Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 2 - Sir Douglas Haig

Episode Date: August 14, 2018

On this episode Joe and Nick talk about Field Marshal Douglas Haig who led the majority of the UK's efforts during WW1, including the brutal battles of the Somme and Passchendaele. Remember kids: Just because you're bad at math doesn't mean that you too may one day lead millions of men to their deaths. Follow joe on Twitter @jkass99 Follow Nick on twitter @nickcasm1 Follow the podcast @lions_by

Welcome back to another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, this is episode two, which is two more than we ever thought we'd be making. We are Joe and Nick and today we're going to be covering another World War I general, even though we said last episode we wouldn't, but we're going to do it anyway. It's British Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the first

Earl of Haig, also known as the Butcher of the Somme. The best donkey. The best donkey of all the donkeys and how we nickname this podcast. We're drinking Newcastle brown ale that I left on the counter to get nice and warm because we hate ourselves.

And mostly because we could never afford any of Haig's family's whiskey. I don't think they make it anymore. And it's obscenely expensive he probably would have been better off leaving that than his own man yeah he could just been a worthless drunk like his dad and millions of people would still be alive very uh so haig was born in edinburgh in all right so i don't know if that's edinburgh or edinburgh, but he was born there in 1861 to a fantastically rich family who ragged the Haig and Haig whiskey distillery. His father was John Richard Haig and

was a drunk, and his mother was born into the gentry, which is old-timey British speak for being just one step below the nobility but her family had fallen fallen on a hard time so she was forced to marry a dirty commoner both of his parents were dead by the time he was 18 from a combination of alcoholism and then being just a horrible time in history to be an old person he attended the brasnos college but did not graduate instead he entered the royal military college at sandhurst in 1884 one of the oldest guys in the class um and unlike a lot of terrible uh military leaders he graduated the top of his class you know you have people like custer and other generals of the world uh civil war era who

limped by in west Point and barely passed. But as long as Haig had doctrine and books in front of him, he was great. He was a great officer. Unfortunately, being in the military, there's more to it than that, and it was all that shit he sucked at. He was awarded with the Anson Sword,

given for, quote, to the cadet who passes out first on the list of his final examination. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in the 7th Hussars in 1885, which would begin his lifelong obsession with cavalry. For better or for worse, this dude loved his horses, and he would never sell them out. Fucking cav. Yeah. And as someone who spent way too much of his military career in cavalry units,

this guy is like every Cav officer I ever knew. Yeah. His life as a junior officer sent him to India, where he managed to impress his superiors with the important military duties, such as sorting out paperwork and scheduling. After carrying out such important duties, he was promoted to captain and left to prepare for staff college his preparations were for nothing though because he failed his entrance

exams because he couldn't do math and he did not get a spot in the college um later in life in 1910 he would do what any vengeful asshole of power would do and he tried to get the math portion taken out of the test completely. As someone who struggled their whole life to do math... That's a fucking story of my life. I would have done the same thing. At one point I had several tutors through my

life so I could limp my way through public school and one time she got up and walked out. I would totally do what Haig did here. He didn't succeed, but he tried i've had teachers just kick me out of class as soon as i walked into class i was terrible yeah so this is the one point in time that we can all sympathize with douglas haig he's a fucking idiot cheers to that cheers he finally got into the staff college in 1896, where on all accounts he was a complete ass and disliked by his classmates,

to the point that they have this super British thing called the first drag of the hunt. And all it means is being the best horseman, because they have to do as British as possible, and they can't just call you the best horseman. And even though he was leaps and bounds the best rider in the entire class, they voted somebody else to be the best horseman because they fucking hated him yeah um he graduated the college in a year so just like before if there's paperwork in front of him he was great right um after graduation haig would see his first action in the sudan war of 1898 serving as a staff

officer for a cavalry brigade before returning back to the UK in 1899. The Sudan War is the first time he actually saw the Maxim machine gun in action, and he learned absolutely nothing. He thought it was overrated, and same with artillery. File. Yeah.

