A History of Strategy (13 page)

Fuller’s famous Plan 1919 was intended to realize these ideas but came too late for it to be turned into practice. Once peace had been restored Fuller, while still in the army, became the principal exponent of mechanization. In numerous publications—he was a prolific writer who, however, often tended to overstate his case—he argued that war, like every other field of human life, was decisively affected by the progress of science. Like Douhet, he considered that currently the most important fruits of science were the internal combustion engine, on which depended the airplane and the tank, as well as poison gas. Whether armed forces liked it or not, these devices
had
to be employed because failure to do so was to risk being left behind. Future warfare on land would center on the tank and be based almost entirely on tracks as artillery, recce units, engineers, signals, supply, and maintenance all became mechanized. Once they had mechanized themselves armies would enjoy almost as much freedom of movement as did ships at sea. They would use it in order to maneuver against each other, concentrating against select sections of the enemy front, breaking through them, and bringing about victory at comparatively low cost.

While not alone in the field, Fuller did as much as anybody to stimulate the debate about tanks and mechanization. Coming as they did from the ex-chief of staff of the most advanced mechanized force in history, his views commanded particular respect. Barring the most extreme ones—e.g. the idea that armies should consist of tanks alone and that every infantryman should be provided with his individual tankette and use it to wage guerrilla warfare—many of his suggestions have come to pass. Indeed it could be argued that all modern mechanized armies stem from the experimental force which was first assembled on Salisbury Plain in 1928 and of which, had he wanted to, he could have been the commander. The problem was that, considering himself not merely a reformer but a philosopher, Fuller went on to surround himself with an immensely complicated network of intellectual propositions on the nature of war, life and history. Combining all these different strands, many of his historical writings were decidedly brilliant. But much of his theorizing was decidedly half-baked; so, for example, his idea that all things fell “naturally” into three parts.

In particular, Fuller, like Douhet, considered democracy and the mass-armies to which it had given rise from the time of the French Revolution to be harmful and degenerate. Also like Douhet, he hoped to replace those mass armies by a small force of elite, tank-riding, professional warriors. Not only would war thereby be conducted much more efficiently, but the example set by such a force would have a regenerating impact on, and serve as a model for, society as a whole. But whereas Douhet was in line with majority opinion in his own country and enjoyed the friendship of Benito Mussolini, Fuller, having resigned from the Army in 1928, did himself a lot of harm by joining the British Union of Fascists and writing articles in a Fascist vein. Later he even went to Germany as an official guest of Hitler’s in order to attend the Wehrmacht’s maneuvers.

In the history of twentieth century military thought, Fuller’s name is almost always associated with that of his contemporary and friend, Basil Liddell Hart. Born in 1895, unlike Fuller, Liddell Hart was not a professional soldier but had studied history at Cambridge for one year. At that time he volunteered for service, received a commission, and was sent to fight in France. Gassed at the Somme, Captain (throughout his life he enjoyed emphasizing the military rank he had attained) Liddell Hart spent the rest of the War in Britain training infantrymen. It was in this capacity that he first started thinking seriously, and writing, about armed conflict. When the War ended, and having been invalided out of the army, he made his living as a sports journalist.

Concerning his intellectual development, two points are worth noting. First, like so many of his generation who, along with him, were educated in public schools, Liddell Hart was brought up on the notion that war was akin to sport and games. In his memoirs he relates, proudly, that he was rather good at football. Not because his coordination and technique were in any way outstanding, but because he could engage in various combinations and foresee where the ball was likely to end up. Second, and again like so many of his generation, Liddell Hart ended the War as a fervent admirer of the British military establishment which, after all, had just fought and won the greatest armed conflict in history until then. Within a few years he completely reversed himself, joining the then fashionable trend and becoming disillusioned with the War in general and with its conduct at the hand of the British High Command in particular. In criticizing that conduct, his experience as a popular journalist and interest in games were to come in handy.

