Keith,

The ringing endorsements you suggest have been made of the British leadership include the following.

Churchill's judgement on Haig was he "wore down alike the manhood and the guns of the British Army almost to destruction"

The Military Historian Sir John Keegan wrote "On the Somme, (Haig)had sent the flower of British Youth to death or mutilation, at Passchendaele he had tipped the survivors into the slough of despond"

JFC Fuller wrote of Passchendaele "to persist ... in this tactically impossible battle was an inexcusable piece of pigheadness on the part of Haig"

The historian B H Liddell Hart (himself a veteran) wrote "He (Haig) was a man of extreme egoism and utter lack of scruple, who, to his overweening ambition, sacrificed hundreds of thousands of men. A man who betrayed even his most devoted assistants as well as the government he served. A man who gained his ends by trickery of a kind that was not merely immoral but criminal"

Praise indeed.