Role of Douglas Haig in 1918

Field Marshal The Right Honourable Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig KT GCB OM GCVO KCIE ADC
Born	19 June 1861 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, Scotland
Died	29 January 1928 (aged 66) London, England

This article is about the role of Douglas Haig in 1918. In 1918, during the final year of the First World War, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig was Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front. Haig commanded the BEF in the defeat of the German Army's Spring Offensives, the Allied victory at Amiens in August, and the Hundred Days Offensive, which led to the war-ending armistice in November 1918.

On 1 January Derby told Haig that he saved Robertson from the sack by threatening resignation. He also hinted to Haig that the government wanted the removal of Launcelot Kiggell (“a tired man”) as BEF Chief of Staff, and that General Butler, Haig’s preferred choice, was not acceptable. Haig had an interview with the King (2 January) to pick up his Field Marshal’s baton. Haig appears to have been placing too much faith in recent German peace feelers ("Germany is now ready, we are told, to give all we want in these respects"), now known not have been seriously intended. He told the King that British soldiers (who, in a large conscript army, now included men from “all classes in the nation, and many are most intelligent”) needed to be told what they were fighting for. In Haig’s view, Britain should keep to her original war aims - the defence of France and liberation of Belgium - not try to gain Alsace-Lorraine for France or Trieste for Italy. In Haig's view the “democratising of Germany”, about to be publicly reiterated by Lloyd George as a British aspiration in his Caxton Hall speech (5 January), was likely to destabilise Germany, as the fall of the Tsar in March 1917 had destabilised Russia, and was not “worth the loss of an Englishman” (like many Scots of his era, Haig often referred to Britain or even the British Empire as “England”).

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