Haig's Post War 'Rewards' ?

[David Filsell]

Equally ignorance and inability to read a post properly seems has its very own!

But then I was addressing the 'open minded' - silly me

[Steven Broomfield]

Coming back to the cavalry thing, merely to point out that the 11th Hussars converted to armoured cars in 1928 (along with the 12th Lancers), whereas the 10th Royal Hussars did not mechanise until 1936 - on a mixture of old lorries and worn-ot Light Tanks (the report in the regimental gazette of a recruiting trip to the West Country had me alternately wiping tears of mirth from my eyes and tears of frustration). I believe the Greys did not lose their horses until about 1940.

Whatever Haig wrote in the inter-war years, his record in France and Flanders was for continuous improvement - tanks, armoured cars, aeroplanes ... what we would now call the "all arms" battle came to fruition under Haig.

(I declare an interest: I have recently become a member of the Haig Foundation, and a damned fine Journal they produce, too!).

[squirrel]

Getting more cynical as I get older, I suspect that the decision to go to war in 1914 probably came from a collection of grandees in a (cigar) smoke filled room rather in the way that Alec Douglas Home was chosen decades later. As always, we never knew who the grandees were but they were the great and the good and it is quite possible that, in 1914, they included politicians, aristocrats, royals & generals. We`ll probably never know.

Late to the party with this but nevertheless...as far as the "smoke filled room" and the "grandees" are concerned the following chapters of The Supreme Command 1914-1918 volume 1 by Lord Hankey may shed some light:

xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii.

[towisuk]

So post war Haig got his rewards, and the men who fought in, and survived the trenches got what???

Tom

[David Filsell]

Not least the prevention of German hegemony over Europe and the loss of freedom.

[towisuk]

"Not least the prevention of German hegemony over Europe and the loss of freedom".

What argument did John Smith the butcher from Doncaster have with Johann Schmitt the butcher from Dresden that led THEM to being stuck in muddy trenches in France and Flanders...... and maybe ultimately under the sod....

They were disposable pawns in an argument that was not of their making....

Yet Haig gets the reward ....!!

Tom

[Steven Broomfield]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXWM84rUV-Q

'Twas ever so.

[Terry_Reeves]

It's interesting Phil is unable to produce any evidence to support his opinion. There is plenty of material around to show what happened and the whole business has been investigated umpteen times by historians. Phil I'm afraid is still stuck in his class-warfare time warp.

TR

Tom

If you have something to say, say it. If you don't have the courage to name "a certain poster", who was me of course, then why bother posting? At least have the courage of your own convictions. I will repeat what I have said before, those who want to go on about "class" need to understand what they are talking about and take their argument from there. Haig's financial reward was actually £100, 000 and followed a tradition of financially rewarding successful senior officers. Check out Hansard and you will get a full history - starting from Wellington.

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1919/aug/06/supply

TR

[geraint]

So post war Haig got his rewards, and the men who fought in, and survived the trenches got what???

Tom

My great uncle Bobby Smith joined the B&Ts, ,then worked as a stonemason, was a drunkard, a wife beater and an alcoholic. Died in 1967 of a broken neck.

Richard Dunn, Ruthin, demobbed from SWBs lived as a tramp in his own re-created Great War dugout, just outside this town. Froze to death winter 1981.

Fredde Fox ex RWF lived under tin sheets at the local dump. In 1947 it took 15 burly policemen to evict him and to place him in the local workhouse.

Laurence Jones ex RWF, at 19 years of age was a double amputee legs in 1918. He was given an almshouse in the Ruthin parish church almshouses. He refused to leave the house, ever. He died there in 1983.

Four other reasons why I dislike Haig.

[towisuk]

My great uncle Bobby Smith joined the B&Ts, ,then worked as a stonemason, was a drunkard, a wife beater and an alcoholic. Died in 1967 of a broken neck.

Richard Dunn, Ruthin, demobbed from SWBs lived as a tramp in his own re-created Great War dugout, just outside this town. Froze to death winter 1981.

Fredde Fox ex RWF lived under tin sheets at the local dump. In 1947 it took 15 burly policemen to evict him and to place him in the local workhouse.

Laurence Jones ex RWF, at 19 years of age was a double amputee legs in 1918. He was given an almshouse in the Ruthin parish church almshouses. He refused to leave the house, ever. He died there in 1983.

Four other reasons why I dislike Haig.

Thank you very much for your contribution Geraint, the above facts often overlooked by the Haig students...the human factor, where normal citizens of a country were sent to die and suffer horrible injuries in a war not of THEIR making. And when it was over... tossed onto the scrap heap whilst the "elite" were given rewards for their direction of hostilities.

