Hello and welcome to this throwback episode of our fake history. This week I'm throwing you back to season 2 and

episode number 31 of the podcast what was the Charge of the Light Brigade?

Our last series on the Great East Asian War

got me thinking about the history of human conflict in general.

Now if you listen to that series on the Great East Asian War,

then you know that that conflict was filled with disastrous military blunders.

Now, when you learn about a military blunder,

it's very easy to look on from a distance and think, I could have done that better I would not

have made that disastrous decision there's a little bit of shot in freighter from the reader of history. You almost want to

laugh at the terrible decisions made by these inept leaders. But it's important to remember that history isn't just a movie or a funny story

that we're hearing. These terrible decisions actually led to real people dying.

And as much as it might be fun to scoff at a bad leader, we need to remember that human lives

were at stake.

So I thought I would take you back to one of the best remembered military blunders in Western

history, the infamous charge of the Light Brigade.

This was a disastrous British cavalry charge that took place at the Battle of Beliclava during the Crimean War of the 1850s.

This embarrassing and tragic military blunder was then transformed into a story about the sacrifice of the common soldier

by the British poet Alfred Lord Tanison.

Now obviously the Crimean War and the Great East Asian War of the late 16th

century are incredibly different conflicts. However both wars were punctuated by bumbling aristocrats throwing

away lives and resources because of their own incompetence.

In both cases, the stories would be funny if they weren't so tragic.

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