B. H. Liddell Hart
Basil Liddell Hart | |
---|---|
Born | Paris, France | 31 October 1895
Died | 29 January 1970 Marlow, Buckinghamshire, England | (aged 74)
Resting place | St Peter and St Paul Churchyard, Medmenham, Buckinghamshire, England |
Nationality | British |
Alma mater | Corpus Christi College, Cambridge |
Occupation(s) | Soldier, military historian |
Spouse |
Jessie Stone (m. 1918) |
Children | Adrian Liddell Hart |
Military career | |
Service/ | British Army |
Years of service | 1914 – 1927 |
Rank | Captain |
Battles/wars | World War I |
Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart (31 October 1895 – 29 January 1970), commonly known throughout most of his career as Captain B. H. Liddell Hart, was a British soldier, military historian, and military theorist. He wrote a series of military histories that proved influential among strategists. Arguing that frontal assault was bound to fail at great cost in lives, as proven in World War I, he recommended the "indirect approach" and reliance on fast-moving armoured formations.
His pre-war publications are known to have influenced German World War II strategy, though he was accused of prompting captured generals to exaggerate his part in the development of blitzkrieg tactics. He also helped promote the Rommel myth and the "clean Wehrmacht" argument for political purposes, when the Cold War necessitated the recruitment of a new West German army.
Life
Liddell Hart was born in
World War I
On the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Liddell Hart volunteered for the British Army, where he became an officer in the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry in December[6] and served with the regiment on the Western Front. Liddell Hart's front line experience was relatively brief, confined to two short spells in the autumn and winter of 1915, being sent home from the front after suffering concussive injuries from a shell burst. He was promoted to the rank of captain. He returned to the front for a third time in 1916, in time to participate in the Battle of the Somme. He was hit three times without serious injury before being badly gassed and sent out of the line on 19 July 1916.[7] His battalion was nearly wiped out on the first day of the offensive on 1 July, a part of the 60,000 casualties suffered in the heaviest single day's loss in British history. The experiences he suffered on the Western Front profoundly affected him for the rest of his life.[8] Transferred to be adjutant of Volunteer units in Stroud and Cambridge which trained new recruits,[9] he wrote several booklets on infantry drill and training, which came to the attention of General Sir Ivor Maxse, commander of the 18th (Eastern) Division. After the war, he transferred to the Royal Army Educational Corps, where he prepared a new edition of the Infantry Training Manual. In it, Liddell Hart strove to instil the lessons of 1918, and carried on a correspondence with Maxse, a commanding officer during the battles of Hamel and Amiens.[10]
In April 1918 Liddell Hart married Jessie Stone, the daughter of J. J. Stone, who had been his assistant adjutant at Stroud,[11] and their son Adrian was born in 1922.[12]
Journalist and military historian
Liddell Hart was placed on
In the mid-to-late 1920s Liddell Hart wrote a series of histories of major military figures through which he advanced his ideas that the frontal assault was a strategy bound to fail at great cost in lives. He argued that the tremendous losses Britain suffered in the Great War were caused by its commanding officers not appreciating that fact of history. He believed the British decision in 1914 of directly intervening on the Continent with a great army was a mistake. He claimed that historically, "the British way in warfare" was to leave Continental land battles to her allies, intervening only through naval power, with the army fighting the enemy away from its principal front in a "limited liability" commitment.[14]
In his early writings on
According to Liddell Hart's memoirs, in a series of articles for The Times from November 1935 to November 1936, he had argued that Britain's role in the next European war should be entrusted to the air force. He theorised that Britain's air force could defeat her enemies while avoiding the high casualties and the limited influence that would come from Britain placing a large conscript army on the Continent.[16][17] The ideas influenced Neville Chamberlain, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, who argued in discussions of the Defence Policy and Requirements Committee for a strong air force, rather than a large army that would fight on the Continent.[18]
Becoming prime minister in 1937, Chamberlain placed Liddell Hart in a position of influence behind British grand strategy in the late 1930s.
