Customer Reviews

Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

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Admittedly standing on the shoulders of Brian Bond, John Mearsheimer has written a superb account of the falsifications of Basil Liddell Hart and how he manipulated his own record as an "expert" military commentator to cover up that he was one of those responsible for the debacle in France in 1940. While LH still has his fans and his books are still in print, it is now clear that he was a shameless self-promoter and that, because of his enormous body of written material, he could pick and choose those works which would vindicate his record while ignoring the ones that damned him. All through the 1930s, for instance, he insisted that there was no hope of success for offensive tactics and that Britain did not need - in fact he was opposed to - a large and powerful army. During this period, he was an adviser to the minister of war and the military correspondent for the Times. He would later write that he was the father of the blitzkrieg and a lonely outsider calling for change! All this and more is grist for Mearsheimer's thorough mill. Engagingly written, this book is a must for military historians and those who honor intellectual honesty.

This is a fascinating and highly readable piece of historical detective work I read many years ago that demolishes the reputation of someone who at one time ranked alongside Fuller and Clausewitz as one of the most far-sighted military thinkers of modern times. Mearsheimer takes Liddell-Hart apart bit by bit showing he was always well behind the curve of contemporary thinkers such as Fuller, the true advocate of armoured warfare, and how in the 1930s Hart completely lost the plot by advocating a vague and ultimately meaningless strategic doctrine called 'The indirect approach' that had a disastrous influence on Britain's military and strategic thinking in the inter-war years. Mearsheimer doesn't deny Hart's influence, but far from being the far-sighted voice of reason in the wilderness, was a well-placed and very damaging figure in the inter-war political and military establishment, arguing the futility of fighting a European land war and insisting Britain use its naval and air reach to fight at a distance, 'indirectly', a disastrously dated concept that contributed to Britain's psychological and military unpreparedness in 1939. Unsurprisingly, Hart's reputation went through the floor during the war, but with the war's end he saw an opportunity to rebuild his reputation and this is where the book gets really fascinating. Mearsheimer carefully reconstructs Hart's relationships to the defeated Wehrmacht generals' and how he insidiously exploited their desire to revive their own reputations through their memoirs, ingratiating himself with the likes of Guderian and Manstein and acting almost as their literary agent, whilst insinuating himself into their English memoirs, persuading them to insert recommendations and references to his own works that helped to revive his own reputation - with great success - at least in his lifetime. As I said, the book reads like a detective story and you feel like you've read much more by the end than you have in only 248 pages, and that's a tribute to the author's economy of style. A great read whether you are a military or history buff or just have an interest in the way knowledge, history and memory can be manipulated and rewritten. Should also credit British military historian Kenneth Macksey who was an 'apostle' of Hart and may have been the first to stumble on inconsistencies between the English and German versions of Guderian's memoirs and mentions this in his own biography of Guderian.

The name of Basil Liddell Hart is still widely known among analysts of military tactics and strategy. The central argument of this book is that Liddell Hart manipulated the historical record after the fact to show himself as the preeminent military analyst of the first half of the 20th Century. Specifically Mearsheimer used painstaking research to compile a record of the writings and statements of Liddell Hart in which his position on important issues either changed or was proven false by subsequent events. For an analyst with the reputation of Liddell Hart such a posthumous compilation ought to be pretty damning to his reputation as a forward thinking advocate of modern war, especially the impact of mechanization the future of warfare.

Yet Mearsheimer in the end misses the real value of the analytic work of Liddell Hart. By concentrating on the individual statements of Liddell Hart, he misses the real and significant contribution that Liddell Hart has made to the fields of tactical and strategic analysis. Liddell Hart like any good analyst was not a rigid thinker, but altered and even discarded views in the face of different information. Also like all analysts good and bad, Liddell Hart allowed various personal agendas to influence his analytic conclusions to the point of producing some very dubious conclusions indeed. Rather than being consistently right in every thing he wrote or said his main contribution was to provide a large body of analysis and critical thinking that serve military analysts to this day. He proved it was possible to objectively analyze tactical and strategic issues and derive logical conclusions about them. This was much more important than being as prescient as Liddell Hart clearly wanted to appear.

Mearsheimer's volume on Liddell Hart is an absolute must-read item for anyone interested in the history of WW2, WW1, or understanding what may or may not have happened in those wars. In particular, board and computer game designers need to consider carefully what they are being told about standard secondary and primary historical sources. The notion, thoroughly documented, that the usual presentations on those wars have been distorted for purely personal reasons is highly disturbing.