#THE HUNDRED DAYS SERIES#

There is much here which could be debated, but I wish to concentrate on the Hundred Days and the claim that the British Army defeated Imperial Germany in what might be considered its greatest ever victory. Haig is credited with ensuring that Britain’s main war-effort was concentrated on the Western Front, while the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, looked to ‘get rich quick’ schemes in Italy, the Balkans, and Palestine.ĭespite having to accept the overall command of the French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Haig, we are told, insisted on his own plans, winning the Frenchman over. That victory, revisionist historians maintain, grew out of his previous attrition strategy of 1916-1917, when, at the Somme and Passchendaele, while not achieving a breakthrough, he had substantially weakened the enemy.

#THE HUNDRED DAYS SERIES#

The crisis in French morale revealed by the mutinies of spring 1917 following the debacle of the Chemin des Dames Offensive, and the fact that the newly arrived American units were not yet combat-experienced and battle-hardened, left the British Expeditionary Force as the only army capable of defeating Germany.įurther, while it is admitted that Haig was no genius, the argument runs that by 1918 he was able to co-ordinate successfully all elements of military force – artillery, armour, airpower, and infantry – to achieve a decisive victory in the series of operations known collectively as ‘The Hundred Days’. The argument is that the British Army followed a learning curve during the war, which meant that, by 1918, it was in prime position. Whereas histories of the First World War were once dominated, in Britain at least, by the ‘lions led by donkeys’ stereotypes of Oh! What a Lovely War and Blackadder, the pendulum has today swung back, behind what was once regarded as the ‘revisionist’ school.

Materiel: motorised British machine-gunners move forwards during the Hundred Days Offensive.

The hundred days