Wonderful presentation. So true, as you spoke at the end that the age of Haig and what society was like belongs now to ancient studies. Contemporary society has no reference point for what our world was nor the appreciation of how many of us were raised by those veterans of the world wars and the positive values of service and sacrifice towards one's country they instilled in us.
Haig let many thousands & thousands of British troops die !!! By getting shot tp peices by German machine gun fire !! With no thought of taking out the germans only by walking in hails of bullets !!! With bad intelligence led to hid stupid orders !! Tanks only helped for a while !!
It's easy to criticise him. Although I have no doubt, any critic wouldn't able to deliver even 0.001% of his performance. WW1 was a huge mess, on never before seen scale. It was never done before him, he was a first man to manage such a magnitude of people and resources. Of course, the errors happened and they were bloody. I do not see how any person could avoid doing any errors in such a great enterprise.
Its a bit of a "Tony Blair Knighthood" job..(apart from the war in Iraq he did a great job) ."Apart from the disasters on the Somme and Paschendale he did a great job".
The Somme was a victory that broke the back of Germany's elite regular army despite being in a favourable position and forced them to retret to the Hindenburg line
36.05 Haig's role in creating the British mass army pre-war??? It was Smith Dorrien's term at the Aldershot Command that turned the British army into a modern force, trained in fire and movement, to use initiative, re-organised and with the cavalry taught to use rifles and forget about sabre/lance, knee to knee charge lunacy beloved by French and Haig. S-D's request to the treasury to fund more machine guns received no support from Haig or French, and yet Haig is lauded as the thinking soldier open to new ideas.. Haig subsequently set about abandoning S-D's advances but carefully taking credit for every advance that his predecessor had made. Haig also failed very publicly in the 1912 manoeuvres. Why do the current WFA speakers all find no fault in Haig's colluding and conniving so slimily with French to dismiss S-D so publicly in 1915? Was not S-D a far more able and effective field commander than both? Are they too heavily invested in the "intellectual soldier" to step back and see what is has been there all the time?
Not that long ago I got into all sorts of trouble for not worshiping Haig as a hero at a well known establishment on the Somme. This is a pretty biased view supporting Haig. I am not a military man, but to my mind having been responsible for the deaths of 20,000 men on the first day of the Somme, most of whom were probably killed in the first couple of hours, I would have thought any reasonable man might just have thought, stop the show, we have got something badly wrong! I only have one relative killed in the attack on Sugar Trench at Courcelette on 15th September 1916 and whose body was never recovered, and one injured in an attack on the Quadrilateral at Ginchy on the same day, but there must be a lot more relatives who wonder, as I do, why Haig persisted with such a killing strategy. There can be no doubt that his organisational skills were excellent, and he was responsible for the gigantic growth in the army. But as a field commander his decisions look somewhat less satisfactory in my opinion. 😢
The battle of somme was pointless once you look at it, they gained only a few km of useless land and on the other hand, the total casualties with both sides added together shows us that about 1.25 million people was killed. The battle of Passchendaele was the repeat of it.
What choice did Haig have though? The western front was going to be a bloody struggle, there was no way - using the technology of the time - to avoid that. Equally, losing that many men was sadly a fact of this war as a whole. On the 22nd August 1914 the french army lost over 27,000 killed. On the 21st March 1918 the German army lost over 10,000 (yes it’s half that of the Somme casualties but tactics had evolved and this was the greatest advance the war had seen since 1914 but the figures are still very high).
They woud remove it before the attack, but it was said that some soldiers got caught in the wire and died during the battle, which I guess is a lack of consideration on the British's part
Is there any evidence of the Brits studying the Franco/Prussian engagement? I'm interested in the deaths by sabre and lance vs rifle and machine gun notwithstanding German barbed wire and the use of observation balloons? If not why not? If so, why ignored and by whom? Further, notice the provision of a model "tank" in 1908 by a Australian Lacelot De Mole to the Brits? Seems to me any studentship/scholarship of the the military art was NOT part of the Brit, particularly Haig's, mindset....
That you're asking these questions to begin with shows how poorly you understand the subject and are in no position to pass judgement. The Franco Prussian war saw significant and successful use of cavalry especially by Von Bredow at Mars la Tour with both of the combatant countries continuing to field large numbers, this was only enhanced in the British experience during the Boer War. The emphasis you place on tanks is particularly dumb. The tanks of the time were remarkably crude things that were able to be outpaced even at top speed by someone jogging and so unreliable that in any action more than half would be disabled from simple mechanical breakdown than enemy action. In the fluid manoeuvre warfare such as in 1914 they'd have been useless, too slow and unreliable to keep pace with any advance, it's only in the static and limited movement of 1915-18 that such vehicles would be useful enough for idea to take off. De Mole's notion of an armoured fighting vehicle was by no means novel with several designs prior to the war showing up in all of the major powers and all being rejected.
