:Douglas Haig and the First World War.(Cambridge Military Histories.)

Abstract

British casualties in World War I, the majority of which occurred in the deadlocked conflict on the western front, greatly exceeded those of any previous British conflict. A British soldier's chance of surviving the war in France and Flanders without becoming a casualty was roughly one in two. Popular perceptions of these unprecedented casualties are reflected in A. J. P. Taylor's famous comment: “brave, helpless soldiers; blundering, obstinate generals; nothing achieved.” It has been the fate of Sir Douglas Haig, who commanded the largest British force ever sent abroad, to become the British scapegoat in popular culture for the appalling casualties. Positive reassessments of Haig, at least among military historians, began to emerge as early as 1963 with the publication of John Terraine's Douglas Haig: The Educated Soldier. Other sympathetic evaluations followed, including several very recent ones: Douglas Haig: War Diaries and Letters 1914–1918 (2006), edited by Gary Sheffield and John Bourne, and three biographies written by Walter Reid, Gary Mead, and Andrew A. Wiest, respectively. Haig's command is placed in the context of a great war in which mass forces, armed with unprecedented firepower, engaged each other in siege warfare. A quick victory proved illusionary. If the Anglo-French alliance were to be preserved and if Germany were to be defeated, there was no realistic alternative to committing a large British army to the western front, where casualties were certain to be enormous. The book under review, however, begs to disagree with current scholarship that portrays Haig in a generally sympathetic light. J. P. Harris does not find Haig a great general. He does not even view him as a good general and expresses amazement that he survived the war as commander-in-chief.