Is It Fair To Blame Haig For The Failure Of The First Day Of The Somme?

Authors Avatar

“Is It Fair To Blame Haig For The Failure Of The First Day Of The Somme?”

        The Battle of the Somme was one of the biggest military blunders in history. There were 60,000 casualties on the first day. The British were put to shame. After a seven day bombardment it was carelessly assumed that there would be no German survivors; this could not have been more wrong.

        The German trenches were far more advanced than was thought and they had simply sat out the bombardment in dugouts far below the ground. Another mistake was that the explosions were expected to cut up the wire so that the British soldiers could get through to the German lines. However, all that had happened was that the explosions had lifted the wire off the ground and then dropped in an even worse state than before. When the bombs stopped the Germans became aware that an infantry attack was imminent and so scrambled to get out from the dugout to get their guns in place. This was the “Race To The Parapet”. The British, however, had no idea of this “race” and they thought that everyone on the other side would be dead. Many of them didn’t even get halfway across no-mans-land before they were cut down by the machine-guns. Even after the first wave of men, more and more were sent over the top, even though it was evident that they weren’t making ten metres towards the other front-line.

Join now!

        So who was to blame for this catastrophe? Many accuse Field Marshal Haig. He was the man in charge of the attack. It was under his orders that tens of thousands of men walked slowly across no-mans-land to their deaths.

        However, Haig was not the only one involved in the Somme. He was taking his own orders from higher authority, quite probably back in England. These people had no way of knowing what conditions were really like across the channel. He may well have been given false or insubstantial information about the German defenses and wire. Many people think that ...

This is a preview of the whole essay