It is not the intention in this book to examine the Gallipoli campaign. Suffice it to say that the concept was sound and offered a realistic chance of keeping Russia in the war and knocking Turkey out of it. It has to be said, however, that the execution was flawed, and that when the Royal Navy failed to force the narrows and destroy the Turkish forts, the caper should have been abandoned. That it was not, cannot be laid at the door of the generals in the field at the time.
Hunter-Weston’s handling of his division at Helles Beach on 25 April 1915 was one of the more competent aspects of the bloody landings, although he did fail to switch the point of landing to a far safer alternative which was available. That he did not do so was due to poor communications. For all sorts of reasons the operation began to go sour shortly afterwards, but Hunter-Weston’s handling of his division, once ashore, was thoroughly competent. Although severe sunstroke led to his having to be invalided out in July, Hunter-Weston’s performance brought him another field promotion, to lieutenant general, and command of a corps.
For the Somme battle in 1916 Hunter-Weston was in command of VIII Corps, which was responsible on 1 July, the opening day of the offensive, for attacking the German lines between Serre and the River Ancre. In the centre of the corps area was a huge mine – known as Hawthorn Redoubt mine – one of the nineteen mines placed under the German positions by the tunnelling companies Royal Engineers. The plan was for these mines to be blown just before zero hour, the start of the attack. The mines would disorientate the German defenders and kill quite a few of them. The British infantry would then seize the craters before the Germans could react, thus obtaining strongpoints right on the German front line. Hawthorn was the only mine north of the Ancre, and Hunter-Weston wanted to blow the 40,000 pounds of ammonal under the Hawthorn Redoubt at half-past three in the morning, four hours before zero hour. The redoubt was a particularly formidable German defence work dominating the intended line of the British advance. Hunter-Weston’s intention was not only to destroy the redoubt but to have the resultant crater seized and held by the infantry. If this were done four hours before zero hour, any stand-to or heightening of alert states ordered by the Germans would have time to die down before the attack proper began.
Hunter-Weston put his suggestion to the army commander, Rawlinson, who passed it on to General Headquarters of the BEF. There it was vetoed. The Inspector of Mines pointed out (not unreasonably) that the British had a poor record of seizing craters, and that blowing the mine early would probably mean the Germans’ being found in occupation of the crater at zero hour. As a compromise Hunter-Weston was allowed to blow ten minutes before zero, which he thought would still give him an advantage if the crater could be seized.
The order to blow at 0720 hours meant that the British heavy artillery would have to stop firing on the German front-line positions ten minutes before zero – to continue firing would endanger the troops attempting to seize the crater – but there would be some fire support from Stokes mortars. The Hawthorn mine was duly blown, and two platoons of the 2nd Battalion Royal Fusiliers, with four Lewis guns and four mortars, set off to take the crater. Unfortunately the Germans got there first. When the Fusiliers got to the lip of the crater they found the far rim and the flanks already occupied. The lifting of the heavy artillery and the mine explosion had warned the Germans that an attack was due and their machine guns, no longer suppressed by artillery, were able to fire on the troops forming up in no man’s land, causing very heavy casualties. Hawthorn crater was not captured until 13 November.
In hindsight Hunter-Weston was wrong, and the premature blowing of the Hawthorn mine did give the Germans warning of the coming attack. The lifting of the artillery barrage, ten minutes before it would otherwise have become necessary, allowed the Germans to man their defences and catch the attacking infantry in open ground. That said, Hunter-Weston’s logic was not necessarily at fault. He was wrong in thinking that the seven-day artillery bombardment would so disrupt the German defences that Stokes mortars would be adequate when the British heavy artillery lifted, but in this he was at one with nearly every other commander on 1 July. He had more faith in the ability of the infantry to reach the crater first than had the Inspector of Mines, but then most of the large mines blown on 1 July were occupied by the Germans before the British could get there. Whether the casualties would have been much fewer had the mine been blown just before zero is debatable: they probably would have been, but it is still unlikely that the British could have taken the crater first.
