Abstract
Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart’s fame rests largely on his perceived role as a leading, if not the leading, theorist of modern armoured warfare. During the interwar period he supposedly envisaged, developed, and directly influenced the way armoured forces would be employed during the Second World War, first by the Germans in their brilliant ‘Blitzkrieg’ campaigns and, subsequently, by all other major armies. Yet in recent years historians have come to doubt and reject this picture, arguing that Liddell Hart (1895–1970) largely fabricated the accepted image of his role in, and influence upon, the development of the doctrine of armoured warfare. The consequences for his reputation have been devastating. Highly egocentric and vain, Liddell Hart carries much of the blame for this change of opinion. His almost compulsive manipulations of evidence for the purpose of self-aggrandizement could not in the long run withstand critical scrutiny and only cast doubt on everything he wrote about himself. Nonetheless, a further examination of the evidence reveals that the main charges levelled against him are misplaced and based on almost incredible historiographical slips on the part of his chief critic, John Mearsheimer. Indeed, once the distortions created by himself and by others are removed, the picture that emerges is not very far from the accepted one and is, on the whole, impressive as far as Liddell Hart is concerned.
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Notes
Basil Henry Liddell Hart, The Memoirs of Captain Liddell Hart (London, 1965), i. 86; idem, ‘Suggestions on the Future Development of the Combat Unit — the Tank as a Weapon of Infantry’, RUSI Journal (Nov. 1919), 666–9; Jim Harper to LH, 6 Sept. 1919: 7/1919/6 (references are to LH’s papers at King’s College, London). LH’s false pretence has been tacitly noted in
Robin Higham, The Military Intellectuals in Britain 1918–1939 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1966), 84–5;
Harold Winton, To Change an Army: General Sir John Burnett-Stuart and British Armoured Doctrine, 1927–1938 (Lawrence, Kansas, 1988), 38 n.67.
Only a couple of historians have noted this briefly. As Brian Holden Reid, J.F.C. Fuller: Military Thinker (London, 1987), 225, has written: ‘the similarity in the approach, content and style of Fuller’s The Reformation of War and Liddell Hart’s Paris is striking though rarely remarked upon.’; also
Michael Carver, The Apostles of Mobility (London, 1979), 43–4.
See e.g. LH’s briefing of John Wheldon, Machine Age Armies (London, 1968), 33–8.
John Mearsheimer, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (London, 1988), 33–46.
Jay Luvaas, The Education of an Army: British Military Thought, 1815–1940 (London, 1965), 405.
This is fast becoming the accepted view; cf. J.P. Harris, ‘British Armour 1918–40: Doctrine and Development’, in his and F.H. Toase (eds), Armoured Warfare (London, 1990), 29, claiming that LH had no theory of armoured warfare other than what he wrote in Paris; also his Men, Ideas and Tanks: British Military Thought and Armoured Forces, 1903–1939 (Manchester, 1995).
LH, Memoirs, i. 236–8; Hobart to Lindsay 10 Nov. 1933, 1/376; The Tanks, i. 305 and seq. Cf. Kenneth Macksey, Armoured Crusader: a Biography of Major General Sir Percy Hobart (London, 1967), 117–18.
Robert Larson, The British Army and the Theory of Armoured Warfare 1918–1940 (Newark, Delaware, 1984), 163–7, 170; Mearsheimer was apparently unfamiliar with this book. Hobart’s manoeuvres of August 1934 are not covered by Winton’s excellent To Change an Army, because the hero of his book, General Burnett-Stuart, was not involved in them, having just returned from a three-year tenure as commander-in-chief in Egypt; but see ibid. 123. Hobart’s historical manoeuvres of 1934–37 are curiously not even mentioned by
J. Paul Harris, ‘Sir Percy Hobart’, in Brian Bond (ed.), Fallen Stars, Eleven Studies of Twentieth Century Military Disasters (London, 1991), 86–106.
Letter exchange in Feb. 1964, in 1/302. See also A.J. Trythal, ‘Boney’ Fuller: the Intellectual General (London, 1977), 60–4, 71, 73.
Macksey, The Tank Pioneers, 79–88, makes this point very well.
Fuller, ‘One Hundred Problems of Mechanization’, Part Two, The Army Quarterly, 19 (1929), 256–8. For a balanced assessment from the second half of the 1930s see
Fuller, ‘The Problem of Tank and Anti-Tank Weapons’, The Fighting Forces, 14 (1937), 42–5.
For the counter-argument that armour still enjoyed the advantages of initiative and concentration, see both Tukhachevsky, ‘The Red Army New (1936) Field Service Regulations’, Red Star, 6 May 1937, printed in
Richard Simpkin, Deep Battle: the Brainchild of Marshal Tukhachevski (London, 1987), 161–2;
Heinz Guderian, Achtung Panzer! The Development of Armoured Forces, Their Tactics and Operational Potential (London, 1992; German original 1937), 154–8, 169.
Tukhachevsky, ‘The Red Army Field Service Regulations’, Red Star, 6 May 1937, in Simpkin, Deep Battle, 161–2. But see n. 72 above.
Talk with Hore-Belisha, 15 Oct. 1937, 11/HB 1937/56; not cited in LH’s Memoirs. See also Wesley K. Wark, The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 (London, 1985), 95–6.
