Earl Haig, son of field marshall, dies at 91

R.I.P. Earl!

Earl Haig, son of field marshall, dies at 91 - Yahoo! News

Earl Haig, who developed his gift for painting as a prisoner of war in World War II, has died at age 91.

Art helped Haig move out of the shadow of his father, Field Marshal Douglas Haig, whose command of British troops in the war of attrition on World War I's Western Front has been sharply criticized by some — and strongly defended by his son.

Haig died on Friday at Borders General Hospital in Melrose, Scotland, his family said. The cause of death was not announced.

Serving as a second lieutenant in the Royal Scots Greys, Haig was captured by Italian troops in North Africa in 1942 and eventually was held at Colditz Castle in Germany. In captivity, he revived a childhood interest in art.

"I was able to shed the burden of living up to my father's great reputation as a soldier," he once said. "Suddenly fate had liberated me. I could slink away into the shadows of a prisoner of war camp to cultivate the resource of painting."

A family funeral was planned for July 21 at Mertoun Kirk.

 

rip sir!

 

God Speed

 

Rest in Peace Earl. :mourn:

 

I was lucky enough to visit Dawick Earl Haigh at his home in the Scottish borders on two occasions , what a lovely man he was and very supportive of his late father.

The tales of when Churchill and Sir Hubert Gough came to visit his father and they discussed the First World war were totaslly fascinating.

One of our visits was to interview him for a documentary on the Battle of the Somme , the 90th Anniversary which turned into a remarkable insight into the man, his father and his family,

regards

Paul

 

I am still trying to purchase a copy of John Terraine's "Douglas Haig- The Educated Soldier."

Haig's reputation still takes a pounding from know-nothing high school history teachers et al. This is something that Terraine spent most of his published life trying to fix. In my view he succeeded. It's a pity Terraine's work has been swept under the carpet by the modern peace movement, or by socialists attempting to paraphrase Lenin's view of the Great War.

Rest well Earl

 

Well, when you are responsible for the deaths of 20,000 men IN ONE day, you should be castigated. The 1st of July 1916 will live in infamy. 20,000 dead Tommies.What a waste of life.

Haig was typical of WWI generalship. Unimaginative, stubborn, and a utter disregard for the lives of his soldiers.

This has nothing to do with "socialist" perceptions of Haig, but with realistic appraisal of atrocious tactics by military men--who by the way, tend to be conservative.

 

Read a little of Terraine's work....you may have a little less to complain about.

I recommend "The Smoke and the Fire"...."White Heat"....

These two alone will change your perception of how the Great War was fought and WHY it was fought this way.

I'm certainly not going to sit here and paraphrase Terraine's work...I'll leave that to your reading.

Terraine is not the only historian to change perceptions of the war....Norman Stone is another whose works you may wish to pick up (His "Eastern Front 1914-1917" is brilliant), and his A.J.P. Taylor style short history is a lesson in academic short books...

You sound like you've read the TIME-LIFE version of the Great War....or maybe one too many Lynn Macdonald books? Or other authors concerned with the minuete of the Great War, rather than concentrating on the WHY....

Anyway, it's all there waiting for you...

 

So you are saying that there was no alternative to charging across hundreds of yards of open ground littered with obstacles at men ensconced in trenches with accuratge rifles, machine guns, and artillery?

The fact is that technology rendered the Generals tactics null and void. At least not until the Germans developed the inflitration tactics ad the Brits introduced the tank into the battlefield.

I'm not an expert on WWI. Far from it. But one doesn't need to be a graduate of West Point to see that the tactics used for the first 3 years were ineffective against modern weaponary.

 

Good Afternoon Sir....

In reply to your more than reasonable request, I'm going to sit and do a little revision, with the books of John Terraine and Norman Stone, so that I may accurately answer your enquiry.

Suffice to say, I'm not sure this is the correct forum, but since we are discussing Doug Haig, here is as good as any place.

I no longer possess a copy of "The Smoke and the Fire", but I do have a hardbacked copy of "White Heat", which I intend to quote at some length from, whilst quickly re-reading Stone's "WW1" to add a few extras.

It's unfortunate that not too many are familiar with Terraine's work anymore, but no matter. He does a much better job of bringing the Great War into proper focus than Lynn Macdonald or Barbara Tuchman, and Stone's "Eastern Front 14-17" is STILL considered definative (even by Russian authors) all these years after it first hit the press.

Stay posted and I'll be with you shortly....(I'm squeezing my computer time in between household chores).

Christopher

 

Once i thought like you as my Graet Uncle was one of the 20,000 but i have to say having now studied WW1 and Haig and the Generlas , things are not as simplistic as it appears, i can only support the advice given by Volga Boatman to read Terraine etc and get a much more balanced view,

cheers

Paul

 

To open...

The period between 1860 and 1914 is unique for two reasons. First and foremost, unprecedented expansions of populations in Western nations (with France a notable exception), and technological expansion on a scale not seen to that time, nor since...