Haig a Hero, not to my way of thinking. How he was perceived by the men who had served him? He might have been. Was he a fool and a Butcher? No more or No les than other WW 1 Generals. In reality he was probably more in tune with the situation than most of the others both at the outset of hostilities and as the situation progressed. The real question, who else could have replaced him and done a better job? The French general’s went through the same time period and for the most part, followed the same game plan. With the possible exception of Petain, who argued against the possibility of offencive Due to defencive fire power. Yet Thousands more were killed under his command. Foch and the French Generals under his command did much the same as Haig and his. The Somme was planned when and where it was initially for politics, Then still fought with greatly reduced French participation, with little chance of success, to take pressure off the French at Verdun. All the Generals, were out of ideas, still trying out dated, tactics, Throwing huge numbers of relatively raw recruits into the maelstrom of fire, for months on end with little or no sign of success. Haig might arguably be argued to be smarter than some of the others, he looked for and supported new ideas. Surely if Haig is a foolish, callous butcher, Rawlinson must have been worse. It was Rawlinson who planned the attack. It was Rawlinson who ordered the “New Army” to go over the top and walk towards the enemy. Something the original BEF had known not to do, prior to landing in France. It might be argued this disaster was particularly influenced by Rawlinson prejudiced view of the “New Army”. Or perhaps because he was correct, the “New Army” was just not well enough prepared. The demands of the politicians who were insisting the “New Army” get involved in an offensive for political reasons. Must be equally guilty. By 1918 things were getting better, unfortunately to late for my Grandfather, my Dads Uncle, His Cousin, and almost all their contemporaries. Who after volunteering for Kitcheners Army, survived from 1915 until March 1918. despite the requirements of Joffre, Foch, French, Haig, Rawlinson and their subordinates. Their company D 8th Royal Highlanders was on the front line on 21 March. My Grandfather was one of vey few of the dead to return. He spoke very well of the front line German soldiers who took him prisoner and tended his wounds. However he was left with the dead by while being moved back from the front through Belgium. He was found found still alive by a Belgian civilian tended to him until he recovered who hid him until after the armistice. I don’t know, what his opinion of Haig was. He was a Private, I get the impression he wasn’t to keen of officers in general. Another Uncle survived Gallipoli, According to him they landed as a battalion, but couldn’t form a company when they were evacuated. Now that was sheer incompetence. But Churchill is a Hero. And the British General was one of the few possible alternates to Haig or Smith Dorian. And Lloyd George would be Haig’s critic, and still complain he wasn’t doing enough to assist the French. The whole thing was a unnecessary horrendous disaster for all the countries involved on both sides. No senior Generals were Hero’s, Most if not all oversaw hundreds of thousands of deaths.
How, exactly, Gary, do you know what sexual practices British soldiers did or did not engage in while they were overseas? Sounds like just more bollocks to me.
Gary Sheffield has established himself as an apologist for Haig. Unfortunately this position requires highly selective use of the evidence. I’m particular Professor Sheffield consistently skates over the ample evidence that Haig was an irrational optimistic fir ever in search of impossible breakthrough and cavalry exploitation battles and then claiming after their abject failures that he was really fighting successful attrition operations. What about too Haig’s casual dilution of the planned Somme bombardment by a factor of at least two - he had failed the arithmetic exam at Staff College of course!
“The machine gun is a much overrated weapon” Sir Douglas Haig in 1915. He loved a glorious cavalry charge though! It’s hard to be too tough on these generals, they all traded a lot of blood Entente and Central Powers alike. But with his Royal connections and the Crown being the Head of the Armed Forces of Great Britain and her dominions and colonies at that time, Haig deserves some special attention because George V fixes him in his command for so long whereas French, Russian, and German generals go by the wayside. Was there someone in the background who could have done better tactically and at the operational level? Maybe. For me the Brita’ mistake on the Western Front was not Haig, but going on adventures in the Middle East, the Dardanelles, and elsewhere. They committed something like a half-million Indian troops to the Middle East. The British Navy could have been used for oh, I dunno, securing a flank attack on zee Germans in the Strait of Dover rather than getting pummeled my Ottomans and trying in vain to clear hundreds of mines in the Dardanelles and wasting thousands of men pinned down on a useless beachhead.
