[Closed] Field Marshal Haig and WW1 casualties

a-wobble

Which book is it? I'm always interested in new books on WWI.

how come we think of the Somme (and other "going over the top" battles; Ypres, Mons, Cambrai, etc) as sensless slaughter

Zero thought, zero strategy ultimately. Plus we are still finding bits of WWI soldiers in the fields today. How many must have been vaporised/pulverized into dust.

One story bothers me- where over 1,000 German soldiers were wiped out by an accident in a redoubt in WWI. Literally in a few seconds they were vaporised by a mistake. Will try and find a link.

Says it all to me. How senseless.

Your Country Bleeds You.

if you've not read a copy of 'Mud, Blood and Poppycock' - get it, its a fantastic insight into the way that the great war has been subject to a huge amount of revisionist propaganda thanks to war poetry and films like 'oh what a lovely war' and blackadder .

how come we think of the Somme (and other "going over the top" battles; Ypres, Mons, Cambrai, etc) as sensless slaughter, while Normandy was a heroic and necessary action?

because going over the top achieved nothing but death and slaughter
Normandy liberated a continent and defeated the Nazis

the outcomes were completely different

If we had failed to land at Normandy and we tried every week then they would be the same

20th Century War fought with 19th century strategy, innit.

Don't forget - the Somme was a tactical, but costly, victory - it certainly did not achieve 'nothing but death and slaughter'

The key tactical objectives were achieved, and more importantly, a collapse of the French line at Verdun was prevented - which would likely have been catastrophic to the entire allied war effort and cost many more lives.

Which book is it? I'm always interested in new books on WWI.

We didn't seem to have 'won' anything. That's the main difference between WW1 and WW2.

In practice the Germans had the same objectives in WW1 as WW2.

The Germans attacked at Verdun because they knew that the French would defend to the last man - so working on that very theory. And it wasn't just a theory, because the French did.

It pretty much broke the French, and took the fighting spirit out of a couple of generations.

[i]What's more, although the casuarty figures are truly horrifying, the scale of the attack distorts them - British casualties on the Somme were about the same per unit per week as those suffered by British forces during the Normandy landings. And the thought that occurs from that is, how come we think of the Somme (and other "going over the top" battles; Ypres, Mons, Cambrai, etc) as sensless slaughter, while Normandy was a heroic and necessary action?
[/i]

Yes, but Normandy lasted days/weeks, not months/years.

Which book is it? I'm always interested in new books on WWI.

Zero thought, zero strategy ultimately.

Bet someone will be along in a minute with some bloody poetry. Oh, wait...

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

because going over the top achieved nothing but death and slaughter
Normandy liberated a continent and defeated the Nazis

the outcomes were completely different

If we had failed to land at Normandy and we tried every week then they would be the same

Far more died in WW2 and nobody pays any attention to what poets have to say.

20th Century War fought with 19th century strategy, innit.

Mr Woppit sums it up really.

They didn't understand the technology they were using and were up against. WW1 turned into trench warfare because they tried to fight a traditional war of manoeuvre against modern weapons. The attrition rate at the Battle of the Marne was the highest of WW1.

Read Mud, Blood and Poppycock as ninfan says, it gives a very interesting viewpoint, I don't agree with it all of it but it certainly puts the whole thing in a different light.

You must remember Haig was considered a hero at the end of the war, he wasn't seen as a bumbling idiot like he is now. He got his statue.

I have just finished "Britain's Great War" by Paxman, surprisingly good. He puts the whole war in it's social context at the time.

the outcomes were completely different

have to take these historical issues in context. they are history we can learn from them or repeat them. we havent repeated them and have fought battles/wars differently since.

ww1 was the first and only conflict between groups of nations who both possessed the means to kill very large numbers simply and effectively and both sides gave it thier best shot suffering many thousands of casulaties.

In practice the Germans had the same objectives in WW1 as WW2.

Invade the whole of Europe and north Africa, and wipe out an entire race while you're at it?

Like any event people can and do write "history" different ways from different perspectives and for different reasons.

