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Remembered Today:

Haig's Post War 'Rewards' ?


towisuk

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1 hour ago, Muerrisch said:

Martin, thank you. However, calculating German casualties has never seemed a core consideration to my mind.

Battle is not a football game, whereby a side 3-2 up can be said to be winning. To know [or believe] that "we are killing them faster than they are killing us" might be good for morale but is without much significance except considered in the longest of attritional terms.

 

Surely of much greater significance is determining the strength and battleworthiness of the enemy at the front and in immediate reserve. At the Somme and at Passchendaele the assessments of these factors was apparently woefully optimistic. 

 

I would agree. I mentioned the casualties simply because Haig's detractors often focus on this single aspect. In very simplistic terms Haig may have made decisions based on (known) British casualties and allegedly higherGerman (estimated/inflated) casualties. Clearly the decision making process is far more complex, but populist views on Haig seem fixated with casualties.

 

Beach's book is goes much further and covers the intelligence gathering in a multitude of different aspects including the German Army's ability to sustain its Army in the field; physical numbers in each cohort, morale, the demands of German industry on manpower etc. MG

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23 hours ago, phil andrade said:

The casualty exchange rate was an immensely important predicator of the success or failure of the Somme offensive.

Phil

predicator. /ˈprɛdɪˌkeɪtə/ noun. 1. (in systemic grammar) the part of a sentence or clause containing the verbal group; one of the four or five major components into which clauses can be divided, the others being subject, object, adjunct, and (in some versions of the grammar) complement..

 

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1 hour ago, Muerrisch said:

predicator. /ˈprɛdɪˌkeɪtə/ noun. 1. (in systemic grammar) the part of a sentence or clause containing the verbal group; one of the four or five major components into which clauses can be divided, the others being subject, object, adjunct, and (in some versions of the grammar) complement..

 

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It seems as if I'm out of my depth on the grammar front.  Serves me right for using such pretentious language !

 

What I'm driving at is something being " predicated" upon an assumption : in this case, Haig, denied the breakthrough he had sought - I know there's controversy about how far he was planning with this aim in mind  - justified the offensive on attritional grounds.  To validate this argument, he insisted that German manpower losses exceeded those of the British.  This was only true if German casualties against the French were allowed for....if it was purely a case of the Anglo German exchange, the advantage lay very heavily with the Germans, perhaps to the extent of two to one. 

 

The fact that Churchill had suggested that this was the case when the battle had completed its first month ( actually, he estimated a 2.3 to 1 ratio in Germany's favour ) makes a very striking contrast with the claims made by Haig.

 

Now I must google that word " Predicated" and see if I've made a fool of myself again.

 

Phil

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FWIW - there is a danger here of judging the "intelligence"compiled from many sources and subsequently supplied to Haig, by 21st century standards.

The means of communication need to be understood - spies, prisoners, photo recce, trench raids, radio/telephonic intercepts etc., and all passed on in written reports and/or by word of mouth and recorded.

But with all of this, it is mainly reliant on the Mk1 human eye and ear - not the most infallible of resources, and the interpretation/collation of what information was provided and the balanced judgement of just how accurate the source may be.

Most of what was gathered and disseminated was a "best estimate" and knowing what went on on "the other side of the wire" was always going to be so.

Attempting to extract from the mass of information that was provided what the enemy's actual intentions might be was never going to be accurate.

It is not always so today even with the mass of electronic surveillance equipment and sources available for intelligence gathering which were not even dreamed of in 1914-18.

 

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1 hour ago, squirrel said:

FWIW - there is a danger here of judging the "intelligence"compiled from many sources and subsequently supplied to Haig, by 21st century standards.

The means of communication need to be understood - spies, prisoners, photo recce, trench raids, radio/telephonic intercepts etc., and all passed on in written reports and/or by word of mouth and recorded.

But with all of this, it is mainly reliant on the Mk1 human eye and ear - not the most infallible of resources, and the interpretation/collation of what information was provided and the balanced judgement of just how accurate the source may be.

Most of what was gathered and disseminated was a "best estimate" and knowing what went on on "the other side of the wire" was always going to be so.

Attempting to extract from the mass of information that was provided what the enemy's actual intentions might be was never going to be accurate.

It is not always so today even with the mass of electronic surveillance equipment and sources available for intelligence gathering which were not even dreamed of in 1914-18.

 

 

Haig's Intelligence (the book) covers all these aspects and goes into some detail on the value and what I would call the 'half-life' of intelligence; how quickly its value depletes. There is some discussion on the sources and the fact/claim/assumption that 90% of the information came from the front line...as well as a discussion on the time value. 