Random Person because those machine guns had not been destroyed or suppressed by a rather lacklustre artillery barrage. That’s not necessarily Haigs fault - he had no way of knowing the true state of the German frontline till the first wave actually went over the top. It’s worth noting that on the southern flank of the Somme attacks, the advance was very successful, achieving all its objectives on the first day.
This quote about machine guns is nonssens the original source says it came from ",an army commander" in the great war the UK had more than Douglas Haig. Furthermore Haigs Review of the Work Done During the Training Season 1912, states: "More attention should be paid to the handling of cavalry machineguns when brigaded. Their drill and manoeuvre should, before departure to practice camp, attain a high standard of efficiency." This is in 1912.... Before the war. He is quoted in orders to I Corps on August 20, 1914: "German machine-guns are said to be well commanded; the French are believed to have lost heavily by attacking them with infantry." Again this is very early in the war. Even in his private family correspondence he's clear: "There will be a great want of troops, and numbers are wanted. So I expect you will all soon be in the field. *Meantime train your machine guns*. It will repay you." All of these are quotes directly attributable to Haig and from sources that are explicit unlike the machine gun quote above
Worse criminal than Hitler. I was in Kuantan in the North East corner of Malaysia. There was a small monument to a dozen or so soldiers who had been sent to France. Literally every corner of the empire scoured for bodies.
I think the following from HISTORYnet sums up Haig - Visiting the Somme battlefield in northern France is largely a matter of going from one Commonwealth Graves Commission cemetery to another. The graveyards are everywhere, some of them very small, comprising only a handful of white Portland marble stones, many bearing the inscription, A Soldier of the Great War / Known unto God. One sees so many of these cemeteries and so many stones-along with the vast memorial at Thievpal bearing the names of some 70,000 British soldiers whose bodies were never recovered-that after a few hours of it, you feel numb. Overwhelmed. The magnitude of the battle still stuns the imagination. The Somme was an epic of both slaughter and futility; a profligate waste of men and materiel such as the world had never seen. On the morning of July 1, 1916, 110,000 British infantrymen went “over the top.” In a few hours, 60,000 of them were casualties. Nearly 20,000 of these were either dead already or would die of their wounds, many of them lingering for days between the trenches, in no man’s land. The attacking forces did not gain a single one of their objectives. Even so, a staff colonel had the cheek to write: “The events of July 1st bore out the conclusions of the British higher command and amply justified the tactical methods employed.” Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, chief of staff of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and architect of the battle, evidently agreed. On the day after the debacle, stating that the enemy “has undoubtedly been shaken and has few reserves in hand,” he discussed with subordinates methods for continuing the offensive. Which he did, with a kind of transcendent stubbornness, for another four months, until winter weather forced an end to the campaign, if not the fighting. By then, Haig’s army had suffered more than 400,000 casualties. For the British, in the grave judgment of noted military historian John Keegan, “the battle was the greatest tragedy…of their national military history” and “marked the end of an age of vital optimism in British life that has never been recovered.” Haig envisioned a vital role for the horse in his masterpiece, the Somme offensive. That battle is generally, and incorrectly, remembered as one decided through attrition. (It failed even on that score, since the Allies lost more men than the Germans.) Haig, popular thinking goes, attacked and kept on attacking-even when the ground his men gained, yard by bloody yard, was useless by any military measure-in order to wear down the Germans. Attrition is never an inspired strategy and is usually the refuge of a commander who cannot come up with anything better. And Haig was, if anything, unimaginative. As Paul Fussell writes in his indispensable volume The Great War and Modern Memory, “In a situation demanding the military equivalent of wit and invention…Haig had none.” Still, in his defense, it’s clear Haig honestly believed a massive frontal assault by British infantry would punch a hole in the German line, through which his cavalry would then charge to glory. On several occasions mounted troops were brought up in anticipation of the breakout that, of course, never occurred. Critics of Haig are remorseless on this point-the man was so confident in his outdated ideas that he never allowed actual battlefield experience to challenge them. His fantasies of cavalry charges across open country were matched by his insistence on sending infantry against the enemy in neat ranks at a slow walk, the better to maintain control. Andrew Jackson had demonstrated the flaw in this method of attack during the War of 1812, and the American Civil War had truly driven the point home on a dozen different occasions. But if Haig had ever heard of Cold Harbor, he plainly did not believe its lessons applied to British soldiers. And the Confederates who had cut down 7,000 Union troops in 20 minutes didn’t even have machine guns. There's lots more, but the final para nails it - As late as 1926, he was still capable of writing this about the future of warfare: "I believe that the value of the horse and the opportunity for the horse in the future are likely to be as great as ever. Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the men and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse-the well-bred horse-as you have ever done in the past". Astonishing that any man who was there could still believe in cavalry 10 years after the Somme. But it is the bit about “the well-bred horse” that really gives the game away. Haig was undeniably a butcher, as his severest critics have claimed, but he was most of all a pompous fool.
