

Actual warfare tend to be boring affairs with planning and marching and fighting like one battle every now and then with a surprising low number of casualties.

Now don't let that discourage you. Far be it for me to even suggest it.

All I'm saying is that the pure idea of strong=good is never a military thing.

So with that in mind you can solve most of those problems. Maybe they are trained and bred to solve most of those problem. They also got a particular logistics branch of the army that just handles them. Like trainers and grooms and transportation and usage. Heck. The story can revolve around just that! Obviously enemy commander can try to exploit your weakness. But that just same old military tactics. So perhaps your Rhinos are a bit different. Maybe your state is really into them because it's a tradition and they are useful. And on that note please understand that most warrior cultures were extremely practical otherwise they don't tend to stick around.

Anyway solve the underlying reasons why they are not used and use them if you want.

Answer 2

So, putting myself in the opposing army's shoes here:

The first battle is probably a rout - You've found a new weapon, no-one knows how to deal with them, the Rhino charge wins hands down.

The second battle, being a sneaky medieval commander, I show up prepared. Rhinos have soft feet, so I get my smiths making hundreds of caltrops* to scatter. I cut longer pikes, and dig indentations so the shafts can be braced into the ground. I have my bowmen carry sharpened stakes, and knock them into the ground facing forwards. I try and find boggy and marshy ground, and try and persuade you to attack me there. As I'm not the one feeding muti-tonne animals, I can probably afford to wait around there.

If we have a tradition of horse archery, I send out horse archers - the Rhinos are slower, with lower stamina. We lure them across the battlefield, and every now and then one of them goes beserk.

Without horse archers, I get my cavalry to feint - pretend to charge, and then withdraw. With any luck, the rhinos will chase them, with their riders unable to control them, and I can lure them across the battlefield until they're too tired to stand, and then deal with their riders with lances. This works even better if my cavalry have a few javelins to pelt them with.

Light siege weapons would work very well here - a ballista has very good range, and just a few crazed rhinos running back through the opponent's lines might make them question using them in future

They'd also be hit hard by the standard medieval tactic of retreating, and burning all the crops, forage etc you can find along the way.

In short, they're a terrifying weapon, but easy to counter if you base your entire strategy on them.

*A quote from Vegetius, writer of Epitoma rei militaris:

The armed chariots used in war by Antiochus and Mithridates at first terrified the Romans, but they afterwards made a jest of them. As a chariot of this sort does not always meet with plain and level ground, the least obstruction stops it. And if one of the horses be either killed or wounded, it falls into the enemy's hands. The Roman soldiers rendered them useless... they strewed the field of battle with caltrops, and the horses that drew the chariots, running full speed on them, were infallibly destroyed. A caltrop is a device composed of four spikes or points arranged so that in whatever manner it is thrown on the ground, it rests on three and presents the fourth upright.

Answer 3

Rhinoceroses are about twice as heavy as horses. If the hypothetical rhinoceroses used as cavalry mounts truely "behave almost war horse-like" as the question states, then standard tactics developed against horse-riding heavy cavalry will work with minimal adaptations against rhinoceros-riding heavier cavalry. They just need sturdier pikes.

Pike formations work against cavalry charges because horses will not charge a wall of pikes. Hence the importance of deciding how much do those rhinoceroses behave like horses.

On the other hand, if the rhinoceroses don't behave like horses and instead keep their typical rhino berserker behavior when charging, then the infantry won't try to use the same tactics. Ancient and medieval armies were not commanded by idiots.

What the infantry would do we can only speculate, and the question doesn't ask it.

Answer 4

I would start by comparing them to mounted elephants rather than horses. Elephants are extremely big and scary, but not unstoppable. And logistical reasons mean that it's hard to bring a large number of elephants to the battlefield.

Armies fighting elephants would often pelt them with heavy javelins until the elephants got so scared/angry they went out of control. A rampaging elephant is a threat to anyone standing near it, so you would hope this happened before they reached your frontlines. Some elephant riders carried a special weapon to kill their own elephant in case it started trampling their own side.

Some relevant rhino facts:

Rhinos can reach speeds of up to 30mph, faster than any human (28mph for an expert sprinter) or elephant (25mph) but slower than a horse (44mph). If they're travelling at 2/3rds the speed of a warhorse, then the rider's lance (if he had one) would have significantly less impact. Fun fact: when moving at top speed, rhinos run on their toes.

Rhinos have a lot less endurance for travelling long distances than horses.

A rhino has skin two inches thick (thicker at its shoulders and at back, a little soft under its neck), similar to an elephant's, making them somewhat resistant to spears, arrows, etc. A soldier could perhaps be trained to target their weak spots.

A rhino has a good sense of smell but very poor eyesight. I suspect that unlike horses they would not shy away from infantry with spears - by the time they even noticed the spears were there it might be too late for them to stop. (Although rhinos are surprisingly good at making tight turns mid-charge.)

Rhino poachers are known to catch them in wire snares and then finish them off with a spear or machete. This suggests that a well-prepared army in a good defensive position would have a good chance of holding them off.

Answer 5

Medieval times?

One rhino? Terrifying. A whole platoon of rhinos acting together? Complete devastation.

Have you seen what rhinos can do to sizable animals?
WARNING Scenes of animal vs animal aggression in the wild https://youtu.be/liAdulWOWws?t=17

One-on-one, rhinos are only evenly matched by a large hippo. An elephant treats a rhino as a toy. Anything else and watch out.

The real unnerving aspect of rhinos as cavalry mounts is that, unlike horses, they have no discernible fear of anything and will attack large moving objects even if unprovoked. They don't know when they are beaten and would probably refuse to lie down even if they were dead.