Haig

A Re-Appraisal 80 Years On

Brian Bond, Nigel Cave, Brian Bond, Nigel Cave

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781844158874
• eBook ISBN: 9781783409204
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

Field Marshal Earl Haig's reputation continues to arouse as much interest and controversy as ever. This volume represents the collaboration of two leading historical societies, The British Commission for Military History and The Douglas Haig Fellowship. Leading historians have produced a comprehensive and fascinating study of the most significant and frequently debated aspects of Haig's momentous career.

Chapter 1

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Haig and the Historians

J.M. Bourne

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Haig and the historians. Haig versus the historians. Haig and me. History and me. Whenever I write or (more rarely) speak about Haig it always becomes personal. ‘What’s the matter?’ my wife asked as I sat slumped over my desk with my head in my hands. ‘It’s this article I’m writing on “Haig and the Historians”,’ I replied, ‘it’s depressing me.’ Writing and speaking about Haig always depresses me. This is because, despite my best intentions, I nearly always become far more strident in Haig’s defence than is proper and more than the evidence permits. Stridency has no place in the repertoire of a respectable historian. But, in Haig’s case it is difficult to avoid. My own painful journey of discovery about the true nature of the First World War and Haig’s role in it has been described elsewhere.¹ Public discussion of the war surrounding the eightieth anniversary of the Armistice, in November 1998, made it abundantly clear how few of my fellow countrymen have followed me down the road to Damascus. On 6 November, 1998, a national newspaper, The Express, under the banner headline ‘He led a million men to their deaths’, launched a campaign for Haig’s statue in Whitehall to be removed because of the ‘shadow’ it cast over the Cenotaph and the memory of Britain’s war dead. Its extraordinary editorial deployed the full panoply of anti-Haig prejudice. He was an ‘ambitious cavalryman’ ‘who did not share the sufferings and deprivations of his men’. His view of strategy and tactics was ‘blinkered’. ‘Hundreds of thousands of men died needlessly as a result of his orders.’ The situation in our schools appears to be little better. A recent GCSE ‘Revision Guide’ explains how 600,000 British troops were killed on the Somme, that Haig ordered 400,000 men to advance up to their waists in mud at Passchendaele (close your eyes and imagine the scene), and that he did not understand the use of tanks because he was ‘used to cavalry charges’.² In this atmosphere it is difficult not to succumb to the temptation of joining the ‘angry band of revisionists’, who, ‘hopelessly outnumbered’, are driven to the ‘opposite extreme, transforming the senior commanders from butchers into saints’.³ Brian Bond’s hope that one day the Great War would be studied ‘simply as history without polemic intent or apologies’ still seems a long way from realization.⁴

The gulf between popular understanding of the war and the burgeoning academic scholarship on the British Army’s performance on the Western Front remains vast. ‘After the work of the last ten years,’ wrote Ian Beckett, ‘it might be argued that we have broken the Hindenburg Line, we are somewhere around the end of October 1918 and we can see those green fields beyond. It is only a pity that, back in Blighty, it is still 1 July, 1916. Clearly, we need a superior breed of conducting officers when the war correspondents arrive to visit the ‘Old Front Line’.’⁵ This conducting officer is beginning to wonder whether he is up to the task.

The gulf between popular understanding of the war and academic scholarship on the British Army has affected views of Haig in a particular way. Haig is absolutely central to the popular view of the war. His ‘stupidity’ and ‘indifference’ to the sufferings of his men provide an explanation for the war’s horrors which people can readily grasp. Those who lecture to ‘extra-mural’ audiences on the Great War will know how impossible it is to keep Haig out of the discussion. No matter what the subject of the lecture, questions always return to the first day on the Somme and Passchendaele, which continue to exercise a firm grip not only on popular memory but also on popular historiography. This is in marked contrast to the revisionist academic literature of the last fifteen years, which has begun to transform our understanding of how the British Expeditionary Force actually planned and executed military operations, and which is becoming increasingly concerned with 1918, the war’s ‘forgotten year’. Haig has all but disappeared from this literature. Some of the leading figures in the renaissance have been quite blunt about the matter. ‘We need no more books devoted exclusively to Sir Douglas Haig,’ declared Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson in their devastating review of Denis Winter’s Haig’s Command, ‘and least of all to trivialities such as his spitefulness or noble character, his callousness or grim forbearance, his sexual deviance or marital uprightness. There are large issues crying out to be explored: among them, how first world war battles were devised and organized and waged and supplied and commanded and made to serve a purpose, or caused to serve no purpose. A book like Haig’s Command is more than an impediment to the exploration of real issues. It helps to preserve historical writing about the Great War in its ridiculously protracted adolescence.’⁶ In practice, this means that popular opinion holds Haig responsible for the British Expeditionary Force’s bloody failures but academic revisionist history has not credited him with responsibility for its bloody successes.