Thanks for the reference, with 2014 anniversary coming it will be an interesting read.

Yes @pondo, WW1 was a cross over point in terms of equipment and thus strategy. WW1 didn't start out in the trenches.

As for Normandy I read an interesting statistic whilst looking into "friendly fire" the whole Normandy Offensive resulted in some 40,000 Allied casualties with the number killed in the landings a portion of that. Over 15,000 French Civilians where killed by Allied "friendly fire bombing" in the landings phase.

The Germans attacked at Verdun because they knew that the French would defend to the last man - so working on that very theory. And it wasn't just a theory, because the French did.

It pretty much broke the French, and took the fighting spirit out of a couple of generations.

Yes, but Normandy lasted days/weeks, not months/years.

@5thelement - re: poets, one factor in WW1 was it was largely a volunteer army, there was still this perception of glory in war. Many young writers got caught up in the romance element and signed up and thus we have the poetry. In WW2 it was much more about conscription and conciensious objectors and the visual arts so we have more photos and film.

I've read that WW1 was the event that discredited Europe's aristocracy so badly that they never recovered. They are now so thoroughly unfashionable that they have all but gone into hiding and we only get glimpses of them on rare ocasions, such as when a government minister calls Police officers "plebs" for example.

Cheers for the shouts on "Mud, Blood and Poppycock", folks - I shall look it up.

Far more died in WW2 and nobody pays any attention to what poets have to say.

A vast majority of the deaths were (in no particular order) Russians, Japanese, Americans and European Jews. UK got off relatively lightly compared to those listed. Of those listed a majority were probably civilians due to the total nature of the warfare (bombing cities) and liquidation/genocide. It would be interesting to see how many of the Russian casualties were due to NKVD punishment rather than killed by the Wehrmacht/SS (not that we'll ever know).
The lack of knowledge and the sheer scale of the genocide makes it easier to ignore as it was so "unreal" to the average person of the time.

[quote=5thElefant ]Far more died in WW2 and nobody pays any attention to what poets have to say.

I think the shock factor of WW1 was the newly mechanised way of warfare. Where most European powers had fought colonial wars and only against the Boers had the British had much of a fight, this was a number of ineptly managed but "proper" European armies fighting each other for the first time since the Germans and French went at it 40 years before.

To a certain extent, WW1 battles were more about trying not to win yourself to death as an army moreso than merely winning. Over 22% of the French population were killed or wounded in the war and if you were a male of an age to serve, those percentages were not looking terribly healthy for you.

Haig was, by all accounts, in the upper level of abilities for commanders of the era but has been maligned since the wars to the point where he's seen as a heartless butcher. To some extent, he HAD to be callous as it can't be possible to plan such epic battles if you agonise over every death.

We will never know how many died in total in the Russian Civil war or the purges that followed upto and including WWII behind their lines. Some estimates say 20million Russian dead. Who knows though with a country so vast and with areas previously hardly even visted before the war. In some forests in Russia you can still find complete figher aircraft etc etc etc.

20th Century War fought with 19th century strategy, innit.

To be fair, a portion of the reason for this was that the communications were still essentially 19th Century - once the order to attack was given, without radios etc, it would have been spectacularly difficult to get a message to or from the troops who had gone over the top, so the coordination of complex fire patterns, rolling artillery barrages and fire support was just not possible, the running of the battle relied on a pre-formed plan that was difficult to alter, particularly where an attack stretched across a wide area and troops relied upon other elements for support and reinforcement - once you had committed to an attack it would have been very difficult to change that, so the only option for a commander was to continue to send troops to reinforce the attack and push home the advantage or shore up the weaknesses.

Strategy is one thing but the tactics of walking across no mans land or sending officers over the top effectively unarmed is rather questionable... I read recently, german soldiers felt that if the British had only run they would have overwhelmed the German line on the first morning of the Somme.

So while the strategic objectives may have been achieved, tactical objectives and methods were absolute suicidal faliures. I think that is why Haig is viewed so poorly.

