These factors make General Haig's motive for writing the letter questionable and puts doubt on the reliability of the content.

After taking the purpose of the letter into consideration I then looked at the author and analysed how reliable the content of the letter is. As the British army General, Haig was in the position of knowing more than anyone on the matter. On the other hand it could be said that Haig could not have know casualty figures for certain as he was stationed 50 km behind enemy lines. This makes the believability of the information in Haig’s letter questionable. In the letter he says, “ the German casualties have been greater than ours” he couldn’t have possibly knows this for sure as even to the present day casualty numbers have not been confirmed. Haig may have genuinely believed German casualties were in-fact greater than ours, because of the utter scale of the attack launched on the enemy lines. There had never been a war the size of the battle of the Somme so it cannot be said Haig is lying in the letter. This is because after the 7 day shelling of the german trenches Haig believed the German army would be obliterated, so this leads me to believe Haig believed what he was writing.

I then moved on to look at the context of the source and analysed whether General Haig actually had a motive to lie. Did he have a motive to lie? Yes he did. Haig was being heavily criticised by Churchill and Lloyd George, this must have effected Haig’s assessment of the battle of the Somme and possibly lead to him lying or at least exaggerating in his report. On the other hand it has been said that Haig’s motive for writing the letter was to get his argument across, as he had not had the change to do before hand. This would mean he did not have to lie in his report and was just writing what he believed was happening. Another argument to prove General Haig was not lying is, the outcome of the Battle of the Somme. Haig couldn’t have possible proved casualty figures from 50 km behind enemy lines so he may have just gone with what he thought was happening because he was confident he was going to win the Battle eventually. Haig could not ask the Germans about their casualties, so he just presumed that after a continuous seven-day shell bombardment there were more German casualties.

Finally I studied the tone of Haig’s report, and realised how straight to the point he was in this report. After all, this was a military report on the Battle of the Somme and General Haig knew this and made no excuses in his letter. Haig is also constantly giving information during the report and makes no excuses, for example he says, “it is true that the amount of ground we have gained is not great, that’s nothing”. He does not try and make an excuse because he knows that the plan isn’t to gain land, the plan is to break the back of the German army. Haig doesn’t even explain why the British haven’t gained much land because he knew its part of his battle plan. It is noticeable that Haig talks about the Germans for the majority of the report but as he was under pressure from the British cabinet he wanted to tell them about German casualties etc.

To finally draw a conclusion about the believability of Haig’s report I thought, do Haig’s comments fit what I know about the battle of the Somme? Well to do this I had to look at the Battle of the Somme in a certain way, I had to put myself in a military position and look at it like General Haig would have seen it. If I were General Haig writing this report I would most probably focus my attention on the German casualties as apposed to the British ones, but that would be one sided and the truth of the report would be questionable. On closer examination of the source I realised it is only an extract from the original report. This means that later on in the report General Haig may have spoken about British casualties which would mean that it was not a one sided report.