There is a certain irony in the personal demonization of Haig, because his doughtiest champions over the years have undoubtedly been found among his biographers. These have been numerous.⁷ Haig’s predecessor, Sir John French, has not enjoyed such lavish attention. Neither have Haig’s immediate subordinates, all of whom commanded at a level comparable with Bernard Montgomery in the Second World War. Only Rawlinson has been the subject of a truly distinguished and enlightening study.⁸ Gough has, perhaps, fared next best.⁹ Plumer and (more particularly) Byng have been the subject of adequate accounts.¹⁰ But there is little of value on Allenby and virtually nothing has been written about the seemingly unknowable Horne.¹¹ This is not simply because Haig is more important than the others, but because it is more practical to write about him. The distinctiveness of history as a subject is that it is about documents. In Haig’s case, there is no shortage of documents, especially material of a personal kind. Haig kept a diary and wrote copious letters to his wife. These provide ideal material for painting a portrait of Haig. In the case of his most recent biographers, however, the portrait has been far from flattering.¹²

Haig emerges from the pages of Gerard De Groot as a man of awesome self-assurance, with a religious sense of mission and a direct line to God, whose military ‘education’ had revealed to him the road to victory but closed his mind to any thoughts of an alternative route, a dabbler in spiritualism and a self-obsessed valetudinarian who surrounded himself with sycophants, a man of calculating ambition, petty-minded, devious and disloyal. To this, Denis Winter, self-appointed Witchfinder General of the Great War, has added the charge of fraud. Haig is accused of deliberately falsifying his diary, setting in train an international conspiracy of official historians and archivists designed to protect his reputation and render a true explanation of the war’s operational history impossible from the official record. Refutation of these charges would take up more space than is available here. Suffice it to say, that Winter’s perceived conspiracy would appear to be one of the least successful in history, judging by the state of Haig’s public reputation in Britain. The falsification of his diary seems equally inept, given the frequency with which its contents are held against the author’s competence, integrity and humanity, not least by Winter himself.

There are, however, wider and more serious problems with the personal approach. Haig’s papers provide abundant evidence about Haig. They offer a splendid platform from which to observe their author, but they lack the altitude for a comprehensive survey of the war as a whole. Those who see the war on the Western Front as little more than a working out of Haig’s pre-war (mis)conceptions have a dilemma. How do they explain the eventual British and Allied victory? In Winter’s case the dilemma is avoided by the classic psychological ploy of denial. There was no military victory on the battlefield in 1918, therefore there is nothing to explain. Except, perhaps, why the German military leadership asked for an Armistice. There are often major disjunctions between what Haig thought should happen, would happen and even had happened and what did happen. Nowhere, perhaps, is this clearer than in the case of Haig’s ‘cavalry obsession’.

Haig’s origins as a cavalry officer are frequently cited against him. Cavalry officers were supposedly incapable of understanding technology. Why this should be is rarely explained. Horse management was certainly complex and technical: horses were in an important sense muscle-powered machines. Haig’s private papers provide abundant evidence of his devotion to the cavalry. His pre-war writings are optimistic about its utility on modern battlefields. During the war he did his best to emphasize the cavalry’s successes. After the war he lent his support and encouragement to maintaining the arm.

