I think The IWM is right Keith...

So do I Musket. I do not think they agree with you.

Jim,
Then you are saying that all that "appalling waste of human life" was worth it?

No. What I am saying is that the people who fought it DID think it was worth it, and apart from Ferguson every historian of the period agrees.

I give more weight to their opinion than yours, based as it is on just political dogma and not actual historical knowledge at all.
(Or have you now read a history book written this century?)