Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig

It's hoped that this deception will buy the British the time they need to deploy the wonder weapon on the battlefield, but the name sticks.

And for General Douglas Haig, these new tanks cannot arrive soon enough.

He's the commander-in-chief of British forces on the Western Front, and he intends to launch a new offensive in the area around the Somme River, where British and German armies have been locked in position for months.

So tank production is made a priority by the British government, but the new weapon still isn't ready for the start of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916.

Since the successful demonstration earlier this year, the British Army has spent months assembling dozens of tanks and training the crews needed to operate them.

When enough machines and soldiers were ready, they were shipped across the English Channel and brought to the Somme.

Now they're ready to support General Douglas Haig's latest offensive, a mass infantry attack on German trenches near the villages of Flers and Courcelette.

As dawn breaks, Captain Mortimer's crew cranks the engine to life.

And if we look at the British side, and by extension the Allied side, there's no doubt that when the Somme concept is cooked up in the late autumn of 1915, the idea is that the Somme, or possibly one of the other Allied defences, will breach the lines and a war of manoeuvre will return.

Douglas Haig, as we've heard in this series, he certainly on day one thinks there can be a general rupture and that the Allies, the British, are going to go all the way through this.

They're going to break through all the German lines into open country beyond.

That never happens.

It's ultimately going to inflict a puncture wound on Germany that is going to lead to its defeat by the end of 1918.

Well, that's an argument that a lot of the British military tried to make, particularly towards the end of the war.

Douglas Haig referred to the Somme as a wearing out battle, this battle of attrition that was eventually going to weaken Germany to the point when it's defeated in 1918.

Now, I think Haig's playing a little bit fast and loose there because he doesn't necessarily see it as an attritional battle in 1916.

Conferences were held with Chancellor von Herting, Admiral von Hinz, the Foreign Minister, and Field Marshal von Hindenburg on August 14, 15, and 16. and there was also a meeting of the crown council at which i clearly stated that the war could not be won militarily the kick-off of august eighth at amiens was the first general offensive attempted by the british armies in nineteen eighteen and the events leading up to it must be briefly rehearsed in order to get a true strategic picture this can best be done in the words of field marshal haig as contained in his famous victory dispatch of december twenty one nineteen eighteen after describing the weakened condition of the forces at his command following the enemy offensive he says the german attacks though they had failed to break the allied line had stretched the resources of the allies to the utmost while before amiens and hayesbrook they had brought the enemy within a short distance of strategic points of great importance in these circumstances the possibility of an immediate renewal of the enemy's offensive could not but be viewed with grave anxiety at the commencement of the period under review in early may the allied high command repeatedly expressed the opinion that the enemy would renew his attacks on a large scale on the front arras amiens mondidier the strategic results to be obtained by the capture of amiens the separation of the french and the british armies and an advance toward the sea along the valley of the somme were very great and might have well proved decisive the enemy's opening offensive in march and april had already brought him within a measurable distance of success in this direction and had carried his armies through practically the whole of our organized lines of defense in short the enemy still possessed a sufficient superiority of force to retain the initiative and it was known he would be compelled to act within a comparatively limited time if he were to turn his superiority to account before it passed from him these were the two main factors which had to be taken into consideration when deciding the policy of the british armies during the late spring and early summer the common object of the french and ourselves was to tide over the period which must elapse until the growth of the american armies and the arrival of allied reinforcements placed the opposing forces once more on a footing of equality the situation was an anxious one but as it turned out the enemy was in no condition to push a new offensive and when it did come at last he elected for a direct thrust at paris from the aisne front launched at the end of may this great offensive swept steadily on until despite the desperate resistance of the french reinforced by british and american troops the marnier was reached And it culminated on July 15 with the opening east and southwest of Reims of what was to prove the last enemy blow on the grand scale.

On July 18, Falk struck his shattering counter-stroke.