Hunter-Weston was a competent commander acting in good faith and with the best of motives. At a distance of eighty-five years one can see that he got it wrong on 1 July 1916. He continued as a corps commander and does not deserve the vilification thrust upon him for one mistake, costly though it may have been, that has obliterated all the good things he did and all the good service he rendered before, during and after the Somme.
Lieutenant General Sir Richard Haking was the son of a vicar and was commissioned into the infantry from Sandhurst in 1881. Pre-1914 he had seen active service in Burma and the South African War. He was both a graduate of the Staff College and an instructor there, and produced a series of training pamphlets that were considered to be first-class. Even today his work on company training has a freshness about it and an insight into human characteristics that would not be out of place in a modern military work.8 In 1914 he commanded 5 Brigade in 2 Division, one of the few brigades to fight its way onto the escarpment of the Chemin des Dames after the crossing of the River Aisne on 14 September. He was wounded next day but his skilful handling of his brigade earned him promotion to major-general and command of 1 Division. Further promotion came in September 1915 when he assumed command of XI Corps, and although this corps was engaged in the Battle of Loos, Haking had little to do as his divisions were taken under command of GHQ. After Loos, Haking’s corps took over the left of the First Army front, from Vermelles to Laventie, and so was only peripherally involved with the two great British battles of 1916 and 1917, the Somme and Third Ypres. For a time Haking and his corps were in Italy assisting the stiffening of the Italian front after the drubbing of Caporetto. Back in France, XI Corps under Haking did well in resisting the ‘Kaiser’s offensive’ of 1918 and earned a high reputation in the subsequent British offensive that ended the war. His post-war career was distinguished and he retired in 1925 as a full general.
Why should this intelligent and capable man be remembered only as ‘Butcher’ Haking? It appears that the name was bestowed upon him by the Australians, who disliked his penchant for ordering trench raids. It is not even known how pejorative the appellation really was – after all, to Australians ‘bastard’ is almost a term of affection.
A cardinal principle of military doctrine, at least in the British army, is that defence must be aggressive, and that in defence one must endeavour to dominate no man’s land. By doing so the defender has the initiative: the enemy is prevented from close reconnaissance and from interfering with the defenders’ obstacles (at that time, barbed wire). Aggressive defence for the infantry means patrolling, sniping and ambushing in no mans’ land, and trench raiding. A trench raid is exactly that: a local attack on a portion of the enemy line, carried out by anything from a section of ten men to a battalion of 800. It has no strategic object but its intention may be to kill the enemy, to destroy his defence works, to gain intelligence by capturing documents or prisoners, or a combination of all three. Trench raiding is one way of ensuring that one’s own troops do not become defensive-minded, but think aggressively and have a sense of hitting at the enemy rather than just holding a line of trenches. As XI Corps had less to do during 1916 and 1917 than many other formations, Haking rightly encouraged trench raids. These were not senseless forays in pursuit of self-aggrandisement, but serious, useful, and necessary operations of war. Some were successful, others were not, but it was a perfectly proper way of conducting a defence, and had XI Corps not adopted a policy of raiding when they were not
otherwise engaged, Haking would have been rightly condemned.
Haking also presided over the attack on Fromelles, on Aubers Ridge, in July 1916. The capture of Aubers Ridge had long been an aspiration of the British as it would have removed the Germans’ ability to overlook British positions north of La Bassée, and it had been a phase two objective of the Battle of Neuve-Chapelle in March 1915. The 1916 attack, by one Australian and one British division, failed with heavy casualties, but it did prevent the Germans from shifting reserves south to the Somme battlefield, and cannot be said to have been without point.
The life and work of Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the BEF from December 1915 and a field marshal from January 1917, has probably been the subject of more contradictory analysis than any other general in British military history. To some he was a butcher and a bungler, to others the man who won the war. Born in 1861 he passed out top in the order of merit from Sandhurst having, unusually for the time, attended Oxford University first. A cavalry officer, he experienced active service as both a commander in the field and as a staff officer in the campaign against the Mahdi (he was at Omdurman in 1898) and in the South African War, before being appointed Inspector General of Cavalry in India, where he undertook a thorough and much-needed reform of that arm. As Director of Staff Duties in the War Office from 1907 to 1909 Haig was responsible, along with Haldane (Secretary of State for War from 1905), for the transformation of the British army’s haphazard reserve system by welding Militia, Volunteers and Yeomanry, all with different terms of service and varying standards of training and administration, into one Territorial Force; this was to become an essential element of the army’s expansion from 1914. Pre-war he commanded Aldershot District, the nerve centre of the British combatant army, and was appointed to command I Corps of the BEF in August 1914.