Like Fuller, Liddell Hart arrived at the conclusion that sending men to attack frontally in the face of the machine guns which were trained at them had been the height of folly. All it did was lead to masses of unnecessary casualties. More than Fuller, he took care to trace this folly to its origin which, according to him, was to be found not in simple bloody-mindedness but in the writings of the greatest of all military philosophers, Carl von Clausewitz. He called Clausewitz the “Mahdi of Mass;” the prophet whose clarion-call had misled generations of officers into the belief that the best, indeed almost the only, way to wage war was to form the greatest possible concentration of men and weapons and launch it straight ahead against the enemy. In 1914–18 this “Prussian Marsellaise” had borne its horrible fruit. The results could be seen on literally thousands of war memorials erected not only in Britain but all over the British Empire and, indeed, the world.

Like Fuller, Liddell Hart was largely self-taught. However, he enjoyed several advantages over the older man. For one thing he was less interested in the non-military aspects of history and philosophy. This caused his historical writings to be somewhat one-dimensional; not for him the scintillating synthesis of politics, economics, sociology, and culture that often marks Fuller’s work at its best. However, it also saved him from engaging in the kind of mystic flights that sometimes made Fuller appear incomprehensible if not unbalanced. He wrote clearly and to the point, and indeed cynics might argue that part of his success stemmed from the fact that his work was so simplistic even generals could understand it. By the time he set forth his ideas about Clausewitz in
The Ghost of Napoleon
(originally delivered as the Lees-Knowles lectures for 1933) he was already the most famous military journalist in Britain. By way of confirming his status, was working for the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
as well. Four years earlier, in 1929, he had set forth his mature doctrines in
The Decisive Wars of History
. Expanded to include World War II and reprinted many times under such titles as
Strategy: the Indirect Approach
and
Strategy,
it was to become perhaps the most influential military study of the twentieth century.

Though he started his career as an infantry tactician, much like his predecessors from Jomini on Liddell Hart’s main interest was strategy. Like them, this fact caused him to ignore the period from about 600 AD. (the wars of Belisarius and Narses) to 1500 AD. (the Franco-Italian Wars in Italy), a 900-year period apparently marked by nothing but endless skirmishing in which nothing of interest took place. For the rest, however, he accepted the late nineteenth century view, which Mahan, Douhet and Fuller had all shared, that whereas the forms of war were subject to change, its fundamental principles were not. In this way he was able to treat ancient and modern campaigns, starting with Alexander the Great and ending with Ludendorff in 1918, as if they were basically similar. He ironed out all differences between them and focused on what, to him, was the essential point. The essential point, arising straight out of the experience of World War I, was that direct attacks against the enemy’s front had to be avoided at all cost since they inevitably ended in failure.

To restore the power of the offensive and save casualties, Liddell Hart went on to recommend “the indirect approach.” Rather than attacking the enemy head on, he had to be weakened first by having his limbs cut off, his organization disrupted, and the mind of his commander unbalanced. As he sought to show at the hand of historical studies—in reality, little more than thumbnail sketches—this could be achieved by combining rapidity of movement with secrecy and surprise. The goal was to conceal the true center of gravity for as long as possible; the means were to be strikes carried out by dispersed forces coming from unexpected directions and following the route of least expectation, even if mounting them meant overcoming topographical obstacles. Above all, every plan had to possess “two branches,” which meant it should be drawn up in such a way as to keep Red guessing at Blue’s true objectives. It should also be sufficiently flexible to enable that objective to be changed if, by some mishap, the first one turned out to be too strongly defended.

All these maneuvers were to be carried out in two dimensional space, along lines of communication, among all kinds of natural and artificial obstacles, while trailing “an umbilical cord of supply,” and against an enemy who presumably was also capable of maneuvering. To this extent they owed a lot to Jomini, although it was characteristic of Liddell Hart that, in his
chef d’oeuvre
, his great predecessor’s name is never mentioned. Consisting essentially of movement and characterized by means of colored arrows stretching across a map, war was presented almost as if it were some kind of sophisticated game played between opposing teams. This was particularly true of his mature work. Having started his career as a trainer of infantry, the older Liddell Hart became the more pronounced in his tendency to give tactics a short shrift. Mobilization, logistics, command, communication and control, and those twin unimportant questions of killing and dying were also lightly skipped over. As he once wrote, “could one but remove the horrible suffering and mutilation it would be the finest purifier of nations ever known.” Reading his last book,
A History of World War II
, one might be excused for thinking it was all about operational movement and very little else.