I think he didn't like it because he realized his horses weren't as cool as he thought they were when a belt-fed machine gun was firing at him. But if Battlefield 1, they're tanks. That's a fucking true story. Haig was then deployed to South Africa for service in the Boer War. It was here that the version of Haig we're familiar with, an overconfident idiot who has skewed all critical thinking in favor of rigid doctrine, began to be created. in favor of rigid doctrine began to be created. Hague began to become skeptical of the effectiveness of mass artillery and machine guns. Instead, he was impressed by the use of cavalry charges,

even going so far as to say cavalry would be greater and then less important in incoming conflicts, whereas infantry and artillery would only likely be really effective against raw troops that would become partially true only because all the machine guns and artillery killed all the seasoned troops and the only thing left were the raw troops right and i guess in his defense in the boer, the Brits did have some pretty impressive cavalry operations against the Boers, but they weren't in an organized military. No. Once the British won the Conventional War, Haig's unit was disbanded, and instead he was placed in an all-arms unit in charge of policing the greater Johannesburg area, during which haig employed the standard uk policy at the time a scorched earth policy against anyone possibly harboring fighters and throwing the women and children in brutal concentration camps

scorched earth motherfucker yeah yeah uh not only did he march people into machine gun fire throughout the first world war he also ran concentration camps solid fucking resume hero of the empire he was uh haig didn't invent the camps we'll give him credit for that um he just was following orders uh that was lord kitchener the overall commander for effort he but at no point did haig or really any other british commander ever say that we shouldn't be doing this um Since this is Imperial Britain, that kind of barbary was completely commonplace. For his war crimes, Haig was mentioned in dispatches four times and then promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in 1901. And mentioned in dispatches is an old-timey thing

where people would sing your praises and tell all the senior commanders, and in this case royalty, how great you are. And then he was promoted we're going to breeze through the interwar periods of haig's life because it just involves him dicking around in administration duty in india and rapidly getting promotions due to his previous war service became the largest he became the youngest major general in the british army in 1904 so in comparison i was a specialist for nearly a decade. So, Haig could go right to hell. Apparently, the only thing on my resume that was missing was machine gunning native troops and running a concentration camp.

Should have fucking studied history earlier. I know. In 1914, the Great War began, and Haig's job was to organize the British Expeditionary Force under the command of Field Marshal Sir John French. To his credit at the time, somehow Haig was the only realist about the situation that the world found itself in. Everybody else was talking about how the war would be over by Christmas, it'd be over in a month, you know, once the Huns got their nose bloody, they'd stop fighting, it'd be over in a matter of weeks. Haig openly stated the war would undoubtedly last years and require an army in the millions of men that Britain just didn't have. That would be about the last time during World War I

that Haig was right about anything. So we have to point it out before we pass it and enter all the awfulness. In the opening stages of the war, Haig spent his time complaining about his commanders and his French allies. I know it's a little confusing. His superior was John French, and they're working with the French, so I'm going to do my best. There's no confusion there.

Don't worry. The French, the person, gets fired pretty quickly. After two weeks of constant infighting between British and French commanders, Haig was moved to Ypres. Am I pronouncing that right? Ypres? That sounds right. Yeah. I don't know how to say it.

My French was not strong. Even though I took two years of it, I learned absolutely nothing. Just like the amount of Spanish that I know from living in Texas for ten years. Same-sies. Yeah. And you're Mexican. Which is really sad. Family reunions suck.

It was at Ypres there that Haig should have learned the importance of mass artillery fire. The British Chief of Staff Falkenhayn brought 250 heavy guns, which later on in World War I, 250 heavy guns is absolutely nothing. But here in 1914, it is a lot. It is more than the brits could bring to bear it through the entire bef and the germans brought it to one battle and then he quickly turned the british troops into bloodshed piss the germans almost won almost but pulled back when their casualties began to mount. If they would have kept pushing, they totally would have won.

