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9e256cf
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Alexander the Great would have found it difficult to succeed in forcing a breach in the German line in 1914-1915, and the defeats Haig's armies suffered in 1916 and 1917 - those notorious disasters on the Somme and at Passchendaele - should not obscure the fact that it was Haig who commanded the British armies that spearheaded the Allied victory in 1918 and showed the other armies how this war should be fought; even General Foch admitted th..
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Robin Neillands |
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6e14f7c
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Douglas Haig remained Commander-in-Chief of the British Armies in France until the end of the war but his reputation was blasted by the death toll on the Somme and took a further beating in 1917, after the losses of Passchendaele. Only now, more than 80 years after the Great War ended, has Haig's reputation begun to recover. This seems only fair, for many of the attacks on his character and reputation seem misguided. Haig was neither callou..
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Robin Neillands |
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19cc3ae
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The Somme began as an offensive; it ended as a battle of attrition.
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Robin Neillands |
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d8165dc
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At Neuve Chapelle in March 1915, the British lost almost 13,000 men in three days; at Loos in September, 59,000 men in six weeks, but most of them fell in the first two days; neither attack gained more than a few hundred yards of useless, shell-pitted, corpse-strewn ground.
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Robin Neillands |
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e604d85
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This view - that Germany was not responsible for the outbreak of war - was maintained for the next two decades, during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, and was only finally refuted by the extensive researches made into the Wilhelmine archives at Potsdam by Professor Fritz Fischer, research which proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Germany had been planning a major European war for years and saw the Sarajevo incident, and the sub..
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Robin Neillands |
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6399bba
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The general feeling among the Entente nations at the end of 1916 seemed to be that unless Europe returned to the status quo ante, the terrible loss of life in the previous three years had been for nothing.
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Robin Neillands |
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dc155a2
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During the Great War all armies lost men in quantity in the attack; the Germans at First and Second Ypres, the French in Champagne, on Vimy Ridge, in Artois and on the Chemin des Dames. Everywhere it was the same story: a failure to develop a breach in the enemy defences was common to all armies and, by the end of 1915, French and German losses far exceeded those of the British Empire.
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Robin Neillands |
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f790ae5
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No one seemed able to accept that the war had been a terrible mistake and that ending it, on any reasonable terms, which must include the German evacuation of France and Belgium, was far less costly than letting it continue.
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Robin Neillands |
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e4196a7
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There was, however, a deeper failure, a failure to realize that the current conventional tactics were not working. The focus was on solving the shortages of men and guns and of increasing the weight of attacks - which only increased the scale of loss.
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Robin Neillands |
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795a293
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Despite arguments between Easterners, who wanted an offensive anywhere but France, and Westerners, who believed that an offensive anywhere else was a waste of effort, it was generally accepted that the Germans could only be decisively defeated on the Western Front, not least because that was where most of them were.
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Robin Neillands |
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c08d0c6
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The late Barbara Tuchman, an American historian and the author of some fine books on the Great War, has written that while the human race has made great progress in many fields of endeavour - science, medicine, the arts - since the siege of Troy to the present day, it has made no discernible progress whatsoever in the field of government. She adds that nations will frequently adopt policies which are not only dangerous to their national wel..
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Robin Neillands |
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01b49b2
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There were two views on how to conduct a frontal assault and they reveal the basic tactical argument of the Great War. Should the attacker go for 'bite and hold', seizing a small portion of the enemy line and hanging on to it, then bringing up the guns and the infantry before taking another bite, or should he concentrate on going for a full scale 'breakthrough'?
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Robin Neillands |
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22d155a
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And so the war was fought with new weapons and old ideas and the result was a slaughter exceeding that of any previous war. In just four years, about 9,300,000 soldiers died on the battlefields of the Great War; 3,600,000 from the nations comprising the Central Powers and 5,700,000 from the nations of the Entente.
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Robin Neillands |
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b4b117d
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The generals, British, French and German, were unable to achieve a breakthrough because the defences were always too strong and the facilities available to reduce them were not fully developed, either technically or tactically.
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Robin Neillands |
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6e1e682
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By the turn of the century, all-out attacks by hosts of valiant French infantry, rather on the style employed by the Imperial Guard at Waterloo, were the received wisdom in French military circles, and would remain so until the losses of the Great War killed off its adherents and a million or so brave young men.
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Robin Neillands |
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f198363
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the men of the French Army have never been short of guts. Clad in their brilliant uniforms, carrying swords and wearing white gloves, the officers of this gallant army led their men into the German machine-gun fire in 1914 . . . and then war was suddenly not glorious any more. A million men were killed or wounded trying to make this tactic work.
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Robin Neillands |
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6a71d5e
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The secret of any advance through a well-defended and carefully prepared position in the Great War depended almost entirely on artillery. In spite of the popular image created by TV documentaries and military memoirs, the Great War was primarily an artillery war. Over 60 per cent of the casualties were caused by artillery, and only artillery - heavy artillery - could beat down the enemy defences, flatten the wire, stun his troops, knock out..
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Robin Neillands |
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3bfe3c6
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There was, of course, another alternative to this endless, pointless killing - peace. Achieving peace depended on a recognition by all the participants that the war was not worth fighting, or that all that could be achieved had been achieved and the argument should be promptly transferred to the conference table. Given the benefit of hindsight and the losses so far, by the end of 1915 this seems the obvious alternative to more slaughter but..
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Robin Neillands |
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4c04c6e
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Peace negotiations began, or were at least initiated, almost as soon as the war began, but by 1915 they had led nowhere. The nations of Europe were not yet sick of killing and at the end of 1915 there was no doubt in anyone's mind that the fighting would go on.
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Robin Neillands |
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8af1d63
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Haig and Robertson were two of the most inarticulate officers in the British Army. Haig could write lucid notes and detailed instructions but was unable to express himself clearly at meetings or discussions, while Robertson's normal response to any query or criticism was either an explosive grunt or the dour comment 'I've heard different.
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Robin Neillands |