Haig may have taken an great interest in, and sought to raise funds for the soldiers who served under him in the war, but the treatment of one set of citizens of a country compared to their "masters" is a reflection on the attitude of, and MORALS applied to different levels of society.

No doubt there may be cries of "class war" by some of our fellow forum members reading this topic, but if we don't learn from history we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. The fact that class DID come into the structure of the forces in WW1 and may have led to deaths of thousands of our fellow country men, is something to be considered seriously by all studying this subject.

respectfully...

Tom

[nigelcave]

All of this is fair enough by today's standards but it would have been extremely rare, if not unprecedented, if Haig had not received his parliamentary grant: and I am not sure why the focus on Haig when many other senior generals also got grants, not least French. Now, so far as I know, things had changed by the time of the Second World and certainly by its end: thus honours for senior military commanders, yes; grants, no. So things had moved on.

If we want to take another example of the unacceptable by today's standards one only has to look, for example, at the treatment of the United States' black troops in the Great War - a situation that was not all that much improved by the time of WWII.

Different eras, different mores; historical judgement has to consider and be guided by the norms and expectations of the time otherwise it becomes counter-academic because everything is viewed through the standards and mores of the present rather than the 'then': which is not to say there cannot be criticism, of course, but ....

[Steven Broomfield]

My great uncle Bobby Smith joined the B&Ts, ,then worked as a stonemason, was a drunkard, a wife beater and an alcoholic. Died in 1967 of a broken neck.

Richard Dunn, Ruthin, demobbed from SWBs lived as a tramp in his own re-created Great War dugout, just outside this town. Froze to death winter 1981.

Fredde Fox ex RWF lived under tin sheets at the local dump. In 1947 it took 15 burly policemen to evict him and to place him in the local workhouse.

Laurence Jones ex RWF, at 19 years of age was a double amputee legs in 1918. He was given an almshouse in the Ruthin parish church almshouses. He refused to leave the house, ever. He died there in 1983.

Four other reasons why I dislike Haig.

Why were they Haig's fault? They may well have been (probably were) victims of the war which Haig certainly didn't start.

I feel that sometimes we see Haig as the sole focus of blame, but surely the people who - for want of a better word - "created" the war should be held guilty too? As Cowper said, War's a game which, were their subjects wise, kings would not play at.

[PhilB]

The belief that the machinations of the establishment were, in those days, all above board and in public view is rather touching, if a little naïve. To call a disbelief "class warfare" is something of a non sequitur.

I notice that Haig himself wrote "On the way to Montreuil the King said to me that he had told the PM to offer me a peerage" (War Diaries & Letters 27/11/18). Are the King`s other instructions to his cabinet on record? I doubt - it`s the way things were done.

[Gareth Davies]

A few random thoughts:

- Our memory of the GW is often conditioned by WW2. In the GW we were facing the main element of the German Army. In WW2 the majority of the German Army is on the Eastern front.

- The scale of the GW is so very much greater than anything previously.

- Haig is a good administrator and a good manager.

- Haig is not a pessimist nor cautious.

- He is a rat catcher who wants to be a regulator (see Andrew Gordon's Rules of the Game).

- He uses technology (gas, tanks, air) but is not a great innovator.

- He is not inspirational.

- Haig is not an attritional commander. He is consistently in favour of breakthrough; he is all for manoeuvre and decisive act. Interestingly his successes are all with bite and hold operations (did Rawlinson manage to influence him?).

[SiegeGunner]

All this 'wisdom in hindsight' overlooks the fact that the returning citizen army could, probably with relative ease, have turned out the 'Establishment' and created a very different society ... as happened in a number of European countries after the Great War. Considering what became of most of those utopian post-GW systems, I think the British did rather well with their slow and conservative approach to change.

[Steven Broomfield]

Surprisingly in these discussions, no-one ever cites the arch-attrtioner ... Falkenhayn must have been responsible for far more wasted, ruined and devastated lives than ever Haig could have dreamt of.

[Guest]

I am very late to this, so forgive me if I am covering points already made.

Systemic Risk. Casualty ratios among the major powers in the Great War appear to have been largely in the same order of magnitude. On this basis alone the high casualties would seem to be systemic risk in the Great War and well beyond the control of any individual such as Haig. The British Army's experience was far from unique.

Other than the argument that "it should never have happened" it would be interesting to see what Haig's detractors could offer as an alternative. The factors seem so inordinately manifold and complex that it is difficult to isolate one single factor such as an individual commander. Haig was a Corps commander for the first year and British casualty ratios (as a percent of numbers engaged) for the other Corps and the Army as a whole in 1914-15 were as high as anything that followed when he took over from French. As an aside, is Haig to be blamed for the losses at Gallipoli too? - a theatre of war that he had no influence over.