This is the most extraordinarily ill informed and wrongheaded summary of Haig's leadership I have read for a long time. In fact, it has hard to know where to start so I will confine myself to a few choice refutations. Firstly, Haig had no 'fantasises' of cavalry charges across open country. What he did desire was the effective use of modern cavalry tactics as part of a combined arms offensive. Cavalry was in fact strikingly effective during periods of open warfare on the Western Front and you will no doubt recall how decisive cavalry would prove to be in Palestine in 1917 and 1918. Secondly, at no stage the war were British soldiers sent into battle in 'neat ranks' and at a slow walk akin to Napoleonic tactics. In fact there was a clear tactical progression during the war- with infantry tactics evolving at a rapid rate. Thirdly, the comment regarding the 'well bred horse' has been classically and consistently misinterpreted. In fact the comment only makes sense when you understand that Haig was addressing the Royal College of Veterinarians. You may also recall that the horse was still an integral part of most armies until well into the 1920s and 1930s (in fact the German Army of 1940 which conquered Europe was overwhelming horse drawn). Finally your lack of knowledge about this period is clearly evident by the reliance of Paul Fussell's widely discredited book. Read more widely- you might learn something.
@@henrypulleine8750 But Haig connived with French to dismiss Smith-Dorrien, who had saved the BEF in the 4 day Mons-Le Cateau action, in which he demonstrated his command, calmness and awareness of what was actually happening in the maelstrom of the German advance. Haig's time in the war reveals no ability to think outside the box., contributing more of the same, time and again. It is my contention that the butcher's bill for WW! would have much smaller if Smith-Dorrien had been in command of the BEF.
What the hell are you on about? The BEF lost the least amount of soldiers throughout the war. May I suggest you read some actual history instead of regurgitating nonsense from Blackadder.
Acosori MaxConto Lol 100 days offensive was orchestrated by Haig and saw Britain inflict nearly as many casualties on Germany as the rest of the Entente combined. He didn’t lose most of our armies and the unfortunate slaughter was just a reality of trench warfare. Even so Somme was more the fault of lower down officers failing to adapt plans to altering circumstances, not to mention Haig was forced into the offensive to bail the French out at Verdun when he’d have rather continued to train his troops and attack later in Flanders.
The label "Butcher" Haig was coined many years after his death. He was regarded as a national hero at the end of WW1, and vast crowds came out for his funeral in 1928, some say more than did for Lady Di's funeral(!). He didn't lose most of the British and allied armies; Britain effectively bailed out the French in 1917 after their troops mutinied and while the Americans were a welcome addition to the Allied cause, they were mostly raw, inexperienced troops who suffered very high rates of attrition when they went on the attack. Sure, Haig made some big mistakes - but so did every other Army commander in WW1 - but he also oversaw the huge improvement in the British Army's performance 1916-18 leading the the victory at the Battle of Amiens and the 100 days, which seem to have been written out of popular history. N
A fair and balanced reminder that Haig was a man of his time and that that time is well beyond our experience or even understanding today.
Wonderful presentation. So true, as you spoke at the end that the age of Haig and what society was like belongs now to ancient studies. Contemporary society has no reference point for what our world was nor the appreciation of how many of us were raised by those veterans of the world wars and the positive values of service and sacrifice towards one's country they instilled in us.
Haig was the man that brought victory to the UK 🇬🇧 he remodeled the British army on the go he was a man of his times.
Haig let many thousands & thousands of British troops die !!! By getting shot tp peices by German machine gun fire !! With no thought of taking out the germans only by walking in hails of bullets !!! With bad intelligence led to hid stupid orders !! Tanks only helped for a while !!
It's easy to criticise him. Although I have no doubt, any critic wouldn't able to deliver even 0.001% of his performance.
