This is more of an “out of the ether” type post, but I couldn’t find a good place to put it. Regardless, the topic is worth discussing, especially with the recent special episode on Blitzkrieg.
Liddell Hart is routinely seen as one of the more important figures in the story of British mechanization. While many historians have seen him as influential, the accepted nature of his influence has changed fairly drastically since his death in 1970. Traditionally seen as a proponent of armored warfare who influenced armies across Europe, more recent examinations of his extensive personal archive and other primary source material has shown that he was more as an outside commentator and what influence he was able to exert was more negative than positive.
Much of the initial highly positive views of Hart amongst historians can be traced back to 1965, which saw the publication of four works: Jay Luvaas’ Education of an Army , which included a highly reverent chapter dedicated to Hart titled “The Captain who Teaches Generals,” Hart’s own Memoirs in two volumes and Michael Howard’s The Theory and Practice of War , which was actually a festschrift for Hart. Conveniently, both Howard and especially Luvaas were friends of Liddell Hart, and the chapter in Education of an Army received direct input from the man himself.
Luvaas’ chapter begins with Hart’s World War I career in the British Army, discussing his experiences at the Somme and covering his initial contributions which were focused on infantry drill and a new method of attack that he referred to as the “expanding torrent system”. He then moves on to his early meetings with JFC Fuller and his conversion to mechanized warfare. He makes sure to note here that Hart’s views on mechanization were less radical than Fuller’s, claiming that Hart put greater emphasis on combined arms, especially cooperation between tanks and aircraft, and advocated the continuing importance of infantry to be used as mechanized “land marines.” Upon his conversion to armored warfare, he becomes a strong advocate for its cause, writing numerous articles in the Daily Telegraph and the Times expounding his ideas and supporting the radicals of the Royal Tank Corps (RTC) while struggling against a strongly conservative body of infantry and cavalry officers in the War Office. While he did gain influence within the British military body, his time as an unofficial advisor to Secretary of State for War Hore-Belisha in the late 30s led to a falling out that effectively ended his influence at a critical period right before the outbreak of war. Hart could only watch from the sidelines in 1940 as the Germans, who had listened to his theories on armored warfare and the indirect approach, and adopted them themselves, crushed the allied armies in France and drove the British back across the English Channel. Luvaas concludes with:
Looking at his creative contributions as a theorist, military correspondent, historian, and reformer, and especially in view of the impact that his work has had upon the twentieth-century revolution in warfare, surely the time has come to recognize the greatness of Liddel Hart.
Not until 1976 did some inklings of criticism against Liddell Hart begin to appear amongst scholars when Brian Bond, another of Hart’s friends, published his book Liddell Hart: A Study of His Military Thought . While still mainly laudatory in its tone, it does begin to poke holes in the views espoused by Luvaas (and Hart himself in his memoirs) that the man was a prophetic visionary of armored warfare. It began to show, that in reality, during the 1930s Hart had turned his focus away from mechanization to the larger strategic debate over continental commitment (sending a land force to the continent in the event of a new war with Germany). Through his formulation of the strategy of the indirect approach in the mid to late 1930s he became an advocate of limited liability, a policy which favored the commitment of little to no ground forces and instead focused on the use of naval and air power to attack the enemy’s communication, transportation and economic nerve centers while Britain’s allies fought the land war. Much of this view seemed to come from his idea that the conservative leadership of the army was so stuck in the ways of the Great War that any form of continental commitment could only result in human disaster. While he was still in favor of mechanization and armored warfare, his growing distrust in the British military establishment turned him away from continental commitment at a time when he was at the height of his influence on military policy. He even went so far as to criticize Prime Minister Chamberlain’s expanding of the Territorial Army and guarantee to Poland in 1939 when war seemed to have become inevitable. Bond does, however, accept most of the other points of Luvaas’ analysis, although he does slightly amend the story of Hart’s influence on the German blitzkrieg, stating that only his works in the 1920s (before the creation of any Panzer division) had any influence on the Germans and that Fuller could be paired with Hart in influencing the officers of the Wehrmacht.
It is the work of John Mearsheimer in his book Liddell Hart and the Weight of History that truly deconstructs the myth of Hart’s importance and influence. He notes that Hart produced no books or articles specifically on what could be defined as blitzkrieg doctrine, but rather his thoughts were spread out over various works that were mostly conceptual and provided nothing concrete enough on which to base doctrine. In the critical period of the 1930s Mearshimer shows that, not only did he become a strong advocate of limited liability, he also completely abandoned his earlier theories of armored warfare and instead adopted the idea that the defense reigned supreme on the modern battlefield. Rather than predicting German success in 1940, he felt the French Army’s defensive works would easily halt any German advance. Most damningly, however, is Mearshimer’s argument that postwar evidence of Hart’s influence on the German Army (and most of his highly positive reputation in the mid to late 20th century) was a fabrication created both directly and indirectly by Hart himself. Having been proven completely wrong in 1940, Hart’s reputation with the British military establishment was ruined and beginning around the end of the war he undertook a Herculean effort to rebuild it, mainly by selectively editing history. After the war, he quickly made himself an advocate of the German generals, working actively to get them out of prison and publish their memoirs. In return the generals falsified his importance in their historical account of the interwar years. Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence is what Mearshimer calls the “infamous second paragraph” of Guderian’s Panzer Leader . It reads:
It was principally the books and article of the Englishmen, Fuller, Liddell Hart and Martel, that excited my interest and gave me food for thought…
I learned from them the concentration of armour, as employed in the battle of Cambrai. Further, it was Liddell Hart who emphasized the use of armoured forces for long-range strokes, operations against the opposing army’s communications, and also proposed a type of armoured division combining panzer and panzer-infantry units… So I owe many suggestions of our further development to Captain Liddell Hart .
Mearshimer discovered that the italicized section not only fails to appear in the German version of the book, but was written by and added at the request of Liddell Hart himself in a letter that Hart scrubbed from his personal archives. Further examples exist in other works Hart created or edited for the German generals, including the manipulation of the Erwin Rommel’s friends and family to accomplish the same goal in his book The Rommel Papers . It seems that the German generals cooperated with Hart for the same reason: to preserve their place and importance in history.
Overall, the historical record of Basil Liddell Hart has changed drastically since his death in 1970. Initially seen by historians as a key figure in the development of modern military theory in both Britain and Europe as a whole, examinations of his works and primary sources have discredited much of this claim. Today he is viewed more as a journalistic soundboard from which new ideas could be communicated and spread to general audiences rather than a source of original thought. For historians, however, many of his works on the World Wars and interwar period are well-researched and still useful to this day.