 Starter

1.  Starter Blackadder Why does this newspaper think there might be ‘blood on the hands’ of generals in WWI like Haig?

2. Was this man really the ‘Butcher of the Somme’?

3. The Battle of the Somme –fact file • 1 July – 18 November 1916 • One of the most significant battles of the First World War • Casualties, suffering and the human tragedy were horrific.

4. The Battle of the Somme –fact file • 60,000 British casualties on first day of battle alone • 11 Cambridgeshire Battalion sent 750 ‘over the top’ and 691 became casualties of war • Most casualties were men in their late teens or early to mid twenties • By end of battle a strip of land 25 km long and 6km wide taken at the cost of …

5. The Battle of the Somme –fact file 420,000 British casualties

6. The Battle of the Somme –fact file 200,000 French casualties

7. The Battle of the Somme –fact file 500,000 German casualties

8. Was Haig really the ‘butcher of the Somme’? • Why did so many men die? • Could the enormous loss of life have been avoided? • Does General Haig deserve the title of … ‘The Butcher of the Somme’?

9. Your task • Recently there has been a campaign to have the statue of Field Marshall Haig in London removed and replaced by a statue of an ordinary soldier. Write a letter to the Mayor of London explaining what you think should be done. Include the following points: • A brief description of who Haig was • Explain the key events of the most famous / infamous battle associated with him – the Somme • Give both sides of the debate • Use quotes from historians or contemporaries where appropriate • Reach a judgement about what you think should be done with the monument to Haig and why

10. Statue of Haig by AF Hardman unveiled in Whitehall in 1937

11. Was Haig a fool who despised the machine gun and argued the efficacy of a cavalry charge even as the guns boomed in the background (Lloyd George, 1935-6, p.323); or was he a great military innovator, who saw early the value of tanks and invented ‘protoblitzkrieg’ tactics? • Did Haig selfishly resist Lloyd George’s attempts to introduce unity of command, or did he selflessly propose Foch as Supreme Commander because he saw that it was the only way to win the War? • Was Haig ignorant and ill-informed, surrounded by sycophants, as he planned – miles from the actual conflict – ‘yet another gargantuan effort to move his drinks cabinet six inches closer to Berlin’ (Blackadder, 1989); or was he a hands-on general, who visited the front line often, sensitively managing the biggest army Britain ever put into the field, controlling the overall strategy while allowing initiative to local commanders? • And in his great battles at the Somme and Passchendaele, was he was a ‘butcher and bungler’ (Laffin, 1988), or ‘amongst the “Great Captains” of History’ (Phillips, 1999)?

12. The war years • The first criticisms of Haig surfaced during the War itself. In late July 1916, Churchill circulated a paper round his Cabinet colleagues, criticising Haig’s tactics: ‘In personnel the results of the operation have been disastrous; in terrain they have been absolutely barren… from every point of view the British offensive has been a great failure.’ In 1917, Lloyd George made strenuous efforts to prevent Haig mounting the Passchendaele campaign, and both men knew he would have dismissed Haig if he had been able.. • Yet, at the same time, there was a general willingness in the army to portray Haig as an inspiring, awe-commanding officer who set the tone for his troops. In 1916, during the battle of the Somme, Basil Liddell Hart, a young Lieutenant in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, wrote in his notebook: ‘In the first half of the War our leadership was flawless… perfect’. Even after being gassed and invalided back to England the young Liddell Hart’s confidence was undaunted, as he saw in Haig ‘a genius for pure generalship which has made Sir Douglas Haig fit to rank with any general of past or modern times’ (letter to the Daily Express, 21 December 1916).

13. When Haig died in 1928, some 200,000 ex-servicemen (the equivalent of 200 battalions) filed past his coffin. Since his death was popularly attributed to the stress of the War, Haig was seen – alongside the ordinary soldiers – as one of its victims, and he was respected for his work for the British Legion.

14. Changing attitiudes in the 1930s Even by the end of the 1920s, attitudes were beginning to change. The years 1927–1933 saw the publication of what Esther MacCallum-Stewart calls ‘the Canonical War Books’ – Sassoon’s and Owen’s poems, and books like All Quiet on the Western Front (published in English in 1929) and Goodbye to All That (1929) – which emphasised the horror and futility of the War, and presented the ordinary soldier as the victim of callous generals: 'He's a cheery old card,' grunted Harry to Jack As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack. But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

15. A society in which the nature of the Great War, and the nature of the Army, were both becoming the subject of fierce reproach, was not one in which Haig’s reputation could long have remained intact. • It must be remembered also that, by the early 1930s, it was becoming clear that the Great War had also failed in its promise to be ‘the War to end all wars’, and interpretations of the conduct of the War (and of Haig) became entangled with public support for the policy of appeasement. In the 1930s, stopping even so great an evil as Hitler was NOT thought worth the deaths of millions of young men, and Haig – under whose command so many lives has been lost – was bound to come under criticism, even if he did win the War by doing so.

