World War histories
NORMAN GIBBS
These two books, together with the two volumes on The Tanks published ten years ago, comprise Liddell Hart's most substantial contribution to military history. They deal with the period he knew best as an historian, and the period on which he did most of his detailed, authoritative research. In the long run Liddell Hart's reputation as a military historian—and that is something different from his reputation as a writer on professional military matters, such as infantry training and the theory of mechanised war— will rest to some considerable extent on these histories of the two World Wars and on his history of the Royal Tank Regiment.
Of the two books reviewed here, that on the war of 1914-18 is a reprinting, not a new edition; the volume on the second World War now appears for the first time. Those who have enjoyed Liddell Hart's style in his other books will not be disappointed in these. He writes with his usual economy and, often, elegance; he took pride in his writing and had reason to do so. Take, for example. the introductory pages to his account of operations in 1917, -the year he calls The Strain. He writes with the acute awareness of someone who had himself been involved in those events and yet with a detachment born of a knowledge of earlier, comparable times which could have provided a balancing sense of perspective for politicians and soldiers alike in 1917; the mixture of the two moods is effected without waste of words and yet with a pervading if undefined sense of tragedy. The volume on the first World War is better than that on the second in this respect. It is not that the command of words flags. But the events of the first conflict seem, even in retrospect, to move the author more, and in that he was, perhaps, typical of most of his generation.
So far as the details of the fighting are concerned, Liddell Hart is, hardly surprisingly, at his best when he describes the land battle. In his account of the fighting in the first World War the details of individual battles are filled out with analyses of lengths of front in relation to numbers, of the tactics of infantry infiltration, of the 'expanding torrent' concept he wrote of on than than one occasion in the nineteen- twenties and, of course, of penetration by armour. -All these are the work of an expert. Even when his prejudices are most apparent, as for example, in his account of the German attack in the west in 1914 with its attack on the Clausewitzian quality of the Schlieffen Plan, he can still come back with an excellent analysis of the Battle of the Marne, the battle that was not', with its un- expectedly happy outcome for the Allies.
History of the First World War B. H. Liddell Hart (Cassell 84s). History of the Second World War B. H. Liddell Hart (Cassell as 5s) _
And his brief chapter on the battle of Megiddo in September, 1918, provides him with a wonderful opportunity to describe the kind of war he approved of most, one in which victory was achieved at the strategic level by planning rather than on the battlefield itself by fighting.
In the volume on the second World War it is in his account of the land fighting. again, that Liddell Hart is in his element. There is some unevenness of treatment here. It could be argued that, in terms of men, of arms, and of general importance, the fighting between Germany and Russia gets less than its fair share of space and the fighting in the Mediterranean theatre too much. But it would be wrong to argue that quality suffers in a similar way. Liddell Hart, for the purpose of this book, is just as much at home in describing the great battles in Russia as in the very much smaller ones in the Western Desert; his particular personal interests have virtually unlimited scope in his accounts of the fighting in both those theatres as in the campaign in NW Europe from D-day onwards. He is not concerned with the history of war as a series of tales of hCroism and glory. His accounts of these operations are solid reading for the professional soldier but they are, as they should be coming from the pen of an expert who wrote well, intellig- ible to he serious amateur. Doubts about his judgments on particular persons and situations can be accepted while still enjoying the story. Moreover, unlike many lesser writers on this subject, he does not allow patriotism to cloud judgment. He has some balanced comments on the strategic merits of the Italian campaign, particularly after the capture of Rome, which some British readers may not like. Indeed, it is a pity that he did not allow himself more scope in this respect in view of his own earlier writing about Britain's traditional strategy. A basic weakness in the position of those who objected to priority for 'Overlord' over the Italian campaign in 1944 was that the campaign in Italy was not and never had been specifically related to the defeat of Germany—except in terms of 'round the clock' bombing. As far back as 1939 the Allies planned to defeat Italy first on the ground that she was the weaker partner in the Axis and not because there was a plan of campaign to advance from Rome or the northern Apennines through Switzerland or Austria into Germany. In this connection, however, it is difficult to know on what evidence Liddell Hart bases his view that an advance from the north-east of Italy via the Ljubliana Gap into Austria appealed to 'the British Chiefs of Staff, particularly to Alan- brooke'. The latter certainly maintained after the war that he had always regarded this approach as militarily impracticable.