With the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the War Cabinet reversed the Chamberlain policy advanced by Liddell Hart. With Europe on the brink of war and Germany threatening an invasion of Poland, the cabinet chose instead to advocate a British and Imperial army of 55 divisions to intervene on the Continent by coming to the aid of Poland, Norway and France.[21]
Postwar
After the war, Liddell Hart was responsible for extensive interviews and debriefs for several high-ranking German generals, who were held by the Allies as prisoners-of-war. Liddell Hart provided commentary on their outlook. The work was published as The Other Side of the Hill (UK edition, 1948) and The German Generals Talk (condensed US edition, 1948).
A few years later, Liddell Hart had the opportunity to review the notes that Erwin Rommel had kept during the war. Rommel had kept the notes with the intention of writing of his experiences after the war; the Rommel family had previously published the notes in German as War without Hate in 1950. Some of the notes had been destroyed by Rommel, and the rest, including Rommel's letters to his wife, had been confiscated by the American authorities. With Liddell Hart's help, they were later returned to Rommel's widow. Liddell Hart then edited and condensed the book and helped integrate the new material. The writings, along with notes and commentary by former General Fritz Bayerlein and Liddell Hart, were published in 1953 as The Rommel Papers.[22] (See below for Liddell Hart's role in the Rommel myth.)
In 1954, Liddell Hart published his most influential work, Strategy.
The Queen made Liddell Hart a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours of 1966.[28][29][30][31] As of 2009, Liddell Hart's personal papers and library form the central collection in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College London.[32]
Liddell Hart died on 29 January 1970 at the age of 74 at his home in Marlow, Buckinghamshire.[33]
Key ideas and observations
[N]ot of one period but of its whole course, points to the fact that, in all decisive campaigns, the dislocation of the enemy's psychological and physical balance has been the vital prelude to his overthrow.
— B. H. Liddell Hart[34]
Liddell Hart was an advocate of the notion that it is easier to succeed in war by an indirect approach.[17][35] To attack where the opponent expects, as Liddell Hart explained, makes the task of winning harder: "To move along the line of natural expectation consolidates the opponent's balance and thus increases his resisting power". That is in contrast to an indirect approach, in which physical or psychological surprise is a component: "The indirectness is usually physical and always psychological. In strategy, the longest way round is often the shortest way home".
Liddell Hart would illustrate the notion with historical examples. For example, Liddell Hart considered the Battle of Leuctra, won by Epaminondas, an example of an indirect approach.[36] Rather than weighting his army on the right wing, as was standard at the time, Epaminondas weighted his left wing, held back his right wing and routed the Spartan army. A more modern example would be the landings of the Allies at Normandy on 6 June 1944, as the Germans were expecting a landing in the vicinity of Pas-de-Calais.[37] By contrast, an example of a direct attack, in Liddell Hart's eyes, was the attack by Union forces at the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862.[38]
Even more impressive in Liddell Hart's eyes was the further campaign by Epaminondas, his invasion of the Peloponnese, in which in winter and in separate columns, he invaded Spartan controlled territory.[39] He was unable to draw the Spartans into combat and so settled on freeing helots. He then built two city states as a break against Spartan power and so the campaign was successful. By breaking the Spartan economic base, he won a campaign without ever fighting a battle.
When analyzing the campaigns of Napoleon, Liddell Hart noted that his approaches were less subtle and more brute force as his forces became larger and that when his forces were lesser, he was more apt to be creative in his battles.[40] Constant victory seemed to have dulled his skills as a soldier.
According to Reid, Liddell Hart's indirect approach has seven key themes.:[41]
- The dislocation of the enemy's balance should be the prelude to defeat, not to utter destruction.
- Negotiate an end to unprofitable wars.
- The methods of the indirect approach are better suited to democracy.
- Military power relies on economic endurance. Defeating an enemy by beating him economically incurs no risk.
- Implicitly, war is an activity between states.
- Liddell Hart's notion of "rational pacifism".[42]
- Victory often emerges as the result of an enemy defeating itself.
Influence
During the 1960s Liddell Hart's reputation reached extraordinary heights. When he visited Israel in 1960 his trip stimulated more public interest than that of any other foreign visitor except Marilyn Monroe.
— Brian Holden Reid[43]
Liddell Hart's reputation as a military thinker stood very high at his death in 1970. Post-mortem assessments, however, have been more ambivalent.
