And it's a shame that greed, power and man's stupid unwillingness to sincerely negotiate with their adversaries still brings war.
At first I didn't believe the above post, but I did some checking and it is substantially correct. There were 3,500 casualties, but not fatalities. The fact that less then 3,500 soldiers were killed doesn't make it any better, though.
The Germans were even yelling at them to go back, to not attack because the war was over but the Americans continued to attack.
On 11/11/18, there was heavy shelling of German positions and many last minute attacks... Why? Probably to gain a more advantageous position prior to the armistice or simple vanity. Criminal, if you ask me.
There is only one real take-away from all the histories of wars; politicians, generals and staff officers aren't the sharpest tools in the shed. If you look at what Haig was responsible for in terms of needless casualties during WWI and if he'd have done it 20 years later, he too would have dangled at Nuremberg even though he was on the winning side. Every war, no matter what, has been all about money and was usually stewarded by idiots and paid for in blood by the common folk who are lulled by false ideologies to go out and kill when they normally wouldn't. The brighter generals are actually the ones who in the end win. You look at Grant as opposed to McClellan, and Lee as opposed to Johnson, each was smarter and could think faster than their predecessor who was more popular. Then in WWI, Moltke the Younger was an idiot; his fear and cowardice cost the Germans the war within the first month. No one really understood that at that point, except for the French who were well aware of the Schliefen Plan and the consequences of its failure. But for 4 more years, they slaughtered one another, they ruined millions of lives and whole towns and basically shoved European civilization back 200 years. That war was the start of the Downfall of the West, which is continuing unabated today.
Douglas Haig died a national hero in 1928. His funeral was attended by masses of WWI veterans. It wasn't until the 1960s when a wave of revisionist historians began to call Haig a sadistic incompetent butcher. I will not go into the political motivations of said historians. For all the faults Haig had, he was faced by a new type of war that no one really understood, one in which a technological revolution had made mobile offensive operations impossible. John French and Haig inherited the tiny army that had struggled to defeat the Boers just a few years earlier and despite what we are told, Haig enthusiastically championed the development of new tactics and technologies. By 1918 the British army was a massive finely tuned instrument capable of operations not much different from what took place in WWII. Lloyd George hated Haig's guts but the reason why didn't fire Haig was that he couldn't find anyone to replace him. In the last 20 years historians have begun to give Haig the credit he deserves.
This is a fantastic series on the Great War that was made by the BBC on the 50th anniversary of the war. I haven't watched it in some years, but it predates the "new wave" of academic interpretations of the war that came just a few years later. Instead you hear the very people who were there talk about their experiences.
Seems like the best leaders are those who lead in the field and by example, not the armchair idiots who call the shots, risking the lives of our troops, while sitting in air conditioned comfort.
I'm hoping we can keep this discussion civil and tempers will not rise. Well, I'm not sure how much credit Haig deserves. There are a few towns in Newfoundland that will never forgive how he continued to sacrifice thousands after the first waves were repulsed in the Somme, Ypres or in Paschendael. Subordinates were already telling him as the first waves went over that the German machine gun positions were still intact and in operation as was the German artillery. He felt he knew better and ignored them, and just continued to throw bodies in. Sure, he was up against a new type of warfare; - they had actually started using trench style defenses in the American Civil War. The Siege of Petersburg comes to mind as one. The problem is Haig didn't read much about the past, and his knowledge of tactics outside of cavalry were rather limited. He was right in one fact, get the front to open up and become mobile he could theoretically over power the Germans. Every break through he did accomplish was never followed up; there are numerous reports of German defenses falling apart and great holes opening up (especially after Vimy) that were never properly exploited. The Germans could never believe their luck. The other issue I have with Haig is he never listened to his own intelligence corps; - he assumed what he wanted to. He had in the Canadian contingent a group of gutsy intelligence-getters; - they'd literally go raid the enemy's trenches and capture officers and bring them back over for interrogation. Haig used artillery barrages but couldn't get through his head that just lobbing millions of tons of explosives doesn't do much except deafen everyone and chew up the ground and render it impassible. ("Never has the wire been so well cut...") The Germans used the time to buck up defenses and get men moving in anticipation of the inevitable attack. The Canadians knew and understood things about artillery barrages, Currie invented the creeping barrage that enabled the Canadians to be successful at Vimy. He hated Haig, as did Robert Borden. And yes, so did Lloyd-George among others. I can't remember who made the quote that Haig would have made a fine regimental sergeant somewhere but as a tactical commander he was worse than useless. Haig was unfortunately indicative of the old structure of the British Army; - the brightest and the most money went into the Navy and the Army was largely forgotten or ignored. The third-rung sons of nobility who weren't bright enough to do anything else ended up in the army. The Boer War was a wake-up call; if they hadn't had a Baden-Powell or a Kitchener a bunch of pitchfork toting farmers would have kicked the crap out of them. Things weren't much better at the start of WWI either; officers report having to take their troops down to the train station and buy them a ticket home when on leave because many couldn't read or had the mental acuity to make sense of a railway schedule; the army back then was one step up from prison. Now by the end of the war, the British Army had totally reformed itself and was a very capable fighting force. They had finally learned from their colonials and the Americans and realized that it is better to retain experience and brains over class. They started shedding the idiot aristocrats who did nothing but hold down chairs and replaced them with experienced men who could think. Training then became important, as did salaries. Even the king saw that this was far more effective and quietly pushed for it. And who was the one lone dissenting voice on that front after the war? Uh huh, Douglas Haig. Haig was a vindictive SOB too; - he went after French and more or less had him exiled and launched a dirty little slander campaign against Currie that eventually got him in trouble before he died. Haig was very, very instrumental in approving the huge report on the war that became the definitive Allied resource after the war, the one written by the Imperial War Ministry. It's something like 19 volumes, and it's all about how glorious Haig was and how dumb everyone else was. Oh yes, in that history, the Americans play a supporting but "largely insignificant" role too; by the time the Americans came on, Haig had beaten the Hun and the French had all but caved in. That was the extent of the scholarship for years, until the 80s when scholars started to have a solid look beyond the official history. Now it's largely discredited except for dates and as an operational register. The war we shouldn't forget, everyone went out of their way to forget. Sorry Mikel, there's not much you can tell me about Haig that will change my mind about him. I've read some recent biographies about him done by reputable historians and not revisionists that aren't very flattering. Sure, he got the job done in the end. But at what cost? And did you read what he did when the Kaiserschlacht started? He couldn't run away fast enough as it looked like the Germans would open things up and roll over his chateau. He honestly thought it was all lost and over with. And that was in midsummer 1918! Another general from that war that I have no use for but is revered by most is Hindenburg. "Germany's greatest Servant" betrayed the country twice; - once as a general to the Kaiser, whom he told he could not guarantee the army would hold and then ordered the abdication without the Kaiser's consent, (and then perpetrated the "stab in the back" legend to keep his own a$$ clean) and then as Reichspraesident by appointing Hitler at the behest of his idiot son and Von Papen, and then allowed him run riot over the Weimar constitution. Oh yeah, great guy he was too! And I could go on...
