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View this object. Early career The son of a wealth whisky distiller, Haig was born in Edinburgh into a large family of ancient Scottish lineage. General Sir Douglas Haig, Offensives Under his direction the British Army launched a series of mighty offensive against the German lines, the most famous of which were the battles of the Somme and Passchendaele Tending a grave near Mametz Wood, Carrying a wounded man at Passchendaele, Attrition Haig has since been accused of being an out dated cavalryman wedded to a belief in the possibility of breakthrough, failing to appreciate the realties of the new attritional warfare where success was measured not in territory captured but by a favourable casualty ratio.
Tough lessons Yet in both battles Haig and his subordinates learnt a tough lesson in how to fight a large-scale war. Prisoners captured during the August battles, All Arms To this end, he oversaw the greatest expansion of the British Army in its history and worked tirelessly to ensure that it evolved into a mighty and sophisticated instrument of war.
Diplomat Haig was also flexible enough to work with difficult allies. Reputation When Haig died in vast numbers attended his funeral, testament to the high regard in which he was held by his contemporaries. Hannibal, daring. Of course, truly great generals seem to possess all these qualities to some degree. They are artists of a kind, blending in one person intelligence, intuition, courage, calculation and many other traits that allow them to see what others cannot and to act when the time is right.
For students of military history, the question of what makes great commanders is inexhaustibly fascinating. We are, naturally, not intrigued by unsuccessful generals any more than we like to read about ballplayers who hit. There is nothing edifying in the biography of, say, Ambrose Burnside or any of the Union generals tormented by Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley.
But Douglas Haig may be the great exception to this rule. First, because he still has defenders who—in spite of those many graveyards and inconclusive, costly battles—would claim he was not in fact an unsuccessful commander.
At the end of the war, after all, the army he commanded—and had almost ruined—was, if not victorious, then plainly on the winning side.
Still, at the other extreme, one can argue persuasively that Haig did not merely fail to achieve his stated objectives in the great battles of the Somme and Ypres. While the controversy over Haig has never been settled, there was no question about his fitness for command when he took over the British forces on the Western Front after the failures of The battles at Arras and Loos had been badly planned and managed, captured little ground and resulted in what seemed at the time heavy casualties.
Then—BEF commander Sir John French was exhausted, demoralized and lacked confidence in himself and that of his immediate subordinates. He had obtained every qualification, gained every experience and served in every appointment requisite for the General Command. He was as sure of himself at the head of the British army as a country gentleman on the soil which his ancestors had trod for generations and to whose cultivation he had devoted his life.
The man had a thing for horses, which is understandable in one who had been a cavalry officer during the infancy of the internal combustion engine. Generals, the cynics like to say, are always fighting the last war.
But Haig continued to believe in the cavalry long after the war that he was actually fighting—World War I—had proven mounted soldiers absurdly vulnerable and obsolete.
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. Search term:. Read more. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled.
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