— Christopher Bassford[44]
At the height of his popularity,
Controversies
Influence on Panzerwaffe
Following the Second World War Liddell Hart pointed out that the German Wehrmacht adopted theories developed from those of J. F. C. Fuller and from his own, and that it used them against the Allies in Blitzkrieg warfare.[51] Some scholars, such as the political scientist John Mearsheimer, have questioned the extent of the influence which the British officers, and in particular Liddell Hart, had in the development of the method of war practised by the Panzerwaffe in 1939–1941. During the post-war debriefs of the former Wehrmacht generals, Liddell Hart attempted to tease out his influence on their war practices. Following these interviews, many of the generals said that Liddell Hart had been an influence on their strategies, something that had not been claimed previously nor has any contemporary, pre-war, documentation been found to support their assertions. Liddell Hart thus put "words in the mouths of German Generals" with the aim, according to Mearsheimer, to "resurrect a lost reputation".[52]
Shimon Naveh, the founder and former head of the Israel Defense Forces' Operational Theory Research Institute, stated that after World War II Liddell Hart "created" the idea of Blitzkrieg as a military doctrine: "It was the opposite of a doctrine. Blitzkrieg consisted of an avalanche of actions that were sorted out less by design and more by success."[53] Naveh stated that,
by manipulation and contrivance, Liddell Hart distorted the actual circumstances of the Blitzkrieg formation and obscured its origins. Through his indoctrinated idealization of an ostentatious concept, he reinforced the myth of Blitzkrieg. By imposing, retrospectively, his own perceptions of mobile warfare upon the shallow concept of Blitzkrieg, he created a theoretical imbroglio that has taken 40 years to unravel.[54]
Naveh stated that in his letters to German generals Erich von Manstein and Guderian, as well as to relatives and associates of Rommel, Liddell Hart "imposed his own fabricated version of Blitzkrieg on the latter and compelled him to proclaim it as original formula".[55]
Naveh pointed out that the edition of Guderian's memoirs published in Germany differed from the one published in the United Kingdom. Guderian neglected to mention the influence of the English theorists such as Fuller and Liddell Hart in the German-language versions. One example of the influence of these men on Guderian was the report on the
Though the German version of the Guderian memoirs mentions Liddell Hart, it did not ascribe to him his role in developing the theories behind armoured warfare. An explanation for the difference between the two translations can be found in the correspondence between the two men. In one letter to Guderian, Liddell Hart reminded the German general that he should provide him the credit he was due, offering "You might care to insert a remark that I emphasise the use of armoured forces for long-range operations against the opposing Army's communications, and also the proposed type of armoured division combining Panzer and Panzer-infantry units – and that these points particularly impressed you."[57]
Richard M. Swain comments that while some arguments against Liddell Hart's thinking are deserved, Liddell Hart the man himself was not a knave and Mearsheimer's attempt of character assassination is unwarranted.[58]
Role in Rommel myth
Liddell Hart was instrumental in the creation of the "
The myth was initially fueled by
Following the war, the Western Allies, and particularly the British, depicted Rommel as the "good German" and "our friend Rommel". His reputation for conducting a clean war was used to support
After the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, it became clear to the Americans and the British that a German army would have to be revived to help face off against the Soviet Union. Many former German officers were convinced, however, that no future German army would be possible without the rehabilitation of the Wehrmacht.[64] Thus, in the atmosphere of the Cold War, Rommel's former enemies, especially the British, played a key role in the manufacture and propagation of the myth.[65] The German rearmament was highly dependent on the image boosting that the Wehrmacht needed. Liddell Hart, an early proponent of these two interconnected initiatives, provided the first widely available source on Rommel in his 1948 book on Hitler's generals. He devoted a chapter to Rommel, portraying him as an outsider to the Nazi regime. Additions to the chapter published in 1951 concluded with laudatory comments about Rommel's "gifts and performance" that "qualified him for a place in the role of the 'Great Captains' of history".[66]
1953 saw the publication of Rommel's writings of the war period as The Rommel Papers, edited by Liddell Hart, the former Wehrmacht officer
According to Connelly, Young and Liddell Hart laid the foundation for the Anglo-American myth, which consisted of three themes: Rommel's ambivalence towards Nazism; his military genius; and the emphasis of the chivalrous nature of the fighting in North Africa.