Officers leading from the front- One definite way of cutting down the leadership/head of the force. Madness.

sending officers over the top effectively unarmed is rather questionable.

This is another myth. Some of the "Upper Class" Officers chose to go over the top without even pistols. It was supposed to inspire their men. The majority carried pistols and wore riding breeches etc. However, by 1917, especially as a large percentage came form the ranks, they dressed like the others and carried rifles. This was to prevent the Germans picking them off immediately.

german soldiers felt that if the British had only run they would have overwhelmed the German line on the first morning of the Somme

The British Army at the Somme were (relatively) very poorly trained. They were volunteers who had been rushed into the front. Rightly or wrongly, it was considered impossible to do anything more complicated. Their German counterparts had been through compulsory reservist training for several years before the war, which gave them a bit of a head start on the British.

But that was just part of the learning curve, wasn't it? That was how it had been traditionally done, and they didn't know any better? The French turned up for early battles in scarlet and blue, for heaven's sake!?!

Tell you what keeps springing to mind about all this - Captain Scott. There's a lot of stuff floating around about what an eedjit he was for leading the expedition as he did - but when you look at it, most of the stuff that he did was done to the best standards of the day. Not all of it, of course, there were mistakes, but it wasn't like they had better knowledge or skills and decided not to use em. Same with WW1 tactics, mebbe?

Officers leading from the front-

Junior officers and senior NCO's always have the highest attrition rate, relative to their numbers.

I have not really read much on Haig, but do subscribe to the orthodox view of him - a small-minded man incapable of adapting his thinking to the occasion. I don't think he ever grasped at all that the stalemate was caused by a lack of movement from Winter 1914 onwards, until the Germans did get it in March / April 1918 and very nearly won by their three fluid attacks by well-trained storm troops. The only reason they couldn't win by then was that they were so drained, and in fact their discoveries of how well equipped the British Army was thoroughly demoralised them. Arguably that discovery didn't cause them to lose as the army was indeed not technically defeated on the battlefield, but I don't subscribe to the Nazi stab-in-the-back theory - they were in reality all-in by then.

If Haig had worked out that strategy in say 1916 and converted the British Army into a flexible, mobile, adaptable well-trained fighting force, the Somme could have been avoided and the war over relatively quickly. But he wasn't that sort of man, and had he and the Germans had limitless resources, he'd still be going at it!

I might be over-simplifying, but I thought the German offensive in 1918 only came about because the Russian surrender in 1917 freed up a whole sh!tload of troops, and was a last big push to try and win the war? If it was just a matter of superior tactics, why didn't they do that in the preceding years?

I don't think he ever grasped at all that the stalemate was caused by a lack of movement from Winter 1914 onwards, until the Germans did get it in March / April 1918 and very nearly won by their three fluid attacks by well-trained storm troops. The only reason they couldn't win by then was that they were so drained, and in fact their discoveries of how well equipped the British Army was thoroughly demoralised them. Arguably that discovery didn't cause them to lose as the army was indeed not technically defeated on the battlefield, but I don't subscribe to the Nazi stab-in-the-back theory - they were in reality all-in by then.

Both sides had, by the end of the war, developed superior tactics - the rolling artillery barrage, tanks, defense in depth... arguing that the Germans lost the war rather than the Allies winning is unfair to the [s]Edit: British Army[/s] Allied armies and its leaders.

If Haig had worked out that strategy in say 1916 and converted the British Army into a flexible, mobile, adaptable well-trained fighting force,

Not asking a lot are you?

1) By "that strategy" I take it you mean basically Blitzkreig? It took the German army 4 years to work that one out and they were a land based military.
2) The British Army was tiny, the original BeF was 100,000 men. Very good but very small. Covert what? The Army didn't start recruiting until 1914. They had to go into the front to relieve the pressure on the French as soon as possible.
3) The equipment didn't exist in 1916 to fight like they did in 1918. The artillery wasn't accurate and reliable enough for one thing.

