Free Republic

He is the most pilloried military leader in British history, caricatured as a butcher and a bungler who sent hundreds of thousands of men over the top to their deaths. Now a new biography pins a further damning indictment on Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig. Late in the final year of the First World War, it argues, he was pushing for a peace that would have left Germany as the real winner of the war. According to Dr J. P. Harris, senior lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Haig was not quite the uncaring monster of...

An Arizona man, previously identified as a person of interest in the Las Vegas shooting investigation, was charged by authorities Friday for manufacturing and selling armor-piercing bullets without having a proper license, according to court documents obtained by The Associated Press. Fingerprints belonging to Douglas Haig, 55, were found by investigators on a stash of unused armor-piercing ammo in the Mandalay Bay hotel room from which Stephen Paddock launched his bloody Oct. 1 assault, the documents said. It wasn’t noted if the bullets were the type used in the attack. Paddock, the lone gunman in the shooting, fired a stream...

The Arizona man who sold bullets to gunman Stephen Paddock was charged Friday with conspiracy to manufacture and sell armor-piercing ammunition without a license. Douglas Haig, 55, is the first person to be charged in connection with the Las Vegas shooting investigation. Paddock, 64, killed himself on Oct. 1 after fatally shooting 58 people and wounding hundreds more. Authorities have described him as the lone shooter. According to a criminal complaint, the FBI determined that “two unfired cartridges bearing Haig’s fingerprints” were found in Paddock’s suite at Mandalay Bay, and the cartridges are classified as armor-piercing ammunition. Court records show...

An Arizona man who sold ammunition to the gunman in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history was charged Friday with manufacturing armor-piercing bullets, according to court documents obtained by The Associated Press.

Search warrant records unsealed Tuesday show that in the first hours after the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, Las Vegas police and FBI agents identified two people of interest along with the lone gunman, Stephen Paddock. The name of one of those people is blacked out in the court records. The other is Paddock's girlfriend, Marilou Danley. She was in the Philippines at the time of the attack and is cooperating with investigators.

Many years ago, I went to the Central Lobby of the Houses of Parliament in London to keep an appointment with the almost picturesquely reactionary Conservative politician Alan Clark. He was the son of Kenneth (later Lord) Clark—the art historian and author of the Civilisation series—and the heir to Saltwood Castle, in Kent. He was also the author of a 1961 book, The Donkeys, which was a history of the British General Staff in the First World War. The title came from a famous comment that had supposedly been made at that epoch by a German military strategist. Told by...