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To What Extent Do You Agree with the View That Douglas Haig Deserves His Reputation as the ‘Butcher of the Somme’?

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To What Extent Do You Agree with the View That Douglas Haig Deserves His Reputation as the ‘Butcher of the Somme’?
Haig was born in Edinburgh on 19 June 1861. He was born into a wealthy family that had good business. When Haig was younger he went to a good school and in 1884 went to Royal Military Academy at Sand Hurst. He first served as a Calvary Commander; however this experience was not useful in the battle of Somme because it was trench warfare which was a new kind of war so he couldn’t use the same tactics. He was also a celebrated commander of the Boer war, but the Africans were weaker and were poorer equipped. The Battle of Somme started in July 1st 1916. It was planned as a joint French and British operation. The idea originally came from the French Commander-in-Chief called Joseph Joffre and Haig accepted it. The battle was launched on the 1st July 1916. The French achieved there objective but whilst doing this there were 7000 casualties however the British weren’t successful and on the first day they had 60 000 casualties, including 20 000 dead however in the final result the British did win. The main plan of action was to kill all the German soldiers and destroy the German trenches. Many people give General Haig the reputation as “The Butcher of the Somme” but many people would disagree with this. I think that he shouldn’t get the reputation as “The Butcher of the Somme” but he did do a lot of things not as well as he should have done. There are many reasons why people blame General Haig for the failure of the battle. Throughout the battle Haig continued to use the same tactics over and over again even thought the tactic kept failing. The objective of this tactic was to wear the German army down. Another one of Haig’s failing plans was to get the soldiers to walk slowly so they could stay in a straight line towards the enemies, because of this it was easy an easy target for the German Gunners, which resulted in more casualties and deaths. The attacks weren’t very well rehearsed and said to be unrealistic so the soldiers weren’t properly ready. General
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