Given this evidence, one might expect certain things to follow: a British Army in which cavalry was a major component; the widespread appointment of cavalry officers to key posts; a low level of mechanisation. None of these things was true during Haig’s command of the BEF. By September 1916 there were only five cavalry divisions on the Western Front, two of them Indian Army, less than three per cent of the BEF’s total strength. By September 1918 the number of cavalry divisions on the Western Front had fallen to three compared with sixty infantry divisions. During the war the cavalry grew by some 80 per cent, a growth accounted for largely by Yeomanry, which did find an effective use in Palestine. But the infantry grew by 469 per cent, the artillery by 520 per cent, the engineers by 1,429 per cent and the army service corps by 2,212 per cent.¹³ Both the artillery and engineers grew to a size larger than the whole of the British Regular Army in August 1914. The BEF also boasted the world’s first Tank Corps, which had 22,000 officers and other ranks by September 1918, equal to the size of the cavalry in August 1914. It was also supported by the world’s first independent air force, an organization much sponsored by Haig, and many of whose officers had transferred from the cavalry. Appointment to general officer rank in the BEF was not dominated by cavalrymen. Haig showed no preference for appointing cavalrymen either to senior appointments (with the exception of Gough) or to his circle of ‘sycophants’. And by the end of the war the BEF was not only awash with horses and mules but also with lorries, motor-cars, armoured cars, tanks and motor-bikes.¹⁴ It was the most mechanized army in the world. Haig’s ‘cavalry obsession’ therefore seems to have had little practical effect.

De Groot’s biography provides an interesting account of the evolution of Haig’s pre-war ideas as well as a ruthless dissection of his character and personality, but ultimately it fails to convince because it does not sufficiently engage with the most important issues of Haig’s wartime command, of what actually happened to the BEF on the Western Front and why. De Groot offers us his understanding of Haig, but little of his understanding of the war. The two are clearly connected but to understand one is not necessarily to understand the other. John Terraine’s Douglas Haig, the Educated Soldier remains formidable precisely because it does engage with these issues.¹⁵ Terraine has always insisted that his view of Haig was determined by his view of the war and not the other way round.¹⁶ This appears to be the sounder methodological approach. In future there seems little doubt that Haig’s reputation will be finally determined not by studies of the man himself, but of the man in the context of the armies which he commanded, and especially by detailed operational analyses at the army, corps, divisional, brigade and even battalion level. It is equally clear that the day has not yet arrived.

Despite the transformation of our understanding of the conduct of war on the Western Front by an impressive body of work published by British and Commonwealth historians since 1982, the year in which Shelford Bidwell and Dominick Graham’s seminal study Firepower appeared, there has been no fundamental re-assessment of Haig.¹⁷ This is, to some extent, unsurprising. Bidwell and Graham deliberately shifted the academic historiography of the Great War from an increasingly sterile debate about a handful of leading military and political leaders (especially Haig), based largely on gossip, to an increasingly fruitful consideration of the British Army as an instrument of war, based largely on contemporary archive sources, especially the 4,500 boxes of operational records contained in the Public Record Office’s WO 95 series of unit war diaries and after-action reports. Although valuable and much-needed at the time, the long-term consequence of this shift has been to disembody the BEF’s evolution. It is now time, perhaps, to restore some individuality to the process.

