Haig's Command

[Len Trim]

Picked this up on ebay for a quid or so. Have read large chunks of it. The guy is so biased and some of the claims he makes of mass conspiracy between Edmonds and the military and the government etc. etc. re Haig's Diaries leads me to wonder if he was not just a little bit paranoid and certainly beyond being taken too seriously.

Len

[Muerrisch]

and yet his Death's Men is a very useful contribution.

[Jonathan Saunders]

As David has said Death's Men was an excellent work. Unfortunately his "Reassement" is virtually a piece of fiction - he obviously had a large axe to grind. I havent heard much of him since.

[Mark Hone]

A couple of years ago, in a similar thread, someone said that he was now in ill health. My old lecturer Corelli Barnett once described 'Haig's Command' as a book which seemed to have been written in a strange parallel universe where Haig was revered as a national hero but only because of a sinister conspiracy to conceal his incompetence.

[SiegeGunner]

Winter based much of this book on copies of documents which he claimed had been weeded from the British records but had survived in the archives of other Commonwealth countries. I don't know whether anyone has ever re-traced his steps through those archives to confirm his claims, but – without taking any position on Winter's conclusions – I think we should at least be grateful to him for drawing attention to the possibility that other 'lost' British material may still exist in archives outside the UK.

I have also heard that he may now be in poor health and living in straitened circumstances. In view of the acknowledged merit of his earlier work, it would therefore seem charitable to shoot at the message rather than the messenger.

[Jonathan Saunders]

Winter based much of this book on copies of documents which he claimed had been weeded from the British records but had survived in the archives of other Commonwealth countries. I don't know whether anyone has ever re-traced his steps through those archives to confirm his claims ...

I think I heard Gary Sheffield say at one of the lectures he gave, that Winter had been found to quote/use material out of context from many of these documents. As I recall, there were several repudiations published after the book was published, and you would think these were written after consulting the "new" material.

Regards,

Jonathan S