For too long, Dr John Laffin maintains, the military reputation of British Generals in World War I has not been examined critically enough, and he asks how those responsible for catastrophic defeats were able to retain their commands. Haig, whose army suffered 60,000 casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, was still in command after five months more fighting and another 400,000 casualties. By the war's end the numbers of dead ran into millions - doggedly brave British Empire soldiers who, Laffin believes, were killed, wounded or broken by commanders who were vain, egocentric and incompetent. But the generals, who blamed the dead and junior in rank, cannot be excused on the grounds that there was "nothing else that they could do". Even now, more than 75 years after that "Great War for Civilization", this book raises questions that are uncomfortable. Laffin draws on the memories and writings of those who took part and quotes the judgements of other military historians to provide an analysis of just what went wrong in the generals' leadership, and how it resulted in such appalling and tragic losses - and concludes that they were not merely incompetent but uncaring.
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About the Author
John Laffin, a veteran writer on war, wrote over 70 books on most aspects of military history. He is a well-known and respected author, and wrote many books for us.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
41 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Very good--but says nothing new,
By Michael Carragher (mcarrag@comp.uark.edu) (Fayetteville, Arkansas) - See all my reviews
This review is from: British Butchers & Bunglers of World War One (Paperback)
This book assesses the military performances of Sir Douglas the Inarticulate and Pious, Sir John the Spiteful, Sir Henry the Humble, Sir Ian the Fastidious, Sir Aylmer the Ass, Sir Lancelot the Lachrymose, Sir Hubert the Confident and Callous, Sir Henry the Jolly (another Sir Henry, one who later brought a sword to a gun-fight with the IRA, with predictable consequences), and other half-baked be-knighted nincompoops who constituted the British High Command in the Great War, and who went on to have such an inspiring effect on the Monty Python Team. Sir Douglas Haig takes most of John Laffin's flak, though as the chapter "Dedicated Futility" suggests, Haig may have been much less disastrous a commander-in-chief than his predecessor, Sir John French. Haig, like French, was "stupid ... but better educated." But the dogs of the streets where the slaughtered Pals Battalions came from have been barking all this for years, so why should anyone read this book now? Why indeed has it been reissued, ten years after its publication? Laffin, if anything, does not go far enough in his condemnation, and besides, he might have gone beyond proving a well-worn point to exploring in greater depth answers to the questions he poses. How did these clowns come to be placed in charge of the lives of men and entrusted with the very survival of European democracy? Why were they allowed to stay in charge after they had squandered millions of those lives and proved their incompetence? How could career soldiers have failed to learn the most rudimentary lessons of the American Civil War, fought in the lifetime of many of them, and be so blind to the strength of the defense and the ruinous cost of the attack against, not just rifles now, but machineguns? How could they have dismissed machineguns as "overrated," or imagined, as Haig did, that the effectiveness of these dreadful weapons against horses was "greatly exaggerated"? (How could anyone of even average stupidity doubt the effect of fifty-caliber bullets hosed upon flesh and bone at high velocity?) How could the "master of the field" possibly endorse the use of horse cavalry eight years after the war was over? ("Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to ... the well-bred horse"-tell that to the Poles, old chap; it is difficult to evade the suspicion that Haig was not so much stupid as mentally deficient in some literal, clinical, sense.) What does unbridled confidence in Divine Aid, and pig-headed faith in long-outmoded tactics and resources, tell us about the army and society of the time? And why were the few truly able commanders, like John Monash and Herbert Plumer, kept in positions so far below their capabilities? Of course, had Laffin addressed these questions, he would have written a very different book ("The Dashing Adventures of Sir Peter Principle in the Trenches"?), and the one he has written does draw qualified endorsement. He has a clear thesis which he stoutly defends. His book is quite short and not badly written, apart from a few things his editor should have picked up. It is readable and worth reading, if only for the chapter "Townshend of Kut," which describes the Mesopotamian theater, one that gets relegated to footnote treatment in many books. Townshend was, Laffin says, "a gratuitous bungler." More intelligent than many of his colleagues, his butchery is interpreted here as deliberate rather than incidental; his psychology is compared with that of certain Nazi war criminals, notable Goering. Very noteworthy is Laffin's discussion of what he calls the HCI-High Casualties Inevitable-fixation. This belief in attrition warfare led to the success of engagements being measured in terms of losses, units with low body-counts being regarded