Sir Douglas Haig

The Somme was the first major challenge faced by Sir Douglas Haig after he took over command of the British army on the Western Front.  His conduct of the Battle made him one of the most controversial figures of the war and has been passionately disputed ever since.

View the film clip showing Haig with King George V at his Headquarters

After serving with his regiment and attending the Staff College, Haig saw active service during Kitchener's 1898 campaign against the Dervishes in the Sudan and served under Sir John French on the staff of the Cavalry Division in South Africa.  When the British Expeditionary Force went to war in August 1914, Haig commanded I Corps at Mons, the Marne, the Aisne and First Ypres, and the renamed First Army from December 1914 including the battles of Neuve-Chapelle and Loos in 1915.

Haig succeeded Field Marshal Sir John French as Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force on 19 December 1915, but his period in command remains wrapped in controversy.  He envisaged a breakthrough in his offensives on the Somme in 1916 and at Ypres in 1917, relying on bigger forces and weightier bombardments rather than tactical flexibility, and persisted with them longer than was desirable, justifying them as battles of attrition when no decisive strategic advances were possible.

Nevertheless, he displayed great tenacity during the crises in the spring of 1918 and acknowledged the value of a unified Allied command under Foch.  Between 8 August 1918 and the end of the war, the forces led by Haig defeated the main body of the German army in the greatest succession of victories in the British Army's history, a fact all too often obscured by his previous failures.

He was created Earl Haig of Bemersyde in 1919 and, in 1921, he helped establish the Earl Haig Fund with the aim of providing help in time of need to all who served in the Armed Forces and their dependants.  Douglas Haig died aged 67 in 1928.