 

The interesting aspect is that with the benefit of hindsight we are in a position to try and evaluate how much Intel was accurate and make some judgement on its value and relevance. More importantly in the context of this debate it might be possible to establish if Haig was operating on the back of grossly misleading reports or whether they were remotely accurate. Haig and Charteris would both have understood that Intel was never going to be 100% accurate but had to weigh its value. 

 

From the little I have read in the Somme, and particularly the first day, there was little standardisation across the various formations. As one simple example, the frequency and intensity of patrolling between the preliminary bombardments varied considerably. The consequences of this were that the level of understanding of the effectiveness of the wire cutting operations a varied. This itself might have been the source of different outcomes. The intelligence gathering was far from uniform in this simple example.

 

Successful wire cutting in one sector might not have been replicated in other areas where patrolling had been less efficient. If the Intel staff had, for example, assumed success in one area was replicated elsewhere without the necessary Mk 1 eyeball verification, this would lead to some rather large surprises on the morning of 1st July. My speculation. MG

 

 

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One of the things that Churchill identified in his allusion to his memorandum in THE WORLD CRISIS was the tendency of reports from Intelligence to inflate the import of documents in order to flatter the effectiveness of the British offensive on the Somme.

 

For example, a pay book from the pocket of a German corpse or prisoner indicated that he was from a certain battalion which belonged to a certain division.  The inference was then drawn that the entire division had been engaged against the British, while in fact only a part of  that division - perhaps a regiment or even that sole battalion - had been deployed in the battle.

 

This encouraged the tendency to inflate the German losses pro rata : whether this was a disingenuous practice, or a genuine mistake, is very pertinent to the charge that there was a culture of wishful thinking extant in the British High Command.

 

I write this from my Swanage bivy, without my Churuchill volumes to hand, so I don't know if Churchill discerned  this tendency at the time, or if he discovered it subsequently.

 

Editing here : I'm sure that, at the time, he commented that enemy accounts from the July fighting emphasised that, while the Germans were remarking on the very lavish expenditure of manpower by the British, they themselves maintained their defence on the cheap by deploying relatively small numbers which were callously exploited but which exacted a disproportionate toll.

 

Phil

 

 

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The false intelligence was the gravest failure in the history of the Secret Intelligence Service,

 

This comes from a review of a very recent report of a fairly recent conflict. Telling the Boss what he wants to hear. Do we ever learn?

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5 hours ago, charlie962 said:
5 hours ago, charlie962 said:

The false intelligence was the gravest failure in the history of the Secret Intelligence Service,

 

This comes from a review of a very recent report of a fairly recent conflict. Telling the Boss what he wants to hear. Do we ever learn?

 

5 hours ago, charlie962 said:
5 hours ago, charlie962 said:

 

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How true. In my early career as a weather forecaster attached to the RAF, my civilian status [albeit with officer privileges] was a precious asset. It meant that my line management was civilian, and that I could give my honest professional opinion to the Station Commander or his Wing Commander Operations without regard to their wishes to press on or indeed to stack.

That does not mean that forecasters were unmindful of their clients needs [far from it] , but we could stay objective, right or wrong. This was not the case with most of our NATO allies. "Telling it like it is" was an article of faith in the British Met. service. A very difficult ask if both boss and underling are in the same uniform.

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One small part of Jim Beach's lengthy conclusion in his Haig's Intelligence: GHQ and The German Army 1916 - 1918

 

" .... But since then Charteris has been an easy target; the stalwart defenders of Haig's reputation, particularly Marshall-Cornwall, have exploited his [Charteris']  fall from grace. Like Lloyd George in December 1917, they have sought to blame Charteris when the realities of the intelligence provision are actually incidental to their wider intention. The intelligence system serving Haig was far from perfect, and many of Charteris' assessments were clearly wrong, but these shortcomings cannot be used to absolve Haig of responsibility for his decisions. Indeed, Charteris as scapegoat is perhaps an early example of the phenomenon of blaming setbacks on ‘intelligence failure’, when the broader policy is at fault...."

 

MG

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This charge against Haig will carry even more weight if it transpires that- even as early as July 1916 - Churchill was aware that the claims being made by Intelligence were akin to " over egging the pudding."

 

If Churchill suspected this was the case at the time, then how did this fail to strike a chord with Haig, who dismissed the memorandum as an example of Churchill being drugged up and out of his mind ?

 

I remember reading about a visit by Hankey to the Front in September 1916, and he alluded to the fine physical condition of the German prisoners, and remarked that they were very proficient at digging, which - and this is the crucial thing - accounted for their suffering " less than our men ".

 

If Hankey was observing that the Germans were getting the better of the British in the casualty exchange rate in September ( when, it should be noted, the balance was far more equal than it had been in July) , and Churchill had suspected this too a month or so earlier, then Haig's insistence to the contrary becomes more reprehensible.

 

Phil

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