WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

Taranaki Daily News, 13 June 1930, Page 9

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

EARL HAIG AND MARSHAL FOCH. London, June 2. ■ Field-Marshal Earl Haig had been in supreme command of the Allies on the Western front from 1914, the war might have ended in 1917,” suggests Sir Harry Robinson, who was Times correspondent during the war, writing in the Nineteenth Century Review. Sir Harry declares that it was Earl Haig’s plan that ended the war in 1918. Without Haig’s advice Marshal Foch would have allowed the fighting to go on through the summer of 1919, and the writer asks whether it Is not time that the world was made to realise that the essential features of the plan were far more Haig’s than Foch’s. “Whatever vision or genius they contained were Haig’s contribution to comparatively crude proposals,” Sir Harry declares. He adds that if Earl Haig had commanded all the armies on the Western front from the start of the war the Nivoile fiasco of 1917 would not have occurred; there would not have been any French mutiny or deterioration of morale which put out the French Army as a fighting force for the whole of 1917 and made it unreliable for the remainder of the war; and the German attack of 1918 would have found the front fully manned and ready. “Earl Hkig changed Foch’s plans by refusing to make a frontal attack on the impregnable Royes-Chaulnes lines in August, 1918, thereby converting Foch’s series of local attacks into a far-see-ing plan for breaking the German resistance,” says the writer. Sir Harry also declares that , the French were sluggish in the final advance, their transport was inferior, foot insufficient and treatment of the wounded shocking. He severely criticises British politicians, whom he accuses of having been jealous of Haig.