Название: Hell Riders: The Truth About the Charge of the Light Brigade Автор: Terry Brighton
Издательство: Penguin
ASIN: B010CFWEMY
Год: 2015
Страниц: 400
Язык: английский
Формат: epub
Размер: 58.2 MB
On 25 October 1854, during the Crimean War, the Light Brigade of the British Cavalry Division made the most magnificent and most brutal charge in military history. Almost 700 men armed with sabre and lance, charged straight at the muzzles of Russian cannons.
This vivid and extraordinarily detailed account of the charge and the bloody melee that followed, by an author with unique access to regimental archives, is told largely in the words of the survivors themselves. Terry Brighton takes the reader closer than ever before to the experience of charging down the Valley of Death.
The truth about war is not found in the politics or in the strategy, or even in the official dispatches of generals, but in the experiences and observations of fighting men. This truth is often missing from the history books, where the need to summarize the countless individual actions that constitute a great battle takes readers ever further from the brute facts as recorded by the original combatants.
On 27 February 1854, Britain issued an ultimatum to Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, whose troops had crossed the Danube into Turkey. The view of London was that if Russian forces took the Turkish capital Constantinople (now Istanbul) then the Tsar’s Black Sea Fleet would gain access to the Mediterranean and from there his warships could dominate the seas. Britain demanded the Tsar withdraw his troops and told him that ‘refusal or silence will be equivalent to a declaration of war’. He took no action and had nothing to say.
On 28 March, Britain declared war on Russia. At the time this was known as the Great War with Russia; we know it as the Crimean War because most of the action took place on the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea, at the southernmost point of the Russian empire. Britain joined forces with France and Turkey to send a fleet of sixty-seven warships and several hundred troop transports carrying a combined army of 64,000 men. In September this force invaded the Crimea and began bombarding the Russian naval base of Sevastopol, home of the Black Sea Fleet. If the city could be taken and its fleet destroyed, the Tsar’s expansionist plans would be foiled.
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