Basil Liddell Hart

Basil Liddell Hart spent his life arguing that armies should stop attacking things head-on, and spent his last years arranging the credit for it. He was gassed on the Somme in 1916 as a young infantry officer, and everything he wrote afterwards proceeds from the conviction that the frontal attack of 1914 to 1918 was not war but a failure of thought. He left the army on health grounds and became military correspondent of the Daily Telegraph and then The Times, which in Britain between the wars made him more influential than most serving generals. The doctrine he built was the indirect approach: attack where the enemy is not, dislocate him psychologically before fighting him, and expand the torrent through whatever gap appears. He set it out in Strategy and in a study of Scipio, and he read the whole of military history back through it - which is where his Subutai comes from. He advised Hore-Belisha at the War Office in the late 1930s, pressing mechanisation, and also argued for a limited liability strategy that would keep Britain out of a continental land war, which did not survive 1940 well. After the war he interviewed captured German generals and published them as The Other Side of the Hill, and they told him, gratifyingly, that they had learned blitzkrieg from his books. Later historians have found rather little evidence for that in the German record of the 1930s, and rather a lot of evidence that he encouraged the claim. The indirect approach has outlasted the argument about its paternity. It is taught at staff colleges that no longer teach the man, which is probably the fate he would have chosen if he had been offered only one.

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