In books of this length there are bound to be difference:La vie.w.about. detail and they
can lend interest rather than detract from value. There are, however, some serious defects which do make both volumes a good deal less valuable than they might otherwise have been. Neither volume is, in fact, a history of the whole war it claims to describe. These are books very largely about land campaigns. In neither is there any comparable description of the war at sea and, in the book on the second World War. the war in the air. In the volume on the first World War there is a chapter on Jutland and one on air operations, a total of thirty pages out of six hundred. The index does mention 'blockade' and 'economic factors', but the promise is not really borne out in the text. From this account the reader without previous knowledge could not be expected to understand the continuous, often critical and militarily essential nature of operations which rarely produced battles but which made other battles possible. The word 'contraband' does not appear in the index to either volume.
So far as the volume on the second World War is concerned this restricted outlook is even more serious. There is a chapter on the Battle of Britain—a fair allocation—and after that the narrative of sea and air operations is largely confined to one chapter on the Battle of the Atlantic and one on the 'Crescendo of Bombing'—and that out of a total of forty chapters for the book as a whole. There are, it is true, references to both forms of war in other places, but they are incidental. The lean treatment of air operations is from one point of view, perhaps, not surprisingly to a man like Liddell Hart, who regarded successful war- making as three-quarters calculation and
only one-quarter brute force, the air power of the nineteen-forties seemed an undesirably blunt instrument of war. On the other hand, by 1944 it provided—as airmen had always claimed it would—a method of winning the war behind the battlefield.
It is the quite inadequate place given to the war at sea which is so surprising. The core of Liddell Hart's contribution to the debate about national defence policy in the inter-, war years lay in his insistence that Britain had wrongly forsaken her traditional policy during the first World War and should not do so again. A reversion to traditional ways meant an emphasis on air power (despite its defects) and on sea power, on that independence of choice and ability to exploit the enemy's weaknesses which sea power afforded.
This is not the place to discuss whether he was right or wrong. The fact is that governments in this country in the nineteen- thirties, and until within a few months of the outbreak of war, planned on just such a strategy even though the war itself found Britain forced to fight as a major contributor on land, as she had done twenty-five years earlier. But the underlying significance of sea-power remained, nevertheless, and without it victory would not have been possible. Why Liddell Hart failed to reflect this in the structure of the book as a whole it is impossible to say.
Again, given the author's strong preference for the oblique and the indirect as against the frontal attack, it is difficult to explain the absence of any serious analysis of political warfare, of propaganda and of the importance of resistance both in foster- ing morale among friends and in undermin- ing morale among enemies. In his book on The Indirect Approach he quoted with ap- proval Lenin's words that 'the soundest strategy in war is to postpone operations until the moral disintegration of the enemy renders the delivery of the mortal blow both possible and easy,' and it was surely the corollary of this thought, i.e. 'don't stiffen enemy morale by unnecessary terms' which made Liddell Hart so strong a critic of the policy of unconditional surrender. But the 'Allies had some other ideas and acted on them. Whether they were successful or not there were 'indirect approaches' and they form part of the story of the war.
Despite the criticisms made here, these are important books. On their chosen ground of land warfare neither is likely to be supplanted, within the limits of a single volume, for a long time to come. Moreover, in their good and in their less good qualities they throw valuable light on the thinking of one who was the most influential British military writer of his time. Liddell Hart suffered the happy fate of being honoured at last even in his own country—and rightly so. Sadly, for his family and a host of friends, he was denied the satisfaction of seeing his last major work in print,
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