They would have broken the British line, and World War I would probably look a little bit different. Oh, yeah. But it impressed an important and horrible lesson on Haig, that attacks must be kept up until there was a chance of success. And then the attacks cannot be broken. If this is not foreshadowing of how millions of british people would soon die um you'll learn uh the battle reduced haig's corps from 18 000 men to just 3 000 men in two weeks so the germans definitely worked them over but at this point the war the

german commanders still apparently cared about losses i mean don't quote me on that it's world war one it was always awful but it was all big clusterfuck yeah mean, don't quote me on that. It's World War I. It was always awful. That was all big clusterfuck. Yeah. But you don't see any other kind of going, my losses are way too high. We need to stop this. That doesn't happen at any other point of World War I. You just keep smashing your face against the rock

until the rock breaks or you die. After a huge Russian victory at Lodz, people began to think that the war was about to be over. The horrible reality of war in the Western Front hadn't really set in yet. Nobody had really started carving in the thousands of miles of trench lines. And Haig blamed several failed attacks on poor staff work and scheduling. Haig still didn't quite understand the importance of artillery, haig still didn't quite understand the importance of artillery as during the battle of all right another french word here nuva nuva chapelle i believe he's dave's cousin sounds good yeah

haig ordered a short quick bombardment even though henry rollinson a subordinate corps commander suggested a much longer one after a short 35 minute bombardment because haig always got his way bf ground forces attacked along a small front the battle lasted for three days though it had become obvious to rollison at midway through the first day that the german line simply was not going to break and they should probably stop the attack haig and said send in his reserves haig lost 12 000 men for the gain of a few thousand meters that he quickly lost right back to the germans and pretty much wiped his hands as pants called success and walked away um looks like my working here is done and when french pointed out that you

did absolutely nothing here that is field marshal french not the french uh point out that you did fucking nothing um haig quickly tried to find other ways to blame uh anybody except himself kind of like our good friend codorna did last week um he blamed everybody and uh when rollison tried to point out like hey asshole i try to tell you that we need to bombard these people a whole lot more um well there's a caveat that they simply couldn't uh due to the shell critical shell shortage that england was having they just had no artillery shells um and everybody knew about it to include the germans and uh french kind of had the idea that they should sit back wait for munitions production to kick up before they try to, you know, say, lose 12,000 men so they can have some kind of artillery support.

And you're going to see that this is something that happens time and time again with Haig is that he just goes and does it anyway. And he nearly fired Rawlinson, which would have destroyed Rawlinson's career and, you know, made Rawlinson terrified to say anything against Haig ever again. And that is going to be why Rollinson ends up crying in a van in Passchendaele when he sees what Haig did. Because he doesn't have the balls to say, hey, sir, you're stupid. Please stop. He would have got fired and all the attacks would have happened anyway, but at least he wouldn't be complicit. He would have got fired and all the attacks would have happened anyway, but at least he wouldn't be complicit.

French Committer Joseph Joffre said that the Battle of Nouvelle-Chapelle was a success that led to nothing. And if anybody knows about successes that lead to nothing, it's probably Joseph Joffre. It's pretty much the only thing he was really good at was not losing the war. But the opening stage of the war, like I said, led to a critical surge in munitions in England, which turned to a political mess. It caused a complete downfall of the liberal government in May 19, 1915, and led to Haig to begin getting involved in politics, which is something he always preached against before was don't get involved in politics, you're a military officer. He went and did it anyway.

Haig was invited to meet with Kitchener himself and the King of England, where instead of talking about the realities of the front, because Haig clearly couldn't grasp the realities of the front, he took the opportunity to shit-talk Field Marshal French and try to get him fired. He succeeded in that the King and Kitchener both said it would be best if our correspondence kept secret, meaning from French. So it was already, he did a really good job at trying to get his superior fired for his

failures. Not that French was a great field commander either, but it's kind of like, I don't know, who do you root for in this situation? But it's kind of like, I don't know, who do you root for in this situation? Haig told them that French is like a bottle of soda water, which I'm going to assume is a sick burn or something in old-timey England, because I don't know what my feelings would be hurt by that.

