Military Blunders

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 ra...