LH, ‘Gamelin’, Life Magazine, 20 Feb. 1939, 56–63; Sunday Express, 29 Oct. 1939 and 18 Feb. 1940; The Current of War, 205, 209; Mearsheimer, LH, 124. LH’s unfavourable testimony regarding Gamelin in Memoirs, ii. 18, tilts the original record, and has misled
Martin Alexander, The Republic in Danger: General Maurice Gamelin and the Politics of French Defence, 1933–1940 (Cambridge, 1992), 274; but for the generally warm reception of Gamelin during his visits to Britain in the years preceding the war and for his objection to any offensive ventures during the Polish campaign and the Phoney War, see respectively Alexander, ‘Maurice Gamelin’, in Bond (ed.), Fallen Stars, 108, 119; idem, Gamelin, 279ff. For Ironside’s opposition to an encounter battle in Belgium see The Ironside Diaries, 1937–1940 (London, 1962), 108. Gamelin was very highly regarded by the Germans, e.g. by Beck and Rundstedt who both met him in 1936–37: Reynolds, Treason was no Crime: Ludwig Beck, Chief of the German General Staff (London 1976), 111–15; Earl F. Ziemke, ‘Rundstedt’, in Correlli Barnett (ed.), Hitler’s Generals (London, 1989), 188.
In March 1941, while correctly assessing the number of German mobile divisions, Allied intelligence estimated the German tank force at 5800–7500, two to three times the actual number: F.H. Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War, i (London, 1979), 134. But see Guderian to LH, 14 Dec. 1948: 9/24/62.
See e.g. Europe in Arms, 27–8, 48; The Defence of Britain, 101. For the British picture of German armour see excellently in Wark, British Intelligence, 93–101, who stresses, however, how assessment was affected by the disputes within both the German and British high commands regarding the role of armour. For the French, see Robert Young, ‘French Military Intelligence and Nazi Germany, 1938–1939’, in Ernest R. May (ed.), Knowing One’s Enemies: Intelligence Assessment before the Two World Wars (Princeton, 1984), 288–9.
He was of course not alone in developing this idea. The Soviets developed it by far the most systematically in their 1936 Field Service Regulations, and it was also well recognized by the Germans. See in Simpkin, Deep Battle, 47–8, 172–3; Ritter von Leeb, Defence (Harisburg, Pa., 1943; original in Militärwissenschaftliche Rundschau, 1936–1937), 109–110.
See Henry Dutailly, Les Problèmes de l’armée de terre française (1935–1939) (Paris, 1980), 141–59, 314–37; Alexander, Gamelin and the Politics of French Defence, 201–2;
Robert A. Doughty, The Seeds of Disaster: the Development of French Army Doctrine 1919–1939 (Hamden, CT, 1985), 161–77. LH was well informed about these developments at the time: Europe in Arms, 43–4.
Quoted by John Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca and London, 1983), 102, 108.
The best analysis of the Allies’ strategic considerations is Jeffery A. Gunsburg, Divided and Conquered: the French High Command and the Defeat of the West, 1940 (London, 1979).
Winston Churchill, The Second World War (London, 1948–55), ii. 46–7.
Although recent research has done much to show the logic behind the Allies’ plans, it reaffirms that they (and Gamelin in particular) totally blundered in respect to the Ardennes: Robert J. Young, In Command of France: French Foreign Policy and Military Planning 1933–1940 (Cambridge Mass., 1978), 169; Umbreit’s contribution to Militärgschichtles Forschungsamt (MF) (ed.), Germany in the Second World War, ii. 271; Claude Paillat, Le Désastre de 1940, i (Paris, 1983), 191–6; Alexander, Gamelin, 199–200.
On the whole operation see Robert A. Doughty, The Breaking Point: Sedan and the Fall of France, 1940 (Hamden, CT, 1990). For the Belgian and French reading of German intentions in this respect see
Brian Bond, France and Belgium, 1939–1940 (London, 1975), 60–1, 64–5, 76–7, 78–80; Hinsley, British Intelligence, i. 129–36; Paillat, 1940, ii (Paris, 1984), 299–354; Doughty, op. cit., 73–7. For Ironside’s prediction regarding the Ardennes see The Ironside Diaries, 120–1, 125, also pointing out Gamelin’s intransigence.
Fuller, ‘Problems of Mechanized Warfare’, The Army Quarterly (Jan. 1922), incorporated in The Reformation of War, 161–4, and reprinted in On Future Warfare, 248–51; ‘The Ideal Army of the Artillery Circle’, The Journal of the Royal Artillery, (Oct. 1926), and ‘Tactics and Mechanization’, The Fighting Forces (Apr. 1927), reprinted in On Future Warfare, 368–70, 233–7 respectively; Armoured Warfare, 19–21, 95; Towards Armageddon (London, 1937), 140–1. Reid’s assessment in Fuller, 161–3, is similar to mine, but does not make it clear that Fuller assigned his light infantry to ‘infantry areas’ only.
R.M. Ogorkiewicz, Armoured Forces (London, 1970), 59.
For both sides of the controversy see the somewhat partisan accounts in Giffard le Q. Martel, An Outspoken Soldier (London, 1949), 67, 124–5, 175, 178, 183–4, 188; Macksey, Armoured Crusader, 185–227, The Tank Pioneers, 172–6.
Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader, (London, 1952), 294–5; he probably referred to LH’s article of 31 Dec. 1942, mentioned in n. 143 above; the authenticity of Guderian’s evidence is beyond question, for he had not been advised on this point by LH, who was himself surprised and delighted to read it in the Guderian memoirs: LH to Broad, 28 Dec. 1951, 1/108. Generally on their objection to the decrease see also Thoma’s evidence, 9/24/144; Guderian to LH, 14 Dec. 1948 and 24 Jan, 1949, 9/24/62.
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© 2000 Azar Gat
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Gat, A. (2000). Liddell Hart’s Theory of Armoured Warfare. In: British Armour Theory and the Rise of the Panzer Arm. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333982389_1
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