The Battle of Isandlwana
On 22 January 1879 a Zulu army destroyed the main British column invading Zululand, killing more than thirteen hundred men in an afternoon. The war had been manufactured. The British administration in South Africa wanted a confederation of colonies and states, and an independent Zulu kingdom with a standing army of forty thousand men was in the way. An ultimatum was delivered in December 1878 demanding that Cetshwayo disband that army within thirty days - a demand no king could meet and remain king - and the invasion began when it expired. Lord Chelmsford crossed the border and camped below the rock at Isandlwana without entrenching or laagering the wagons, on the reasoning that the position was temporary and the enemy unlikely to face rifles in the open. He then split his force and took half of it away chasing a decoy. The Zulu army of some twenty thousand had camped undetected in a ravine five miles away. Discovered by a patrol, it attacked at once in the standard formation of a chest and two encircling horns. The British firing line was extended too thin, ammunition resupply failed at distance, and once the line was flanked the camp was overrun. Almost nobody in it survived. That evening a detachment of about a hundred and fifty men held a mission station at Rorke's Drift against a Zulu reserve, and eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded for it - the most for any single action, and a decoration for the day that Britain preferred to remember. The war resumed with overwhelming force, Ulundi was burned in July, and the kingdom was broken into thirteen chiefdoms designed to fight each other.
- Year: 1879 CE
- Category: Military