WW1 was a huge mess, on never before seen scale. It was never done before him, he was a first man to manage such a magnitude of people and resources.
Of course, the errors happened and they were bloody. I do not see how any person could avoid doing any errors in such a great enterprise.
Butchers are those who started the whole bloody affair - Bethmann-Holweg, Jagow, Falkenhayn, Moltke.
I'd be interested in the ration of Haig's time on nice soft, plush carpets and the battlefield. My little bit of research shows him to be a REMF 😎
Its a bit of a "Tony Blair Knighthood" job..(apart from the war in Iraq he did a great job) ."Apart from the disasters on the Somme and Paschendale he did a great job".
The somme and Passchendaele weren’t disasters though
the First Day on the Somme was but the whole battle wasnt.
The Somme was a victory that broke the back of Germany's elite regular army despite being in a favourable position and forced them to retret to the Hindenburg line
@@atrlawes98 They were disasters for the widows and orphans, among whom my father and his five siblings figure.
36.05 Haig's role in creating the British mass army pre-war???
It was Smith Dorrien's term at the Aldershot Command that turned the British army into a modern force, trained in fire and movement, to use initiative, re-organised and with the cavalry taught to use rifles and forget about sabre/lance, knee to knee charge lunacy beloved by French and Haig. S-D's request to the treasury to fund more machine guns received no support from Haig or French, and yet Haig is lauded as the thinking soldier open to new ideas..
Haig subsequently set about abandoning S-D's advances but carefully taking credit for every advance that his predecessor had made.
Haig also failed very publicly in the 1912 manoeuvres.
Why do the current WFA speakers all find no fault in Haig's colluding and conniving so slimily with French to dismiss S-D so publicly in 1915? Was not S-D a far more able and effective field commander than both? Are they too heavily invested in the "intellectual soldier" to step back and see what is has been there all the time?
Not that long ago I got into all sorts of trouble for not worshiping Haig as a hero at a well known establishment on the Somme. This is a pretty biased view supporting Haig. I am not a military man, but to my mind having been responsible for the deaths of 20,000 men on the first day of the Somme, most of whom were probably killed in the first couple of hours, I would have thought any reasonable man might just have thought, stop the show, we have got something badly wrong! I only have one relative killed in the attack on Sugar Trench at Courcelette on 15th September 1916 and whose body was never recovered, and one injured in an attack on the Quadrilateral at Ginchy on the same day, but there must be a lot more relatives who wonder, as I do, why Haig persisted with such a killing strategy. There can be no doubt that his organisational skills were excellent, and he was responsible for the gigantic growth in the army. But as a field commander his decisions look somewhat less satisfactory in my opinion. 😢
The battle of somme was pointless once you look at it, they gained only a few km of useless land and on the other hand, the total casualties with both sides added together shows us that about 1.25 million people was killed. The battle of Passchendaele was the repeat of it.
What choice did Haig have though? The western front was going to be a bloody struggle, there was no way - using the technology of the time - to avoid that. Equally, losing that many men was sadly a fact of this war as a whole. On the 22nd August 1914 the french army lost over 27,000 killed. On the 21st March 1918 the German army lost over 10,000 (yes it’s half that of the Somme casualties but tactics had evolved and this was the greatest advance the war had seen since 1914 but the figures are still very high).
I agree entirely. This man Haig was a stupid, upper-class butcher.
Question: How did the attacking army going "over the top" make it thru their own barbed wire obstacles?
It was removed in advance, usually during the night.
Without the Germans finding out? Not likely!
They woud remove it before the attack, but it was said that some soldiers got caught in the wire and died during the battle, which I guess is a lack of consideration on the British's part
I believe they also had paths where you could just move it aside
Is there any evidence of the Brits studying the Franco/Prussian engagement? I'm interested in the deaths by sabre and lance vs rifle and machine gun notwithstanding German barbed wire and the use of observation balloons? If not why not? If so, why ignored and by whom? Further, notice the provision of a model "tank" in 1908 by a Australian Lacelot De Mole to the Brits? Seems to me any studentship/scholarship of the the military art was NOT part of the Brit, particularly Haig's, mindset....
That you're asking these questions to begin with shows how poorly you understand the subject and are in no position to pass judgement. The Franco Prussian war saw significant and successful use of cavalry especially by Von Bredow at Mars la Tour with both of the combatant countries continuing to field large numbers, this was only enhanced in the British experience during the Boer War.
