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Matt,
I find it very hard to believe that Haig was taught in his early militay career to "use up" mens lives like he did at The Somme, Fromelles, Pozieres etc. As Jim stated that even the slowest of minds would realise that those high casualty rates could not be sustained.
Haig then went ahead and butchered more men because he wanted to end the war before the U.S. got to France, what a butcher, to kill so many brave men to satisfy his ego, he was nothing more than a murderer.
So many Australians who had lived through that other brilliant piece of English strategy, Gallipoli, lost their lives on the Western Front, the following is an extract from a Private Williams written in 1918;
"On the way out I looked at some of the Australian dead. There were some people at home whom I wished could see them too. Each one of a group of three wore the brass A on their red and black colour patches which denoted that the wearers had served at Anzac on Gallipoli, and above the cuff of their right sleeve were the red chevrons of 1914 service. A sergeant....had a golden wound stripe on his left sleeve and one other wore a similar badge. We covered with their waterproof sheets these three men of the peerless First Australian Division and went on our way with heavy hearts."
It was not only the Australians that suffered Haig's bloodlust it was all the "colonials", they were mainly used as shock troops, and most of them knew it. Surely this lunatic would have learnt some sort of new stratagy by 1918. A whole generation wiped out by Haig's military genius.
To try and defend this man by way of using his antiquated battlefield stratagies is verging on the ridiculous, he did nothing more than try to fight a war of attrition, and then tried to win the war before a former colony entered the war and helped to win it.
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