Yeah, it's just that simple! If only Britain had you to tell them how to fight the war! So smart!
Most irrational and counter intuitive decisions ever made
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McPherson
Banned
Robert Neville is a French hiccup, the utter fool, but the French return and stick to it doing the thing the right way and they will win.
Verdun.... The British don't need me or anyone like me. They just need to see what the French are doing successfully.
Wow I can't believe Haig didn't think of that. I mean he only preceded Somme with a bombardment with twice as much artillery as any before it for five days using almost the entirety of the high explosive shells possessed by the entire military. And definitely his fault for not inventing the entirety of tank doctrine within five months of literally the first combat tanks even being ordered (February) instead of the whole SEVEN it took him OTL. And it's definitely not like waiting till September when enough tanks were available would have prevented the Somme from accomplishing any of it's major strategic goals due to weather changes and not helping the French.
Seriously, Haig did as well as if not better than almost any Peer officer during the war and built the only British Army in its history that was truly a first class continent force. The Army that won the Hundred Days was his Army. His ability to cope with technological innovation in artillery and tanks is in fact stunning (and even when he didn't come up with it, he was able to listen to officers who did ). The Somme failed because the artillery and munition parks were not up to the physical task required of them, the technical skills of the artillery arm were not yet there, and as you previously pointed out, Haig had to attack at a place and time he though disadvantageous for the greater good of the war effort.
Even if you want to call the Somme a poor decision, it was certainly not irrational or notably bad by the standards of the Grear War. Haig gets a lot of shit he doesn't deserve because of a century of popular acceptance of Lloyd George's revisionist nonsense published once Haig was safely dead and his partisans unable to easily oppose it.
McPherson
Banned
You might look at what I said in the subsequent post.
Much as I despise Petain, the traitor, Haig was not worthy to wipe the mud off Petain's boots.
You don't want to read what I have to write that rotten British minister of munitions production of the time. The only criminal I would indict more harshly for his idiocies is the American "genius" in charge of USN torpedo and munition production during WW II. You might have heard of the "Atomic Playboy"?
Everything about MacArthur's handling of Korea once he crossed the border back into North Korea was pure white-hot flaming stupid, and it was all because Mac Dadddy had an ego the size of Jupiter and listened to his pet Hitler-fanboy toady over the actual competent people screaming at him about the Chinese about to flood the peninsula.
MacArthur is a big part of why the DPRK still exists, entirely due to his gross incompetence and oversized ego.
His handling of the Japanese invasion of the Philippines was hot garbage, too.
1. Big reason why they picked the Somme battlefield was precisely so they could cooperate with the French.
2. No rational person could look at what the French were suffering on the Verdun front and think 'yeah, let's have some of that.' Certainly not, you know, the French.
3. The French were begging the British to launch a main force offensive; you can't do that just by lobbing shells (more than the millions fired during the preparatory bombardment?)
4. The successful French counterattack depended on the British making this major offensive on the Somme front.
5. The losses of the Somme and the failure at Verdun convinced H&L that drastic measures were needed to retrieve the situation, leading them to completely reinvent their defensive doctrine, drastically overclock their domestic economy, and awaken the sleeping giant with USW.
This sense of haughty superiority to the professional and experienced generals who actually won the war is frankly the worst part of online history communities. To me it recalls nothing more than Stadion's sneering that the only reason a stupid and incompetent commander like Napoleon triumphed was because Archduke Charles was even more stupid and incompetent. Moreover, it's almost always based on false conceptions of warfare, like the technovangelism that saw the tank as the means of deliverance from the trench stalemate, or Liddel Hart's 'indirect approach' snake oil. There's no 'cheat code' around symmetry of forces and the superiority of the defense, no matter the era.
McPherson
Banned
a. Haig didn't pick the Somme because he wanted it. When he was told by his bosses in London that he was going to launch an offensive to relieve the pressure Falkanhayn put on the French he was forced by the geography of the front to make that BAD choice. He does not help matters with his poor operational understanding of what is going on.
b. Compared to what the British try? The French get pounded but they are not being WASTED.
c. So were the Russians and the Italians. Making a wrong military decision to attack, even at the behest of your incompetent political leadership, (We Americans know about that problem.) loses you more than doing nothing or not attacking. (McNamara / Westmoreland)
d. No, it did not.
e. This claims more for the Somme than can be proven by the record.
