Dear ration-ga;
Thank you for allowing me an opportunity to answer your interesting question.
Some military leaders become forever immortalized by their greatest
blunder, and so it was with Sir Douglas Haig. In 1916 Haig was to have
helped plan and execute a joint assault at Somme alongside the French
against the deeply entrenched German Army. When French unexpectedly
suffered an extraordinary number of casualties at Verdun leading up
the mission the responsibility to carry it our shifted largely to the
British, who would attempt, according to Haig, to do the job alone.
Having already had a lengthy military career, mostly in the cavalry,
Haig?s plan naturally involved mounted soldiers who were to flank the
Germans after being weakened by a tremendous bombardment on their
front line. Behind the times and unable to adopt new technology and
tactics, Haig literally expected the cavalry to come to the rescue. He
rejected new fangled war machinery such as machine guns and tanks, to
the extent that he not only underestimated their usefulness but he
also underestimated their deadliness. This proved to be a fatal flaw.
At the Battle of Somme July 1, 1916, Haig earned the derogatory
nickname ?Butcher of the Somme? when the bombardment failed to weaken
the German line and both the cavalry and the infantry charged to their
deaths. When the battle was over 60,000 British men lay dead and many
more wounded or maimed for life. This was to be the greatest loss of
human life in any single British battle.
While it is favorable that Haig managed to get 60,000 men to do his
bidding, on a personal level he did not place a high value on the
lives of his men. He was known to refer to them as ?damned colonials?
and in his own statement before the battle indicated his willingness
to sacrifice them for what proved to be very little gain:
?The nation must be taught to bear losses. No amount of skill on the
part of the higher commanders, no training, however good, on the part
of the officers and men, no superiority of arms and ammunition,
however great, will enable victories to be won without the sacrifice
of men's lives. The nation must be prepared to see heavy casualty
lists."
-Written by Haig in June 1916 before the battle began
Douglas Haig was an obtuse man who so mistrusted the "New Armies" that
he relied on his won grandiose strategies that ultimately cost
thousands of men their lives in this one event. He firmly believed in
the principle of leaving decisions to ?the man on the spot? ? but only
where he, himself, was ?the man?. In 1928, after the wars end, Lloyd
George wrote in his ?War Memoirs?
?He was a painstaking professional soldier with a sound intelligence
of secondary quality. He had the courage and stubbornness of his
race. But he did not possess the necessary breadth of vision or
imagination to plan a great campaign against some of the ablest
generals of the war. I never met a man in a high position who seemed
to me so utterly devoid of imagination.?
-Lloyd George, War Memoirs (1928)
SOURCE DOCUMENTS ON HAIG
http://www.johndclare.net/wwi_haig_docs.htm
In summary, it seems that Haig was a once-effective commander who
served beyond his time and beyond his ability of vision. His ideas for
reinforcing failure with significant recourses were outdated and
obsolete. World War I, for Haig, marked a moment in his career where
he sought immortality for himself as a great historical leader at the
cost of his own men?s lives. Though his men followed his orders, they
followed them to their doom.
FIRST WORLD WAR
http://www.firstworldwar.com/bio/haig.htm
?The machine gun is a much over rated weapon.?
-Haig - 1915
TRENCHES ON THE WEB
http://www.worldwar1.com/biochaig.htm
?Haig was the epitome of all that Australians disliked about British generals.?
?He was devoid of the gift of intelligible and coherent expression.?
-David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, 1936
?Haig failed perhaps to see that a dead man cannot advance, and that
to replace him is only to provide another corpse.?
-E. K. G. Sixsmith, British Generalship in the Twentieth Century, 1970
?In World War 1 Douglas Haig butchered the flower of British youth in
the Somme and Flanders without winning a single victory.?
-William Manchester, American Caesar; Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, 1979
FIELD MARSHAL SIR DOUGLAS HAIG
http://www.diggerhistory.info/pages-leaders/haig.htm
Sir Arthur Currie, on the other hand, was the polar opposite of Haig.
He was an unsuccessful banker prior to the war and was, in fact,
facing criminal prosecution for embezzlement when war erupted and
strings were pulled to enlist him in the officer?s corp. Though he
began his professional military career on a rather sour note he
evolved into a successful and respected leader.
Currie?s primary difference from Haig, rather than planning for and
reinforcing failure, was to develop a new tactic of reinforcing
success instead. He was open to new tactics and ideas and even polled
war-hardened commanders to find out what worked and what didn?t.
Currie accepted the fact that blind charging an enemy was no longer a
viable strategy, and embraced the concepts of the Fire and Movement
doctrine where scattered groups of men attacked from multiple vantage
points. Currie?s version became known as the creeping barrage, which
consisted of troops walking just behind an advancing line of shell
fire from Canadian artillery, shielding soldiers as they approached (a
tactic Haig would never have resorted to). He theorized that fighting
men could be trained not only to utilize their courage but also their
brains and he took great pains to have men well-trained in their
various skills ? not only to perform, but to think and react as well.
Currie had such confidence in the INDIVIDUAL abilities of his men that
he even had 40 thousand maps of the Vimy Ridge battlefield (the most
significant battle in Canadian history) distributed to his troops so
each man could see for himself the obstacles he was facing.
This differences between Haig and Currie reached an obvious pinnacle
when, at Canal du Nord in September of 1918, Currie flatly refused to
carry out Haig's orders to attack across a canal and into a fortified
German trench. Instead Curried summoned engineers (another innovation
that Haig detested) to quickly build bridges so his men could safy
traverse the canal
Sir Arthur Currie was considered aloof by his troops and they
nicknamed "Guts and Gaiters" (?Guts? for the bravery of his strategies
and ?Gaiter? for the way he strode about like an refined gentleman).
In summary, Currie was not well liked (admiration is not necessary to
be an effective leader) on a personal level because of his arrogance
but he was respected by his men and regarded as a competent general
who would not waste their lives needlessly (a very necessary attribute
of an effective leader).
FIRST WORLD WAR
http://www.firstworldwar.com/bio/currie.htm
TRENCHES ON THE WEB
http://www.worldwar1.com/bioccurr.htm
WINNING LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLES: CANADA'S SUCCESS AT VIMY RIDGE
http://www.canlead.com/Vimy_Article.htm
THE BATTLE OF VIMY RIDGE: A MILESTONE IN CANADIAN HISTORY
http://www.civilization.ca/cwm/cwmessays/essay3eng.html
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Tutuzdad ? Google Answers Researcher
INFORMATION SOURCES
Defined above
SEARCH STRATEGY
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"SIR DOUGLAS HAIG"
?GENERAL DOUGLAS HAIG?
"SIR ARTHUR CURRIE"
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