The Great Wolfe

History is always made by those who are prepared to hazard the bold moves, the risk takers of all kinds. In the annals of British military history there was perhaps none bolder than General James Wolfe, the two-hundredth and fiftieth anniversary of whose death and transfiguration fell earlier this month. The attack on the French stronghold of Quebec, after a totally unconventional amphibious assault, opposed by all of his colonels, was an achievement of strategic brilliance. It brought an end to Anglo-French imperial rivalry in the Americas, with an outright victory for the British. There was, however, an irony in this victory: for in being rid of the French, of fear of the French and their murderous Indian allies, the Americans no longer needed the British. Canada may have begun, but America was lost.

Even so, Wolfe’s victory was not fleeting. He was indirectly one of the founding fathers of the United States, a contention that some might dispute. But what is beyond dispute is the simple fact that Wolfe, by his victory on the Plains of Abraham, established a lasting Anglo-Saxon hegemony in North America. Yes, there have been disputes between England and America since, at one stage breaking into outright war, but a common ancestry, a common language, shared commercial interests and shared legal values have meant that genuine community of inertest developed between the two nations. In the late 1890s when Bismarck was asked in an interview what he thought would have the greatest impact on the course of the coming century he replied without hesitation, “The fact that North America speaks English.”

And so it was. If it had not been for North America, for the United States, Anglo-Saxon democracy, threatened in turns by Nazism and Communism, may very well have perished from the earth. This, to my mind, is the true and lasting legacy of the Seven Years War, the true and lasting legacy of James Wolfe.

Douglas Haig-a Great Soldier

The role of Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig during the First World War continues to be a matter of abiding controversy that I do not suppose will ever be settled one way or the other, though I have a feeling that the pendulum is beginning to swing in his favour.

I have long been of the view that only the English could have developed such a negative view of arguably one of the nation's greatest commanders. His contribution in defeating the Germans was widely recognised at the time, by both the people of Britain and a number of foreign observers, including General Pershing.

It was several years later when the true extent of the sacrifice involved in winning the Great War began to sink in that a new mood of hostility and revisionism began to emerge. This developed over the years, finding popular expression in Joan Littlewoods’s stage production of Oh, What a Lovely War, as well as support in several academic monographs. The whole campaign of vilification seemed to be based on the assumption that Haig sacrificed men unnecessarily; that battles were fought simply for reasons of attrition, and nothing besides; that there was somehow another, less bloody, road to victory that Haig and his colleagues did not take.

But wars cannot be won without confronting the main enemy army in battle; and this, sad to say, is inevitably a gruesome process. Consider the example of U. S Grant, who in his campaign from the Wilderness to Petersburg in 1864 and 1865 was arguably responsible for the death of more Americans than any other man in history. At one battle alone, Cold Harbour in the early summer of 1864, the Union losses, as a proportion of the total strength of the Army of the Potomac, were as great as some of the battle losses on the western front. Grant could have taken the same road as McClellan, Burnside, Hooker and so many others before him and retreated back to his start line; but he pushed on to Richmond and victory.

Likewise, in the Second World War, Georgy Zhukov, the greatest of all the Soviet commanders, sustained losses at Stalingrad and Kursk quite as dreadful as those at the Somme and Passchendale. What other way was there of defeating the Germans?

Haig, like all other commanders at the time, began without really knowing what the new warfare, the great battle of men and materials, was really about: heavy prolonged artillery barrages were followed by unsupported and uncoordinated assaults on enemy positions, with the inevitable consequences in casualties.

However, by 1918, Haig had moved through a sharp learning curve, turning the British Army into one of the best in the world, a remarkable achievement when one considers that the country had little in the way of a military tradition, and in 1914 was only able to field four 'contemptible' divisions in France. In the final offensive of 1918 Haig, in carefully co-ordinating a creeping artillery barrage with measured and discreet infantry attacks, was able to advance in relentless stages against the German positions, covering more ground than the rest of the Allied armies. It was this that broke the back of the German army and assured victory.