I guess I am like most people and thought the disaster at Isandlwana was caused by the British ammo boxes having the lids screwed down and the British ran out of ammo. Certainly that was true, but I believe their widely dispersed formations and complete lack of defensive positions was the real cause of their defeat. If their ammo boxes had been open, it would only have prolonged the afternoon and resulted in more Zulu been killed. It may also have given time for Lord Chelmsford to have returned to the camp, the reserve formation of Zulu (who attacked Rorkes Drift) were capable of ambushing them, this could have doubled the size of the British disaster. Any way you look at it this was not a good afternoon to be in the British army.
I posted this on the Melville/Coghill thread, but worth mentioning again. There is a trend in battlefield studies to do multi-disciplinary archeology. If you can find a copy, I highly recommend you watch the episode of the British TV show
Secrets of the Dead that deals with Isandhlwana. I think it is called Dawn of the Zulu.
The show is narrated and writen with input from Ian Knight who is probably the top Znglo-Zulu war expert. They did a bunch of metal detecting and archeology and learned some interesting things.
One of the things they did was to use metal detectors to try and find the main firing line. They reasoned that even after years of souvenir hunters, they should still be able to find anough casings to identify the line.
They were successfull, but found the line much further out than expected, almost out by where the current road is. They also found the tin lids of the famous ammo boxes at the firing line, along with screws bent in a strange way. By way of experiment, they built a replica box copied from an original in a Durban museum, and smashed it open with the butt of a Martini Henry, and discovered that the boxes could be broken open without too much effort and that it bent the retaining screw exactly the same as those they found.
They also did some tests on the Martini-Henry at the National Army Museum in London to determine how fast they would overheat and jam, and they beleive that this, along with the loss of visibility due to the smoke and the eclipse that took place during the battle was a contributing fact.
They concluded, like you, that the dispersion of the firing line prevented an orderly retreat to a more compact formation, and once the line was broken, it was pretty much over.
They also did some neat experiments (using Judoka) on traditional Zulu battle "muthi". First buying it at the local market, then analysing it in a lab, and then actually giving it in a blind test to a couple of competitive Judo practitioners.
Highly, highly recommend this DVD if you can find it.
Last time my brother and I were back in South Africa visiting relatives we made a point of going to Isandhlwana and Rorkes Drift with a good guide. The ground looks way smaller than it does in the movies. It is one thing to see a map of the zulu advance, quite another to walk the ground and imagine the right wing coming around the back of the mountain, and the desperate flight down fugitivres drift.
