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Nov 7, 2018 · The reputation of Scottish World War One leader Douglas Haig has been controversial but it is finally being recovered from the ruins by historians.
Mar 27, 2019 · Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig has had the unenviable reputation of being the worst British general of all time, a bone-headed “donkey” who threw away the lives of his men in futile attacks. In many ways, the debate has now moved on from such stereotypes.
Haig was one of the chief inspirations for the character of Herbert Curzon in C. S. Forester's novel The General, a sharp satire of the mentality of old-school British officers in the Great War. References
Feb 5, 2013 · Douglas Haig, Britain’s First World War commander-in-chief from December 1915 to the end of the war, is remembered as the archetypal ‘donkey’ leading ‘lions’ to their death by the thousands. But, almost a century on, is this a fair judgement? Born in Edinburgh, 19 June 1861, Douglas Haig was the eleventh son of a wealthy whiskey ...
- The Plan
- The First Day
- The Problem of Scale
- Communication
- Was It Worth It?
The offensive on the Somme was initially conceived as part of a wider strategy to wear down the German Army by attacking it on all fronts in 1916. The French took the lead in planning the offensive on the Western Front and Haig played second fiddle to commander-in-chief Joseph Joffre. The Somme was not Haig’s favoured battleground. He would have pr...
It is well-known that, by the end of the first day of fighting on the Somme, few objectives had been secured while 19,000 British soldiers were dead. The scale of loss suffered in the first attacks can be attributed to the failure of the Allied artillery to neutralise German defences. Like the British Army at large, the artillery was on a steep lea...
In 1914, Britain went to war with a small professional army. By 1916, the British Expeditionary Force in France numbered two million. This rapid expansion in scale caused major structural challenges for Haig, whose staff had no experience of commanding such large forces. Not only were the armies bigger, but so were the fronts. The Battle of the Som...
Proponents of the “lions led by donkeys” argument point to the fact that senior commanders tended to be stationed a distance away from the front lines, while the humble soldier slogged it out in the trenches. But there was good reason for this. The length of the front meant commanders needed to be a further away to get a complete picture of what wa...
Over the course of the battle, about one million men were killed, wounded or captured. Haig maintained that the battle achieved the goal of eroding the German Army and its will to fight. But attrition swallowed up Allied manpower and material just as quickly as it did the Germans’. The scale of the Allied offensive on the Somme had nevertheless com...
- Cassie Pope
Haig believed that offensives were won by decisive battles, which goes against his own attritional warfare at the Somme, showing that Haig may have been attempting decisive victory’s, yet showing up short and achieving very little.
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May 28, 2016 · Ahead of the centenary of the beginning of the Battle of the Somme on July 1, Haig is still a controversial figure and the battle’s 419, 654 British casualties help explain why.
