The Great War VI: General Haig and the Somme

Time prevents a post as full as I had hoped in time for Remembrance Sunday on two of the central myths remaining to be confronted regarding the Great War, namely the truth about the Battle of the Somme and the reputation of the British generals, in particular Field Marshall Haig, but I will sketch what seem to me the salient points. The two are inextricably linked as, of course, Haig was the commander in the field by the time of the Somme campaign.

The first point to make concerns why Haig was in charge at all: it was because his predecessor Sir John French had been sacked. French took the blame for what I set out in an earlier post - namely that Britain ended up having to throw its resources into a full scale land war on the Continent, despite having spent the preceding century doing everything to avoid such an eventuality. Whether that was fair on French is not my concern today, save to note that French wrote a very aggrieved memoir in 1919 complaining about how unfair it all was on him. Haig did no such thing, but remained staunchly apolitical after the war. It does however point to one thing, which is that London was not unconcerned about the conduct of the war. If at any point Haig had been thought responsible for the pointless deaths of hundreds of thousands, he would have got very much shorter shrift than French.

The second introductory point concerns British officers in general. I have mentioned on many occasions how they are portrayed as lounging around behind the lines whilst sending the working class soldiers over the top in an act of totally callous indifference. In fact, no fewer than four British lieutenant generals, twelve major generals and eighty-one brigadier generals died or were killed during the Great War. A further 146 were wounded or taken prisoner. These are not statistics associated with out of touch toffs avoiding the front.

Now let us move to the Somme itself. One of the key points of my earlier posts concerned the difficulties faced by the British in raising, training and equipping an army out of all proportion to its peacetime force and resources. Necessarily the hurridly assembled new army was not going to be of the same calibre as the highly professional and experienced men who were dispatched in 1914, and the generals knew it. They did not want to attack on a large scale in 1916. If they had to they did not want to attack on the Somme either, but rather further north. But events, once again, conspired against them. In particular, the Germans launched a massive attack on the French town of Verdun. Received wisdom has it that this was, indeed, an instance of trying to bleed the other side down, not gain any territory. I have seen more recent research suggesting that this was in fact an ex post facto justification of the German commander, seeking to justify the fact that he had failed to take the objective. But that is not our present concern. What is relevant is that it rapidly became clear that the Germans were on the brink of destroying the French army. With it would go the British, the Germans reasoned, because they would not bother to fight on with a defeated ally, particularly given that until the Somme the British had been the junior coalition partner in the land war.

Pressure therefore became insurmountable on the British to launch a massive offensive to relieve the French. This they did, and so we need to view the Somme in that context: the primary objective was to save the French from oblivion, and this was achieved. The Germans diverted massive resources from Verdun, and their assault there ultimately failed.

The second point is that, again contrary to the myth, Haig was not trying a Verdun in reverse: he wasn’t operating a meat-grinder’s exercise with the hope that at the end there would be a few British left and no Germans. He was, instead, hoping for a breakthrough (as he was throughout the war). That he didn’t get it means the Somme is called a failure. But as I have just explained, that was not the only objective and even had Haig known he would not break through, the parlous state of the French at Verdun meant he could not have avoided a large attack in 1916 however much the ill-prepared state of the new armies meant he wanted to avoid it.

Haig’s justified scepticism of his new armies is, incidentally, supported by the German official history, which ascribed much of Britain’s heavy losses to poor training of both men and officers. One other point has to be made about the Germans: they were just as prone to sending men on impossible missions as the British, and had roughly comparable casualty rates in the battle to prove it. Professor Richard Holmes says that if people keep imagining waves of British Tommies being slaughtered, they ought to imagine the same for the Germans as well.

The third point about the Somme concerns Haig’s remark that the losses could not be considered excessive given the numbers involved. To modern ears this sounds callous. But it has to be emphasised that the British army never undertook anything of that scale before or since. By way of comparison, I suspect if most people if asked would say that the Normandy campaign in 1944 was a success - Britain landed at D-Day and broke through the German lines. So it was, but at a greater cost per capita than the Somme. On the Somme, incidentally, 74% of the British who took part didn’t get a scratch. And at Normandy there was not the same urgency for the campaign (though Stalin had demanded a second front for some time); it was done at a time of Britain’s choosing, and with the full weight of the United States’ industrial machine behind it. By comparison Britain’s factories in 1916 were labouring to produce the shells demanded by the front and not always succeeding in terms of numbers or quality.

Dreadnought in an earlier comment pointed out how deficiencies of shells badly affected the Somme’s assault. So too did the unforeseen quality of the German trenches, and the efficiency of their machine guns. As did - and this cannot be overemphasised - the infrastructure of the day. The commanders had very poor communications of the day - no radios or the internet for them. Same with physical infrastructure - poor roads and vehicles (horse was the dominant form of transport still) which caused a traffic jam behind the lines. But the British learned, and learned fast. As the attack went on, they developed more concentrated forms of artillery.

Afterwards the British reviewed the failure comprehensively. They learned to send troops over the top with fewer pieces of equipment, for example. Many other changes were made but most crucial of all was the ‘creeping barrage’ - artillery advancing with the troops - which was the key to the success of future attacks, though the terrible mud caused by the rain in 1917 delayed that success a further year. Between the end of the Somme and the end of the war the British (including Empire and Commonwealth) went from an untried army with deficiencies in communication, ammunition and tactics, to the most powerful field army in the world. It defeated Germany notwithstanding that the latter had been greatly bolstered in 1917 by the closing of the Eastern Front. And at the head of this incredible transformation was Haig.

Notwithstanding that Haig has still been landed with a very bad press. Let us consider a few other things about him in closing. He is portrayed as a cavalry officer. He was; but that is not a criticism so much as name-calling. He refused to visit the wounded, we are told. Actually he did initially but his staff officers stopped him from continuing, as they saw the effect it had on him, and a distraught General isn’t fit for command. He was a Luddite who didn’t understand the machine gun’s significance. In fact in Haig’s army there was a point: the superbly trained professional soldiers of 1914 were so adept with rifles that the Germans at Mons thought they were, in fact, facing machine guns. At the same time Haig is criticised for putting his faith in new technologies that didn’t have the decisive effect he hoped. That is trying to have it both ways: either Haig was for or against new technology.

In fact he was in favour of it, and two new forms of equipment in particular. They were the tank and the aircraft. No-one could doubt the two most significant weapons in twentieth century warfare post the Great War - of course, the tank and the aircraft. Together they rendered trench warfare obsolete, which is why so little of it was seen in WWII. Haig, in that respect, was far sighted beyond what he could possibly have imagined.

Those reading this piece on 11 November are, I trust, wearing poppies. Most know that they originated from the Great War. Many might know that they were founded by the British Legion. The British Legion, in turn, it might be of interest to note, was founded by Field Marshall Haig, not, I would venture to suggest, the actions of a callous butcher.