Does Haig Deserve his Nickname "The Butcher of The Somme"?
             Feild Marshall Haig was appointed commander of the army on 10th of December 1915, he was fifty-four at the time and he had had a very succesful military career. Haig decided to attack the Germans at the river Somme in 1916 to attract German soldiers from the town of Verdun where they were fighting the French and had almost broken through. But even though he was victorous there was a very high casulty figure. It is our job to find out whether Feild Marshall Haig deserves his nickname "The Butcher of The Somme"
             Firstly he should have the name "The Butcher of the Somme" because of his attitudes towards modern technology and the way he threw away many soldiers lives. You see he despised the machine gun and said "it is a much overrated weapon that could be taken by pure grit and determination." with this attitude he gained very little land with the cost of many lives which he also did not care about, "Britain should be prepared for a high loss of life." Secondly the strategies he used were "the tactics of the stone age" says Lovat Fraser, this is because all he would do was send wave after wave of soldiers to face the enemy machine guns like they did in the olden times but when he was shown any alternatives he turned them down. This inflexibility was one of the main reasons why he was given his nickname. Thirdly he could have trained and prepared his troops in a more realistic way, in his training courses there were no shells, no mud, no enemy bullets no barbed wire and no trenches, this insufficient training meant that the soldiers were not properly familier with the warfare they had to face. Fourthly the methods he used were so outrageous that anyone who was told to do somthing like that today would turn around and tell him how stupid that was. He told his soldiers to "walk slowly in a line towards the enemy" giving the machine gunners an easy target. Lastly Ha...