There has been a particularly obdurate myth – emerging partly in the 1920, but with almost irresistible force in the 1960s – that the British Army during the Great War was a force comprising “lions lead by donkeys”. A key element of this myth is that Field Marshal Douglas Haig, commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force from 1915 onwards, was the iconic donkey – a dimwitted, hidebound, callous leader almost diabolically indifferent to the suffering his brutally anachronistic search for a “breakthough-followed-by-cavalry-exploitation” victory over the strategically much more adept forces of the Kaiser. Although not the first to attempt to dispel this myth – and historically insupportable myth it is – Gary Sheffield is the latest and to my mind most effective.
Sheffield carefully removes plank after plank in the bridge of lies that leads us from Lloyd George’s self-serving near-slander in the 1920s to the Blackadderesque parodies of Haig’s leadership in from the 1960s through the 1980s. Haig, he painstakingly demonstrates, was a thinker, an innovator, a forward-looking army (and cavalry) reformer and – within the bounds of military propriety – a man deeply concerned with the wellbeing of the officers, NCOs and other ranks who served under him. To be sure, as Sheffield points out, he had grasped the character of war in the early twentieth century – he knew that defeating the Germans would require “wearing them down” through attritional battles like the Somme, Messines and Paschendaele. And he had sufficient imagination to grasp that that the butcher’s bill would be very expensive indeed. But he also believed (correctly) that the cost of defeat would be intolerable for Britain and that everything possible had to be done to defeat the German foe. To that end, he devoted all of his considerable energies to fighting and winning not some imagined or hoped-for war, but the actual war at hand -- the only war possible given the technical realities of the time.
Was he successful? Sheffield argues yes. Contrary to the myth of the hidebound cavalryman, Haig is portrayed in The Chief as a careful military innovator promoting all sorts of technical, tactical and operational innovations that eventually proved decisive on the battlefield. And at the strategic level, Haig certainly adapted and learned from his early experiences (the Somme in particular), but right from the start he knew what had to be done to win the war. And on more than one occasion, his campaign strategy nearly paid dividends. If you don’t believe this, consider that two successive German commanders-in-chief reported, during and after the war, that Haig’s offensives more than once came close to breaking the German army in the West. They were probably in a better position to know than Lloyd George or the subsequent armchair critics of Haig.
Sheffield is at pains to point out, however, that Haig was far from perfect. He was a man – and indeed a man of his times – and made some very costly mistakes. Sometimes these were just the kind of mistakes limited human beings make when confronted with new challenges and the fog of war. But if Haig had one enduring flaw it was that throughout almost his whole tenure as C-in-C he adhered to closely to the doctrine of trusting his subordinate commanders – of not interfering with the “man on the spot”. Sometimes this worked very well indeed. But at other times the man on the spot was not up to the challenge and failed to implement Haig’s operational vision.
Bottom line: this is a very well-written and illuminating book. If you are at all interested in grasping or participating in the debates – especially lively in the UK this year – regarding how the war should be remembered, this is essential reading.