By 1918 the British were using very advanced creeping barrages with accurate guns, and combined air power working with the infantry. It beat the Germans then and it was basically what the allies did in 44 45.

The war was brutal and savage. With hindsight anyone could do it better but it needs to be considered in the context of its time.

The first world war was very much a transitional war. 19th century tactics with 20th century technology. A major problem was that the generals were almost all 19th century soldiers and were massively sceptical of the new technology that they were both up against and that they were playing catch up with.
on the Somme, a series of bad decisions and a total lack of any ability to adapt to the changing conditions on the ground was compounded by the commanders who started out overseeing the battle on a hillside had no means of telling the commanders on the front line what they could see was happening. they then went into command centres and were kept abreast of the battle by runners which led to a massive delay in any commands that were given.
The barrage the precluded the battle proper was laid down on the assumption that it was actually doing what it was intended to do. To all intents and purposes they might as well have sent the germans a letter informing them of the forthcoming attack. They also massively underestimated the german defences which were damaged by the barrage but not destroyed as they had assumed. they also had no way of noting that the wire had been cut and very little in the way of contingency should they not have been cut sufficiently.
The thing that always beggars belief to me was that they were under strict instructions not to run.

Ranulph fiennes wrote quite a good book about Scott. Well worth a read.

[i]But it wasn't a one-way thing - the Germans suffered heavy casulaties at Verdun just as the French did, same with the Somme. [/i]

I didn't say it was, just agreeing that they were working on the "we've a larger population than one" method of 'warfare'.

By 1918 both sides had worked out the need for 'Blitzkreig', and were successful - the Allies more so. It's just the 1918 technology and the general state of the German Army/State meant they couldn't take advantage of the advances.

British casualties...

1914 892 Officers 25,013 other ranks
1915 5,558 Officers 121,006 other ranks
1916 12,818 Officers 219,539 other ranks
1917 15,311 Officers 321,628 other ranks
1918 15,311 Officers 265,730 other ranks

Likelihood of death of injury:
http://www.pbs.org/greatwar/resources/casdeath_pop.html

Found it - lifted in one big, trimmed (in the hope of brevity, hopefully without changing the meaning), chunk from Haig's wiki;

When British forces engaged in a major battle in Normandy in 1944, total losses were fewer than on the Somme in 1916 as Normandy was around half the length and less than half the size, but casualties per unit per week were broadly similar. Another historian observes that British daily loss rates at Normandy - a battle in which divisions lost up to three quarters of their combat infantry - were similar to those of Third Ypres in 1917, while average battalion casualty rates in 1944-5 (100 men per week) were similar to those of the First World War.

John Terraine wrote:

It is important to remember that in 1939-45 the world losses were probably over four times as many - the British task was entirely different, which is why the (British) loss of life was so different: about 350,000 in 1939-45 and about 750,000 (British deaths, 1 million including the Empire) in 1914-18. The casualty statistics tell us nothing about the quality of British generals. The statistics show that the British losses in great battles were generally about the same as anyone else's.

In the same article he argued that British perceptions were coloured by the terrible losses of 1 July 1916 (57,000 in one day), but that it should also be remembered that the British never suffered anything like the losses of June 1916, when the Austro-Hungarian Army had 280,000 casualties in a week, or of August 1914 when the French Army lost 211,000 in 16 days, or of March and April 1918 when the Germans lost nearly 350,000 in six weeks (8,600 per day), or 1915 when Russia suffered 2 million casualties in a year.[214]

Total British WW1 deaths seemed especially severe as they fell among certain groups such as Pals Battalions or the alleged "Lost Generation" of public school and university educated junior officers. In fact British deaths, although heavy compared to other British wars, were only around half those of France or Germany as a proportion of population

Mud, Blood and Poppycock is worth reading - even though it is from a very army historian POV.
TBH a lot of the imagary of WW 1 is now as a result of films - and particularly Blackadder.
I would guess that most who have posted very emotive postings on this subject haven't actually read up on the subject, just reacted to what they think they know.