By any standard of military competence Haig was fully qualified to command a corps, and then the First Army from Christmas 1915. On the removal of Sir John French there was really no choice but Haig as a replacement for the Commander-in-Chief. The only other possible contenders were ruled out by political or military considerations, or by character traits that made them unsuitable in a coalition war. Ian Hamilton, later to command at Gallipoli, although younger than French was, at sixty-one, probably too old for the Western Front, and he had been away from the European theatre for five years. Smith-Dorrien, commander of II Corps in 1914 and of the Second Army from Christmas 1915, was a man of considerable intellect but fiery temper, and had in any case been sacked in May 1915 (for advocating a withdrawal around Ypres to more favourable ground – militarily sensible but unacceptable politically). James Willcocks had been senior to Haig as a corps commander in the BEF, but his experience was mainly with the Indian army; he was a respected and popular commander of the Indian Corps but insufficiently flexible to merit further promotion, as well as being too old. Robertson was needed as CIGS back at home, and few in the army trusted Wilson, who was in any case better employed using his talents in liaison with the French.
Haig was not a social person: he was abstemious, disliked having to explain himself and could best be described as dour. Nice men, however, do not necessarily win wars and the fact was that the obvious and best-qualified candidate for overall command – by training, experience and performance in the BEF to date – was Haig. When Haig assumed command of the BEF in December of 1915 it consisted of thirty-seven British and two Canadian infantry divisions and five cavalry divisions, or about 600,000 men all told: a mix of regulars, reservists and Territorials, with the New Armies only just beginning to appear. By 1918 this army had expanded threefold and had absorbed the New Armies and the conscripts. In December 1915 the BEF held thirty miles of front; in February 1918 it held 123 miles. It was Haig who had to manage that expansion; and train, equip, deploy and fight the largest army that Britain has ever had, an army set down in another country and, until 1917 at least, the junior partner in a coalition war with difficult allies. Alone amongst the original warring powers, the morale of the British army never cracked, and it was the British army that in 1918 was the only Allied army capable of mounting a massive and sustained offensive. During the ‘Hundred Days’ of 1918 Haig’s army decisively defeated the German army on the Western Front. When criticism of him began at home in the 1930s, General Pershing, Commander-in-Chief of the American army on the Western Front and not a man naturally inclined towards the British, said, ‘How can they do this to the man who won the war?’
There can be no doubt that Haig was a superb military manager. Unlike his nearest equivalent in the Second World War, Montgomery, Haig was not only in supreme command of the BEF but also had to deal directly with his own and Allied governments and with the Allied military commanders. Montgomery always had an Alexander or an Eisenhower to fly top cover for him, and to allow him to concentrate on commanding the troops. Haig’s nearest comparison might be Wellington, who was sole commander in theatre and sole conduit to government and ally; but Wellington’s army in the Peninsula was never more than 100,000 men, and communications with home were such that he was allowed far more latitude than the British government would permit to Haig.
It is not Haig’s management that is faulted by his critics, but his supposed stubbornness in persisting with attacks when they were, it is said, obviously going to fail. This is to look at the Western Front from an Anglo-centric viewpoint and to neglect what was happening elsewhere. The Somme, as we shall see, had to be persisted with because of what was happening 100 miles away at Verdun, and the prolongation of Third Ypres bought time for the French army, almost destroyed by mutiny, to be reconstituted. Haig wanted a breakthrough; he never wanted to engage the British army in battles of attrition. Until 1918 that breakthrough was never achieved, but nor could anybody else on either side achieve it. Haig was neither hidebound nor resistant to technology; indeed it was Haig who, on taking over command of the BEF, first heard of the experiments with tanks and insisted that development should be given a high priority. That tanks when first used were not the hoped-for war-winning weapon was nothing to do with Haig, but rather with problems inherent in the development of any new method of waging war. Haig encouraged the development of air power, and it was the BEF who by 1918 had the only strategic bomber force capable of any meaningful contribution to the war.