The emphasis you place on tanks is particularly dumb. The tanks of the time were remarkably crude things that were able to be outpaced even at top speed by someone jogging and so unreliable that in any action more than half would be disabled from simple mechanical breakdown than enemy action. In the fluid manoeuvre warfare such as in 1914 they'd have been useless, too slow and unreliable to keep pace with any advance, it's only in the static and limited movement of 1915-18 that such vehicles would be useful enough for idea to take off. De Mole's notion of an armoured fighting vehicle was by no means novel with several designs prior to the war showing up in all of the major powers and all being rejected.
Haig a Hero, not to my way of thinking. How he was perceived by the men who had served him? He might have been.
Was he a fool and a Butcher? No more or No les than other WW 1 Generals. In reality he was probably more in tune with the situation than most of the others both at the outset of hostilities and as the situation progressed.
The real question, who else could have replaced him and done a better job?
The French general’s went through the same time period and for the most part, followed the same game plan.
With the possible exception of Petain, who argued against the possibility of offencive Due to defencive fire power.
Yet Thousands more were killed under his command.
Foch and the French Generals under his command did much the same as Haig and his.
The Somme was planned when and where it was initially for politics, Then still fought with greatly reduced French participation, with little chance of success, to take pressure off the French at Verdun.
All the Generals, were out of ideas, still trying out dated, tactics, Throwing huge numbers of relatively raw recruits into the maelstrom of fire, for months on end with little or no sign of success.
Haig might arguably be argued to be smarter than some of the others, he looked for and supported new ideas.
Surely if Haig is a foolish, callous butcher, Rawlinson must have been worse. It was Rawlinson who planned the attack. It was Rawlinson who ordered the “New Army” to go over the top and walk towards the enemy.
Something the original BEF had known not to do, prior to landing in France.
It might be argued this disaster was particularly influenced by Rawlinson prejudiced view of the “New Army”. Or perhaps because he was correct, the “New Army” was just not well enough prepared.
The demands of the politicians who were insisting the “New Army” get involved in an offensive for political reasons. Must be equally guilty.
By 1918 things were getting better, unfortunately to late for my Grandfather, my Dads Uncle, His Cousin, and almost all their contemporaries. Who after volunteering for Kitcheners Army, survived from 1915 until March 1918. despite the requirements of Joffre, Foch, French, Haig, Rawlinson and their subordinates. Their company D 8th Royal Highlanders was on the front line on 21 March. My Grandfather was one of vey few of the dead to return. He spoke very well of the front line German soldiers who took him prisoner and tended his wounds.
However he was left with the dead by while being moved back from the front through Belgium.
He was found found still alive by a Belgian civilian tended to him until he recovered who hid him until after the armistice.
I don’t know, what his opinion of Haig was. He was a Private, I get the impression he wasn’t to keen of officers in general.
Another Uncle survived Gallipoli, According to him they landed as a battalion, but couldn’t form a company when they were evacuated.
Now that was sheer incompetence. But Churchill is a Hero. And the British General was one of the few possible alternates to Haig or Smith Dorian. And Lloyd George would be Haig’s critic, and still complain he wasn’t doing enough to assist the French.
The whole thing was a unnecessary horrendous disaster for all the countries involved on both sides.
No senior Generals were Hero’s, Most if not all oversaw hundreds of thousands of deaths.
How, exactly, Gary, do you know what sexual practices British soldiers did or did not engage in while they were overseas? Sounds like just more bollocks to me.
This is mostly bollocks. I question this gentleman's academic qualifications. They do not appear on his Wikipedia page.
Haig the Butcher*
Gary Sheffield has established himself as an apologist for Haig. Unfortunately this position requires highly selective use of the evidence. I’m particular Professor Sheffield consistently skates over the ample evidence that Haig was an irrational optimistic fir ever in search of impossible breakthrough and cavalry exploitation battles and then claiming after their abject failures that he was really fighting successful attrition operations. What about too Haig’s casual dilution of the planned Somme bombardment by a factor of at least two - he had failed the arithmetic exam at Staff College of course!
“The machine gun is a much overrated weapon” Sir Douglas Haig in 1915. He loved a glorious cavalry charge though! It’s hard to be too tough on these generals, they all traded a lot of blood Entente and Central Powers alike. But with his Royal connections and the Crown being the Head of the Armed Forces of Great Britain and her dominions and colonies at that time, Haig deserves some special attention because George V fixes him in his command for so long whereas French, Russian, and German generals go by the wayside. Was there someone in the background who could have done better tactically and at the operational level? Maybe. For me the Brita’ mistake on the Western Front was not Haig, but going on adventures in the Middle East, the Dardanelles, and elsewhere. They committed something like a half-million Indian troops to the Middle East. The British Navy could have been used for oh, I dunno, securing a flank attack on zee Germans in the Strait of Dover rather than getting pummeled my Ottomans and trying in vain to clear hundreds of mines in the Dardanelles and wasting thousands of men pinned down on a useless beachhead.