MI5 controversy
On 4 September 2006,
Biographies
- Alex Danchev wrote the biography of Liddell Hart, Alchemist of War: The Life of Basil Liddell Hart, with the cooperation of Liddell Hart's widow.
- Brian Bond wrote Liddell Hart: a study of his military thought (Cassell, 1977; Rutgers University Press, 1977).
- John J. Mearsheimer's Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (New York, 1988), published by the Cornell University Press and part of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, uses primary evidence to look at Liddell Hart's claims to have predicted the fall of France by Blitzkrieg tactics and that he was influential with German generals and thinkers (notably Guderian and Rommel) in the 1930s. What emerges are serious questions as to Liddell Hart's version of history.[52]
Works
- Scipio Africanus: Greater Than Napoleon (originally: A Greater than Napoleon: Scipio Africanus; W Blackwood and Sons, London, 1926; Biblio and Tannen, New York, 1976)
- Lawn Tennis Masters Unveiled (Arrowsmith, London, 1926)
- Great Captains Unveiled (W. Blackwood and Sons, London, 1927; Greenhill, London, 1989)
- Reputations 10 Years After (Little, Brown, Boston, 1928)[74]
- Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American (Dodd, Mead and Co, New York, 1929; Frederick A. Praeger, New York, 1960)
- The Decisive Wars of History (1929) (This is the first part of the later: Strategy: The Indirect Approach)
- The Real War 1914–1918 (1930), reprinted as A History of the World War 1914-1918 (1934); later republished as History of the First World War (1970).
- Foch: The Man of Orleans in two volumes (1931), Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, England.
- The Ghost of Napoleon (Yale University, New Haven, 1934)
- T.E. Lawrence in Arabia and After (Jonathan Cape, London, 1934 – online)
- World War I in Outline (1936)
- The Defence of Britain (Faber and Faber, London, Fall 1939 (after the German war against Poland); Greenwood, Westport, 1980). German edition:
- Die Verteidigung Gross-Britanniens. Zürich 1939.
- The Current of War, London: Hutchinson, 1941
- The Strategy of Indirect Approach (1941, reprinted in 1942 under the title: The Way to Win Wars)
- The Way to Win Wars (1942)
- Why Don't We Learn From History?, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1944
- The Revolution in Warfare, London: Faber and Faber, 1946
- The Other Side of the Hill: Germany's Generals. Their Rise and Fall, with their own Account of Military Events 1939–1945, London: Cassel, 1948; enlarged and revised edition, Delhi: Army Publishers, 1965; pub. in the United States as The German Generals Talk: Startling Revelations from Hitler's High Command (1971 ed.). William Morrow. 1948. ISBN 9780688060121.
- The Letters of Private Wheeler 1809-1828, (editor), London: Michael Joseph, 1951
- "Foreword" to Heinz Guderian's Panzer Leader (New York: Da Capo., 1952)
- Strategy, second revised edition, London: Faber and Faber, 1954, 1967.
- The Rommel Papers, (editor), 1953
- The Tanks – A History of the Royal Tank Regiment and its Predecessors: Volumes I and II (Praeger, New York, 1959)
- "Foreword" to Samuel B. Griffith's Sun Tzu: the Art of War (Oxford University Press, London, 1963)
- The Memoirs of Captain Liddell Hart: Volumes I and II (Cassell, London, 1965)
- History of the Second World War (London, Weidenfeld Nicolson, 1970)
References
Notes
- ^ This history of this work is involved, as it has multiple titles and editions. Later versions are known as Strategy: The Indirect Approach as well. Danchev notes the first version was developed in 1929 and was rewritten and updated in 1941, 1946, 1954, and 1967.[26]
- ^ Connelly also uses the term "Anglophone rehabilitation".[67]
- ^ Kitchen: "The North African campaign has usually been seen, as in the title of Rommel's account, as 'War without Hate', and thus as further proof that the German army was not involved in any sordid butchering, which was left to Himmler's SS. While it was perfectly true that the German troops in North Africa fought with great distinction and gallantry, ... it was fortunate for their subsequent reputation that the SS murderers that followed in their wake did not have an opportunity to get to work." Kitchen further explains that the sparsely populated desert areas did not lend themselves to ethnic cleansing; that the German forces never reached Egypt and Palestine that had large Jewish populations; and that, in the urban areas of Tunisia and Tripolitania, the Italian government constrained the German efforts to discriminate against or eliminate Jews who were Italian citizens.[71]
Citations
- ^ a b c "Hart, Sir Basil Henry Liddell". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Archived from the original on 11 June 2014.