Actually, since it appears that I have tried to use the best professional military analysis we have of how WW I was actually won; I think I might understand precisely why one might say Haig was incompetent, Foch is misjudged and why the "British" popular version of WW I is no more truthful than the American one. Please go back and read what is presented about how the WW I generals understood exactly what kind of war they were headed into and why some of them succeeded and why some failed. Look at the "Combined arms" video below to make that explanation clearer, if needed.
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1. If the Somme, with its relatively open terrain and easy link with French armies, was a bad choice, then it was the least bad choice. The British wanted to fight alongside the French, owing to their greater experience with this kind and level of warfare.
2. The French army never recovered from the losses at Verdun, especially after the abortive Chemin de Dames offensive in 1917. Afterwards, the French were generally blood shy and unwilling to attack except under those fleetingly rare 'ideal conditions'. Meanwhile, the British went into 1918 with an army whose skill and armament had never been better, and which never suffered from collective indiscipline the way pretty much every other Continental army did.
3. This is just an empty slogan. The costs of a failed attack vs loss of the initiative depend on the situation, not immutable rules, and in 1916 an offensive was an overwhelming necessity. The French army faced destruction if it was not relieved, and without the French army, victory on the Western Front would not have been possible. Moreover, the community of interest is the center of gravity of successful coalitions; standing aside while your allies get butchered undermines this commonality and threatens the coalition with dissolution.
4. Yes, it did; it was the British effort on the Somme that forced the Germans to suspend their Verdun offensive and carry the French to their winter respite. Without it, the Germans would have taken the heights and smashed the French counterattacks; in the spring, there would have been no physical barriers to a drive on Paris.
5. Uhhh the interconnected allied victories of 1916 absolutely caused a dramatic change in the German war effort, as witnessed in the Hindenburg program, the Hindenburg line, and Unrestricted Submarine Warfare. Just look at the timetable; once it's clear Verdun is lost (a direct result of the Somme offensive), Falkenhayn is sacked and replaced with HL, who implement this massive armaments program and completely change their strategy on the Western Front.
I like youtube lectures as much as anyone (watched this one several months ago), but they're no substitute for actual books. And there is no shortage of evidence to showr that the war was won when it was because of British efforts; they blunted the main force of the German spring offensive in 1918, and took the lead role in the decisive offensive in the Hundred Days. The BEF under Haig captured as many prisoners as the other Allies on the Western Front put together, twice as many as the French under Petain; their breach of the strongest portion of the Hindenburg Line, in Foch's own words, brought the Germans to request an armistice.
Beyond all other disagreements, no one can look at the Hundred Days, or Italy, or Salonika, or Mesopotamia, or Palestine and conclude the war was won why just lobbing HE or letting 'tanks solve the trench problem.' Tanks had only narrow application during the First World War: broadly speaking, they strengthened a frontloaded assault. This was not an especially pressing problem to solve; infantry could already take German positions just fine. Meanwhile, tanks' mechanical unreliability left them unsuitable for far more important niches in the new system of war: defeating counterattacks and exploiting opportunities. WWI wasn't as static as it was because attacking trenches was hard, it was because a defending enemy could commit operational reserves to seal off a break-in faster than the attacker could commit their reserves to exploit a successful assault. The strongest section of the Hindenburg line was broken without tanks; fixation on this Wunderwaffe is only somewhat more moored in reality than it was in WWII.
There was no cheap way to win in WWI. The Allies were fighting to destroy Prussian militarism; this could not be achieved without the destruction of the German armies. This was an aim of the highest value, but those are always the costliest ones. This is the nature of the offensive; it secures greater prizes, but the attacker must pay up front. Germany would fight until they could no longer continue. Losses were always going to be high, but the Allies decided the price was worth it.
Sure, you can argue for shorter bombardments or more HE or more modest first-day objectives. Getting lost in the pedantry of fire plans and shell mixtures, though, misses the big picture. Britain fought for the security of its homeland and empire against a cruel and dangerous enemy. Its principle theater was the Western Front, the one place a true decision could be reached. There, it built the first great land army in its history. Douglas Haig led that army, turning aside the main enemy's fiercest attacks and landing the hardest blows, smashing their last refuge and sealing the tomb of the German World Empire.