Like a bottle of soda water? Like a bottle of soda water. I don't know. I don't know. He said he is incapable of thinking and coming to a reasoned decision. That is rich coming from fucking Haig. Right. So after the defeat at the Battle of Loos, where Haig ordered the Germans to be gassed and once again wasted his reserves long after the battle had already been decided,

the blame fell squarely on Field Marshal French again as the overall commander. French was fired, and Haig became the overall BEF commander on December 10th. Fun fact. The Battle of Lucifer, Rudyard Kipling's son Jack died. So, not so fun fact. And it should be noted that Kipling started writing much more defeatist poetry and everything after that. But Kipling's son

was only in the war because of kipling right yeah his son was never going to be allowed in the military because he was pretty much blind and uh they didn't take anybody yeah they didn't they didn't take anybody that wore glasses back then um and kipling being an already a popular literary figure in england used his power and his connections to get his kid a commission as a lieutenant. And then went missing and using his connections again after the war. He started interviewing people from the Irish Guards unit that he was in, and they all said, yeah, at loose it was raining. And knocked his glasses off, and he wandered into a machine gun nest.

So good job, Dad. Jeez. Yeah. So in 1916, Haig saw the German buildup near Verdun. If that name is not familiar to anybody, it became one of the most deadly battles in human history on February 14th. He thought it was nothing but a feint for a later attack on the BEF, and he told Joseph

Joffre the same thing. The Verdun offensive came on the 21st and would nearly destroy the French completely. Joffre begged the British to attack somewhere else, anywhere else, to relieve their destroyed armies still attempting to defend Verdun. Haig wanted to wait until mid-August before launching the attack, which caused joffrey to fly into a violent rage and say quote in august the french army will cease to exist leading to haig to shut him up by giving him brandy until he got drunk couldn't have picked the worst time yeah um and haig even though he got him drunk and cooled joffre's rage, he didn't actually change his mind. The French army began

to fall apart completely. Their terrifying losses wiped out entire basic training classes in one day and it caused entire regiments to mutiny completely and refuse to fight. So Haig finally decided to speed up his preparations and become the largest battle of the entire Western Front of

World War I. On July 1st, 1916, Haig ordered nearly 2 million men into battle, starting the Battle of the Somme. The main assault was a massive, four-day-long artillery barrage that consisted of over 1 million shells meant to destroy landmines, cut barbed wire, and turn the German defenses into nothing but dust and corpses. It accomplished none of those things. This was the biggest bombardment in military history. The biggest. And still, nothing happened to the Germans.

Not a thing. No, they were pretty much just... I mean, a great example of that is the documentary the documentary the psalm they had entire like apartment complexes right 40 feet under 40 feet underground completely encased in concrete and the brits knew about them and there was they didn't have any kind of technology at the time that would have pierced the ground and gotten into the where the people were sleeping um but they did it anyway. And probably the dumbest thing about it is they were all shrapnel rounds. Two-thirds of the rounds fired during the bombardment of the Somme were shrapnels, those little ball, lead ball rounds.

That do absolutely nothing to barbed wire, landmines, and fortifications. Which were the entire point. And that's two-thirds of the one that actually exploded um because remember the shell shortage we talked about earlier well the uk ramped up its production just like the ministry of defense asked or the ministry of war um but to give you an idea of how big this bombardment was uh the british guns were almost wheel to wheel for 18 miles. Holy shit. Yeah, it's a shit ton. All the way from

the French part of the fucking song to the end of the British fucking artillery. That's nuts. This is all coming from a great documentary. I really do recommend it. Lions Led by Donkeys is kind of where we got the name from. So I guess we have to think for two things.

Yes, we do. So the shell shortage, which the UK had busted its ass to try to fix, its production ramped up like crazy. But the quality of the shells went way down. It's roughly estimated that a quarter of them simply did not explode. So the shells that were flying of those million, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, were just flying pieces of shit that just did nothing. The ones that did explode, like Nick said, were shrapnel shells and did absolutely nothing.

This ensured that the British and French that were running across No Man's Land were going right into German rifles and machine guns. And I didn't actually mean running. Yeah, I was about to say. Slow down. I meant marching like they're fighting in line units in the 1800s. Haggad ordered his soldiers to walk slowly across no man's land into what he knew was going to be hundreds of thousands or millions of German soldiers in a storm of artillery

because he thought it'd be easier for unit commanders to control them. The French, on the other hand, just down the line, were almost all veterans of Verdun because the way that the French army operated that they would rotate units in and out of the hot zones which they were the only people who did that a unit would spend a week two weeks at Verdun and rotate out so that meant well there's a downside of that that every single surviving member of the French military effectively had to earn his right to survival through Verdun. But it also meant that instead of fielding a raw army like the Brits were, which was Lord Kitchener's new army.

