In one of the last great cavalry actions in military history, mounted lancers from the princely states of Jodhpur and Mysore, serving under British command, charged uphill through machine-gun and artillery fire to capture Ottoman and German gun positions overlooking Haifa. The victory, achieved with lances and swords against modern weaponry, opened the road to the city's capture and became a celebrated feat of Indian military valor still commemorated annually in Jodhpur and Haifa.
By 1917 the machine gun and trench had supposedly rendered cavalry charges obsolete, relics of a bygone era of warfare. Yet on this morning the Jodhpur Lancers and Mysore Lancers, part of the Allied force pushing Ottoman troops out of Palestine, launched exactly such a charge against entrenched positions on the slopes above Haifa, where German and Ottoman gunners commanded the approach with artillery and machine guns.
Riding at full gallop with lances lowered, the Indian horsemen suffered casualties but overran the gun emplacements before defenders could reload, a feat that stunned observers who considered such tactics suicidal against modern firepower. Major Dalpat Singh of Jodhpur was killed leading the charge and became a folk hero in Rajasthan.
The victory secured Haifa's harbor for Allied use and is still honored each September in a ceremony in Haifa, where a street and memorial bear the name of the Indian cavalry. It stands as one of the final instances in which cavalry decisively broke a fortified, mechanized defensive line, a last echo of nineteenth-century warfare inside the twentieth.
Key people: Dalpat Singh