LAST WEEKS OF THE WAR

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 225, 19 June 1929, Page 13

LAST WEEKS OF THE WAR

HAIG GIVEN CREDIT FOR FINAL OFFENSIVE.

Credit for initiating the decisive offensive in the last phase of the Great War is given to Field-Marshal Haig in a biography by Brigadier-General John Charteris, who was an intimate friend and colleague. He says: “It was Haig who, when warned by his own Government that they would not support him if ' his judgment erred, and when even _ Foch himself shrank from the responsibility of ordering the attack, took on his own shoulders without any hesitation the whole load, and launched the attack which shattered the great Hindenburg line, bared the German communications and laid open to his armies the country that stretched to the frontier and to Germany itself, It was Haig, and Haig alone, who, when Foch was still planning his campaign for 1919, when the responsible military advisers in London were telling the Cabinet that July, 1919, would be the critical time in the war, when the War Minister himself was calling the Commander-In-Chief ‘ridiculously optimistic,’ with complete confidence in his own careful judgment of the circumstances, definitely foresaw the result and designed and delivered th* Mow#"