An untested unit. Yeah. Everybody. It was effectively, I mean, their training, they didn't even have rifles to train with or uniforms. Yeah, the growth was so big and they weren't expecting that big of a growth where they were just wearing the civilian uniforms on their back and using canes and broomsticks as their rifles for training and then they hit

fucking the continent and they're like all right let's go do this massive offensive with these dudes who barely have been soldiers for 10 weeks. Let's go do this war thing. Yeah. And I'm curious how many of them had actually fired the rifles before they got to the Somme. And how many of them actually got to fire their weapons at the Somme. Not a lot. The first wave was 60,000.

I think half died. I wouldn't be surprised at all. Well, the French, who had survived Verdun at that point and were now deployed at the Somme, knew better and didn't do any of the things that the British did. They didn't use timetables. They didn't march shoulder to shoulder. They didn't do anything, which you can clearly see in their casualty numbers. And the first day of the Somme alone, 57,470 casualties in the British Army, including 19, 19 000 killed and they gained just three miles of territory i mean the french gains were just as pointless but they lost significantly

less people right and that's just from that absolute refusal to change tactics and walking like a fucking stroll right no yeah like uh a british rifleman in the documentary reflects uh from a speech given by the corps commander after you go over you will be more or less on a picnic and then he says what a load of bullshit he told so you could tell a lot of those men did not like their higher command at all after the Somme. They probably respected them beforehand because the old imperial British type shit. And then as soon as they realized, like, oh, a whole generation just got slaughtered. Oh, yeah. I imagine after that they lost faith in, like, the cause, their leaders,

and probably only had loyalty for the guys they were with. I mean, if you think about modern-day armies, that takes one person getting killed on a stupid mission, and everybody's already bitter and jaded. This dude watched however many tens of thousands die around him. It's hard to think about. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that three-mile gain for all that loss,

that was just one day of carnage. The Somme would grind on for 140 days of unending destruction before Germany finally quit the battle and pulled back, their army completely exhausted. The British government was obviously horrified by the battle and had a policy that you really can't argue with, and that was simply, no more Sommes. No more Sommes.

We just can't handle that anymore and it's it should be noted and it's not really all that surprising because of the carnage of world war one and but if you look at all the wars that britain had been involved in her giant empire at the time you know the sun never sets in the british empire type stuff um the losses of the psalm at that point on the first day were greater never sets in the british empire type stuff um the losses of the psalm at that point on the first day were greater than the losses of british military casualties in recorded history combined and that's insane fucking mind-blowing so the no more psalms policy haig obviously disagreed surprise in 1917 the british government wanted to sit back and rest

while the americans who had just officially entered the war to land on the continent in force to be before they go on the offensive again haig apparently unable to see the the version of the war where he wasn't ordering millions of men to their deaths all the time outright refused and um haig planned another attack near the small belg Belgian city of Ypres again. And he was the only one who acted like he won the attack. Because he was. The British Prime Minister, George Lloyd, and the French Chief of Staff both said it was a terrible idea.

my mind here because lloyd george will go on um to write his memoirs that he spends a healthy portion of his shit talking hag um he was a fucking prime minister right he could have just been like no you're not doing that it's not gonna happen uh but he never did he he didn't have the guts or the political willpower or anything to stop him. So, Haig shrugged, said fuck it, and launched the Battle of Passchendaele on 31 July 1917. The battle was marked by constant pouring rain, turning the battlefield into a muddy hellscape. So terrible was the rain and terrain that Haig's chief of staff, Rawlinson, the gentleman I was talking about earlier, was being driven to the front. And after seeing the field or poorly asked his driver,

