When and why did Cavalry stop being useful in a direct combat compacity?

>hey, what if we made a gun that just vomits out bullets at a high rate of fire and virtually bottomless supply of ammunition, creating a wall of flying chucks of lead and basically eliminating the need to be accurate at all?

The pike and gun combinations stopped most direct cavalry charges but it didn't stop cavalry combat. I'm not sure what OP meant by "direct combat" but if you count armed scouting missions and charges against other cavalry they were active up until the twentieth century

19th century, thanks to rapid-fire weapons and smokeless powder, but last succeful cavalry charge was carried by the end of WW2 (unsurprisingly by Poles).

>firearms
t. brainlet.

Real answer: when automobile transportation became cheaper and more efficient.

Even in WWI cavalry played an important role because its the fastest way you can transport troops around outside of railways.

He spoke about combat, not logistics.

The replacement of the horse came about at different times for different armies.

For each though, the thing that caused the replacement was "Army acquires the ability to mass-produce motor vehicles"

It wasn't trenches or firearms that killed horses, it was cars.

When they were replaced by Paratroops

You mean Air Assault?

By the time of the US Civil War they were pretty much only used for scouting and screening, since caplock rifles would tear up cavalry if used properly. That's not to say cavalry wasn't useful though. To use a combat example from the Civil War, in the lead up to Gettysburg, J.E.B. Stuart, General Lee's cavalry commander, used his forces to go on a deep raid of Union railways and depots, but this effectively left Lee blind without his cavalry and the Confederate forces didn't realize that a Union army was pursuing them until they literally ran into them in a small town. Logistics wise, cavalry was used heavily in WWI and I believe that the Wehrmacht still used them into WWII, but I could be wrong about that.

*it ain't me starts playing*

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>he doesn't know about unmounted cavalry

where do you think the term 'ghostriding' comes from?

>unmounted cavalry

Is that not an oxymoron?

Except it was carried out by Italians in Russia "the charge of isbuscenkij"

So why was heavy cavalry still around in 1815?

The same reason modern armies still have tanks.

Just because things are made obsolete by the changing times doesn't mean everyone accepts it.

An army without cavalery would get absolutely wrecked pre-1900

The Wehrmacht didn't use horse mounted cavalry per se, they did have a few divisions that retained the "cavalry" name in the early part of the war. However they did use draft animals extensively because of a motor vehicle shortage that plagued them on the EF.

Heavy cavalry was a very important tool in napoleonic war.