as shirkers, and their commanders being censured, as happened with the 49th Division at the Ancre. Laffin reminds us that this sort of bungling and butchery characterized the Great War, something we must never forget. His book is therefore a useful reference to help us refute those defenders of the sort of prodigal lunacy and villainy it describes. For, however we may laugh at the Monty Python Team and their frightfully funny performances, the real thing was not funny at all. And, as remarkable as it may seem, there are people who still can defend the frightful butchery. One must, I suppose, respond with charitable silence to Earl Haig's recent assessment of his father as "one of the great men of the twentieth century," but professional historians have no such filial excuses, and deserve no indulgence. Last November John Terraine defended Haig with the same old tired tautology that Haig used himself: He won the war, therefore his tactics and strategy, and his leadership, are vindicated. This claim, like the man it is made about, is half-baked at best. The naval blockade did far more effectively what Haig and his HCI fixation merely tried to do-break the Germans' will-and the arrival of Pershing's doughboys broke Ludendorff's nerve, and drove him to adopt, in desperation, a HCI fixation of his own. Laffin not merely itemizes the butcher's bill, but presents a few lower-fat recipes Haig might have used to cook up a less costly, less bloody, perhaps more permanent, victory.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stupidity,
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This review is from: British Butchers & Bunglers of World War I (Paperback)
This is a very well written book and is a scathing assesment of British generalship during WWI, particually Gen. Haig and his battles of attrision on the Western Front. When Haig was shown the prototype of the tank he was so impressed with the it's armor that he wanted to take the engines out and use the hulks as pill boxes! Haig also sent the tank corp into battle after several days of shelling the ground they were supposed to drive over, even after the tank commanders told him that they would get stuck in the mud caused by the constant shelling and sent him a map showing where not to shell so they could get through. Haig responed by teling them "don't send me any more such stupid maps." If your a student of The Great War this book should be on your shelf - it really hepls put into presective the needless slaughter of the Western Front and the generalship which contributed too it.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Smoke and Mirrors of a Holocaust,
By
This review is from: British Butchers & Bunglers of World War One (Paperback)
This book has got the sort of title - "British Butchers" - that ordinarily I would not be particularly attracted to, as it sounds like some sort of anti-war 'rant', probably a pacifist tract, as were so many books about World War One, or "The Great War", as it was known in its day, and as it still is known in Europe.But, World War One (WWI), circa 1914-1918, is a subject that I've generally felt that I never really knew enough about, so, given the bargain basement price - they were practically giving it away, something like $3 for a new hardcover at Stacy's downtown - and given the general subject matter, I just bought it, almost absent-mindedly among a slew of others on various subjects. It sat on my bookshelf though for several years, 'till finally one day I was out of stuff to read, and I just picked it up almost idly and started reading. Boy was I ever shocked. First of all, it's not in any way an anti-war tract. The author, in fact, is proud to be a soldier, who served under Montgomery in World War Two, and proud to be from a soldiering family. He thinks war and soldering is the greatest thing since sliced bread, fight it out and may the best man, and the best country win, is his idea. No no. It's not war that he takes issue with at all. His problem is that, from all the extensive research that he'd done, he'd reached the conclusion that World War One was not a war at all. It was, in fact, a mass murder by the rulers of the respective European countries involved, of their OWN soldiers. In other words, what he shows, is that the generals of the respective armies were not out to kill the other country's soldiers so much as being out to kill off their own armies. To the uninitiated, this may sound a little strange. After all, everyone knows that, certainly traditionally, you send armies into battle in order for them to kill off the opposing army; Not, first and foremost, to get one's own troops killed. So goes the propaganda of war, and everyone finds it pretty convincing. This book shows that that's not what happened in World War One. In World War One, armies were routinely thrown onto the field, not so much to kill, but rather to be killed. It was a deliberate and organized mass execution of the entire working class of Europe, not a battle between nations. The ruling classes of all the main nations involved, were killing off the working classes of all the nations involved. Not nation against nation, but rather, and rather overtly at that, ruling classes of all the involved nations against working classes of all the involved nations. It's hard for people to keep this in mind, but this book is the most powerful evidence for this that I've ever seen.
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