Delivered by Professor Peter Simkins at the Sixth Annual Lunchon 28 January 2000

Random Reflections

It would, of course, have been a great honour for me to have served as Haig Fellow at any time, but it has been particularly gratifying to have done so in such a special year at the end of one century and at the start of a new Millennium. It has given me additional pleasure to have been Haig Fellow in succession to one good and long-standing friend, Professor Brian Bond, and to be handing over to another, Dr Gary Sheffield. 1999 was also the year in which I retired after more than thirty-five years on the staff of the Imperial War Museum. It is therefore a good time to take stock, not least of the state of First World War studies - to which I have devoted so much of my working life.

It goes largely without saying that, for the Douglas Haig Fellowship, 1999 was a notable year, marked as it was by the publication of Haig: A Reappraisal 70 Years On and, one might add, by Look to your Front: Studies in the First World War - two outstanding collections of essays, a fair proportion of which were contributed by scholars present today. In many respects, these two publications provide us with a clear reassurance that First World War studies - especially in Britain and the Commonwealth - are currently in reasonably good health, with an encouraging number of bright young scholars emerging to relieve the old sweats in the academic front-line trenches. To repeat what Brian Bond and Nigel Cave have written in their Editors' Foreword to the Haig book -also quoted in the latest issue of Records:

... what we have in common is a belief that, given the long lapse of time and the availability of a vast amount of new documentary evidence, the British Army's part in the First World War, and Haig's role in particular, should at last be placed in a full historical context where there will be less need for emotional partisanship on either side and more dispassionate concern with the complexity of events and the limited scope for the decisive influence of individuals even at the highest level of command

I, for one fully concur with the wise words of Dr John Bourne, who has written that:

In future there seems little doubt that Haig's reputation will be finally determined, not by studies of the man himself, but of the man in the context of the armies which he commanded, and especially by detailed operational analyses at the army, corps, divisional, brigade and even battalion level.

I also agree with John that 'the day has not yet arrived'. However, I remain optimistic and would, indeed, suggest that we are certainly progressing in the right direction. While Sir John Keegan might continue to dismiss the work of revisionist First World War historians as 'pointless', I think there is now little doubt that the revisionist approach has taken firm root in the last decade or so. Thanks to the research and teaching undertaken and offered at institutions such as King's College London, the Universities of Birmingham and Leeds, Sandhurst and the Imperial War Museum, I believe that we can at last look at the conduct of the war on the Western Front in a more objective way. In contrast to the situation in the mid-1970s, for example, there is now available a substantial and growing body of scholarly works on the battlefield performance of the BEF, its morale and discipline, mapping and survey work, logistics, artillery organisation and support, officer-man relations, air co-operation, recruiting, and command at all levels - as well as a host of new works on individual formations. To underline what I have said in my review of Ian Malcolm Brown's excellent study of British logistics on the Western Front, it is evident that the BEF's 'learning curve' did not just apply to its tactics and technology but to virtually every part of its organisation. As the man who presided over that process of improvement and reform between 1916 and 1918, Haig is surely due a significant share of the credit. That much, I feel is increasingly acknowledged in scholarly circles if not yet among the public at large or by the media - so much work still lies before us.

A major disadvantage for me as the Haig Fellow in a year which has seen the appearance of the book edited by Brian and Nigel is that, at a stroke, I have been robbed of some fourteen potential topics for my Address. On many of these topics there is little left for me to say which would not be crossing ground already brilliantly covered by one or more of the distinguished authors represented in the volume. For this reason - some might call it desperation -1 have decided to offer a few, almost random, personal reflections on some of Haig's qualities as a commander. Inevitably, such reflections may, in turn, merely echo points expressed by others - for instance, John Hussey in his 'Portrait of a Commander-in-Chief - but, if so, they will be points which I believe merit extra emphasis.

The first of these qualities - which, I suggest, stemmed from Haig's undoubted professionalism - was his ability to take a broad view of his own command when C-in-C of the British Armies in France and Flanders. By this I mean that, as the officer in charge of the biggest army which Britain and the Dominions has ever placed in the field, Haig - without any real precedent or blueprint to guide him -never allowed himself to become absorbed in actual operations, important as they were, to the exclusion of everything else. As I stressed earlier, the very fact that the BEF's 'learning curve' extended to all areas of its organisation - from aero engines to sound-ranging; from medical services to mapping; from bakeries, training schools and the widespread issue of instructional pamphlets to sports days and concert parties; from the effective handling of compensation claims to postal services - was the product of the climate of hard work, thoroughness and pragmatism which Haig and his GHQ helped to create for the vastly expanded army after December 1915.

A good illustration of Haig's grasp of what mattered to the BEF - both in and behind the battle zone - is his readiness to welcome Sir Eric Geddes as Director-General of Transportation at GHQ in September 1916. In the words of Ian Malcolm Brown, Geddes's legacy gave the BEF an administrative infrastructure that, in 1918, enabled Haig and GHQ 'to mount limited-objective attacks of tremendous power almost at will and to switch their locations at very short notice'.