TERRAINE..."WHITE HEAT"...PAGE 7
"These large population increases are central to the great wars of the first industrial revolution; the mass population supplied the mass armies which are a particular feature of those wars. Mass armies-nations in arms- are the modern version of the warfare of primitive armed hordes and the later asiatic invasions, whose savage style briefly receded from military history of Europe during the 18th century but reappeared with the French levee' en masse of 1793. That year heard what has been called 'the birth cry of total war'

Terraine cites 1793 as merely a birth cry, not "the fortissimo of a mature opera singer".

PAGE 8...
"...Clearly, during the early decades of the 19th century, there remained a substantial gap between the raising of mass armies, and maintaining them effectively in the field."

Terraine calls the subsequent wars leading up to 1914 "transition wars". Crimean, Franco Prussian etc...."But none of these wars was a life and death struggle between great industrial nations; they were limited wars for limited objectives."

The one exception to this between 1793 and 1914 was the American Civil War..."The institution of slavery created the unbridgeable divide between the two societies."
...."Slavery was the unreconcilable factor; it made this a war a'outrance ('to the hilt'), and thus the first Great War of the Industrial Revolution."

After covering technical advances, Terraine argues further that the mass of the ACW was not reflected in the actual numbers on the battlefield, but rather, the total number of men in uniform as a percentage of the populations of the protagonists.

"Reliable estimates suggest that from first to last the Confederacy put some 850,000-900,000 men in the field; that is to say, over 15% of the total white population. This compares very directly with 1914-18 proportions. France 20%, Germany 18%, Italy 15%, Austria-Hungary 14%, Great Britain 13%. But expressed as a proportion of the white males of military age, the Confederate total becomes a staggering 74.5%, a true reflection of war a'outrance, war for survival."

The North had all the industrial advantages, but..."even they had to shop abroad for certain essentials; no less than 726,000 small arms were purchased in Europe by Nov 1862."

Terraine goes further to suggest that armies are nothing "if they cannot be moved", and quotes G.F.R. Henderson, "Railways are good servants but bad masters".....Terraine expands this point,
"Europe's vast armies required the servant role of railways in order to conduct operations of war at all effectively. But the railways themselves then decided where and how these operations would be conducted- a mastery from which there was no escape until the advent of the Second Industrial Revolution. This was the technology of the internal combustion engine fuelled by oil which, in the Second World War, made it possible again to conduct campaigns independently of railways and to offset another serious limitation imposed by them during both the American Civil War and the First World War. An American historian writes:

"It was the railroad and the river steamboat which robbed the great battlefield victories of finality. It was these devices, managed by telegraphic communications, which made it possible to promptly repair the terrible casualties of the major battles, to re-supply and re-equip, to draw reinforcements from another theatre to plug gaps which the enemy opened up, to manoeuver not only armies but groups of armies so as to prevent defeat from turning into destruction."

He might have been writing about 1914, or 1918.

So we see the lineaments of the First Industrial Revolution warfare becoming clearly defined between 1861-65. The very landscape changed to match the new style; scenes hitherto associated with siege operations against particular localities now became normal on all major battlefields. The new fire-power dictated new tactics; instinctively, as the lead storms swept them with unprecendented accuracy, the soldiers of both sides sought cover. In country that was generally well timbered they did what the Japanese did in jungles in ww2: they built logs into parapets, covering them with earth from trenches, shelters and bombproofs dug behind. Against riflemen thus entrenched, assault after assault withered away; the bayonet became chiefly useful as a cooking instrument or for opening tins or boxes, scarcely ever as a weapon of war. The arts of trench warfare were universally cultivated; 'the armies went into the ground completely at the end.'

Dig as they might, the Civil War armies could no more avoid heavy losses than their successors in the First World War. Political leaders, military theorists, and the general public of the world alike, in the last decades of the 19th century, continued to think in terms of 'great captains' and 'thunderclaps of war'. They dwelt upon such events as Jackson's Shenandoah Valley campaign in 1862, or Lee's 'perfect battle' at Chancellorsville in 1863. They generally failed to notice what war was becoming in it's industrial guise; above all they failed to notice what it was likely to cost."


Unit casualty figures follow, showing breathtaking similarities between ACW and First World War...Now follows the most telling point of comparison, as he quotes Sherman complementing Grants strategy of "all out attack and unrelenting pressure in all theatres. It was Sherman, his principal Lieutenant, who advocated and executed a significant addendum:

"If the Southern people persisted in the folly of rebellion after three years, they must take the consequences. As he swept across the land, he wouls sieze or destroy their crops, their animals, their barns and mills and wagons, not as a wanton act of destruction for it's own sake, nor as an act of vengeance, but as a means of destroying the southern capacity, and above all, the Southern WILL, to make war."