This isn't the end of the discussion on Haig's operational skill by any means, but it must be recognized at the outset to keep discussion in the proper context. You can definitely argue that Haig made mistakes that led to casualties higher than absolutely necessary, but his achievements in command put him way ahead of say Cadorna, who got canned after losing 300,000 PoW in a matter of days. Nivelle's failure led to the total breakdown of military discipline on the Western Front. Certainly, Haig's better than Hoetzendorf, who willfully led his country to a war that resulted in its total destruction as a great power; Grand Duke Nicholas's failures set the stage for Russia's collapse into Communism; Hindenburg and Ludendorff squandered the opportunity of Russia's collapse by pointlessly bringing the US into the war and wasting their best troops, leading the the fall of the empire.
The Somme wasnt anywhere near the worse battle for British casualties rates try the 2nd Battle of Arras
Trying to pin down casualty figures and numbers of combatants is very hard and anyone (not including outright liars like Lloyd George, Liddel-Hart and Clark) claiming they have definitive numbers is just plain wrong. I have seen casualty figures for Germany ranging from 436,000 to just under 600,000 and total combatants over the whole 140 day campaign (actually about 10 different but linked battles) ranging from 1,400,000 to 1,900,000. I have seen British casualty figures ranging from 390,000+ to 456,000 and total combatants from 1,400,000 to 1,500,000. French casualties about 200,000 and combatants from 900,000 to 1,450,000.
I will quote the old saying by Benjamin Disraeli "there are lies, damn lies and statistics" if anyone comes along and says that X combatants minus Y casualties gives Z% loss rate then they are making the stats fit their argument. Until the invention of the time machine we will never know the true figures.
The best any truthful realistic historian can say is that over WWI Britain suffered fewer casualties per head of population and fewer casualties per head of military men than any other major combatant. I am not including the USA or British Empire forces.
You want a disaster for a British Empire force led by an incompetent fool look at the Mesopotamia campaign and the siege of Kut it makes Gallipoli look like a stunning Allied victory.
McPherson
Banned
Pick a better kill funnel with rolling dominant high ground terrain in northern France for the Germans to defend.
You mean like the British promptly became in WW II? Come on. Being rational in the face of military reality is not being gun shy. It is the understandable husbanding of the most precious military resource of all, human lives; until and unless the situation can be developed when the spending of such blood makes sense.
NONSENSE. The French of WW I were not going to quit. They were under far worse pressure in 1917 and early 1918 and they hung on.
Again nonsense. There was this little thing called the Brusilov Offensive.
See Brusilov Offensive. The Somme was a DEFEAT.
I would think a study of available manpower cohorts applies here. The British are DONE in January 1919. The French were done in September of 1918. The Germans were finished about the same time as the British. As for the causes of victory? At sea it was the belated use of convoy after the Americans told the British to use it in 1917. On land, there was this little thing called the AEF in 1918 which stretched the Germans out and acted as a huge sponge to fill in the gaps where the other allies could not man the front because they ran out of men..
As I have said, neither the British nor the American views on how WW I is entirely correct. If WWI was won in the Western Front on land, it was the FRENCH who did it. The Anglo-Americans were just there as file fillers. That may be a gross over-simplification in some quarters, but it is the bald truth.
70% of the killing was done by lobbing shells. Mobility was restored in late 1917 by making it possible for routine infantry to cross ground (tanks, FRENCH as well as British). As for defeating counterattacks, WW I tanks had this disturbing habit of becoming instant pillboxes making them strongpoints around which attacking infantry could set up hasty defenses to beat off the Germans. The 100 days worked because there were no more German reserves. They were dead. But there were plenty of fresh Americans to free up experienced British and French surviving troops who could be pulled out of line to form Allied assault units.
Never said there was a cheap way. Interior lines for the central powers (hence name of that aggregate of nations), defense with a 3x advantage factor and supply lines that for the allies stretched back across the Atlantic (1/4 to 1/3 the artillery shells of the Western Front were made in in the United States depending on the year.) But there is expensive, there is the learning curve and there is stupid. Expensive is 1914-1915. Learning curve is 1916-1917 for France. Stupid for the British is 1916-1917. Stupid for the Americans is 1917 to the end of the war. I guess the British started learning from the French by late 1917-1918, but it sure could have been a lot quicker. Ever wonder WHY the Americans took the French as their teachers for tactics on the Western Front and not the English? It was not because the American army was full of French speakers.
