Liddell Hart, Capt Sir Basil Henry (1895-1970). Liddell Hart, British military historian, critic, journalist, propagandist, controversialist, archivist, adviser, exemplar, and thrower of stones, was not the Clausewitz of the 20th century, as he and others were wont to claim; but he was, perhaps, the next best thing. A war poet in prose—his inter-war writing carried a comparable charge—he wrote no great book, no timeless synthesis, finished or unfinished. Thoughts on War (1944) is the skeleton of such a work, The Revolution in Warfare (1946) the sketch, Strategy: The Indirect Approach (4th revised and enlarged edn., 1967) the simulacrum. His output is staggering—dozens of books, hundreds of articles, thousands of letters—but his output is not so much an oeuvre as an aggregation, and very often (too often) a repetition. Yet his influence was and is enormous. There is hardly a military writer of repute in the western world who was not touched in some way by this prodigal, indomitable lighthouse of a man. He survives, still, as a climate of ideas. Liddell Hart is the Bertrand Russell of his field: he is all-pervasive.
He described himself as ‘border’, meaning something more than geography, and always felt a certain distance from the social and intellectual heartland of England, a distance he worked uncommonly hard to close. He was born in Paris, where his father was minister of the Methodist church. He had a conventional upbringing, peripatetic on the Methodist circuit. A series of prep schools led eventually to St Paul's in London in the wake of a rather backward boy by the name of Montgomery. His school career was undistinguished; he rose laboriously through the Pauline ranks more by the passage of time in each form than by any sign of intellectual distinction. In 1913, after some frantic cramming, he went up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, to read for the History tripos. His university career was, if anything, even more undistinguished; many years later, when asked to contribute to a survey on ‘What I Owe to Cambridge, ’ he put first a taste in food and wine. In the examinations at the end of his first year he recorded a dismal third.
On the outbreak of war Liddell Hart was one of the many young men unconscionably eager for action. On a temporary commission in the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, he went to this war three times, a persistence of which he was achingly aware. These were short stints, abruptly curtailed by injury; in each case a certain ambiguity surrounds the curtailment. The first was for about three weeks, in September-October 1915, in a quiet sector near Albert. The second was for a few beleaguered days in November 1915, very much in the thick of things, in the waterlogged lines of the Ypres salient. The third was again for about three weeks, in June-July 1916, for the Big Push on the Somme, in the Fricourt sector, where he was traumatized in Mametz Wood. That was enough, but that was all. In spite of himself, Liddell Hart was never a true grognard.
Officially 50 per cent disabled from gas poisoning, and prey to ‘soldier's heart’, he was relegated to the half-pay list in 1924. He left the army, sorrowfully, three years later, bearing his famous, galling, eternal rank. With the passage of time that lowly station became a kind of inverted status symbol, epitomized in Yigal Allon's graceful compliment to ‘The Captain Who Teaches Generals’. Henceforth, he lived by his pen and he lived well. He was first a sports correspondent, producing in short order four different accounts of the same match for four different outlets, and an early succès d'estime, Lawn Tennis Masters Unveiled (1926), an intriguing anticipation of Great Captains Unveiled (1927). He was also a leading authority on fashion—women's fashion, in particular tight-lacing. Liddell Hart had a sophisticated appreciation of l'artillerie de nuit. He was adept at literary cross-dressing. He wrote strategic accounts of lawn tennis, fashion-conscious accounts of strategy, and games-playing accounts of war. Like all great artists, his best ideas were other people's, made matchlessly his own. He had a gift for the expressive phrase—he called them parables—‘the man in the dark’ theory of war (1920), his early metaphor of personal combat; ‘the expanding torrent’ system of attack (1921), derived Newton-and-apple-like from nature, and later adapted to the blitzkrieg. His biggest idea, ‘the indirect approach’, was announced in 1927, first developed in book form in 1929, supplemented by a compendium flagging ‘the British way in warfare’ (a parallel gestation) in 1932, and four times further elaborated by its restless author, in 1941, 1946, 1954, and 1967. As a strategy, the indirect approach is both devious and vaporous. Normally, it is an eccentric manoeuvre, literally and figuratively, directed at the enemy's rear. Robert Graves, a close friend, suggested ‘The Art of Out-flanking’ as a catchpenny title. But the indirect approach is more an attitude of mind than an arrow on the map. The essence of the idea ‘is not so much to seek battle as to seek a strategic situation so advantageous that if it does not of itself produce the decision, its continuation by a battle is sure to achieve this’. For Liddell Hart, contra Clausewitz, ‘strategy has for its purpose the reduction of fighting to the slenderest possible proportions…. The perfection of strategy would be, therefore, to produce a decision without any serious fighting.’ Of what use is decisive victory in battle, he asked, if we bleed to death as a result? A secure peace is better than a pyramid of skulls.