- ^ Whittle, Marius Gerard Anthony. "Deceiving Clio: A Critical Examination of the Writing of Military History in the Pursuit of Military Reform and Modernisation (with Particular Reference to Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart and Major General John Frederick Charles Fuller)". M.A. thesis, University of South Africa, Pretoria, 2009, 63.
- ISBN 0874369908.
- ^ Bond p. 12
- ^ Bond p. 13
- ^ "No. 29000". The London Gazette. 8 December 1914. p. 10452.
- ^ Bond pp. 16–17
- ^ Bond p. 16
- ^ Bond p. 19
- ^ Bond p. 25
- ^ Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart, The memoirs of Captain Liddell Hart: Volume 1 (1965 edition), p. 31: "In April I married the younger daughter, Jessie, of my former assistant adjutant at Stroud, J. J. Stone..."
- ^ Liddell Hart, Adrian John (1922–1991) Archived 30 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine at aim25.ac.uk, accessed 3 May 2011
- ^ Bond p. 32
- ^ Barnett, p. 503.
- ^ Bond p. 29
- ^ Liddell Hart, Memoirs, Vol I, pp. 296–299, pp. 380–381.
- ^ a b Alex Danchev, , "Liddell Hart and the Indirect Approach", Journal of Military History, 63#2 (1999), pp. 313–337.
- ^ Correlli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (London: Methuen, 1972), pp. 497–499.
- ^ a b Barnett, p. 502.
- ^ Minney p. 54
- ^ Barnett, p. 576.
- ^ Major 2008.
- ^ Shah, Shafat U, In Defense of Liddell Hart's 'Strategy Archived 20 December 2019 at the Wayback Machine, Task and Purpose, Nov 2018.
- ^ Reid, Brian Holden, The Legacy of Liddell Hart: The Contrasting Responses of Michael Howard and André Beaufre Archived 3 July 2019 at the Wayback Machine, British Journal for Military History, Volume 1, Issue 1, October 2014, p. 67
- ^ Marshall, S.L.A. (29 August 1954). "New Looks and Old". The New York Times. New York, New York, USA. p. 100,118. Archived from the original on 21 December 2019. Retrieved 18 March 2019.
{{cite news}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) - ^ Danchev, Alex, Alchemist of War: The Life of Basil Liddell Hart, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998, pp. 156–157
- ^ Danchev, Alchemist of War, p. 157
- ^ "new knight Liddell Hart weighs cost in Vietnam". The Windsor Star. Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Associated Press. 4 January 1966. p. 10. Retrieved 16 March 2019.
- ^ "Teaching The Enemy". The Boston Globe. Boston, Massachusetts, USA. 4 September 1666. p. 24. Retrieved 16 March 2019.
- ^ Watts, Granville (1 January 1966). "Acid Penned Writer Wins Knighthood". Statesman Journal. Salem, Oregon, USA. Associated Press. Retrieved 16 March 2019.
- ^ "Novelists Greene and Golding Named on Queen's Honors List". The New York Times. New York, New York, USA. 1 January 1966. Archived from the original on 25 December 2019. Retrieved 16 March 2019.
{{cite news}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) - ^ "Liddell Hart archive, KCL". Archived from the original on 24 September 2006. Retrieved 5 September 2006.
- ^ "Basil Liddell Hart, 74, Is Dead; Military Theorist and Writer". The New York Times. 30 January 1970. Retrieved 19 April 2020.
- ^ Brian Bond, Liddell-Hart: A Study of His Military Thought, London: Casell, 1979. p. 55
- ^ Liddell Hart, B.H., Strategy, Faber and Faber, 1967, pp. 5–6.
- ^ Liddell Hart, Strategy, pp. 14–16.
- ^ Liddell Hart, Strategy, pp. 294–299.
- ^ Liddell Hart, Strategy, p. 128
- ^ Liddell Hart, Strategy, 1967, pp. 14–15
- ^ Liddell Hart, Basil, Strategy, pp. 119–123
- ^ Reid, Brian Holden, pp. 68–69
- ^ Danchev, Alex, Alchemist of War, pp. 167–168
- ^ Brian Holden Reid, p. 67.