The Paradox of the Great War. I have no doubt that pensions for the surviving widows, orphans, wounded and injured were inadequate, however the British experience of the Great War contains an enormous paradox. The Great War brought about unimagined improvements in British society at the most basic levels of health, employment, life expectancy and mortality both during and after the war. The definitive study on this period is J M Winter's "The Great War and The British People" which claims:

"Paradoxically the conflict which killed or maimed over two million men also created conditions which improved the health of the civilian population....the mobilization of a civilian war economy, the unintended and fortuitous benefits of which were the source of the disturbing paradox that the Great War was both an event of unparalleled carnage and suffering and the occasion of significant improvement in the life expectancy of the civilian population and especially the worst-off sections of British Society. ....The fundamental cause of this phenomenon was improved standard of living and in particular improved standard of nutrition among the urban and rural working class. Here is the key to the striking contrast between the demographic gains in civilian population and the demographic losses of the generation that went off to war"

Mortality declined, occupational mortality, maternal mortality and infant mortality declined. medical care improved, the public health service, infant welfare and factory welfare improved as well as national insurance.. Standards of living also improved based on a number of measures. Despite higher food costs, calorific intake improved as did consistency in diet, wages, welfare provision, family income, purchasing power. The compounding effect of these multi-layered improvements in society would be difficult to exaggerate. They changed society forever and were a direct consequence of the War. For the population as a whole, life expectancy actually increased during and after the war. All these improvements had the greatest impact in the poorest tranches of society. When making arguments over the post war plight of the survivors, it is worth considering these other important factors. The rate of improvement was sharp during and after the war and above long term pre-war trends.

In simple terms, prior to 1914 life expectancy for men was 49 years. After the war it was 56. If one in ten servicemen died, the remaining 9 would live (on average) for 7 more years than previously expected. The life expectancy of those who did not serve also improved. Despite the tragedy of the Great War, society when measured on this simple yardstick actually improved.

Human Cost. Lastly, there seems to be some confusion over the human cost to British society. The UK's population recorded in the 1911 census was 45.37 million and fatalities were 704,000 which represents 1.5% of the population. The wounded figure at 2.27 million needs to be tempered by the fact that 65% returned to duty. The 8% discharged as invalids comes to 182,000....when added to the killed, this still comes to less than 2% of the population. 98% of the UKs population survived the war and as a consequence of the massive improvements in health and welfare they lived longer.

While the cost was highly concentrated in the male age group of 19-40 - across all classes of society - when measured against losses in other countries, the UK did not stand out. MG

Edited for clarity.

[phil andrade]

Haig was reconciled to the loss of one tenth of the manhood of the nation as a price worth paying for the defeat of Prussian militarism.

He actually wrote that toward the end of 1915.

He appears to have been remarkably prescient.

While we must acknowledge that the loss of three quarters of a million military dead from the UK does not appear excessive compared with the record of other continental powers - German losses were close to three times greater in absolute terms, and twice as high proportionately - the great preponderance of the British loss in the period commencing from July 1st 1916 is very striking. Would I be right in stating that at least four fifths of all British deaths occurred during that " second half " of the war ? The association of this with Haig's command is understandable , even if the opprobrium is grotesquely unjustified.

Falkenhayn - referred to by Steven as the " arch attritionist " - was a proponent of limited strategic goals ; in the battle forever associated with his attritional aspirations, he was nowhere near as profligate of German lives as the British were to be on the Somme.

Editing : Perhaps I should modify my suggestion that at least four fifths of all British deaths occurred from July 1st 1916 onwards - it might be so for the Western Front ; perhaps it's more like three quarters if we take the war as a whole....still, my observation is pertinent, I hope.

Phil (PJA)

[paulgranger]

This thread began with a criticism that Haig got a financial settlement and a title following his war service, and then developed into a 'haves and have-nots' commentary, in which Haig seems to have been personally responsible for all the deaths and injuries suffered by the British Army in the Great War. What then of Sir John French, who likewise received a substantial cash gift, and an earldom, and was in command during the early part of the war, when casualty rates were also extremely high. Should he not be a greater target for criticism? After all, unlike Haig, he was sacked, and his tenure of command, unlike Haig's, did not lead to ultimate success.

[Chris_Baker]

How sad it is, after this forum has been in existence for some 20 years, that the same old arguments are being recycled here.

That's me out.

[Guest]

Haig was reconciled to the loss of one tenth of the manhood of the nation as a price worth paying for the defeat of Prussian militarism.