I certainly did in the past - but have been investing some time in actually finding out what went on.
For a start, the assumption that troops spend weeks / months at the front line was incorrect ...

I'm currently reading Max Hastings' book Catastrophe: Europe goes to war 1914.
Its a pretty damning read, the various high commands of the combatant Nations were almost criminally deficient. Moltke was the architect of the war in the West (actually of the whole German enterprise) yet had a mental breakdown in the opening months of the war.
The much vaunted Schleiffen Plan was never written down as a plan but remained merely a concept - a concept that did not take into account the limitations of both a primitive European transport system and exactly how far his troops (many unfit reservists) would have to march.
Sir John French of the BEF hated the French and deliberately dragged his feet wherever he could, often refusing to accede to Joffre's commands.
Of all the high commands in 1914 only the French had a few officers who had some idea of what to do.

Interesting story on his Grand Nephew Von Moltke executed by the Nazi's for his ideas. Wirh his family history he could have gone to the top yet instead chose to die for his conscience.

Not convinced me, winston. It doesn't make haig competent that he was slower than his opponent to work it out. And I agree the bef was small in 1914, but was pretty sizeable by the time of the Somme. Haig still only had one tactic - keep throwing men at the other line in huge numbers/

The Germans were indeed able to undertake their spring 1918 offensives due to the end of the Russian front.

[i]Not convinced me, winston. It doesn't make haig competent that he was slower than his opponent to work it out. And I agree the bef was small in 1914, but was pretty sizeable by the time of the Somme. Haig still only had one tactic - keep throwing men at the other line in huge numbers/[/i]

You may not be convinced, but he was as competent as others, both Allies and the Central Powers. Haig lived out his years a couple of miles where we live, some cracking singletrack between there and the Tweed 🙂

This is a good book:

The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914-1918 by Holger H. Herwig

If you aren't convinced about Haig, then you won't think much to the Dual Monarchy's Generals...

"on the psychology of military incompetence " is a informative read

The British Army was a small professional force in 1914 which had little regard for the "new army" which was raised and thrown at the Germans in 1916. Haig was a cavalry officer with little sympathy for the infantry, he constantly maintained a large cavalry reserve during offensives.

Monty fought on the western front and that is what fed his obsession with large arty support for.any offensive. Rommel fought on the eastern front and his book "infantry attacks" also showed his ability to manoeuvre and the use of arty in close support (his famous quote is " in the attack the spade.is as useful as the rifle")

if you've not read a copy of 'Mud, Blood and Poppycock' - get it, its a fantastic insight into the way that the great war has been subject to a huge amount of revisionist propaganda thanks to war poetry and films like 'oh what a lovely war' and blackadder .

It's not a fantastic insight it is just a series of dismissals of straw men theories by a writer who comes across as an arrogant, irritating tit. One thing that really stood out for me is how critical he was of Alan Clark and how he dismissed his writings on the great war as not worth reading because he wasn't even a historian (perhaps a fair enough criticism)...but the thing is Corrigan isn't one either!

Better off reading something like 'First World War A New History' by Hew Strachan - you'll get the challenging of a few myths but in a reasoned war backed up by research not just polemic and apologia.

how critical he was of Alan Clark and how he dismissed his writings on the great war

And rightly so, Clarks 'lions led by donkeys' rubbish has scarred the teaching and in many cases the interpretation of the Great War for generations. The supposed donkeys quote attribution to Hoffman turned out to have probably been made up by Clark himself.

Clark's work has been rubbished by just about every military historian of note since it was first published in the 60s

Top marks to the bloke as a shagger and general cad for his involvement in the matrix-churchill affair, but as a military historian, he was bobbins!

The real villains were the politicians for entering into this war...

With the benefit of hindsight Haig was an utter failure as a tactician but there was countless failures before him that led up to the war, it could have been stopped, it could have been prevented or at the very least contained.

My Grandpa died in 76 when i was 4 but i vividly remember him, he was an engineer at the Hydro power station on the Dee and i used to go to work with him in the vast turbine hall and i operated the bakelite switchgear but as far as i can remember he never talked about it, not to me nor my father who was born in 1949.