War is a rather pure industrial process that is based on kinetics as applied force to kill people. The hardest allied kinetic blows on the Western Front were landed by the biggest and best led and trained Allied army and that army was not British in 1918. It was not even American. (^^^) It was the French.
I did not say that Haig was unsuccessful. But he sure ranks down there with the operational failures you list so eloquently. Neville took credit for Petain's sterling work at Verdun and he managed to screw up the French army in late 1916-early 1917 so badly, that it is indeed true that it had to be extremely cautiously employed. But it was still employed and it did fight offensively. It still carried the main effort for the allies.
Butcher Haig, round two.
As a recognizer of "Vietnam body-counts", yeah I get you. Depending on whose sources, there are fudge factors of about 20%. Also recognize that different nations kept records in different styles.
We still have workable % errors at the unit level. They are large but manageable single digit percentiles for units engaged per day. Even for the "Vietnam body-count type liars".
Not a true metric. How about a better one? British census of eligible military cohorts is notoriously bad. See above where I use US estimates for the manpower pools for projected allies and enemies. At least those are consistent and use a common measurement standard for projected levy exhaustion of available replacements.
Is this the 1915-1916 debacle that the US military looked at when it decided to mount its own "sterling" (sarcasm) invasion of Iraq in 2003?
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McPherson
Banned
"Much as I despise Petain, the traitor, Haig was not worthy to wipe the mud off Petain's boots."
Military expertise or skill is not based on morality. It is based on results in battle. I would hold that type of opinion on skill; if the two bastards were MacArthur and Fredendall.
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Didn't Manstein argue against a breakout? He was worried that by breaking out the 6th would free up Soviet besiegers to go for Rostov, with worse consequences.
Btw Sadat made some of the worst blunders in recent history, notably the order to attack on October 14, 1973. And refusing Kosygin's plea for a cease fire--before the situation deteriorated further for Egypt.
@McPherson
By most objective measures, the British in 1918 carried out the main effort. You can measure this in terms of prisoner counts or the simple fact that the British broke the Hindenburg Line, forcing the Germans to admit they were beaten. Through the whole Hundred Days, the French were consistently 'hanging back' and lagging behind, potentially jeopardizing the prospects for a true decision. In 1918, Haig was right and Petain was wrong; the Germans could be beaten before winter, and his army played the biggest role in ensuring that.
‘Here, here is the immediate result of the British piercing of the Hindenburg Line. The enemy has asked for an armistice.’
-Ferdinand Foch to Douglas Haig after the Battle of St. Quentin Canal.
No man whose army achieved such a splendid feat of arms deserves to be compared, especially unfavorably, to Cardona or fucking Hoetzendorf. At worst, you can say Haig's battle record is decidedly mixed; this compares quite favorably with many CinCs in WWI, who produced unmitigated catastrophe for their results. Seriously, four powerful empires completely collapsed as a result of this war, while Britain emerged victorious and more powerful than ever, and you pick out the British commander as singularly incompetent? I put him mostly in the middle; he wasn't as good as Foch or Mackensen, but he wasn't as bad as Joffre, Nivelle, GD Nikolai, Hoetzendorf, or Cardona. Petain could defend well, but victory is in the opposite direction.
At least Haig had the basic strategic vision for the war correct, which is more than can be said for his harshest critics, LG and Liddell Hart. Their view of the war was fundamentally backward, trying to 'knock away Germany's props' without realizing Germany was the prop. Even Prior and Wilson, no fans of Haig, recognize this.
By most objective measures, the British in 1918 carried out the main effort. You can measure this in terms of prisoner counts or the simple fact that the British broke the Hindenburg Line, forcing the Germans to admit they were beaten. Through the whole Hundred Days, the French were consistently 'hanging back' and lagging behind, potentially jeopardizing the prospects for a true decision. In 1918, Haig was right and Petain was wrong; the Germans could be beaten before winter, and his army played the biggest role in ensuring that.
