Reform the line, we charge the 6 Tonne elephants head on, charge!

>implying a cumdumpster would have any sense of appropriate battlefield tactics

Hm? No, one unit of elephants got out of control and charged their own line, no cavalry involved. The other unit ran between gaps of the Roman infantry and got turned into porcupines by the mighty pilum.

>WhY ArE tHeY ChArGinG tHe PoOr ElEpHaNt????

neither does OP the faggot

No, he is right. Historically speaking cavalry got crushed by normal sized elephants regularly and these are not even one third of the size of a mûmakil.

the mammals did nothing wrong

War Elephants were always shit in warfare and just a show off and a psychological weapon against armies that never faced them before.
Once they knew their weaknesses, Elephants were more dangerous to their own army, then the enemy.

For the purposes of RL antiquity, cavalry was never an effective tool against war elephants - horses spooked too easily and western (Greek/Roman) forces didn't really use Cavalry for head on charges like that anyway. Skirmishers, pilum - even slings and bows were your best bet for agitating the hell out of the elephant till it was delirious with pain and useless as an asset by the enemy. Just getting out of their way was enough in a couple of instances to totally circumvent their usefulness.

In the film, no, that was his only option. Anything else risked a massacre of his forces. There wouldn't be an effective regrouping, they would have been routed off the field. Their only option was to maintain coherency and charge, I seriously doubt Theoden thought he was going to win the engagement, it wasn't about winning. No other option, it was run and die or reform and charge.

user clearly doesn't understand leadership. The best chance the Rohirim had was to push past the Mumakil, then attack and panic them from behind, by shooting out the controllers, while in a position the Mumakil couldn't do much damage. The only other option was to try to push through the huge mass of orcs to take shelter in the orc filled city, robbing the Rohirrim of their best advantage, speed and agility.

That's true, dedicated infantry and ranged units could easily defeat them, but they drove the horses insane. Some even ran amok from their smell alone. I don't know of a single engagement where elephants didn't crush or break cavalry.

Required reading for arm chair Yea Forums historians.

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Or they could literally just run away, they’re on horses

>textextextextextext
heh.

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Except they are in the middle of a horde of orcs. And the moment they run, Theoden looses all his men to them being scattered and isolated, and then killed by the orcs.

You are a real brainlet. Even in the battle of Zama cavalry got instantly crashed by elephants even though it was their own. No one said that elephants were a great tool, but you couldn't deal with them through a cavalry charge.

That meme text is how far your historical knowledge goes, I suppose? Read what the people you are replying to actually wrote: Elephants were a unrelyable unit but almost always defeated cavalry because they spooked horses. This is perfectly exemplyfied by Hannibal's campaign if you actually read up on instead of repeating memes.

Just run past the orcs and then keep running. The orcs can’t keep up, they don’t have horses.

You're dealing with thousands of men on horseback across dozens of square miles.

The force would be gone. It's not an issue of "psh nah it's cool bruh, meet up 2 miles that way". Some get the memo, and run, some don't, and stay, some get lost, some run into pike lines, some get lost in the woods, some flat out run away without leadership. How do you tell people where to regroup? Riders? In a sea of riders? In the middle of a fluid battle with no fixed lines?

8 hours later you regroup and have 40% of what you tried to leave the field with, and the elephonties w/e are still there, the kernel of resistance in the city has given out.

OR - Blow the horns when everyone is grouped, still vaguely in formation, moral still high compared to what it would be after a rout, and charge while the orks are still reeling and you can focus on the giant fucks.

It's not a question of "buh horses dunt trump elephents" That's like saying "use your laser cannon against the tanks!!!" they didn't have skirmishers, they didn't have siege equipment or earthworks. They had horses and momentum, NOT charging gives up every advantage they had, whether it was the perfect strength against that particular enemy or not.

>PRÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖH
:DDDDD

>”Guys there are too many orcs, ride your horses away but don’t wander all over the fucking place into pike lines or woods, stick together please”

Solved

You're an actual retard.

There's a reason communication on battlefields take the forms of flags, bellowing, riders, horns and flares.

They haven't scouted the field, they turned up that morning and charged. Where is safe to regroup? How do you let the commanders know that? How do they ensure their thousands of mobile troops know that?

"Jus leik go over ther senpai hhuee".

Yes, there are a lot of orks, but not too many, you fucked them, they're reeling and routing - USELESS CURRENTLY, they have no contact with their command structure and no unit formation, they are more concerned with not getting trampled again then fighting, they are not a factor, they are scared and out of coherency (see how routs work? Want Theoden to flip the coin to see if his forces do the same?).

