Liddell Hart
Sir: Not having yet read the Mearsheimer book (reviewed by Michael Howard in The Spectator, 25 February), I am at a disability to assess his criticisms, but I would just like to put in a personal word for the old guru — to whom many of us owed so much.
First of all, may I associate myself with Michael Howard's rating of Liddell Hart as 'the greatest thinker about war in this century'. For all his faults, he was; who else?
As a matter of fact, it was at a Spectator party, in the mid-fifties, that I first met Liddell Hart, puffing his pipe and looking like an elongated marabou stork in one corner of the room. I had just published my first book, Back into Power, a journal- ist's book favourable to Adenauer's new Germany (and therefore rather un- favoured by the literary establishment at the time). The guru showed flattering interest, and followed up next day with a letter of detailed comments on the book not just its military details about the newly formed Bundeswehr.
Without his encouragement, and help, I would never have written my trilogy on Franco-German warfare, starting with The Price of Glory. I freely admit to having been deeply influenced by his books and his thinking; but not least by his friendship. He was unsparing with his time; the most footling letter would be followed up, almost by return, by pages of densely argued, factual detail. But, like Michael Howard, I never recall his attempting to brainwash, or 'disarm' me. One point of Mr Mearsheimer's book (which, as I say, I have not read) as quoted by Michael Howard particularly puzzles me; how he 'badgered' the defeated Ger- man generals into acknowledging a non- existing debt. When I was in Germany as a foreign correspondent in the Fifties (and before I had met the guru), World War II generals I knew — like von Manteuffel left me in no doubt about their indebted- ness to his thinking.
And there certainly must be one coun- try, Israel, whose generals (like Moshe Dayan) would recognise battles won, in more recent times, with recourse to the teaching of the old guru — without 'badgering'.
Alistair Horne
21 St Petersburgh Place, London W2
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