So what started as a coventional conflict of armies and navies had now become 'deeply overlaid by the beginnings of the war of organisation and the machine, the war against civilians and resources as well as against the uniformed soldiery of the enemy, the war of conscripted peoples rather than volunteer armies.' In other words, total industrial war had arrived- war which would demand the 'unconditional surrender' not just of armies in the field (the sense in which Grant coined the phrase in 1862), but of nations. The twentieth century would merely underline the lesson.

This passage concludes the introduction....

Hang on a mo'....the wife wants me to check something online (rude interruption!!!!), so I'll have to post again...remember, this was only the introduction!

 

Sorry bout that...pregnant women can be so demanding. Onward then....

2/NEW DIMENSIONS
Terraine's point about "Mass population breeding mass armies" is reflected in the population figures of the principle contestants of the Great War.

"By 1913, Russia had 161 million people, America 95.5, Germany nearly 67, Austria- Hungary over 51, Great Britain and Ireland 45.7, France 37.7, Italy 35.5. The mass populations bred mass armies: the proportions mobilized translate into mass armies such as the world had never seen, (but would be far surpassed in WW2)"

National figures for 1914 are given, then compared to the number of men eventually put in uniform. For our discussion on Haig...
"The British Regular Army numbered 247,432 in 1914; with all catagories of reserve including Territorials (268,777), Britain had 948,965 available. Wartime recruitment, including conscription, produced a full United Kingdom total of 5,704 416 and a British Empire total of 8,654,467. Both these totals were undreamed of in 1914; both would be surpassed between 1939 and 1945. What cannot be doubted is that these statistics gave the war it's shape and character. It was the presense of these masses that ensured that it would be a long war, a violent war, and a costly war."

A discussion of the various importances of Railways follows, noting also that the British had made a significant step ahead of all by "As early as 1911,motorizing the section of the supply system between railhead and troops." He follows by stating that this aspect of the emerging Second Industrial revolution was , by the end of the war, 'increased', with the British experience 'speaking for all'. (From 1,485 motor vehicles of all types on mobilization, to 121,720 by Armistace).

Further discussion moves to airpower, with the various experiences of the larger nations, and noting that the principle use that aeroplanes would be put to was as a helper of artillery. In a war dominated by artillery like no other before or since, this was significant. He also points out that "Only 11 years seperated the first flight of the Wright Brothers from the First World War"

At sea, too, rapid change became the norm, and further discussion follows, paralleling that of the other technologies, ie. changing faster than ever before, so fast that contemporaries struggled to cope. And herein lies the ultimate point about new technology, tucked away at the end of the discussion on naval advancement....

"To be a Captain or an Admiral in 1914 was to follow a profession whose future was full of mystery, full of questions which only the practical experience of war could answer. Admiral Sir John Jellicoe took up command of the British Grand Fleet, the supreme repository of British sea power, at the outbreak of the war. He was, as Winston Churchill said, 'the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon'. Even more significantly, comparing Jellicoe with England's famous Admiral, he said:
"Nelson's genius enabled him to measure truly the consequences of any decision. But that genius worked upon precise tactical data....He felt he knew what would happen in a fleet action. Jellicoe did not know. Nobody knew."

"Nobody knew" - those words may serve as the epitaph for the war itself.

The last 'new dimension' covered is of communications. We get a brief description of the development of wireless, as it relates to the three services.
"A lesson quickley learnt was the vulnerability of communication by wire in more than one way. It was a simple matter to cut wires-Sir Ian Hamilton in 1904 called them 'that reed so easily broken'; it was not difficult to tap them, and learn what messages they carried."

Douglas Haig turns up in 1912 as a Lieutenant General, defeated in an exercise as the attacking side due to a breakdown of his communications airship 'Delta'...

"General Haig, who was defeated in these manoeuvres, took the lesson to heart; from the very beginning of the war he paid great attention to air recon. The Royal Flying Corps itself profited from this demonstration of what it's prime role should be. It entered the war with a far more realistic sense of purpose than either the German or the French air services -strategic recon was it's explicit object.
What was still missing in every country-and 1914-18 would show how serious was the lack- was the blessing of voice communication. Nowhere would this be felt more acutely than at the shortest ranges-in actual combat. In 1915 a voice speaking in Arlington, Virginia, was carried by wireless to Paris and Hawaii, 4,000 miles away. What was immediately needed in 1915, however, was the means of making a voice heard up to about 4 miles away amidst the heat of battle-and that kind of magic was not quite ready. This proved to be a tragic circumstance for multitudes of soldiers."

Terraine rounds out the chapter..."For the generation which encountered this transformation, on the battlefields, on the oceans, in the skies, and in the laboratories of 1914-18, the new dimensions would repeat what was, after all, only an old lesson; as Marshal Turenne once said:
"Speak to me of a general who has made no mistakes in war, and you speak of one who has seldom made war"

To which the Industrial Revolution's added:
"New capacity meant new complexity; new methods of making war meant new ways of making mistakes."