good God, did we really send men to fight in this and broke down into tears. Now this is the only rumor, one that Hague's defenders call absurd because of course their field marshal know the conditions of the battlefield this suggests anything other other than that is just insane well it's actually worse if they're right and haig did know and did it anyway um the shell holes were so deep and uh full of flooded water at some point canadian and australian soldiers would fall into them and drown and nobody would fish them out uh the shell holes were full of waterlogged corpses and people taking cover right next to the waterlogged corpses. Hey, consider the battle,

which had devolved in a little more than a muddy hand-to-hand clusterfuck, a total victory at the cost of another 300,000 British casualties. And when I say British here, I mean Commonwealth. There was Anzac soldiers. Australian, New Zealand. Right. There's a little bit of a mythos around the battle in Canada where they're saying this is where the Canadian nation was born because they were still a territory. Right.

Well, not exactly a territory, but they're still part of the Commonwealth. Right. And there was also another large myth around the battle where a Canadian soldier was captured by the Germans and then hoisted up and crucified with barbed wire and full view of Canadian lines. And it simply didn't happen. It's a complete myth. One, it would be completely unlike German soldiers at the time. I mean, the Germans did some awful shit in Belgium during World War I, but the wholesale slaughter of prisoner of war really didn't happen on the Western Front like that.

Instead of winning the war, Haig actually nearly lost the Allies of the War completely in 1917 by doing this. In late 1917, early 1918, the Germans were playing their own offensive. And if you remember the dates here, the Russians were no longer in the war. So dozens of divisions were able to be flexed over the Western Front, where before the Germans and the Western Front were beaten, exhausted, and held together by duct tape and 550 cord.

Now there's dozens of new divisions getting trucked over there. Russia left the game. Yeah. Russia took their ball and went home and had a deal thrown. Disconnected. Yeah. They pulled the Italy. They decided they had to really figure themselves out there for a while

and go on to become the USSR. So not the greatest timeline there. So the army on the other side of the trench had been beaten to shit from Haig's constant attacks and it was in no shape to weather this new German offensive, which would be called the Kaiserschlacht. Um, Prime Minister George trusted Haig so little he refused to send him new troops, afraid he would just run off and get them killed.

So when Ludendorff's attack did come come the British lost more ground than they'd gained in any of Haig's offensives combined sure is that Haig's fault? yeah he was the field commander was it also the Prime Minister's fault? yeah but at the same time this

I mean I haven't seen this kind of like adversary relationship between the two until like the Korean War when MacArthur and Truman probably wanted to strangle each other. But you know what happened? MacArthur got fucking fired.

MacArthur went fucking off the deep end. Yeah. Truman said, nah. Could you imagine a world where like the military commander can effectively just

bend the prime minister over and do whatever he wants? Yeah. If that would have happened in the situation in the Korean War, we would have nuked China we would have been fucked

and so because the Prime Minister was so gutless Kaiserslautern happened and the only reason why it stopped is fresh American reinforcements finally showed up and pulled his ass out of the fire as the German military machine finally sputtered and broke unable to capitalize on all their gains

they just overextended themselves. Even then, in the end, after all of his pointless attacks, he was unable to force the Germans from positions they'd held from 1914. Mercifully, the Great War came to an end in 1918, and Haig finally retired, leaving millions of dead soldiers in his wake. In retirement, he was completely unapologetic for his actions during the war and maintained that his losses, his forces were suffered were totally acceptable and necessary under the conditions. I'll say one good thing about the man.

During his retirement, he did work tirelessly for veterans organizations, mostly to the benefit of the wounded and the disabled from the Great War. But this is kind of like those stupid paintings that Bush is doing of all the wounded and the disabled from the Great War. But this is kind of like those stupid paintings that Bush is doing of all the dead and wounded soldiers. You can't sit around and mope about the horrors of war if you're the ones who fucking created them. You just can't. You're a fucking idiot. Now, don't go thinking Haig had actually changed before he died. In 1926, he was still thinking about the future of war. And if you were thinking of the future of wars horse-based, you'd be wrong, but you'd also be Douglas Haig.

He said, quote, I believe the value of the horse and the opportunity for the horse in the future is likely to be as great as ever. Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the man and the horse. And I feel sure as time goes on, you'll find just as much use and the horse and i feel sure as time goes on you'll find just as much use for the horse the well-bred horse as you have ever done in the past that's right even 10 fucking years after the psalm this dude was still saying horses were better than tanks even fucking patton saw that horses were useless after a certain time period. Yeah. In World War I.