Another example - as historians such as Dr Paul Harris, Dr David Jordan, John Hussey and Michael Crawshaw have recently highlighted - is that, contrary to popular belief, Haig, the much-maligned cavalryman, not only actively encouraged the development of new technology but had a shrewder understanding than many of his contemporaries of both the advantages mid shortcomings of the tanks, aircraft, motor vehicles, artillery pieces and wireless communications available to the BEF at the time. Haig's wide-ranging professional interests and concerns are further revealed by an examination of his diaries. For example, at one of his weekly conferences with his Army commanders - held at First Army HQ near Aire on 18 March 1916 - he spoke about such issues as the training of divisional cavalry and cyclists and the role of Lewis guns in an advance. Three days later he visited a brigade of the 6th Division and watched companies at platoon and squad drill. On 1 April the agenda for the Army commanders' conference included a section on the extent to which dummy guns and flashes were used by the BEF's various Armies to deceive the Germans. This was not, I would claim, the mark either of a dilettante or of a man who put personal ambition above the maintenance and raising of professional standards.

In addition, it cannot be stressed too often that, when circumstances allowed, Haig routinely spent most afternoons visiting subordinate commanders and formations, a praiseworthy habit which continued to the end of the war. As Brian Bond observed here twelve months ago, Haig was assuredly not a "General Melchett", remote in a chateau while men died in the Flanders mud. On 27 August 1918, for example - after an important meeting with Foch - he met Home at Canadian Corps HQ at 3pm, then visited the 52nd Division, the 2nd Division and the 62nd Division. On 28 September 1918, the eve of Fourth Army's assault on the Hindenburg Line at the St Quentin Canal, he called at Third Army's HQ before lunch; visited the Australian Corps HQ at 3pm; next went tothe headquarters of the United States II Corps; saw Rawlinson at Fourth Army headquarters; and rounded the afternoon off with visits to the 5th Tank Brigade and the US 27th and 30th Divisions. His itinerary on 17 October included visits to IV Corps, 17th Division, 33rd Division, 38th Division and 5th Division. I have concentrated on examples from the Hundred Days campaign, but it is not difficult to find similar instances from other periods of his command. The Home and Rawlinson papers reveal that the pattern set by Haig was followed by his Army commanders. The constant quest, on the part of the BEF's senior commanders, for first-hand briefings and information, and Haig's apparent desire to have "a finger in every pie", were, in my opinion, key - if underrated -factors in the eventual transformation of the BEF into a balanced all-arms force which, when it really mattered in the summer and autumn of 1918, was able to perform more effectively, as a whole (and in most, if not all, of its parts) than any other army on the Western Front.

A second quality which I would identify is Haig's capacity for doggedness and persistence - a quality which he had in common with the ordinary British and Dominion front-line soldier. Some may call this quality bloody-mindedness; still more may think that it points to a lack of imagination or, as Bill Philpott puts it, 'a highly-developed sense of moral superiority and self-importance'; while others may see it as the product of Haig's religious beliefs. Few, however, would question that Haig possessed a deep-seated conviction that he was the right man for the post of Commander-in-Chief. As he frankly admitted to Edward Beddington after the event, he had not supported Hubert Gough to the point of resignation in March 1918 because 'I was conceited enough to think that the Army could not spare me'. It is certainly easy enough to find these facets of Haig's personality unattractive but there is, I feel, another side to the debate. Whether or not Haig can be fairly accused, as on the Somme in 1916, of justifying a policy of attrition after the event, or of pursuing operations on the Somme or at Passchendaele long after they were tactically sensible, Haig's unshakeable belief in the primacy of the Western Front was, I suggest, entirely correct. There was no real alternative to defeating the main enemy - the Imperial German Army - in the main theatre of war. The splendid recent study by Dr Matthew Hughes of Allenby and British strategy in the Middle East has once again exposed the weaknesses of the policies pursued by Lloyd George and the 'Easterners'. Victories in the Middle East undoubtedly helped to satisfy British security interests in the area after the war and to provide a peace settlement favourable to the British Empire. Even so, as Matthew Hughes observes, by late 1917 - with Russia's departure from the war - Turkey was more concerned with the Caucasus and central Asia than with Palestine. The question therefore arises as to how the capture of Damascus would have defeated Turkey or sucked in the bulk of its armies, which were more committed to an advance on Baku. For the Egyptian Expeditionary Force to have knocked Turkey out of the war, it would have had to march hundreds of miles across the inhospitable Anatolian heartland - a logistical nightmare - in order to threaten Istanbul. Moreover, the transfer of German divisions to the west after Russia's defeat posed such a powerful new threat that Britain simply did not have enough men to follow both an 'eastern' and a 'western' strategy. In Hughes's view, the fact that British casualties on the Western Front were huge does not, by itself, invalidate the policy advocated by Robertson and Haig. To argue for the Western Front strategy was one thing, but to stick to it through all the setbacks and losses of 1916 and 1917 - and against the arguments of powerful and articulate politicians - was quite another, demonstrating, I would claim, something more than mere pig-headedness or conceit. I have long been convinced that had ambition or a sense of self-importance truly been the dominant, or only, strands in Haig's personality, they would not have been sufficient to sustain him through all the tribulations of the war or, equally, to enable him to bear the crushing and unprecedented weight of responsibility that he shouldered from December 1915. At least some real inner strength or moral courage was surely required as well. I suggest that, if Haig had lacked that genuine inner strength, the men who served under him on the Western Front would rapidly have detected the fact. In the midst of a protracted and difficult campaign, the last thing a front-line soldier wants - apart from boots that leak or a rifle that doesn't work - is a commander who is prone to recurrent bouts of self-doubt or indecision. In this regard, I often see much in common between Haig, Trenchard, Ulysses S Grant and 'Bomber' Harris, and the men they respectively led.