.

Phil (PJA)

Phil - this is one of the factors that confuses the debate. Britain did not lose one tenth of its manhood. No-where near.

I know you know this, but I think it simply adds to the misconceptions. MG

[kenf48]

What argument did John Smith the butcher from Doncaster have with Johann Schmitt the butcher from Dresden that led THEM to being stuck in muddy trenches in France and Flanders...... and maybe ultimately under the sod....

Tom

In August 1914, in one word, Belgium.

Coming late to this thread as I have no wish to get embroiled in the debate as to whether Haig's rewards were appropriate,though I'm curious as to why similar rewards and honours given to others, including the Admirals, are seldom queried. However, there is absolutely no evidence that in 1914 the populist assertion the 'workers' had no quarrel and this was a 'class war' as epitomised by the 'Oh What a Lovely War' view of history cannot stand unchallenged, one of the first casualties of the war was International Socialism.

There is ample evidence of the hatred of Germans and Germany on the British Home Front. There were furious protests from all quarters at the attack on Belgium by the German Empire and alleged atrocities by their armies. Accepting the scope for propaganda and exaggeration there is no doubt Belgium had the impertinence to stand in the way of the Schlieffen Plan and was expected to relinquish her sovereignty. That Britain would go to war over a 'scrap of paper' was unthinkable to the Germans. Had the Germans not invaded Belgium Britain may have stood aside and remained neutral. There was little appetite for continental war in the summer of 1914, even the bankers thought it was unthinkable. As noted previously the greatest concern fo British politicians was the threat of civil war in Ireland, which some historians claim was less than a week away in August 1914.

As soon as Belgium was invaded both popular and political sentiment supported the war. There were few exceptions, it may have been an unwanted, even an unnecessary war, but there was strong popular support, even by pacifists such as Lloyd George. The enthusiasm for war was, in 1914, universal and encouraged and supported by an influential popular press.

There was no 'class war' in the enthusiasm for war and the crushing of Germany as they had tried to to crush Belgium, everyone from the Pankhursts to the poets supported the war, which as already noted is one thing that can't be laid at Haig's door. The Army and Navy were simply responding to events.

As the war progressed in John Keegan's memorable phrase 'killing became a necessity' and killing while it might entail respect also meant there was a deep and unresolved hatred of the 'Hun' outside the sentimental assertions of poetry and fiction.

Ken

[squirrel]

PJA post # 218

with respect I think that your argument is flawed with regard to the number of casualties increasing as the War progressed.

The size of the Army also increased with more men engaged - might this not be a factor in the increasing number of casualties year on year?

Nearly 5.4 million men served on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918. The Army, deployed in various parts of the world and in the UK in 1914 was 733,514.

[Guest]

this might help reduce some of the speculation on what changed when Haig took charge.

Period.........No. of Bns x months in theatre (%).........% of Total Fatalities

1914-15................5,431.......................17%...................20%

1916-18..............26,200.......................83%...................80%

1914-18..............31,631......................100%.................100%

Based on 1,762 battalions that saw active service. The earlier period when Haig was not in command was slightly more lethal.

[Muerrisch]

How sad it is, after this forum has been in existence for some 20 years, that the same old arguments are being recycled here.

That's me out.

Its not quite as cut and dried as that Chris.

For example, we have new erudite contributors these days .......... I remember the shrill and bitter arguments, not discussions, that turned off a lot of members. These arguments were "don't confuse me with the facts" in the main.

The above posts are fairly moderate, if misinformed or misguided in some instances.

My input would be to suggest that, instead of railing against Haig, or indeed "The War", the proper targets might be

1. The politicians of all nations who sleepwalked into war, and especially Germany which precipitated it on the thinnest of pretexts.

2. The British politiians who did not prepare and provide for war in the pre-war years, despite Haldane's valiant and vital preparations.

3. The failure to remove Haig and replace him with a general of broader intellect, grasp and imagination.

There is, I suggest, an interesting parallel with ACM Butch Harris of the Bomber Offensive, World war II. Both inspired loyalty and devotion in the main. Both exhibited great moral strength and determination. Haig achieved what he was tasked with: winning the war. Harris's brave boys of Bomber Command did not, and could not, but they inflicted savage and unsustainable damage to the German war effort, such that victory became assured. It is even arguable that the post-war German extremely non militaristic stance was triggered by the laying waste of vast swathes of their land from the air.

The other parallel Haig/Harris is that both became figures to be hated after their wars when the politicians who appointed and retained them decided that the mark had been overstepped, and whoever else was to be blamed, it was not to be a politician.

Sounds familiar?