During 1918 another British officer had started to think about how the deadlock of trench warfare could be broken. Captain B. H. Liddell Hart was not a tank officer and never became a tank expert in the way that Fuller was. But like Fuller, and the German Captain Heinz Guderian too, he was from a light infantry regiment, imbued with all the respect for mobility that such regiments have.
Liddell Hart firmly rejected the brainless human battering-ram tactics of General Haig and his fellows and reintroduced the notion that battles are won by ideas. There was always an indirect approach, he argued, always an unexpected place or unexpected way to hit the enemy. His book The Strategy of Indirect Approach exemplified such ideas in a history of warfare that started with the Greeks and Persians. It was to become his most widely read work.
After the war, Liddell Hart was chosen to revise the British infantry training manual, and, like Fuller, he used German tactics as his starting point. He added many ideas of his own, stressing the advantage of reinforcing success rather than sending aid to where the fighting was hardest. Turn opportunism into a system, he advised. He expounded these ideas at lectures. Although the War Office cut and changed the draft he had written for the official manual, his original version was published as a separate volume and Liddell Hart became an influential voice almost overnight. Generals came to hear him talk; the aide-decamp of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, who became Supreme Allied Commander in April 1918, contacted him. In India one general had the lecture printed for the British troops at his own expense.
Boney Fuller was unconvinced by the indirect-approach theory, calling it “the strategy of evasion.” But the two men saw eye to eye on many matters, and it had been Fuller’s Plan 1919 (reprinted in Weekly Tank Notes) that first made Liddell Hart formulate his theories into more specific terms. Both men agreed that modern armies must achieve mobility by means of mechanization, and it was Liddell Hart who extended what were essentially tactical movements (hitting a headquarters 20 miles or so inside the enemy’s territory) into the philosophy of “the expanding torrent,” which spread disorder up through the army commanders to the enemy government.
There were many other theorists describing what the future held. The American Army’s General (then Colonel) William Mitchell had used hundreds of airplanes to drop an unprecedented 80 tons of bombs onto German rear areas in one day to support an offensive. As the war
Ended, he was proposing more such bombing offensives and wanted 12,000 infantry soldiers dropped into the German rear and air-supplied. Mitchell advocated the dive bomber and demonstrated after the war that battleships were vulnerable to bombing aircraft.
In Italy Colonel Giulio Douhet went on to claim that wars could be decided by fleets of bombers. As with all such theories, these writings were more often used in support of vested interests than as a basis for rational discussion. And the theorists were too ready to go to extremes in their writings so that predictions became fantasies set in a science-fiction world.
World History