16. Into the sixties • After the War, Haig’s bad press grew worse. The 1960s saw the popularisation of Owen’s poetry, and the BBC Series The Great War (1964) made available for the first time to the wider public some of the saddest and most horrific images of the War. The ‘60s saw also the climax of an anti-establishment attitude that was not going to appreciate Haig’s Presbyterian pruderies about soldiers’ songs, and WAAC girlfriends, or his desire to staff GHQ with men who were ‘gentlemen’. • The ‘60s were, too, the time of CND, anti-Vietnam protest marches, and a wave of urgent pacifism which was also bound to undermine Haig’s stock. All these issues were prosecuted, moreover, by means of the new medium, again popularised in the 1960s, of satire. AJP Taylor, whose writing caught the mood of the moment exactly, commented wryly in The First World War, an Illustrated History (1963): ‘Though he had no more idea than French how to win the War, he was sure that he could win it’ (p.80).

17. John Terraine Ironically, 1963 saw also the publication of the first major attempt to restore Haig’s reputation – John Terraine’s Douglas Haig, the Educated Soldier. For Terraine, modern students have been ‘misled by myth and deafened by sixty years of lamentation’ (Smoke and the Fire, p.119). Historians have not put the facts of Haig’s command into context (particularly, e.g., the contemporary impossibility of communicating with the soldiers during a battle), and they have not made sufficient allowances for the ‘sheer novelty’ of many of the problems he faced – aeroplanes, submarines, the internal combustion engine, wireless telegraphy, poison gas and flame-throwers, ‘mass production, mass logistics and mass administration’: “The truth is that those ruddy-cheeked, bristling-moustached, heavy-jawed, frequently inarticulate generals rose to challenge after challenge, absorbed weapon after weapon into their battle-systems, adapted themselves to constant change with astonishing success... But no one cared to make a legend out of that. “ John Terraine, The Smoke and the Fire (1980, p.173

18. And so Terraine attacks, one-by-one, by the steady application of tiresome facts, the ‘myths’ of the War. • Haig did not eschew civilian help; he put Sir Eric Geddes in charge of the railways. • Haig’s GHQ was not a collection of sycophantic nits, but ‘a remarkable fusion of the best available talent, civilian and military, in the country’ (Douglas Haig, p.177). • Haig did not reject the machine gun and cling to the cavalry; he had known about the machine gun since 1898, and saw the value of tanks five months before they were used in battle. • His generals did not cower in châteaux behind the lines; many of them fought in battle, and some of them were killed. • The death toll of the War was indeed terrible, but three times as many people died in the Second World War. • The battle of Passchendaele was not ‘futile’; it fought the Germans to a standstill and ‘when German morale did at last collapse, some nine months later, this was the end of a process which had been begun in Flanders .’ (Douglas Haig, p.373). • And in the battle of the Somme , although Haig may have made a mistake in telling the men to walk in waves, he could hardly have been expected to know how well these volunteers, in their first battle, would acquit themselves:

19. Samuel Hynes, in his book The Soldiers' Tale, Bearing Witness to Modern War (1997) argues that the War was just too big for human minds to grasp: ‘Our imaginations simply can't encompass all those armies on all those battlefields’ (p.xii). • Consequently, he argued, we replace a too-complex and too-horrifying reality for a simplistic and comforting myth. In the 1920s, it was possible for the general public to accept the notion of a ‘good war’ to save civilisation and democracy; the notion of Haig’s infallibility came as part and parcel of that myth. • However, when it became clear that that myth was not sustainable, public opinion swung round and grasped the alternative myth – that of an unnecessary war, waged by fools.

20. Towards a synthesis • Although, all in all, the academic debate in the last decade appears to have moved against Haig’s critics, it has to be said that individual studies by authors like Passingham (2000) and Walker (2002) continue to reveal critical individual mistakes by Haig and his team. Thus both sides of the debate seem to be right at the same time: Haig was indeed a very good general who indeed caused the deaths of thousands of men.