Niall Ferguson on B. H. Liddell Hart

“The good news for Liddell Hart was that his work was hugely influential. The bad news was that it was hugely influential not in Britain but in Germany. With the notable exception of Major-General J. F. C. Fuller, senior British commanders like Field Marshal Earl Haig simply refused to accept that 'the aeroplane, the tank [and] the motor car [would] supersede the horse in future wars', dismissing motorized weapons as mere 'accessories to the man and horse'. Haig's brother concurred: the cavalry would 'never be scrapped to make room for the tanks'. By contrast, younger German officers immediately grasped the significance of Liddell Hart's work. Among his most avid fans was Heinz Guderian, commander of the 19th German Army Corps in the invasion of Poland. As Guderian recalled, it was from Liddell Hart and other British pioneers of 'a new type of warfare on the largest scale' that he learned the importance of 'the concentration of armour'.”

“Blitzkrieg is, of course, a German word meaning 'lightning war'. The ironic thing is that it was in many ways a British invention, derived from the lessons of the Western Front in the First World War. Captain Basil Liddell Hart had drawn his own conclusions from the excessively high casualties suffered by both sides. As an infantry subaltern, he himself had been gassed, the long-term effects of which forced him to retire from the army in 1927, after which he turned to journalism, working as defence correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and then The Times and publishing numerous works of military history. In Liddell Hart's view, the fatal mistake of most offensives on the Western Front had been their ponderous and predictable directness. A more 'indirect approach', he argued, would aim at surprising the enemy, throwing his commanders off balance, and then exploiting the ensuing confusion. The essence was to concentrate armour and air power in a lethal lightning strike.”