Douglas Haig - Architect of victory

[Justin Moretti]

Squirrel, "Firepower" was written by Shelford Bidwell and Dominick Graham, not Prior and Wilson.

I think in the end, "Educated Soldier" was Terraine's way of saying "Not the bloody incompetent twit some think he is", rather than implying that other British generals were "not educated soldiers".

[truthergw]

I think Phil B read more into the title than was intended but that said, Haig had studied at university, and gave serious thought to completing the required studies to gain his degree. He had passed staff college and spent a lot of his time before the war studying previous wars both on the continent and in USA . By the standards of his time and possibly any other time, he had made quite an effort to educate himself in his chosen profession.

[squirrel]

JM - smacked wrist then.

TR - agree with your post no 27.

[PhilB]

I think Phil B read more into the title than was intended

Maybe. I have the impression, however, that attendance at a "good" university was a rite of passage for a young man of means in those days, not necessarily for serious academic study but for more "gentlemanly" pursuits a la Brideshead Revisited. Haig may, of course, have been an exception though I don't recall much evidence of such from his diaries?

[Take on me]

QUOTE (Phil_B @ Aug 6 2007, 03:58 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Maybe. I have the impression, however, that attendance at a "good" university was a rite of passage for a young man of means in those days, not necessarily for serious academic study but for more "gentlemanly" pursuits a la Brideshead Revisited. Haig may, of course, have been an exception though I don't recall much evidence of such from his diaries?

I am not sure that that was the case for men who were interested in an army career. I seem to recall that Sheffield and Bourne write in their intro to Haig's diaries that not many high ranking officers were university educated, most choosing to progress straight into Staff College. After all many would have already undergone a rigorous private education.

Jon

[Muerrisch]

By 1914 there was certainly competition to get into the Staff College, such that a list of 'almost made-its' was published. Having NOT attended or attended became largely irrelevant among regular officers in the war if RWF is anything to go by, as a large number of Captains made it to Lt Col temporary Brigadier by the end.

[truthergw]

Hi Phil. As I recall, Haig chose to go to university because it allowed him access to Staff College. He seems to have failed the Math exam for entrance. It was unusual for men intending to make their career in the Services to go to university. He was older than others in his class at college and was noted for taking the studies side a lot more seriously than most of his classmates. Haig was, notoriously a poor spoken communicator but he read and wrote fluently in French. I feel his lack of communication skills may make him appear to be less intellectually able than he was.

[PhilB]

I feel his lack of communication skills may make him appear to be less intellectually able than he was.

That may well have been the case, particularly to someone who was a skilled speaker like DLlG. I've not read any of Haig's military writings from the WW1 period in their unedited form. Perhaps they give a different impression?

[Robert Dunlop]

'Cavalry Studies', by Haig, is an extremely interesting and erudite book. It describes various exercises that were conducted in India. There are numerous annotations, as each exercise was set within a particular context supported by historical studies. The latter draw on material from the Franco-Prussian War, Napoleonic Wars, and a wide range of other sources.

Robert

[PhilB]

Can we take that as an example of Haig's personal writings, Robert? In his rank and position at the time, would he, in your opinion, have written it without staff help?

I found the following of interest:-

http://www.js-ww1.bham.ac.uk/fetch.asp?art...e1_Bushaway.pdf

[truthergw]

Haig's diaries are well written. I think we can discount ghost writing here? Phil, Haig was a very capable officer marked for pre-eminence from a very early stage in his career. Chief of Staff to Sir John French in South Africa. He was the C in C of the British and Empire forces for 3 years. No other C in C kept his job that long, despite desperate efforts by Lloyd-George, aided by his, by then bitter enemy Sir John French, to replace him. That argues a far from stupid man. He outwitted " The Wizard". Not many people in British politics, never mind the Army, could claim the same. Perhaps you could show some evidence for your belief that he was not an educated, sophisticated, high ranking and successful officer in the Army?

[PhilB]

That's not my belief, Tom. I'm simply looking for the writing that best demonstrates his virtues and trying to avoid anything not by him personally. Maybe I'm not looking in the right place but it seems difficult to find something of his in which one can get a feeling of the real man. Perhaps another aspect of his personality that he wanted it so?

