Why Did Haig Break The Somme

Haig’s strategic choice of a massive frontal attack was in furtherance of his notion of a “Big Push” that would break the trench war stalemate. The greatest artillery barrage the world had ever known preceded it. The 3,000,000 shells were supposed to destroy the German barbed wire so Allied troops could walk through virtually unmolested. That did not happen, and because Haig had no effective intelligence capability, the first to learn that truth were attacking troops who died by the thousands on the wire.
The Germans suffered massive losses at the Somme as well, but as defenders the resulting stalemate operated in their favour. In the old game of warfare, time was on their side. In the 19th century mindset, and especially after Verdun and the Somme, it was reasonable for Germany to assume that eventually this war would end in the manner of earlier ones.
The temptation of a Big Push strategy was understandable. The war was going nowhere. What is not understandable is the means of implementing the strategy that Haig would come to favour, both as a way to put a better face on the Somme carnage and as a way forward. It was not simply a strategic error. The moral issue was Haig’s
He decided that the German body count was bound to be inadequate if his own casualties were too low. He was prone to angry outbursts when too few of his own people had died, once deploring in his diary that one of his divisions had only lost 1,000 men that day. The death of 5,000 of his own soldiers each day was an acceptable indicator that the Germans must be losing more. His generals began to refer to the figure as “normal wastage”. British prime minister Lloyd George deplored Haig’s strategy. He wrote: We could certainly beat the Germans if we could only get Haig to join them. Haig’s political connections, however, rendered Lloyd George powerless to replace