New accounts emerge of Charge of the Light Brigade [View all]

[dipsydoodle]

Immortalised in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem about the “valley of death”, the Charge of the Light Brigade is remembered as one of the most glorious defeats in British history.

Now, 160 years on, a series of dramatic, new accounts from survivors of the doomed assault have shed new light on what was the country’s greatest ever military blunder and shows clearly where those involved thought blame should lie.

A new project has uncovered dozens of first-hand testimonies, written in the days after the attack, by those who made it out of the valley alive. The documents overturn much of the established wisdom of the battle and provide clues as to how the calamitous attack, during the Battle of Balaclava, in the Crimean War, came to be accidentally launched.

The charge saw the light cavalry mount an assault into a valley flanked, on three sides, by Russians. Lord Raglan, overall commander of the British forces, had intended to send the Light Brigade to pursue and harry a separate, retreating Russian battery, but due to a breakdown in communications, the unit headed off on the near suicidal mission – attacked from all sides by artillery, infantry and cavalry. Of the 600 who set off, more than 100 were killed, with a similar number wounded.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/10776275/New-accounts-emerge-of-Charge-of-the-Light-Brigade.html