[truthergw]

Haig was a very self contained person. Almost a caricature of the dour, non-demonstrative Scot. This is something which has bedevilled his biographers. His wife did a biography, so did Sgt. Secrett, his servant of 25 years and Rev. Duncan, a Church of Scotland minister who catered to Haig's spiritual needs for most of the war. Haig made no secret of his religious belief. These books are a bit pricey to buy, but available through the public library. These are the ones which help to explain something which is no longer apparent. The extraordinary loyalty shown to him by those who got closest. However close that may have been. The diaries are well written inasmuch as that format can be said to be so, but they do not really give me the feeling that they reveal the inner man. They are his considered opinion of what was important day to day. The diaries were always intended for publication. They should be read with that in mind.

[PhilB]

The diaries were always intended for publication. They should be read with that in mind.

Very true.

Actually, discussion of academic achievement among generals is largely irrelevant as I doubt there's much correlation between that and one's capacity to run an army. Other characteristics are probably more important - and rarer.

[truthergw]

Tut tut, Phil. Now you are starting to sound like a pigsticking Col. Blimp. I doubt if any teacher or university Don would agree with you. The purpose of a higher education is to give you analytic tools for problem solving of the most general kind and afford you practice in their use. The great advantage to Haig of being an educated soldier, would be a wider knowledge base and the self confidence to apply his analytic skills to problems as they arose. He may well have lacked communication skills but no one ever suggested he lacked confidence in his own abilty.

[Take on me]

Pop question; did Haig speak any French? I know that Sir John French certainly did not.

Jon

[truthergw]

See post # 32.

[PhilB]

The purpose of a higher education is to give you analytic tools for problem solving of the most general kind and afford you practice in their use. The great advantage to Haig of being an educated soldier, would be a wider knowledge base and the self confidence to apply his analytic skills to problems as they arose.

Give instruction to a wise man and he will be yet the wiser! I couldn't argue against the above sentiment but experience tells me that you can't equate academic performance too closely to management performance. And generalship must be a particularly demanding type of management.

I recall, as a new recruit in NS days, mopping out some toilets and the chap along side me was a maths PhD from Oxford. Delightful fellow, but he couldn't iron a BD properly or march without swinging his arm and leg together on the same side and was always sent to the latreens when a parade was on. I don't think he could have run a whelk stall. An extreme example, but you get my point?

[Crunchy]

QUOTE (Phil_B @ Nov 26 2006, 11:55 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

PS Why did Terraine call him the educated soldier? He`s given Haig a real boost by giving the impression that he was academically gifted.

From the horse's mouth. Terraine wrote this on the first page of Douglas Haig: The Educated Soldier. "

"Modern professional soldiers, of high rank and experience, use the adjective 'educated' with a definite but subtle meaning: it means an officer who takes his work seriously, who studies it from all aspects, who (above all) has the mind, as well as the aspiration, to think an issue through for himself, from first to last; the reading, the battlefield experience, the staff courses and other qualifications are taken for granted. 'Educated' means a man who has learned and will put into practice all those lessons and many more."

[PhilB]

Since the book jacket was designed to appeal to the general public, it is somewhat misleading then to use the word "educated" in a sense that the public wouldn`t understand? Perhaps "The Self Educated Soldier" might have been more appropriate then?

[David Filsell]

We always seem to be in an interesting starting position on discussions about Haig and that is one promoted by Laffin and Clarke. The Haig bibliography is now vast, much of it recent and using primary sources - and at least one new book - proclaimed as excellent by at least one of the Sandhurst teaching staff - is in the works.

I genuinely believe that so many of the key (positive facts) are now established about he man that I generally stay out of debates.

Of course he was not perfect. But he was without doubt recognised as an outstanding soldier by his contemporaries. He was an 'educated soldier' within the Terraine definition. He created the first doctrine that the British Army had ever had (Field Service Regulations). He was personally brave - many thought he deserved the VC for saving a soldier in the Sudan. There is no evidence that he used the old boys network any more than any other ambitious soldier of the time (and as it is now used in buisness). He got into Staff college on merit. He was one of the very few senior officers to have attended University. The diaries are widely accepted as genuine. He did regulary visit formations under his command. He used advanced command posts. If verbally concise (generally described as inarticulate by the antis) he was a lucid and skilled writer.

