Douglas Haig

Abstract

A Scot, born in Edinburgh into a family made wealthy by distilling whisky, Douglas Haig (b. 1861–d. 1928) is historically important because he held senior commands in the British army in the First World War. A professional army officer, he served on the Western Front throughout the war, rising to command the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from 19 December 1915 to 15 April 1919. Haig’s BEF remains the largest military force the United Kingdom has ever put in the field, and the Western Front was the bloodiest theater of operations in what is still (in terms of British and British Empire casualties) its bloodiest war. The BEF played a major part in Germany’s defeat in 1918. Yet controversy surrounded Haig’s command of it from the outset, became more intense after the opening of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916, and has never entirely ceased. Critics have alleged that Haig’s methods were wasteful of the lives of his troops, while defenders have tended to see the heavy losses as inevitable and have commended Haig as a highly professional, resolute, and ultimately victorious commander. Haig is an iconic figure who has come to symbolize a range of institutions, actions, and approaches, all of which were (and some still are) highly emotive: the British Empire; the British army as an institution: British involvement in the First World War and British military concentration on the Western Front (confronting the major enemy directly as opposed to a peripheral strategy of “indirect approach”) being among these. Only when biographers and historians have penetrated through Haig the icon and examined Haig the individual is it possible for them fairly to assess his specific contribution to British and world history. This has not been easy, and while scholars agree on most of the facts about him, their judgments of him still vary considerably.