In all his battles, Haig never seems to have appreciated that there came a time when he had obtained or achieved all he could hope for and that to press on would either throw away his success to date...
In all the odium the British generals have attracted, it should be noticed that it was the British, not the French or the Germans, who created the tank and brought it into action and in so doing chang...
In some curious way the battle at Verdun had become a paradigm for the entire war. Verdun now exerted its own dynamic and needed no reason to continue. By the middle of 1916 it was, or should have bee...
No tactical or strategic gain was made on the Somme front that was worth the cost in lives. Even had the British and French achieved their breakthrough on the Somme, the Germans had plenty of room to...
The battle at Verdun can best be imagined as some monstrous ball game, in which two teams of giants push a boulder to and fro across impossible terrain. For months the Germans had pushed the French so...
By the turn of the century, all-out attacks by hosts of valiant French infantry, rather on the style employed by the Imperial Guard at Waterloo, were the received wisdom in French military circles, an...
The fate of Sir John French, who had failed in the previous September at Loos - but had not lost anything like so many men in the process - cannot have passed unnoticed by General Haig in the autumn o...
The general feeling among the Entente nations at the end of 1916 seemed to be that unless Europe returned to the status quo ante, the terrible loss of life in the previous three years had been for not...
At Neuve Chapelle in March 1915, the British lost almost 13,000 men in three days; at Loos in September, 59,000 men in six weeks, but most of them fell in the first two days; neither attack gained mor...
Despite arguments between Easterners, who wanted an offensive anywhere but France, and Westerners, who believed that an offensive anywhere else was a waste of effort, it was generally accepted that th...
German casualty returns did not include the less seriously wounded who were treated in their corps area. All British wounded were included in the casualty returns, even if they were treated in a regim...
Sometime in October 1916, Haig abandoned the notion of a breakthrough on the Somme and joined his peers in France and Germany in committing his soldiers to a battle of attrition.
On the day the Somme battle opened, the French share of the offensive had shrunk to 14 divisions compared to 16 British divisions; this fact disposes of one of the lesser British myths, that the Frenc...
What Joffre wanted on the Somme was not a tactical battle. As he saw it, the attempt at a breakthrough had failed and now, as so often before, the task of breaking the enemy line would get even harder...
Even today, 85 years after the battle, an average year of scavenging on the Somme battlefield provides the disposal squads of the French Army with 90 tons of dangerous ordnance.
It is an axiom of warfare that a good officer never reinforces failure. To do so simply throws away more lives and a good general will avoid doing that. A commander's task, even in moments of defeat,...
No one seemed able to accept that the war had been a terrible mistake and that ending it, on any reasonable terms, which must include the German evacuation of France and Belgium, was far less costly t...
One can only wonder if the generals were serious ... or mad. In all but slaughter, the Battle of the Somme was over by early October, and to continue past that point was madness indeed, but this side...
As Alistair Horne points out, this was not simply a battle between two armies but the ancient conflict of Teuton and Gaul, two ethnic groups letting one thousand years of envy and hatred out in one lo...
The decision on when to break off an attack, like the decision to launch it, is one requiring careful calculation and fine judgement. That said, Haig's judgement in fighting on into the early winter o...
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