Haig is pictured as uncaring, and his failure to visit the wounded in hospital is often cited as an example of his unfeeling attitude to deaths that resulted from his plans. Haig did visit the wounded regularly in the early days. It was his staff officers, noting the effect it had on him, who advised him to stop. A commander who is psychologically damaged by the sight of so many wounded and maimed soldiers – his own soldiers – cannot be at his best, and the advice, while perhaps not meeting the requirements of a modern public-image consultant, was sensible and right. Contrary to common belief Haig still visited the wounded, but not as often as hitherto. On balance Haig was the best commander that the British army could produce at the time, and had there been any other general capable of stepping into his shoes, Prime Minister Lloyd George would have found him. Anyone who examines Haig’s relations with his own government is driven to the conclusion (as Haig was at times) that no commander-in-chief should be so treated in the midst of a war on foreign soil.9 Historical opinion is shifting, and shifting in favour of Haig. Public opinion has yet to follow, but much of the received wisdom about Haig is founded on tainted evidence, or on no evidence at all. This author, at least, can only conclude that Haig has been grievously wronged.
It is said that all the generals were cavalrymen, as if this should in some way disqualify them from command of what was mainly an infantry and artillery war. The British army has always insisted (and still does) that commanders of field formations (brigades, divisions, corps and armies) must be from the combat arms – cavalry, artillery, engineers and infantry – rather than from the supporting arms or services, and this is reinforced by the fact that one of the qualifications for high command is success wit
h a formation at the level below. As an aside, the insistence that only officers from the combat arms could command field formations was probably an unnecessary constraint, and one that did not apply in the German army. Command at corps level and above was and is largely a matter of planning, management and administration; and a good general can discharge these functions perfectly capably whatever his arm of the service. French and Haig were both cavalrymen, but command in 1914 was heavily weighted towards the infantry as we have seen. In 1918, of the five army commanders, one was from the cavalry, one was a Royal Engineer and three were infantrymen. Of the corps commanders, two were Royal Engineers, one was an artilleryman and only one (Kavanagh, commander of the Cavalry Corps) came from a cavalry regiment. Two were colonials: Currie and Monash, commanding the Canadian and Australian Corps. All the others (twelve) were from the infantry. If the high command of the army suffered from anything, it was not from an excess of cavalrymen, but from a paucity of gunners!
In the BEF of 1918, three of the five army commanders and seven of the sixteen British corps commanders were graduates of the pre-war Staff College, an unusually high proportion when one considers that entry into Staff College as a captain was then by no means necessary to advancement, and was even frowned upon by some senior officers in the 1880s. Haig himself was a graduate of the Staff College, and it is often claimed that he had failed to gain entry in 1893 and was then admitted without taking the entrance examination in 1895, owing somehow to improper influence. In fact entrance to the Staff College was either by competition or by nomination. All candidates had to take an examination, and those scoring more than fifty per cent of the available marks were described as having ‘passed’ and automatically secured places, regardless of their arm of the service. Vacancies remaining on each two-year course were then filled by nomination by the Commander-in-Chief (later by the Army Council), who presided over a selection board that looked at all officers who had ‘qualified’ by scoring between thirty-seven and a half and fifty per cent in the exam. The number of students nominated varied from two to twenty a year, and Haig, having ‘qualified’ in 1893, was nominated in 1895, the year that the Duke of Cambridge finally retired as Commander-in-Chief of the Army. Haig passed out in 1897, the year that ‘Wully’ Robertson (who had only just failed to ‘pass’) was nominated and became the first officer commissioned from the ranks to go to Staff College. There was nothing underhand about Haig’s attendance at Staff College, and given that the majority of the officers who ‘passed’ and secured automatic places were of the infantry, it was perfectly normal for Haig as a cavalry officer to be nominated. In the years before his entry to Staff College Haig had been employed observing European cavalry and in translating German and French training manuals. His good work in this employment, coupled with reports as to his previous career, made him an eminently suitable student for the college, and he did well there.10
Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military) Page 23