- ^ Bassford, Christopher, Clausewitz in English: The Reception of Clausewitz in Britain and America,Clausewitz in English, Oxford University Press, 1994, Chapter 15.
- ^ Reid, Brian Holden, p. 69
- ^ Bassford, Christopher, Chapter 15.
- ^ Baumgarten, Sam, Australian Army Journal, Summer, Volume XI, No 2, p. 64
- ^ Shah, Shaffat U, ibid
- ^ Osinga, Franz, Science, Strategy, and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd, Routledge, 2006, p. 3
- ^ Danchev, Alex, Alchemist of War, p. 5
- ^ Naveh p. 107.
- ^ a b c Luvaas 1990.
- ^ Naveh 1997, pp. 107–108.
- ^ Naveh 1997, pp. 108–109.
- ^ Naveh 1997, p. 109.
- ^ Corum p. 42
- ^ Danchev 1998, pp. 234–235.
- JSTOR 4050797. Retrieved 8 September 2019.
- ^ Luvaas 1990, pp. 9–19.
- JSTOR 1985958. Retrieved 8 September 2019.
- ^ Searle 2014, pp. 8–27.
- ^ Caddick-Adams 2012, p. 471-478.
- ^ Major 2008, p. 520-535.
- ^ Smelser & Davies 2008, pp. 72–73.
- ^ Caddick-Adams 2012, p. 471–472.
- ^ Searle 2014, pp. 8, 27.
- ^ a b c Connelly 2014, pp. 163–163.
- ^ Major 2008, p. 526.
- ^ a b Mearsheimer 1988, pp. 199–200.
- ^ Caddick-Adams 2012, p. 483.
- ^ Kitchen 2009, p. 10.
- ^ "Files reveal leaked D-Day plans". BBC News. 4 September 2006.
- ^ Michael Evans (4 September 2006). "Army writer nearly revealed plans of D-Day". The Times. London.
- ^ Bakeless, John (1 April 1928). "Reputations Ten Years After". The Atlantic. Retrieved 8 September 2022.
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- ISBN 9781590207253.
- Chambers, Madeline (2012). "The Devil's General? German film seeks to debunk Rommel myth". Reuters. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
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- Corum, James S. The Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans von Seeckt and German Military Reform (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1992). ISBN 0-7006-0541-X.
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- Danchev, Alex, "Liddell Hart and the Indirect Approach", Journal of Military History, Vol. 63, No. 2. (1999), pp. 313–337.
- Gat, Azar. Fascist and liberal visions of war: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and other modernists (Courier Corporation, 1998).
- Gibson, Charles M.; Commander, USN (2001). "Operational Leadership as Practiced by Field Marshall Erwin Rommel During the German Campaign in North Africa 1941–1942: Success of Failure?" (PDF). Naval War College. Archived (PDF) from the original on 7 March 2016. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
- ISBN 978-0-521-50971-8.
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- Larson, Robert H. "BH Liddell Hart: Apostle of Limited War." Military Affairs 44.2 (1980): 72+ in JSTOR
- Luvaas, Jay. "Clausewitz, Fuller and Liddell Hart." Journal of Strategic Studies 9.2–3 (1986): 197–212.
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- ISBN 978-0-345-32158-9.
- Naveh, Shimon, In Pursuit of Military Excellence; The Evolution of Operational Theory. (London: Francass, 1997). ISBN 0-7146-4727-6.
- Reid, Brian Holden. "'Young Turks, or Not So Young?': The Frustrated Quest of Major General JFC Fuller and Captain BH Liddell Hart." The Journal of Military History 73.1 (2009): 147–175. online
- Robinson, James R. (1997). "The Rommel Myth". Military Review Journal. Archived from the original on 8 March 2016. Retrieved 7 March 2016.
- Searle, Alaric (2014). "Rommel and the Rise of the Nazis". In Beckett, F. W. (ed.). Rommel Reconsidered. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books. ISBN 978-0-8117-1462-4.
- ISBN 978-0-521-83365-3.
- Swain, Richard M. "BH Liddell Hart and the Creation of a Theory of War, 1919-1933." Armed Forces & Society 17.1 (1990): 35–51.