The overrated machine guns managed to wipe out most of the 21000 casualties in the battle of somme in just one day. Douglas Haig was a brute.
Random Person because those machine guns had not been destroyed or suppressed by a rather lacklustre artillery barrage. That’s not necessarily Haigs fault - he had no way of knowing the true state of the German frontline till the first wave actually went over the top. It’s worth noting that on the southern flank of the Somme attacks, the advance was very successful, achieving all its objectives on the first day.
This quote about machine guns is nonssens the original source says it came from ",an army commander" in the great war the UK had more than Douglas Haig. Furthermore Haigs Review of the Work Done During the Training Season 1912, states:
"More attention should be paid to the handling of cavalry machineguns when brigaded. Their drill and manoeuvre should, before departure to practice camp, attain a high standard of efficiency."
This is in 1912.... Before the war.
He is quoted in orders to I Corps on August 20, 1914:
"German machine-guns are said to be well commanded; the French are believed to have lost heavily by attacking them with infantry."
Again this is very early in the war.
Even in his private family correspondence he's clear:
"There will be a great want of troops, and numbers are wanted. So I expect you will all soon be in the field. *Meantime train your machine guns*. It will repay you."
All of these are quotes directly attributable to Haig and from sources that are explicit unlike the machine gun quote above
@@RandomPerson-cm2wg Artillery was biggest killer.
Mass murderer of the empire
The butcher strategist.
Worse criminal than Hitler.
I was in Kuantan in the North East corner of Malaysia. There was a small monument to a dozen or so soldiers who had been sent to France. Literally every corner of the empire scoured for bodies.
I think the following from HISTORYnet sums up Haig -
Visiting the Somme battlefield in northern France is largely a matter of going from one Commonwealth Graves Commission cemetery to another. The graveyards are everywhere, some of them very small, comprising only a handful of white Portland marble stones, many bearing the inscription, A Soldier of the Great War / Known unto God. One sees so many of these cemeteries and so many stones-along with the vast memorial at Thievpal bearing the names of some 70,000 British soldiers whose bodies were never recovered-that after a few hours of it, you feel numb. Overwhelmed.
The magnitude of the battle still stuns the imagination. The Somme was an epic of both slaughter and futility; a profligate waste of men and materiel such as the world had never seen. On the morning of July 1, 1916, 110,000 British infantrymen went “over the top.” In a few hours, 60,000 of them were casualties. Nearly 20,000 of these were either dead already or would die of their wounds, many of them lingering for days between the trenches, in no man’s land. The attacking forces did not gain a single one of their objectives.
Even so, a staff colonel had the cheek to write: “The events of July 1st bore out the conclusions of the British higher command and amply justified the tactical methods employed.”
Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, chief of staff of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and architect of the battle, evidently agreed. On the day after the debacle, stating that the enemy “has undoubtedly been shaken and has few reserves in hand,” he discussed with subordinates methods for continuing the offensive.
Which he did, with a kind of transcendent stubbornness, for another four months, until winter weather forced an end to the campaign, if not the fighting. By then, Haig’s army had suffered more than 400,000 casualties. For the British, in the grave judgment of noted military historian John Keegan, “the battle was the greatest tragedy…of their national military history” and “marked the end of an age of vital optimism in British life that has never been recovered.”
Haig envisioned a vital role for the horse in his masterpiece, the Somme offensive. That battle is generally, and incorrectly, remembered as one decided through attrition. (It failed even on that score, since the Allies lost more men than the Germans.) Haig, popular thinking goes, attacked and kept on attacking-even when the ground his men gained, yard by bloody yard, was useless by any military measure-in order to wear down the Germans. Attrition is never an inspired strategy and is usually the refuge of a commander who cannot come up with anything better. And Haig was, if anything, unimaginative. As Paul Fussell writes in his indispensable volume The Great War and Modern Memory, “In a situation demanding the military equivalent of wit and invention…Haig had none.”
Still, in his defense, it’s clear Haig honestly believed a massive frontal assault by British infantry would punch a hole in the German line, through which his cavalry would then charge to glory. On several occasions mounted troops were brought up in anticipation of the breakout that, of course, never occurred.
