General Haig may have been a good general, but there are also arguments to show that he was a bad general. For instance, he had been in the army for years, he trained as an officer after leaving university without a degree in 1883. He obviously had lots of training as he fought in both India and the second Boer war in South Africa, yet he was used to battles going on only for hours, not for months like trench warfare did. He would not have been used to the sudden change in warfare tactics, which would have been difficult for him to adapt to quickly as he was known for being very stubborn which meant that he sent lots of men to fight at once, thinking he would only need the supplies and for a short period in time, yet in reality they needed to last a lot longer. As he was in charge and made the decisions leading to the events of Somme, he should be blamed for the failings of the British Army. 

However, he had a stubborn and unwillingness to change his way of looking over the battle as a whole, which meant that even though lots of men were dying each day he still did not change his tactics or the rate in which he used up men ‘the nation must be taught to bear losses’ (Haig, June 1916, before battle of Somme (Source  )) and also even implied that he knew he was doing it yet didn’t care and thought of the men’s deaths as just a statistic, ‘the nation must be prepared for a heavy casualty list’ (Haig, June 1916, before battle of Somme (Source  )). 

Some people say he was a good man though, for example, the Germans praised him for being a brilliant general and a bold man ‘Field Marshall Haig is certainly one of the ablest generals of contemporary England’ (The Times, 10th May 1917 (Source  )), which shows that some thought, even though these people were the enemy, that he was a worthwhile general. To take a closer look at his tactics, I will examine his involvement in the battle of Somme during 1916.

The plan for the Somme was to bomb the opposition and for the English to then walk across the ‘No Man’s Land’ and fight the Germans in their own trenches. However, after the bombardment, where the Germans hid in their trenches to avoid the bombs killing them, the English walked across the battlefield and got shot down by the waiting Germans. Even though the general’s plan went wrong, he still carried on with the plan for five months after, despite losing well over sixty five thousand men in only the first day. This shows us that even though he was a determined man, he did not fully think out the situation of the war, therefore, causing us many unnecessary casualties, and as the leader of the army he should be held responsible for the plan being not as successful as it could have been.