THE GENERALS...HAIG, Field Marshal Sir Douglas  "Butcher" (later Earl Haig)

Category Index Next

   BACK to Photographs

Click for enlargement.

Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig

later Earl Haig

 Click for enlargement.

"The machine-gun is a much  over-rated weapon" Douglas Haig.1915

"For King and Empire" is a familiar inscription on war memorials. Early records of the League reveal a respect almost amounting to obsequiousness in dealings with Empire organisations. This extended to the British Empire Ex-Services League, and its leader, Earl Haig, whom many Australians had little reason to respect. As Commander-in-Chief of British forces on the Western Front, Haig was the epitome of all that Australians disliked about British generals.

From the web-site of The Returned and Services League, May 2002.
  • There is little doubt that Haig was an idiot. In 1926, 10 years after the barbed wire and machinegun defences of the German Army had proven conclusively that the day of the Horse Cavalry was over Haig wrote "I believe that the value of the horse and the opportunity for the horse in the future are likely to be as great as ever. Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the men and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse - the well-bred horse - as you have ever done in the past".
  • This man ordered hundreds of thousands of troops, his countrymen and 'damned colonials' to attack barbed wire entanglements 40 yards, sometimes 80 yards deep, covered by well placed machine guns in concrete pill-boxes on the high ground and did so without looking at the ground before during or after the battles. He did so time and time again and when confronted with the casualty lists merely said, "The nation must be prepared to see heavy casualty lists".
  • "Success in battle depends mainly on morale and determination."  Haig - 1907
  • "The way to capture machine guns is by grit and determination."  Haig - 1915
  • "The nation must be taught to bear losses. No amount of skill on the part of the higher commanders, no training, however good, on the part of the officers and men, no superiority of arms and ammunition, however great, will enable victories to be won without the sacrifice of men's lives. The nation must be prepared to see heavy casualty lists." Haig June 1916 before the battle of the Somme (Editors note. And then Monash came along and proved him totally wrong on these counts).

These are the thoughts about Haig of some others from that time

  • He was devoid of the gift of intelligible and coherent expression.

    • David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, 1936

  • Brilliant to the top of his army boots.

    • David Lloyd George, attributed

  • It is indeed strange that the man whose stubbornness in the offensive had all but ruined us on the Somme should from August 1918 onwards have become the driving force of the Allied armies. 

    • J. F. C. Fuller, Memoirs of an Unconventional Soldier, 1931

  • He might be, he surely was, unequal to the prodigious scale of events.

    • Winston Churchill, quoted in John Terraine, The Western Front, 1954

  • His war diary is a self-revealing document: frank, truthful, egotistical, self confident and malicious. 

    • Max Beaverbrook, Men of Power, 1956

  • With the publication of his Private Papers in 1952, he committed suicide twenty-five years after his death.

    • Max Beaverbrook, Men of Power, 1956

  • Now Haig had immense influence at the Palace. The King relied upon him. Without doubt, he was the Keeper of the Palace Gates.

    • Max Beaverbrook, Men of Power, 1956

  • Haig failed perhaps to see that a dead man cannot advance, and that to replace him is only to provide another corpse.

    • E. K. G. Sixsmith, British Generalship in the Twentieth Century, 1970

  • From beginning to end his handling of Third Ypres (Passchendaele) betokened an obstinacy of statuesque proportions.

    • Norman F Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, 1976

  • In World War 1 Douglas Haig butchered the flower of British youth in the Somme and Flanders without winning a single victory.

    • William Manchester, American Caesar; Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, 1979

  • Henry Hamilton Fyffe, worked for the Daily Mail and met Sir Douglas Haig several times during the First World War. He said

     "Haig was, in truth, at close quarters very disappointing. He looked the part. His face on a postcard was not less impressive than Kitchener's. But - his face was his fortune. He had little general intelligence, no imagination. When the official war correspondents, much against his will, first went out to France, he made them a speech of "welcome". He said he knew what they wanted. "Something for Mary Jane in the kitchen to read."

    Haig was as shy as a schoolgirl. He was afraid of newspaper men - afraid of any men but those he gathered round him, and they were mostly like himself. If ever the history of the war is written as frankly as that of Napoleon's campaign has been, Haig will be held accountable for the appalling slaughter in the Somme battles and in Flanders, caused by his flinging masses of men against positions far too strong to be carried by assault".
  • Douglas Haig was born on June 19 1861, the son of a wealthy whiskey distiller. He was educated at Oxford and Sandhurst.
  • He took part in the Omdurman campaign (1897 - 1898) and the Boer War (1899 - 1902). His rank remained inspector of general cavalry in India from 1903 until 1906, when he became director of military training at the war office. In 1909 he became chief of staff of the Indian army. At the beginning of World War One in 1914, Haig commanded the first Army Corps.
  • In December of 1915 questions were being raised about how well the war was being fought. On the 10th December a new commander of the British was appointed - Douglas Haig. He was 54 at the time and had a long a successful military career behind him. Even with his experience though, trench warfare was a new form of fighting, so he faced a difficult task.
  • In February 1916, Germany began a campaign against the French at Verdun. Five months passed, 700,000 men had become casualties, and the French were only just hanging on. The British decided they had the relieve the pressure on the French. The British high command, led by Field Marshal Haig began a major attack along the line of the river Somme, he hoped to lure the Germans away from Verdun. After another five months the British had captured little land. On the 18 Nov 1916, in the blizzards and snow Haig called a halt to the attack.
  • The battle of the Somme was one of the most bloody of the First World War, more British soldiers had been killed than in any other battle before it. It earned Haig the title 'Butcher of the Somme', after he unnecessarily sent thousands of British troops to their deaths. (He later did the same thing at the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) only this time it was the ANZAC's that paid the biggest price.)
  • He died in London on January 28th 1928.

Top

Category Index Next

   BACK to Photographs