Historians on the Battle of the Somme and Haig

Interpretation 1 — "Donkeys led by lions" (anti-Haig): The most popular view from the 1960s onwards was that ordinary soldiers (the "lions") were needlessly sacrificed by incompetent generals (the "donkeys"). Haig's failure to learn from the first day's disaster, the repetition of costly frontal assaults, and the appalling casualty figures — 420,000 British at the Somme — are cited as evidence. The TV series Blackadder Goes Forth (1989) popularised this interpretation for a generation.

Interpretation 2 — Haig as necessary strategist (revisionist): Revisionist historians, including John Terraine and Gary Sheffield, argue that Haig was doing the best that could be done given the technology, strategy, and political constraints of the time. The British Army was learning how to fight an entirely new kind of war. By 1918, it had developed combined-arms tactics — artillery, infantry, tanks, and aircraft working together — that won the Hundred Days offensive and ended the war. Haig's Somme casualties, on this view, were the painful but necessary cost of learning how to fight.

Why do they disagree? Historians differ partly because they emphasise different timescales (the catastrophic first day vs the eventual British victory in 1918) and partly because they apply different moral frameworks (was it ever acceptable to order men into known machine-gun fire? Was there a better option?). Both interpretations use genuine evidence — the controversy is about how to weigh it.