Was General Haig the Butcher of the Somme?

Douglas Haig - Butcher or Hero?

One of the greatest debates for almost a century now was whether or not the British Commander-in-Chief, Field Marshal Sir. Douglas Haig, was a hero or a butcher. Now, as we all know, commanding many battalions of men to fight for their country with the least amounts of deaths is extremely hard. It was not a thing that anyone could have done.

Many analysts have referred to Haig as a 'butcher' or a "murderer" who ordered countless men needlessly to their deaths. Numerous historians contribute to this theory and savagely attack Haig's reputation and accuse him of being responsible for the extensive slaughter of men, but they do not think about the other options. Were there any?

The sources have proved to be something else. Many stories were told about Haig. Some may have been fairly exaggerated and misunderstood. One controversial fact of whether Haig was a butcher was the fact the he lied in his war journal. Why would a man lie in his own document about the war if it was going well? "The battle is going very well for us and already the Germans are surrendering freely" (Source A, Haig's report of the first day of his attack, 1st July, 1916). The Germans were clearly not "surrendering freely" and that day was also the day on which he lost more than 10,000 men.

Douglas Haig also had given false declarations at times. He told a squadron that the mortar strikes had taken out the barbed wire, but that was not the case. The strikes only lifted the wire up and placed it down. Haig thought that the wire would be blown apart of structurally weaken, but his lack of knowledge of this event caused the deaths of many thousands of men. "It was clear that there were no gaps in the wire at the time of attack"(Source B, Private George Coppard).

The German Army had better equipment, tactical power, and expertise in modern warfare than the British and the French armies put together. Haig knew this and tried to keep his attitude of attack during the movement. Haig never allowed the Germans to launch major offensives as he knew that defeat would have been the result. He gave it all that he had got to try to stop the German Army's major attack plans, and losing men in the process would have been worth winning the whole battle.

The Germans had their defensive plan laid out, and several historians have said that if the Allies used some of the same tactics and consolidated their positions, disaster would have followed. The Germans would have taken out the French before smashing their lines. The French would by then have run back to Paris to protect it. If this was to occur, then Haig would have been blamed for many more deaths than he was. Haig stuck to his own plan of attack and not defence and he succeeded at doing that.

"...the Million (soldiers) who would rather die than call themselves