‘Here, here is the immediate result of the British piercing of the Hindenburg Line. The enemy has asked for an armistice.’
-Ferdinand Foch to Douglas Haig after the Battle of St. Quentin Canal.
No man whose army achieved such a splendid feat of arms deserves to be compared, especially unfavorably, to Cardona or fucking Hoetzendorf. At worst, you can say Haig's battle record is decidedly mixed; this compares quite favorably with many CinCs in WWI, who produced unmitigated catastrophe for their results. Seriously, four powerful empires completely collapsed as a result of this war, while Britain emerged victorious and more powerful than ever, and you pick out the British commander as singularly incompetent? I put him mostly in the middle; he wasn't as good as Foch or Mackensen, but he wasn't as bad as Joffre, Nivelle, GD Nikolai, Hoetzendorf, or Cardona. Petain could defend well, but victory is in the opposite direction.
At least Haig had the basic strategic vision for the war correct, which is more than can be said for his harshest critics, LG and Liddell Hart. Their view of the war was fundamentally backward, trying to 'knock away Germany's props' without realizing Germany was the prop. Even Prior and Wilson, no fans of Haig, recognize this.
Saying someone is a better General then Cadorna is faint praise. Cadorna is arguably the worst general of all time and his main obsession in life seems to have been destroying the Italian army.
On a wrestling note, Vince Russo deciding that David Arquette was a viable world champion for WCW in 2000; along with the Fingerpoke of Doom (and the aforementioned Tony Schiavone quote about Mick Foley, which Schiavone called Mick and apologized for, BTW, saying it was Eric Bischoff's idea), this wound up killing WCW...
He was actually playing a long game. He planned to crash the Austro-Hungarian empires economy by making them look after millions of Italian POWs.
Basically everything WWE did after Starrcade 1997 with the possible exception of Goldberg's run in 1998 (but they screwed the pooch there too eventually) was the wrestling version of the clip from The Dark Knight of the Joker burning the giant pile of money.
McPherson
Banned
Saying so, does not necessarily make it so. Please show me the metrics. It was not just the British who broke the Hindenburg line.
Better yet;
Battle of St Quentin Canal...
It was an allied offensive.
Same again. There were Americans in the exploitation phase without whom whereby the breach would have been meaningless, Australian assault troops were the ones who carried much of the fighting forward and always THE FRENCH. Somebody had to handle logistics you know?
Britain emerged as a debtor nation and had to concede to American terms at the Washington Naval Conference. I kind of am a HARSH historian when it comes to naval history.
Britain as a sea-power forgot how to fight as a sea-power in WW I and lost her position of global pre-eminence. She tried to fight as a continental power and killed a generation of young men. She never recovered from it. YMMV about that strategic error, but I am convinced that even in the tactical arena on land, that Haig was incompetent as an operational practitioner. Possibly as bad as John Pershing as an operational artist. Certainly Haig never had any complete understanding of how to conduct a breach and exploitation operation. He might have been able to breach after a fashion, but what good is a hole if one cannot move beyond it?
A sea-power understands SIEGE. You want Germany to fall? Starve her of iron, nitrates, coal and wheat. Any two will kill her war making potential. Blockade means you go after what you can stop. Germany cannot raise enough chickens to produce the explosives she needs and she cannot access some of the rare earths she needs for gun steel. And of course she has to import wheat. Knock her props out. Invoking Wilson as a war-leader will get a laugh out of me, too. He had to be told by his own navy how his army should fight the war.
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As can be seen from the questions raised about Haig's inept understanding of LOGISTICS, something that Pershing, Foch, and Petain were utter maniacs about, I doubt that Haig was much better than Cardona by that metric. I kind of see him as a mere push agent on a tube way service who thinks things would turn out all right if he just packs the car full of passengers and closes the doors. He hopes the tube car will move and reach its destination. Never mind the details that the track is out!
LOGISTICS is how you can measure a general. Does he pay attention to it, or does he, like Douglas MacArthur, to take an American example, just assume it will take care of itself?
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And accomplish exactly what? Maintain the exact same blockade that it did OTL? Take the colonies it captured OTL? Hope the French can win the Battle of the Marne with 13% fewer divisions?