He left me his war diaries and a well thumbed and bloodstained book of poetry by Siegfred Sasson, i didn't receive them till my 13th birthday when i guess i could really appreciate the horror he wrote about and survived, one of the poems struck me as horrific from a very young age :

Suicide in the Trenches

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

The last verse has stuck in my head from a young age and i find myself repeating it whenever i hear our politicians talking of war.

And rightly so, Clarks 'lions led by donkeys' rubbish has scarred the teaching and in many cases the interpretation of the Great War for generations. The supposed donkeys quote attribution to Hoffman turned out to have probably been made up by Clark himself.

Clark's work has been rubbished by just about every military historian of note since it was first published in the 60s

I dont disagree, i was just pointing out that I found the arrogance that came across in Corrigans writing to be really annoying. The dismissal of Clark and the resultant inference that his work therefore had more validity was just a case in point. The reality is that both authors are looked down upon by "serious" historians.

Somafunk. I like that one but prefer this one:

To Germany
You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,
And no man claimed the conquest of your land.
But gropers both through fields of thought confined
We stumble and we do not understand.
You only saw your future bigly planned,
And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,
And in each other's dearest ways we stand,
And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.

When it is peace, then we may view again
With new-won eyes each other's truer form
And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm
We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
When it is peace. But until peace, the storm
The darkness and the thunder and the rain.

Charles Hamilton Sorley

[quote=epicyclo ]The real villains were the politicians for entering into this war...

It depends on your viewpoint of whether you should honour defence pacts. Russia had one with Serbia and Bosnia, France had a pact with Russia, the UK had one with France. Germany had one with the Austro-Hungarian empire too. Although the Germans were all too happy to go to war, once the Austro-Hungarians decided they were definitely attacking Serbia to (supposedly) retaliate for Ferdinands murder, it was a pretty unavoidable chain of events unless someone broke their agreement with an ally.

In hindsight you can ask whether it was worth Russia going to war to keep Bosnia/Serbia free (especially as after that point, they weren't free for a VERY long time), but at the time they felt that that sort of attack couldn't be ignored. Once Russia mobilised so did Germany and France had to follow (as the Germans knew). Germany expected that the British would be happy to sit at home, protected by the strongest navy on the planet, and watch the outcome of the scrap.

Hindsight aside, if today, Russia invaded mainland Europe in a conventional sense, we'd end up at war again even if we weren't directly at risk. It's the way of things.

Which is not to say that the losses were sensible, or acceptable, or anything less than horrifying. But when you look at it in context, they were not proportionally greater than other British battles in the 20th century.

It's not just about numbers though, is it? What did all the losses in WW1 actually achieve?

Victory?

A popular English Music Hall refrain from 1914:

"There's not going to be a war,
'cause Georgie is the King.
There's not going to be a war -
he doesn't like that sort of thing."

Oh, the bathos!

ononeorange (and a few others commenting on Haig's ineptitude...)

I have not really read much on Haig, but do subscribe to the orthodox view of him - a small-minded man incapable of adapting his thinking to the occasion. I don't think he ever grasped at all that the stalemate was caused by a lack of movement from Winter 1914 onwards, until the Germans did get it in March / April 1918 and very nearly won by their three fluid attacks by well-trained storm troops.

Prior to WW1 Haig lead the development of British doctrine for wr fighting, encapsulated in Field Service Regulations (FSR) 1909, later re-issued in 1912. He had already developed ideas of mobile warfare long before the war, as captured in FSR, he believed combat fell in 4 phases: the advance to contact; establishment of the firing line, to gain fire superiority; the assault; and the pursuit. Not too disimilar to what we still teach today, but using more modern buzz words: find; fix; stirke; exploit.

