Left-to-Right: 1st/24th, Mtd & HQ, 2nd/24th, NNC, NNC,
wagon park on the nek.
Question: Where do the oxen and mules/horse go?
(They seem to get left off maps of the battlefield all the time!)
Tuesday, September 14, 2021
Sunday, September 12, 2021
Isandlwana - the Lower Storeys
The lower storeys take shape...
This is where the rock face ends...
...and the steep slopes begin.
The Eastern slopes, with that
prominent knoll overlooking the nek.
The Western Slopes.
The next step: paper Mache!
The amaTutshane kopje,
another prominent landmark on the battlefield.
Tuesday, September 7, 2021
Sunday, September 5, 2021
The Battle of Isandlwana: Some Battlefield Research
The Isandlwana Battlefield - via Google Maps
I am preparing to run a wargame version of Isandlwana later this month and have been doing some research to figure out how to set everything up. Luckily, a friend is allowing me to use his 6' x 15' table which, with the ground scale I've adopted works out at just about 4 kilometers. Google maps has a little measuring utility that allows me to measure and display that on the map, as shown above.
Isandlwana topo
Edit: ignore my tentative Chelmsford placement.
I mistook the name of the hills.
His force is down off the SE corner.
The University of Texas has a really good map library:
This is The Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL) Map Collection. Apparently they have decided not to update it further and it was archived this year. Hopefully it will stick around as there are some really great maps there!
Anyway, I located a topographical map of South Africa and cobbled together the above image in PowerPoint. Comparing it to the Google satellite imagery one can see why it's reliability is only rated "fair"! Still it does give a rough idea where things were, and, more importantly for me, it gives me an estimate as to how high the ridgeline was. Going by the above map it is somewhere around 250 feet above the surrounding lowlands.
I'm still trying to work out how high the Isandlwana "mountain" is. It's not that large, actually. The footprint, I mean - see the image below. According to Google its only a couple of hundred meters long and less than 100 meters wide.
The above image shows a possible table layout. I realize now that my arrows for the Zulu Right Horn and Reserve are probably wrong. If the Right Horn was seen sweeping across Cavaye's front when his company was up on the ridge - and 600 yards to that front - then the sweep of the horn must have been much further westwards, leaving the map probably still on the ridge, then descending and doubling back. the end of their arrow would have been moving eastwards over the gap.
More to follow...
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