Field Marshal Douglas Haig would have let Germany win, biography says
He is the most pilloried military leader in British history, caricatured as a butcher and a bungler who sent hundreds of thousands of men over the top to their deaths.
Now a major new biography pins a further damning indictment on Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig: late into the final year of the First World War, it argues, he was agitating for a compromise peace that would have left Germany as the real winner of the war.
According to Dr J. P. Harris, a senior lecturer in war studies at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, Haig was not quite the uncaring monster of popular myth but nor was he, as some recent studies have suggested, a clear-sighted and imperturbable leader who deserves to take the credit for the ultimate British victory.
Rather, he [Haig] was a poor battlefield commander who “didn’t have the sort of intellect that could penetrate the fog of war”.
In Douglas Haig and the First World War, published tommorow, on the 90th anniversary of the Armistice, Dr Harris argues that Haig’s failings led him repeatedly to misread the strength of the German armies, counselling aggression when they were at their strongest in the middle of the war and caution as they weakened spectacularly in its final weeks.
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Now a major new biography pins a further damning indictment on Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig: late into the final year of the First World War, it argues, he was agitating for a compromise peace that would have left Germany as the real winner of the war.
According to Dr J. P. Harris, a senior lecturer in war studies at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, Haig was not quite the uncaring monster of popular myth but nor was he, as some recent studies have suggested, a clear-sighted and imperturbable leader who deserves to take the credit for the ultimate British victory.
Rather, he [Haig] was a poor battlefield commander who “didn’t have the sort of intellect that could penetrate the fog of war”.
In Douglas Haig and the First World War, published tommorow, on the 90th anniversary of the Armistice, Dr Harris argues that Haig’s failings led him repeatedly to misread the strength of the German armies, counselling aggression when they were at their strongest in the middle of the war and caution as they weakened spectacularly in its final weeks.