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B.H. Liddell Hart

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Captain B.H. Liddell Hart is not only a popular writer who has made military history and theory interesting and understandable to the non-professional reader, but he is also "the most stimulating and thoughtful military writer, by far, that we have." Field Marshal Viscount Wavell. He has been a military writer for several London newspapers and Military Editor of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. His books have been translated into 19 languages.

Liddell Hart was born to English parents in Paris on October 31, 1895. By the time he attended Cambridge at the dawn of the First World War, he had displayed an inquisitive mind but was rather bored by formal studies (Reid 2004). As fighting broke out in 1914, the young Liddell Hart joined the King’s Own Yorkshire light infantry. 

He proceeded to serve three tours in the Great War as a junior officer before beginning to write on military issues following the Armistice. As his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography puts it, he became known as a keen “interpreter of the operational experience of 1918: distilling its essential principles for training purposes, and then relating them perceptively to mobility and command in a novel way” (Reid 2004). 

While he gained some notoriety among influential British officers, most notably General Sir Ivor Maxse and Colonel J. F. C. Fuller, his career in uniform was cut short after suffering two minor heart attacks (Reid 2004). He retired from the British Army in 1927 after being on half-pay since 1923 and filling no significant military responsibilities. He held the rank of captain.

After experimenting with several careers, the retired Captain Liddell Hart became a well-regarded journalist and military analyst who corresponded regularly with important strategists of the day, including Fuller and later T.E. Lawrence (Reid 2004). By the late 1920s, Liddell Hart’s notion of the indirect approach to strategy was beginning to take form, and an early version was published in his 1929 book The Decisive Wars of History (Reid 2004). 

The complete formulation of the indirect approach was ultimately offered up in Strategy, published first in 1954 and again as a revised second edition in 1967. The book became widely read in both military and academic circles and played an important role in repairing Liddell Hart’s image, which had been tarnished during World War II when he underestimated Germany’s martial capability, called at one point for a compromise peace with Hitler, and criticized Winston Churchill’s strategy for winning the war (Reid 2004).

His biographer Alex Danchev remarks that Strategy is the closest Liddell Hart ever came to writing a treatise on war. Still, it was “started too soon, distended too much, and finished (or unfinished) too late to produce a truly satisfying whole” (Danchev 1998, 157). Rather than a complete vision of strategy, it offered a “grab-bag” of ideas, some radically novel and others fundamental and well-understood (Danchev 1998, 157). 

These shortcomings are readily apparent to readers who pick up the volume; however, imperfect though it may be, Liddell Hart’s Strategy offers important takes on modern warfare still worth considering today. In particular, his treatment strategy as a concept, the indirect approach itself, and the implications of mechanized and aerial assaults are well worth mulling in detail.

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