Having once overcome his early admiration for the British performance in World War I, during the early twenties Liddell Hart had also become interested in mechanization. In this field his mentor was Fuller whom he had known since 1920; and indeed so much did the younger man lift, not to say, steal, from the works of the older one that their friendship almost went to the dogs. Liddell Hart’s vision of mechanized armed forces was set forth in
Paris, or the Future of War
(1925) as well as
The Remaking of Modern Armies
(1927). In those small but extremely well-written studies he talked about the novel combination of tanks, aircraft, and poison gas as weapons. With their aid the defense could be skipped over or overcome, stalemate broken “within a few hours, or at most days.” And the war brought to a swift and cheap, if violent, end.

The main characteristics of both land-borne mechanized vehicles and aircraft were speed and flexibility. One might have thought that Liddell Hart would have seized upon them as the ideal tools with which to implement a strategy of indirect approach against opposing and equally mobile armed forces. Instead, however, he was enticed by a Douhet-like vision of “London, Manchester, Birmingham and half a dozen other great centers simultaneously attacked, the business localities and Fleet Street wrecked, Whitehall a heap of ruins, the slum districts maddened into the impulse to break loose and maraud, the railways cut, factories destroyed.” As a result, he never quite came around to forging the missing link between the two halves of his vision, the strategic and the technological. Though
Paris
does contain a few brilliant lines about that problem, in
The Decisive Wars of History
the entire question of mechanization is barely mentioned.

What prevented Liddell Hart from making a detailed forecast of the
Blitzkrieg
, with its characteristic armored divisions made up of different arms, was his abiding revulsion with the horrors of World War I and his determination, which he shared with so many of his generation, that they should not be repeated. From about 1931 on this caused him to switch from attempts to devise more effective ways to win towards thinking about less costly ways to avoid defeat. Following Corbett—once again, without mentioning him by name—he now claimed that the “British Way in Warfare” had always been to stay out of massive continental commitments. Instead it had relied on its navy to keep the enemy at bay (and harass and weaken him by means of well-directed strokes at selected points) and on continental allies to deliver the
coup de main.

By 1939 he had convinced himself that “the dominant lesson from the experience of land warfare, for more than a generation past, has been the superiority of the defense over attack.” Even in the air, as experience in Spain had shown, “the prospects of the defense are improving.” Therefore
,
instead of Britain repeating its World War I error which had led to so many casualties, it could safely trust the “dauntless” French to stop the Germans. Britain itself, its armed forces thoroughly modernized and mechanized, should revert to its traditional strategy, relying primarily on blockade on the one hand and airpower on the other. This had the additional advantage that it would make universal conscription and mass armies unnecessary—a preference for small professional forces being one thing which Liddell Hart, who unlike the other two was not a fascist but a liberal, shared with them.

Followed, as they were, by the smashing success of the early
Blitzkrieg
offensives, these predictions all but discredited Liddell Hart. By the middle of World War II he was regarded almost as
pass
é. The means, kosher and not so kosher, by which he revived his reputation after 1945 and presented himself as the person who had taught the Germans all they knew need not concern us here. Suffice it to say that all three thinkers discussed in this chapter so far started from the idea that World War I had provided an example of how
not
to do things. All three were shocked by the number of casualties which had been brought about by the power of the defense. To all three, that power was not the natural result of modern technology (including logistics, a subject to which none of them paid much attention) but, on the contrary, of a failure to make use of its most recent possibilities; whether in the air, or on the ground, or both. Each in his own way, all three sought to discover ways by which comparatively small, but modern, armed forces could overcome that defense so as to once again make it possible to wage war quickly and decisively. Although, as has just been explained, Liddell Hart ended up by retreating from that proposition.