Although a few unreconstructed traditionalists, such as John Keegan, refuse to accept that the BEF underwent a ‘learning curve’ during the war, there is little disagreement among scholars about the nature of the military transformation. In August 1914 the British soldier might have passed for a gamekeeper in his soft cap, puttees and pack.¹⁸ He walked into battle. He was armed with little more than a rifle and bayonet. For support he could call only on the shrapnel-firing field guns of the Royal Artillery. His commanders were often elderly and unfit, with little relevant pre-war experience of any level of command above the battalion. By September 1918 he was dressed like an industrial worker in a safety helmet, with a respirator protecting him against gas close to hand. He was just as likely to be armed with a Lewis gun, grenade or rifle grenade as a simple rifle. He was trucked into battle. His appearance on the battlefield was preceded by a deception campaign based on sophisticated signals intelligence. He was supported by an high explosive artillery barrage of crushing density, by tanks, armoured cars, machine-guns, smoke and gas. Enemy guns were identified and attacked using leading-edge technologies of sound-ranging and flash-spotting, in which specially-recruited scientists played a key role. His commanders had emerged from the ‘tougher and younger core of natural leaders among surviving officers’ and, in some cases at brigade level and below, from Kitchener volunteers and Territorials.¹⁹ Many possessed in good measure the military leadership qualities of courage, boldness, judgement, flexibility and integrity. They abandoned strategic grandiosity in favour of the tactically possible in a war where tactical possibilities were determined principally by the covering fire of artillery. They no longer re-inforced failure or hung on to captured ground for the sake of it. The importance of thorough planning and preparation was accepted. Individual enterprise and initiative was encouraged. By 1918 the BEF had adopted a ‘modern style of war’,²⁰ very different from that of 1914 or 1916 or even 1917, something which popular and media opinion seemingly finds it impossible to grasp and which, during the Armistice commemorations, was totally ignored.

There is no consensus, however, about the speed or quality of the BEF’s learning or of the role of high command in the process. The Canadian historian, Tim Travers, remains an influential critic not only of the army but also of Haig. In a series of articles and two major books, Travers has investigated the British Army’s weaknesses during the Great War in managerial terms.²¹ His ‘villain’ is not one individual, not even Haig, but the pre-war Regular Army itself.

He deploys three main arguments. The first concerns the ‘ethos’ of the pre-war officer corps. He describes this as ‘strangely personalized’, a glorified old-boy network, hierarchical and riven with favouritism, whose principal intellectual activity was the dishonest preservation of individual and collective reputations. This had important consequences. It meant that the army was poorly adapted to meeting some of the war’s most important challenges. It was rigid and inflexible. Initiative and independent judgement were not encouraged. Intellectual honesty and curiosity were lacking. The historical record was deliberately distorted. Failure was disguised and tolerated. The second theme is that the army’s ethos was conducive to the persistence throughout the war of pre-war ideas. These emphasized a ‘human’ image of the battlefield at the expense of a disregard for the tactical implications of new technology. The fire-power lessons of the Russo-Japanese war were ignored in favour of a ‘human-centred’ model of battle in which mass, concentration of force, the ‘offensive spirit’, morale and the idea of ‘breakthrough’ were key elements. As a result senior commanders, especially Haig, pursued tactics which were often inappropriate and beyond the capabilities of the weapons systems employed. Travers’ third argument is the propensity of senior commanders to regard battle as an ordered and regular activity. Haig, in particular, saw his role as that of ‘master planner’ issuing generalized instructions. In the inevitable chaos of war, top-down control was abandoned and a command vacuum created. Too often during major offensives the lights were on at GHQ but there was no one at home.

As an explanation, Travers’ account explains too much. Given the severity of his strictures, the pre-war Regular Army ought not to have been able to ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• The Contributors
• Editors’ Foreword
• Chapter 1 John Bourne: Haig and the Historians
• Chapter 2 John Hussey: Portrait of a Commander-in-Chief
• Chapter 3 Gerard J DeGroot: Ambition, Duty and Doctrine: Haig’s Rise to High Command
• Chapter 4 Ian F W Beckett: Haig and French
• Chapter 5 David R Woodward: Sir William Robertson and Sir Douglas Haig
• Chapter 6 Peter Simkins: Haig and his Army Commanders
• Chapter 7 Keith Grieves: Haig and the Government, 19166–1918
• Chapter 8 William Philpott: Haig and Britain’s European Allies
• Chapter 9 J P Harris: Haig and the Tank
• Chapter 10 Michael Crawshaw: The Impact of Technology on the BEF and its Commander
• Chapter 11 Stephen Badsey: Haig and the Press
• Chapter 12 John Peaty: Haig and Military Discipline
• Chapter 13 Niall Bar and Gary Sheffield: Douglas Haig, the Common Soldier and the British Legion
• Chapter 14 Nigel Cave: Haig and Religion
• Notes