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This article is overly positive about Haig - it seems to have been written by a supporter of the revisionist position. Any criticism of Haig is immediately defused by a contrary point of view, which is often framed as though it were the general opinion. For example:
"In his 1937 essays Great Contemporaries he later likened Haig to a surgeon who had to act dispassionately for the long-term good of the patient, no matter how messy were the short-term means. In another passage of The World Crisis he wrote that massed tank attacks as at Cambrai could have been used as an alternative to blocking enemy machine-gun fire with "the breasts of brave men". This view is now regarded as unrealistic."
The phrase "This view is now regarded as unrealistic" is only referenced to Philpott's 2009 book, which doesn't claim to be stating any sort of broad consensus - in fact, it's openly framed as a counter-consensus position on the Somme battle.
Yes and no. It was written by somebody who has been reading about this stuff for many decades, and reflects the books from which it was drawn back in about 2011. Many of the things which are (or used to be, as he has fallen from popular memory in recent years) widely believed about Haig and were repeated by journalists and by widely-watched programmes like "Oh What A Lovely War" and "Blackadder Goes Forth" are simply false (eg. that he was too stupid to appreciate tanks - in fact he was slow to appreciate the importance of artillery on the Somme (see below) but was an enthusiast for gas, tanks and what he called "airo-planes") or contain no more than a smidgen of truth (that he was very stubborn in persisting with major offensives or that people who had only oral dealings with him sometimes mistook him for a cretin - he was better on paper).
I am well aware of the shortcomings of Philpott's 2009 book on the Somme. There is a recent reissue of Prior & Wilson's 2005 book on the Somme with a new intro - they point out, quite rightly, that his book contains lots of useful material from the French and German point of view but that Philpott goes completely overboard in claiming the Somme as an Allied victory and peddling his thesis that Haig's breakthrough plans were just arrows on the map and that it was all part of Joffre's masterplan to defeat the Germans by inflicting attrition on them (in fact the Allies never repeated their attritional success of autumn 1916 (see Cowan's recent book on 1917) and the Allies came horribly close to crumbling long before Germany did). Philpott's exaggerated arguments don't really impinge on his observation that no serious historian nowadays thinks that the tanks of 1916-18 were a war-winning weapon. The breakthrough at Cambrai is nowadays largely attributed to artillery and almost all of the hundreds of tanks used at Amiens had broken down within 48 hours (and cavalry came back into their own - P&W are wrong to scoff at them - but that is a discussion for another occasion). It is not a breach of NPOV to point out that Churchill was writing nonsense about tanks.
There is a much more serious and better-founded critique to be made of Haig's record in the middle years of the war (whether anybody else would have done much better is of course a moot point - success in public life life is often a matter of timing and being in the right place at the right time). Haig's overconfident breakthrough plans at the Somme have been amply researched by various historians, there are now a number of good books from the German point of view debunking the exaggerated claims made by Haig's defenders about the Somme, and there is the whole question of casualty figures, about which I have a long-term unfinished article lurking on my ToDo list (Churchill was wrong about tanks but he was, perhaps more by luck than judgement, entirely right to point out that the casualty rates were so disproportionate that it is debatable whether it was really much of an attritional success). And as for the Big Picture about Third Ypres, which was regarded as the main blot on Haig's reputation in the interwar period, and the ghastly hole which the Allies thought they'd dug themselves into by the end of 1917, you need to know about the manpower crisis, on which as far as I know there isn't even a wikipedia article yet, Anglo-American relations, domestic politics and worries about British morale both military and domestic, and you won't learn about these things from narrowly focussed military accounts which tend to laser in on the improvements in weaponry and tactics which had been made by then (books from the German perspective, part from the usual couple of endlessly cherry-picked quotes, pay relatively little attention to Third Ypres, which mattered a lot more to us than it did to them).
At the moment the article, like the main biography article, says nothing much yet about the Somme and Third Ypres, because work came to a grinding halt when I put the 1918 and Reputation sub-articles up for creation in spring 2012 only for them to be rejected out of hand as "unnecessary". Nowadays anybody can create an article, and I'll get there when I get there.Paulturtle (talk) 02:00, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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