SO - orks not the issue, right at this moment. But those big fucking monsters are. Infact, they're the only real issue. If we don't fight them now, the orcs will reform and the two will fight us at the same time.

A) you're misunderstanding the objective of the Rohirrim, or atleast their command structure and officers, they're not there to maybe fight and maybe win but definitely survive. Eomer is so pumped when he sees Theoden go down that he screams "Death" and everyone joins him in a charge.

b) you are underestimating how dangerous withdrawing on an active battlefield is, how catastrophically dangerous it is to your entire force and ability to command. Units end up miles out of position in contemporary conflicts with radios, gps and maps.

c) combining what is outlined above can you see how there is no "try again" button. This is it. If they break, run, rout or try again 12 hours from now their opportunity is gone.

You're obviously just trolling and i assume you can grasp all of this.

Not very easy to say in such a situation, and I doubt anyone in Middle Earth would be able to comprehensively come up with such a sound tactic in the face of 50ft tall elephants that were only mentioned in legends and song. Don't forget that this is relatively new terrain to the Rohirrim and they never had any cohesive battle plan in the first place seeing as they rushed their way over to Minas Tirith as fast as possible. They are tired from riding and fighting at this point and their only means of retreat would be uphill from where they came.

Sometimes, as a leader, it is better to take action than to take too much time to think about the best way out of a bad situation.

Huh? Horse archers are a strong counter to elephants, so are jav cav.

I'm getting so tired of absolutely BTFOing the virgin cuckboy betas on this board. Winning an argument decisively daily on here.

reminder that this whole battle was fucking pointless thanks to those dead fucks.

>Was it autism
No. He didn't have time to organize a flanking maneavur as he was getting charged. Having 10k+ force of calvalry becomes a detriment at that point because smaller flanking maneuvors become harder to pull off.

With a force as large as his, you either give the order to charge or retreat.

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the single worst change he made

gandalf cast a spell of "fire" on him that made him a raging lunatic ready and willing to see every one of his people die in glorious battle

His "Death!" speech is taken from when Eomer has gone mad with grief at finding his sister dead, and suicide seems the best and most satisfying option for him. It's not a positive moment.

Not really, everyone in the city would be dead already by the time the undead arrived if not for their battling.

this

the elephants couldn't have entered the city

>Written by the Romans who never lie
hehe

The tens of thousands of orcs could and did.

He didn't do that retarded shit in the book.

That charge was kino

You know exactly that we are talking about melee cav because Rohan consists predominantly of melee cav and that charge was almost exclusively close combat.

>b) you are underestimating how dangerous withdrawing on an active battlefield is, how catastrophically dangerous it is to your entire force and ability to command. Units end up miles out of position in contemporary conflicts with radios, gps and maps.

Cavalry could withdraw from combat quite easily. The Turks built their whole army tactics arround that.

>I don't like what I read so it must be all lies
LMAO

I didn't say it was a dead certain, I said it was dangerous.

It's a bit of a cop out to now bring my argument into the context of the film, crossing reality and fiction, but the Turks weren't extracting forces against an ongoing charge against 50ft elephants moving at the same speed as their horses with a hill to their backs and a river on one side.

Roastie pls go

I don't remember that scene completely, but let's be real here. There is no way they got ambushed by 30 metre tall Elephants they must have seen them from miles away.

>4x their size

kek

The line of elephants was so long and moving at such a speed that getting out of the way to flank them would have resulted in tiring the horses and being caught in the middle of their withdraw. So there was really no other choice.

The people of Rohan are canonically retards and can't into proper tactics even if their lives depend on it

Based. The only reason they survived for that long is because of Helm's Deep, a perfectly placed impenetrable fort.

The siege of minas tirith and battle of pelenor fields was the do or die point in the war. If Gondor fell it would be over for everyone.
You either fight them and try to win or you run away and eventually get overwhelmed.

This is completely wrong. Only one elephant survived the alps crossing and Hannibal basically conquered Italy for about 3 years or some shit beating the Romans in many battles.

No, its that old saying "when all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail." Theoden commanded cavalry, the best available option was a cavalry charge. Retreating was not an option because the battle would be lost, Gondor would be lost and Sauron would win. Dismounting and fighting on foot would also be terrible. Theoden thought that even if the riders of Rohan were wiped out to a man, if they gave the Gondorians the opportunity to defeat Sauron's forces that would be worth the sacrifice.

>this triggers the non /his/ posters

>the mammals did nothing wrong
The mûmakil or the humans?

True. /his/ is all progressivism and reddit means but very little actual knowledge. Exemplified by this witty greentext which is flat out wrong on several occasions.