As soon as Lord Tennyson rhymed the word “Blunder’d” with “the six hundred” in his famous poem The Charge of the Light Brigade, the word became a byword for a ghastly military error – and a few short years later, following the first publication of Alice in Wonderland, the Crimean War was mischievously dubbed “Britain in Blunderland” by clever journalists.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and when we look back at some of the world’s most damaging military blunders it seems unbelievable that rational men could have made such crass decisions and fatal errors. What could make hundreds of horsemen charge well-prepared heavy artillery? How could more than 50,000 French knights and soldiers fail to overcome an exhausted British force, whom they outnumbered by over four to one? How is it possible that 75,000 Union troops failed to overcome 38,000 Confederates in the bloodiest single day battle of the American Civil War?
This publication contains the answers as it looks at what lay behind the disasters at Balaclava, Agincourt, Antietam, the Philippines, and many more. Shocking and incredible, in many cases the blunders might seem almost laughable were it not for the terrible suffering and loss that they created.