His army won the war - the British army did defeat the main body of the main enemy of the main enemy on the main battlefield - an accomplishment only matched by Marlborough and Wellington, employing 'allied armise). Haig also helped build and direct the largest Army that the nation has ever created. Not a bad list of accomplishments - and all fully documented for those who really want to understand the man, rather than accept the still accepted image revered bysome of Haig the Butcher and Bungler so loved by thse like Lloyd George (who had his own fish to fry) and the Laffinistas.

In short more heat than light is almost always created in the Haig debates. The facts are all out there if you reead round the subject.

[George Armstrong Custer]

Neatly summed up, David, and I concur with all you say. On Phil's differentiation between a military appreciation of an 'Educated' soldier and what he suggests 'the public' might better understand, I'd reference the most recent biography by Gary Meade. This makes absolutely plain that Haig, by the standards of the day, was well educated academically for a career soldier, something which made him a natural for Staff College, a career move which signalled his status as an 'educated soldier' in the purely military sense of the phrase too.

Haig's education is apparent too in the monographs and books he wrote on military subjects, as well as in his work with Haldane at the War Office.

To call Haig 'Self-educated' either in terms of conventional academic education or as a soldier educated in his trade would be to ignore the facts of his career.

ciao,

GAC

[truthergw]

QUOTE (Phil_B @ Feb 25 2008, 10:45 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Since the book jacket was designed to appeal to the general public, it is somewhat misleading then to use the word "educated" in a sense that the public wouldn`t understand? Perhaps "The Self Educated Soldier" might have been more appropriate then?

In the first place, I doubt if the book is aimed at the general public or even at the book buying section of that general public. I think it is aimed at people who are interested in military history with perhaps a bias towards the Great War.

Are you claiming to have some sort of special insight into what the public do or don't understand? Are you suggesting that public school, university and staff college equate to self education? Haig had more formal education than the majority of soldiers. All that assuming that a would be reader would not scan the first couple of pages and see Terraine's explanation of the title.

[George Armstrong Custer]

In the first place, I doubt if the book is aimed at the general public or even at the book buying section of that general public. I think it is aimed at people who are interested in military history with perhaps a bias towards the Great War.

That point is well made, Tom. Terraine takes great pains to make clear that his work is a specialist military analysis of Haig's function as C-in-C of the BEF. In the Preface, he writes:

'This book is not meant to be a biography of Field Marshal Earl Haig; it is an attempt at a study of him as a soldier, and in particular, as a Commander-in-Chief.

And in the Epilogue, Terraine reiterates that the focus of his work is narrower than that of a biography:

'In this military study there is no space to put down the full story of the hard, taxing, but freely given labour by which Haig made himself the Founder of the British Legion. Yet the fact that this work occupied the rest of his days from the very moment when his public duties ceased until the day of his death (probably much hastened by the toil), constitutes an important gloss upon the frame of mind in which he had commanded his Army.'

Terraine's book is, then, aimed at a special-interest readership rather than the general public to which a more 'conventional' biography might have been addressed.

ciao,

GAC

[PhilB]

Are you suggesting that public school, university and staff college equate to self education? Haig had more formal education than the majority of soldiers.

It was Terraine`s quote that suggested that "educated" in his sense didn`t mean formal academic education. And indeed, Haig was not academically educated. Merely attending a school and university without gaining qualifications doesn`t constitute academic education. Not enough to qualify for Staff College? I consider myself reasonably WW1 read, and I understood Terraine to mean educated in the normal sense when I first looked at the title. And being more educated, either formally or militarily, than the average officer in those days doesn`t seem to merit excessive recognition.

I don`t wish to get embroiled in one of those H debates. Haig`s lack of formal qualifications says little or nothing about his capacity as a commander. I`m simply suggesting that Terraine`s title may have been misleading. You weren`t misled? Fine.