Colinxy: The New Zealand Mounted Rifles - The Forgotten ANZAC Elite

Some New Zealand schoolchildren can recite Gallipoli like scripture. They can tell you about the cliffs, the trenches, the futility, the sacrifice, the mythology. What they cannot tell you, because the curriculum barely mentions it, is that our most consistently successful soldiers of the First World War weren’t on the Dardanelles at all.

They were on horseback in the Sinai, Palestine, and the Jordan Valley.

They were the New Zealand Mounted Rifles, and they were feared by the Ottomans for good reason.

But in the modern retelling of our national story, they have been quietly filed under “miscellaneous”.

The Campaigns We Don’t Teach

The Mounted Rifles fought in a theatre that doesn’t fit the tidy Gallipoli narrative of noble failure. They fought in a theatre where New Zealanders were not victims of circumstance but professionals, executing complex operations in extreme conditions — and winning.

Sinai: Turning Back an Empire

In 1916, the Ottoman Empire attempted to strike the Suez Canal. The Mounted Rifles helped stop them cold. Long-range patrols, desert marches, and mobile engagements broke the Ottoman advance and secured the canal — a strategic victory of global significance.

Beersheba: The Key to the Charge

Everyone knows the Australian Light Horse’s famous charge at Beersheba. Almost nobody knows that the New Zealanders seized Tel el Saba, the fortified high ground dominating the battlefield. Without that, the charge would have been suicidal. With it, the Ottoman line collapsed.

Palestine & Jordan: Relentless Pursuit

From the Jordan Valley to the hills of Palestine, the Mounted Rifles excelled in:

• night marches
• river crossings under fire
• rapid exploitation
• pursuit operations that shattered Ottoman cohesion

They were fast, accurate, disciplined, and utterly reliable in conditions that broke lesser units.

The Ottomans feared them because they had earned that fear.

Why They’re Missing From the Curriculum

The answer is simple in my opinion: the Mounted Rifles don’t fit the modern ideological template.

The curriculum prefers:

• tragedy over competence
• victimhood over professionalism
• Gallipoli-as-myth over Middle East-as-history

Gallipoli is emotionally useful. The Sinai and Palestine campaigns are historically inconvenient.

The Mounted Rifles represent something unfashionable: New Zealanders who were not just brave, but effective. They fought, manoeuvred, adapted, and won.

And that is precisely why they are forgotten.

A Personal Footnote to a National Blind Spot

One of my own relatives rode with the Mounted Rifles. He was first listed as Missing in Action, the kind of message that must have frozen every household that received it and later confirmed killed. His service, like that of thousands of others in the desert campaigns, is now largely invisible in our national story. The curriculum has room for Gallipoli, but not for him.

This is not remembrance. It is selective memory.

The Cost of Forgetting

When a nation forgets its victories and fixates on its defeats, it tells you something about the nation — not the history.

We have built an ANZAC mythology that centres on:

• futility
• tragedy
• victimhood
• and the emotional comfort of a story where nobody is to blame and nothing could have been done differently

But the Mounted Rifles show a different New Zealand:

• competent
• disciplined
• strategically significant
• and capable of shaping events rather than being shaped by them

That version of us is harder to teach, but far more important to remember.

If ANZAC Day Means Anything, It Must Include Them

If ANZAC Day is about remembering, then we should remember all of it:

• the defeats
• the disasters
• the courage
• the professionalism
• and the victories

Especially the victories.

The New Zealand Mounted Rifles were among the most effective Allied forces in the Middle East. They earned their place in our national memory. It’s time the curriculum caught up.

Because a country that forgets its best soldiers is a country that no longer understands itself.

Colinxy regularly blogs at No Minister, This article was sourced HERE