Yes. Everybody else saw this. He was like, holy fuck, thanks for the shit. Yeah. Even Cadorna didn't hold on to horses. I mean, his troops had probably eaten them because they were starving to death. But, I mean, he didn't hold on to that stupid shit. I mean, the really cool thing was General Ludendorff.

Ludendorff, yeah. really cool thing was uh general uh ludendorff ludendorff yeah he's the one who i would say coined the nickname to uh hey uh that the british were lions led by a donkey yeah which is awesome and it just like i think we said last episode when the Austrians had to feel sorry for the Italians. It's kind of scary that the enemy can see how terrible you are. It takes an enemy to go, holy fuck. Yeah. Like, why are you still doing this? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Haig finally mercifully died in 1928. Yeah, Haig finally mercifully died in 1928. And because history isn't fucking fair, his funeral was attended by over 200,000 people, many of them soldiers who fought under his command in World War I. A veteran of World War I and a man who was wounded at the Somme probably summed up Haig the best. He said, quote,

Haig was a man of supreme egoism and utter lack of scruple, who, in his overweening ambition, sacrificed hundreds of thousands of men, a man who betrayed even his most devoted assistants, as well as the government in which he served, a man who gained his ends by trickery of a kind that was not merely immoral, but criminal. And he was fucking earled. I don't even know what that means, but he is the first Earl of Hague. Earl. Yeah. It's very British. I don't know. But

it was only until very recently people actually started being like, wait, no. No, he was terrible. Yeah, no. Yeah. And it's not historical revisionism. It's, you take off the rose tinted glasses and you start to realize he was a yeah no yeah and it's not historical revisionism it's you take off the rose tinted glasses and you start to realize he's a piece of shit right because at that time i guess people saw it as a i don't know if this is the right way to say a necessary evil like a means to an end right which i mean he's like only that way if you compare him to Falkenhayn and Jofra and the commanders of his era.

If you just look at statistics. Right. Because everybody was losing a lot of people, sure. But they were winning. I mean, Haig won some battles. Obviously, he would have been fired because French lost a lot of people too. And he finally got fired. But, you know, he was losing a ton of people, but he never adapted.

And we left it out. But, you know, the Battle of Cambrai, when we finally broke through the Hindenburg Line, he deployed tanks for the first time in math numbers. But that's not because he wanted to he wanted to use fucking horses right and he wanted to use horses to break a hardened defense line and everybody was like no no no we have these new tanks we're gonna use the tanks the cap will break through bro don't worry right and so um instead of listening to the enemy they were new inventions so nobody was entirely sure of how to field them but everybody at this point in time

was aware of how tractors worked and that was what it was it was a giant tractor right so he chose to deploy in the terrain least suited for it and his low flood lands and they half them fucking broke down and that's probably why on his deathbed he's still talking about how cool horses were the first industrialized war and he could not capitalize on anything you know they wanted to stay on the whole fucking old trail and they said um his one of his instructors in staff college and the name escapes me because i didn't care to look it up but somebody said that his instruction of being so tightly bound to doctrine ended up is why he ended up so refusing to change like he was and it was his fault too but you can't

give him blame because there was you know 60 other people who had gone to be colonels and generals in that class. And none of them probably would have done that. That's just a complete lack of critical thinking. So I guess it's almost 40 minutes here. We can stop trash talking to dead, I suppose. You know, it's almost 40 minutes here. We can stop trash-talking the dead, I suppose. So, write and review us on iTunes or whatever other device you use to listen to podcasts now that we finally have these up there.

You can find us at Twitter at the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. Follow me on Twitter at jcas99. Follow Nick at Twitter at nickcasM1. Follow Nick at Twitter at NickCassM1 And we'll eventually get an Instagram posted So we can share stupid history memes with everybody And follow both of us Follow both of us on Twitter

And you can find out when we're getting massacred by the British And Holdfast or whatever stupid historical video game That we're currently playing and being terrible at And see you next time Later