Liddell Hart's theses seem to live, stubbornly, no matter how many times their tails are salted. The salting itself has immensely enriched military discourse. Used as a vade-mecum by various statespersons, numberless strategists, and the militarily curious of many lands—a Chinese edition of the book came out in 1994—the indirect approach continues to live an active and inspirational life to this day, not least in ‘the manoeuvrist approach’ of official British defence doctrine. Indeed, the dissection and exhibition of Liddell Hart's work is now almost epidemic. A negative wave of exegesis is followed by a positive one. This is entirely in keeping. As the Germans (keen students) noted in 1936, ‘like Zeus's sun light and rain he bestows … praise and blame on the leaders of the armoured formations’. That was his currency. Praise and blame: great captains and overpromoted ones.
He was inordinately fond of lists. Among his last, a Christmas challenge, was the seven people in history he would like to assemble for a dinner party: Socrates, Confucius, Galileo, Bacon (or Shakespeare), Montaigne, Voltaire, and Zola. He could not resist adding to the general list a professional one: Sun-tzu, Xenophon, Scipio ‘Africans’, Belisarius, Saxe, Napoleon, and, perhaps in reconciliation, Clausewitz. If ‘who is the greatest’ is the question of the child stretching out its hand for the moon, as his prophetic friend and rival Fuller said, Liddell Hart aged remarkably little. He lived to be 74, but he was forever 14. Throughout his life he was always stretching out his hand for the moon.
There was a strong journalistic streak in him. Between 1924 and 1939 he was defence correspondent to, successively, the Morning Post, the Daily Telegraph, and The Times, and at least part of the repetition in his works was caused by an understandable desire to recycle for profit. Many of his ideas were repolished notions from the past, set out attractively for an audience attracted as much by their glitter as their substance. The indirect approach owed much to Sun-tzu, and the British way in warfare, far more apparent in the writings of Liddell Hart than in a broader reading of history, struck a powerful chord with a readership anxious to believe that a strategy of limited liability was indeed possible. His ideas were certainly tank-using—in 1925 he wrote that tanks should be ‘concentrated and used in as large masses as possible’—but popular imagination continues to accord him a greater role in their paternity than modern studies of armoured warfare justify.
He was acutely conscious of his own place in history; his relationship with Fuller reflected this. The two enjoyed an effective partnership from the mid-1920s, but while Liddell Hart acknowledged Fuller's intellect as ‘the profoundest that has been applied to military thought this century’, the occasional tussle between them reflected basic differences of ideology and outlook (Liddell Hart was a liberal and Fuller a fascist) as much as specific disagreements over the relative importance of tanks and infantry in the broadly similar tactics they both advocated: Fuller was sceptical of the oversimplifications he believed to be inherent in the indirect approach. On the eve of WW II Liddell Hart served as adviser to the reforming war minister, Leslie Hore-Belisha, and helped the army shed some ‘over-aged and under-talented’ generals. However, his opposition to a continental commitment for the army helped undermine the logic underpinning the very armoured forces he advocated. In later life he suggested that the use of nuclear weapons crossed a threshold into purposeless war, littered with its own pyramids of skulls.
Bibliography
- Bond, Brian, Liddell Hart: A Study of his Military Thought (London, 1977).
- Danchev, Alex, Alchemist of War: The Life of Basil Liddell Hart (London, 1998).
- Gat, Azar, Fascist and Liberal Visions of War (Oxford, 1998).
- Mearsheimer, John J., Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (London, 1988)
— Alex Danchev/Richard Holmes