Meanwhile, the British armies on the west front had been engaged in what Field Marshal Haig describes as a period of active defense.

this included local attacks the building of a new system of railways behind amiens and the digging of five thousand miles of trench the lesson of the necessity for great depth of defense had been hardly learned in march Coming to July, he says, two months of comparative quiet worked a great change in the condition of the British armies.

The drafts sent out from England had largely been absorbed.

The prisoners stated that they had no idea that an attack was impending, and captured documents did not indicate that any of our preparations had been detected.

An officer stated that the Canadians were believed to be on the Kemel front.

It will be interesting to reproduce here the following extract from Sir Douglas Haig's victory dispatch.

Yet every casualty figure is an amalgam of battlefield loss, wounded who later died, and men unaccounted for.

And then there's the question of Douglas Haig.

He's often branded as the butcher, a simplifier in the face of grim numbers.

Historiography now looks past that label to understand what the situation was.

Britain was a naval power.

New technology like tanks was still unreliable, and the German army had endured a grueling summer of attrition.

Haig's strategy at Passchendaele in 1917 is another crucible.

Rain turned the field into a mud pit that swallowed men more quickly than bullets did.

Few people anticipated that from the autumn of 1914, the opposing forces would get bogged down in a costly four-year war of attrition along more or less fixed positions from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier.

As the British military commitment escalated into a mass conscript army and the Butcher's Bill of trench warfare mounted, the autonomy of Sir John French and his successor Sir Douglas Haig, came to be questioned in London, where the civilian politicians, especially David Lloyd George, after he became Prime Minister in December 1916, increasingly sought to assert control over war strategy.

For civil-military relations in Britain, the consequence of total war and the necessity of mobilisation of all the national resources was to shift the wartime balance of power away from the armed forces, especially the army, to the political leadership of the country.

The generals initially viewed themselves as the King's generals.

And we put the phone down.

And then I received a letter a few days later from her thanking me for the conversation, which was addressed to Sir Douglas Haig.

Which is not you.

Which is not me.

Thereafter he devoted himself wholeheartedly to the study of the Anglo-German danger.

Taking for his motto the well-known maxim that it is allowable to learn even from an enemy, he adapted what he thought was best from the German methods, and it is well known that he and his close and trusted friend, Sir Douglas Haig, in making the British army the perfect machine that it is, bore well in mind the lessons to be gathered from the German maneuvers.

He objected strongly to the German close formation, holding it wasteful and unwise.

He had grafted South African experience on his stock of tactical knowledge, and if the drilling of our men was terribly hard, he and Sir Douglas found the ripe fruits of it in that wonderful retreat from Mons and in the battles round Ypres.

I think Frederick the Great would have made much of him, and that his chief hero in a military sense, the first Napoleon, would have kept him by his side.

He has been sorely tried.

It is to be hoped that Sir Douglas Haig, who in a military sense is his creation, will realize his teacher's dreams and ambitions.

End of chapter 24.

So there's pure military reasons.

But the controversy, and it's a controversy at the time, and it will certainly become one very soon after the war, is that there's political pressure on Douglas Haig In November, there's moves in the British government and the sitting Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, who, of course, has lost his son recently and is heartbroken by this.

He's fading away as a politician and he's about to be overthrown by his one-time ally, David Lloyd George.

And David Lloyd George is canvassing opinion.

But, and this is the point to really come to, it won't be captured by force of arms, but the Germans will abandon it without a fight in early 1917.

Perhaps as a recognition of how the Battle of the Somme has played out.

And if we say, is the Battle of the Ancre worth it? Well, Haig thinks it is.

parts of the army think it is, has to be said David Lloyd George and the politicians not so sure, and there's certainly been a number of historians who said this was unnecessary, better to just dig in, the Germans are going to withdraw anyway, although the Allies don't really know that at this stage.

There is no course open to us but to fight it out.

It's a pretty basic quote from General, well, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig.

Oh, do we get a spoiler there? We do.

We're going to have more of that quote later.