Basil Liddell Hart
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Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart (31 October 1895 – 29 January 1970), usually known before his knighthood as Captain B. H. Liddell Hart, was an English military historian who greatly influenced the development of armoured warfare in the 20th century, and strategic theory. He used "Liddell" (his mother's maiden name) as part of his surname from 1921.
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[edit] Life
Liddell Hart was born in Paris, the son of a Methodist minister, and was educated at St Paul's, London Cambridge University. He joined the Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.
Liddell Hart served as an officer in the British Army during World War I, where he witnessed trench warfare. He served at the battle of the Somme and was gassed and decorated for bravery.
He retired from the Army Educational Corps as a Captain in 1927 (after being placed on half pay from 1923 because of two mild heart attacks in 1921 and 1922, probably the long-term effects of his gassing), and spent the rest of his career as a writer. His continued use of his rank angered the military establishment, since it was considered bad form for an officer junior to Major to continue to use his rank in civilian life. He was initially a military and tennis analyst for various British newspapers (Daily Telegraph and The Times) which he kept up until the Second World War. Later he began publishing military histories and biographies of great commanders who, he thought, were great because they illustrated the principles of good strategy. Among these were Scipio Africanus Major, William Tecumseh Sherman, and T.E. Lawrence.
On 4 September 2006, formerly secret MI5 files revealed MI5 suspicions that plans for the D-Day landings had been leaked, and that Liddell Hart had known all the details, three months before the landings took place, discussed them, and had even prepared a critique, entitled Some Reflections on the Problems of Invading the Continent, which he circulated amongst political and military figures. His previous criticism of how the war had been fought raised further suspicions, even of German sympathies, although most modern biographers accept Hart's defence that he had worked out the plans for himself rather than had them leaked to him. Winston Churchill demanded Liddell Hart's arrest, but MI5 instead placed him under surveillance, intercepting his telephone calls and letters.[1]
Shortly after World War II he interviewed/debriefed many of the highest ranking German generals and published their accounts as The Other Side of the Hill (UK Edition) and German Generals Talk (condensed US Edition). Later Hart was able to convince the Rommel family to allow him to edit the surviving papers of the German Field Marshal into a form which was published in 1953 as the pseudo-memoir, The Rommel Papers.
Liddell Hart was knighted in the New Year's Honours of 1966.
[edit] Theories
Liddell Hart began publishing his theories during the 1920s in the popular press. Paradoxically, Liddell Hart saw theories similar to or even developed from his own adopted by Germany and used against the United Kingdom and its allies during World War II with the practice of Blitzkrieg.
He set out in the years following the First World War to discover why the casualty rate had been so terribly high, and arrived at a set of principles that he considered the basis of all good strategy; principles which, he claimed, were ignored by nearly all commanders in World War I.
He reduced this set of principles to a single phrase, the indirect approach, and two fundamentals:
- Direct attacks against an enemy firmly in position almost never work and should never be attempted
- To defeat the enemy one must first upset his equilibrium, which is not accomplished by the main attack, but must be done before the main attack can succeed.
In Liddell Hart's words,
In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there; a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance.
He also claimed that
The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men.
This argues that one succeeds by keeping one's enemy uncertain about the situation and one's intentions, and by delivering what he does not expect and is therefore not prepared for.
Hart explains that one should not employ a rigid strategy revolving around powerful direct attacks nor fixed defensive positions. Instead, he prefers a more fluid elastic defence where a mobile contingent can move as necessary in order to satisfy the conditions for the indirect approach. He would later cite Erwin Rommel's Northern Africa campaign as a classical example of his theory.
He arrived at his conclusions after studying the great strategists of history (especially Sun Tzu, Napoleon, and Belisarius) and their victories. He believed the indirect approach was the common element in the men he studied. He also claimed the indirect approach was a valid strategy in other fields of endeavor, such as business, romance, etc.
Liddell Hart's personal papers and library now form the central collection in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College London.[2]
[edit] Biographies
The principal posthumous biography of Liddell Hart, Alex Danchev's Alchemist of War: The Life of Basil Liddell Hart, written with the cooperation of Liddell Hart's widow, is startling for its candor. Among its revelations are that Liddell Hart connived at the planting of an endorsement of his own work in the English language version of Panzer Leader, the autobiography of Heinz Guderian. Although Guderian greatly admired Liddell Hart's work, and avidly read his newspaper columns, the German language edition of Guderian's autobiography gives Liddell Hart's work no greater preference than that of his contemporary, J.F.C. Fuller whom Guderian also admired.
[edit] Partial bibliography
- B. H. Liddell Hart, Scipio Africanus: Greater Than Napoleon (W Blackwood and Sons, London, 1926; Biblio and Tannen, New York, 1976)
- B. H. Liddell Hart, Great Captains Unveiled (W. Blackwood and Sons, London, 1927; Greenhill, London, 1989)
- B. H. Liddell Hart, Reputations 10 Years After (Little, Brown, Boston, 1928)
- B. H. Liddell Hart, The decisive wars of history (1929) (This is the first part of the later: Strategy: the indirect approach)
- B. H. Liddell Hart, The Real War (1914-1918) (1930), later replublished as A History of the World War (1914-1918).
- B. H. Liddell Hart, Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American (Dodd, Mead and Co, New York, 1929; Frederick A. Praeger, New York, 1960)
- B. H. Liddell Hart, The Ghost of Napoleon (Yale University, New Haven, 1934)
- B. H. Liddell Hart, The Defence of Britain (Faber and Faber, London, 1939; Greenwood, Westport, 1980)
- B. H. Liddell Hart, The strategy of indirect approach (1941, reprinted in 1942 under the title: The way to win wars)
- B. H. Liddell Hart, The way to win wars (1942)
- B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy: the indirect approach, second revised edition
- B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy: the indirect approach, third revised edition and further enlarged London: Faber and Faber, reprint: Dehra Dun, India: Natraj Publishers, 2003
- B. H. Liddell Hart, The Tanks - A History of the Royal Tank Regiment and its Predecessors: Volumes I and II (Praeger, New York, 1959)
- B. H. Liddell Hart, The Memoirs of Captain Liddell Hart: Volumes I and II (Cassell, London, 1965)
- B. H. Liddell Hart, Why don't we learn from history? (Hawthorn Books, New York, 1971)
- B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War (Putnum, New York, 1971)
[edit] Further reading
- Brian Bond, Liddell Hart: A Study of his Military Thought (Cassell, London, 1977)
- Alex Danchev, Alchemist of War: The Life of Basil Liddell Hart
- Danchev, Alex. "Liddell Hart and the Indirect Approach", The Journal of Military History, Vol. 63, No. 2. (1999), pp. 313–337.
- John Mearsheimer, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History
[edit] References
- ^ "Files reveal leaked D-Day plans" BBC News [1]; "Army writer nearly revealed plans of D-Day", The Times
- ^ Lidell Hart archive, KCL
[edit] External link
- Time.
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Hart, Basil Liddell |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Hart, B. H. Liddell |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Noted British historian and theoretician of war |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 31 October 1895 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | |
| DATE OF DEATH | 29 January 1970 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
