Douglas Haig
Douglas Haig commanded the British armies in France for three years and is the most argued-about general in British history. Born in Edinburgh in 1861 into the whisky family, he was educated at Oxford and Sandhurst, served in the Sudan and South Africa, and did substantial work on army reform under Haldane before 1914 — the creation of the general staff and the Territorial Force, which was not glamorous and mattered. He commanded I Corps in 1914 and the First Army in 1915, and replaced Sir John French in December 1915. The Somme opened on 1 July 1916 with 57,470 British casualties on the first day, 19,240 of them dead — the worst day in the history of the British army — after a week's bombardment that had not cut the wire or destroyed the dugouts. The battle ran to November for about six miles of ground. Passchendaele in 1917 was fought in mud produced by the heaviest bombardment yet fired and the wettest autumn in decades, and cost a comparable number. The case against him is that he persisted with attritional offensives after their futility was demonstrable. The case for him is that his army was learning throughout — the creeping barrage, sound-ranging, tanks, all-arms cooperation — and that the Hundred Days of 1918, in which it advanced continuously and took some 188,000 prisoners, was the greatest series of victories Britain ever won. He spent the 1920s building the Royal British Legion and the poppy appeal. He died in 1928. Lloyd George, who could not remove him and spent the war trying, wrote the memoirs that shaped his reputation for fifty years.
- Lived: 1861 CE – 1928 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: field_marshal, military_leader