The third characteristic which I might touch upon is Haig's consistent desire to assert what he deemed to be a reasonable degree of independence as Commander-in-Chief of the British Armies in France and Flanders. At least twice during the Somme offensive in 1916-on 3 July and 19 October to be precise - Haig felt it necessary to point out to Joffre that, in the final analysis, he was responsible only to his own Government ; that, while he was fully prepared to conform to Joffre's overall strategy, he must decline to pursue a tactical plan of which he did not approve; and that he was the sole judge of what the BEF could undertake and when. He issued similar reminders to Foch in 1918 - first, in mid-August, when attempting to persuade Foch to allow the principal thrust of the BEF's operations to be switched from Amiens, where resistance was stiffening, to another sector; and again, in October, when he sought to regain operational control of the British Second Army. As Brian Bond observed in his Address here a year ago, Haig was particularly unwilling to accept unqualified subordination to Foch in 1918 - and especially in the Hundred Days - because he was convinced that the British and Dominion forces were playing the leading part in the final offensive. In Bill Philpott's words: 'As a professional soldier, Haig's loyalty was to his army not his allies, and his primary focus was on following his orders and doing his duty'. I would agree with Bill that such an attitude 'was never going to endear Haig to his allies' and that it may have impaired the overall efficiency of the alliance. Nevertheless, if one accepts - as I would argue - that the BEF was at the tactical, technological and logistical cutting-edge of the Allied armies during the decisive phase in 1918, then one might conclude that this was partly the result of the BEF's growing tactical independence from July 1916 onwards. The French were right to be critical of the BEF's performance on 1 July and to compare Fourth Army's deliberate assault unfavourably with their own more flexible small unit tactics - which made maximum use of ground and cover. On the other hand, the growing divergence between the two armies in some areas of tactics - intensified by British successes on 14 July and in September - did, I think, help to engender and encourage the 'learning curve' in the BEF which so many historians now clearly identify. Certainly, by the end of September 1916, Rawlinson, for one, was asserting that he did not think that the British had much to learn from French methods, particularly in artillery tactics. He also remarked that the use of the creeping barrage, which was, by then, fast becoming standard in the BEF, had been adopted by the French Sixth Army on his right. Even if Haig himself was not a master tactician, he should perhaps receive a fair amount of credit for his part in creating the command climate in which the BEF's all-arms battle tactics developed, flourished and eventually triumphed.

Much work remains to be done by us all to trace the extent to which this process of improvement took place "from the bottom up" or "from the top down". As the contributor of the essay on Haig and his Army commanders, I have argued that there was a detectable 'learning curve' in the command relationships of Haig's BEF just as there was in its tactics and techniques. But I must admit to a few lingering doubts about Haig's selection of subordinates. On the credit side, his support for the elevation to senior command of men such as Henry Home, Henry Rawlinson, Julian Byng, Arthur Currie and John Monash showed sound judgement; similarly he was wise to avoid sacking Herbert Plumer early in 1916, just as he was to overlook Byng's mistakes in the latter stages of Cambrai or in March 1918, and to recall Rawlinson to operational command in time for the successful defence of Amiens. Conversely, his patronage and continued support of Hubert Gough is less easy to justify, while it remains an eternal mystery to me how Haig allowed Aylmer Hunter-Weston to remain in senior command beyond 1 July 1916, let alone to the end of the war. That said, I can do no better, at this juncture, than to echo the words of my friend and colleague Dr John Bourne, who has argued that, by the end of the Great War, the characteristics that mattered were 'the capacity to take infinite care with planning and preparation; to respond effectively to battlefield emergencies; and to maintain the initiative by constant harassing of the enemy'. As John Bourne states, those virtues were well represented at most levels of the BEF by September 1918, when the British Army, temporarily at least, became something of a meritocracy, in which courage and the capacity to command, rather than seniority or class, were the most desirable standards. Here too I suggest that Haig, as the man "at the top of the pile" deserves his fair share of the credit for the existence of such a climate within the BEF - however late in the day.

These, then, are just a few of my random reflections at the end of my year as Haig Fellow. I hope that they may have given you some additional food for thought and further debate or, at the very least, that they have not given you indigestion.