"Haig's Command a Reassessment?" Topic

This has popped up on Naval & Military Press for £2.50 GBP. Anyone read it? The blurb suggests it is a hatchet job on Haig's using more "accurate" Canadian & Australian sources to "prove" the official histories were doctored to put Haig and the British High Command in a better light. Is this simply character assassination dressed up as history or does the author have something useful to say?

I've not seen it but a historian colleague of mine has and suggests it falls in the first of those two camps.

By now, whether anyone has anything useful to say about Haig depends entirely on how you feel about him in the first place.

Is this simply character assassination dressed up as history…?

Which tells me how you feel.

These days you aren't classed as an 'historian' unless you have at least one character assassination published, either that or a deification of someone others have assassinated.

Personally I like facts, boring as they are – then I make up my own mind – unfashionable and certainly not very entertaining, possibly unpublishable too !!

Which tells me how you feel.

Always dangerous to make assumptions. That's the line that the write up takes whether it is my personal take or not remains to be seen! :-)

I think I've heard of this one. I believe the author has been selective in his choice of evidence to prove his point.

It's rubbish. The supposedly more truthful records in Australia and Canada don't exist, and his use of those that do exist was mendacious to the point of dishonest. That's a professional opinion as a professor of military history who did a forensic search of his claims when the book was first published in the early 1990s. Haig is a polarising figure still (though interestingly, was much less so when he was alive), and it is possible to mount a sustained professional critique (see J.P. Harris for example) without resorting to falsification and fabrication.

Oh, that's disappointing. I read it a few weeks back and was somewhat shocked at the total ineptitude on display and fairly confident that the book was well-researched and a reasonable reassessment based on the sources mentioned.

Artaxerxes, what sort of analysis did you do, and how did you find that the Canadian and Australian documents were non-existent?

I work in an Australian university – I went to the archives, called up the files and read the documents he claimed supported his thesis. In many places he had run texts from several documents together and passed them off as a single item, or misquoted or quoted selectively in ways that altered the meaning when in extenso and in context. I checked with Canadian colleagues who confirmed the same there.

I went to a number of seminars by the author – they were replete with barking mad conspiracy theories and all sorts of bizarre and outlandish claims. I'm not a Haig lover, but he deserves to be treated fairly. On the other hand, I hate bad history that passes itself off as something that it isn't – it does a disservice to everyone, especially students.

Several historians published refutations of the book – if you want to follow it up go have a rummage on line. Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson did one in a British periodical, but I don't have the reference to hand.

I will. Thank you.

It's an interesting read but completely over-eggs the thesis, even though I'm no fan of Haig's. He's clearly out to 'get' Haig. Prior & Wilson, or Gary Sheffield, provide much more balanced accounts. link

Read also the same authors book on the Dardenelles if you want to see some more "interesting" theories.

Poor value even at £2.50 GBP I would suggest.

Which author do you mean Etranger? Winter, or Prior?

'Winter', a somewhat different take on ANZAC and one subject to the same criticisms IMHO.

Robin Prior is always worth reading, with or without the equally good Trevor Wilson!

The work of Prior and Wilson is usually thoroughly researched. Their conclusions must be treated with caution though. As a famous military historian once said of 'Passchendaele: The Untold Story' – "Never was a book more aptly named…"

Robert