Critics of Haig are remorseless on this point-the man was so confident in his outdated ideas that he never allowed actual battlefield experience to challenge them. His fantasies of cavalry charges across open country were matched by his insistence on sending infantry against the enemy in neat ranks at a slow walk, the better to maintain control. Andrew Jackson had demonstrated the flaw in this method of attack during the War of 1812, and the American Civil War had truly driven the point home on a dozen different occasions. But if Haig had ever heard of Cold Harbor, he plainly did not believe its lessons applied to British soldiers. And the Confederates who had cut down 7,000 Union troops in 20 minutes didn’t even have machine guns.
There's lots more, but the final para nails it -
As late as 1926, he was still capable of writing this about the future of warfare:
"I believe that the value of the horse and the opportunity for the horse in the future are likely to be as great as ever. Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the men and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse-the well-bred horse-as you have ever done in the past".
Astonishing that any man who was there could still believe in cavalry 10 years after the Somme. But it is the bit about “the well-bred horse” that really gives the game away. Haig was undeniably a butcher, as his severest critics have claimed, but he was most of all a pompous fool.
This is the most extraordinarily ill informed and wrongheaded summary of Haig's leadership I have read for a long time. In fact, it has hard to know where to start so I will confine myself to a few choice refutations.
Firstly, Haig had no 'fantasises' of cavalry charges across open country. What he did desire was the effective use of modern cavalry tactics as part of a combined arms offensive. Cavalry was in fact strikingly effective during periods of open warfare on the Western Front and you will no doubt recall how decisive cavalry would prove to be in Palestine in 1917 and 1918.
Secondly, at no stage the war were British soldiers sent into battle in 'neat ranks' and at a slow walk akin to Napoleonic tactics. In fact there was a clear tactical progression during the war- with infantry tactics evolving at a rapid rate.
Thirdly, the comment regarding the 'well bred horse' has been classically and consistently misinterpreted. In fact the comment only makes sense when you understand that Haig was addressing the Royal College of Veterinarians. You may also recall that the horse was still an integral part of most armies until well into the 1920s and 1930s (in fact the German Army of 1940 which conquered Europe was overwhelming horse drawn).
Finally your lack of knowledge about this period is clearly evident by the reliance of Paul Fussell's widely discredited book.
Read more widely- you might learn something.
@@henrypulleine8750
But Haig connived with French to dismiss Smith-Dorrien, who had saved the BEF in the 4 day Mons-Le Cateau action, in which he demonstrated his command, calmness and awareness of what was actually happening in the maelstrom of the German advance. Haig's time in the war reveals no ability to think outside the box., contributing more of the same, time and again. It is my contention that the butcher's bill for WW! would have much smaller if Smith-Dorrien had been in command of the BEF.
Butcher haig a hero? After loosing most of the British and its allied armies for no strategic gain, he got bailed out by the French and Americans.
What the hell are you on about? The BEF lost the least amount of soldiers throughout the war. May I suggest you read some actual history instead of regurgitating nonsense from Blackadder.
Acosori MaxConto Lol 100 days offensive was orchestrated by Haig and saw Britain inflict nearly as many casualties on Germany as the rest of the Entente combined. He didn’t lose most of our armies and the unfortunate slaughter was just a reality of trench warfare. Even so Somme was more the fault of lower down officers failing to adapt plans to altering circumstances, not to mention Haig was forced into the offensive to bail the French out at Verdun when he’d have rather continued to train his troops and attack later in Flanders.
you moron, the Russians and French lost more than the British
The label "Butcher" Haig was coined many years after his death. He was regarded as a national hero at the end of WW1, and vast crowds came out for his funeral in 1928, some say more than did for Lady Di's funeral(!).
He didn't lose most of the British and allied armies; Britain effectively bailed out the French in 1917 after their troops mutinied and while the Americans were a welcome addition to the Allied cause, they were mostly raw, inexperienced troops who suffered very high rates of attrition when they went on the attack.
Sure, Haig made some big mistakes - but so did every other Army commander in WW1 - but he also oversaw the huge improvement in the British Army's performance 1916-18 leading the the victory at the Battle of Amiens and the 100 days, which seem to have been written out of popular history. N
Acosori MaxConto Ignorant and prejudiced. By the end of 1917 it was Britain bailing of the French. BEF became the only reliable allied army.
Douglas Haig - Homicidal Incompetence!