What lead to the issues Haig (and others) had, as mentioned elsewhere, is the question of numbers - from effectively a colonial gendarmerie of 6 divisions in 1914, the Army had to very rapidly expand to a continental sized army of 60 divisions by 1916; the sheer mass (but critically for us, lack of real training and experience that the conscript army had, plus, given the rapid expansion, very early and rapid promotion to fill the senior posts, meant that learning was very much often on the job with a vengeance) suceeded in styming both our and the Germans' concepts of mobile warfare as developed at the time, hence the war developed very rapidly in to one of attrition.

Prior to WW1 British military thinking for future conventional warfare had very much been along the lines of manoeuvre, albeit in a late 19th/early 20th century non-mechanised way...

By the way, I am neither a fan nor a detractor of Haig, but I am a student of military doctrine, and most here seem to have focussed purely on Haig during the war, rather than any broader context.

[i]Germany expected that the British would be happy to sit at home, protected by the strongest navy on the planet, and watch the outcome of the scrap.[/i]

This.

You have to always with WW1 be very wary of historic context. Although fought in the 20th century the war in many ways was a 19th conflict. You have to bear in mind the Franco Prussian war of 1870 had been won by a German army that everyone else had expected to lose, that war was regarded as the last napoleonic war, but in many respects was a foretaste of the coming war 40 years later.

Way so many deaths? Lack of understanding if the advance of technology vs static armies ( this was the last war where armies "went to a battlefield to stand and face each other to fight" ) or Belgium as we know it now. Lack of penicillin lack of radio, aeroplanes, tanks, still fighting the last war....take your pick Was Haigh to blame? I doubt any one else would have made a noticeable difference

Still recovering from the consequences of that war now

davetrave - well said.

End of thread.

"British casualties...

1914 892 Officers 25,013 other ranks
1915 5,558 Officers 121,006 other ranks
1916 12,818 Officers 219,539 other ranks
1917 15,311 Officers 321,628 other ranks
1918 15,311 Officers 265,730 other ranks"

That's a pretty remarkable coincidence with the same number of officers dying in two consecutive years.

I always find it quite interesting that, until the point you were actually asked to get out of your trench and walk slowly towards the enemy, the British army was supposed to be quite a healthy place to be.

3 square meals a day
proper (and free) medical care
And for the 3 days out of 5 you weren't in the trenches the work was easier and less dangerous than the work you would have been used to on your farm, mine or factory.

The army kept statistics on the weight and general health of recruits entering the army and leaving it. PROVIDED you could avoid death, mutilation or horrible injury your were likely to leavre the army in better physical shape tan when you joined.

Of course the mental side was another matter. Apparently the psychiactric wards in the 60s were full of old soldiers who just couldn't cope any more.

nickc

this was the last war where armies "went to a battlefield to stand and face each other to fight"

No it wasn't - see my earlier post, both German and British armies had expected to employ manoeuvre. Unfortunately, what led to the entrenchment was the sheer numbers that soon became involved, rendering the limited capabilities of mobility available in 1914 useless. Perhaps not a truly valid comparator, but look at how the vast forces of Nato and the Eastern Bloc, not too dis-similar to Allies v Germans in WW1, would have been able to employ mobility to cover the entire continent of Europe in 1 fell swoop and stage huge armoured battles, all because advancements in technology allowed that kind of mass manoeuvre that none of the sides had envisaged or were prepared for in 1914.

[i]No Glory: The real history of the first world war[/i] is worth a read, see

http://stopwar.org.uk/shop/no-glory

..and that's where the Schleiffen Plan fell down. During the 'race to the sea' of Autumn 1914 when the allies and Germans tried to repeatedly outflank each other to the North and East, the Germans found that Belgiums railways ran mainly East to West and hardly any ran South to North, meaning that they simply could not move the newly formed Army Group fast enough. Most troops and the heavy equipment had to move by road.
Its easy for us to forget now, but 100yrs ago outside of the major towns most roads in Western Europe were simply dirt tracks. Throw several million men down them, add in the autumn rains and you have a recipe for chaos before you even think about enemy shelling etc.
The situation on the Eastern Front was even worse, Poland had very few roads and fewer railway lines to use.