Liddell Hart was an English jazzman. Although this man was not a standard professional soldier, and the highest rank he received was only a captain, many famous European and American generals during the Second World War openly declared themselves followers of their military theories and were proud of them. After the British army defeated the German-Italian Axis alliance commanded by Rommel the "Desert Fox" on the battlefield in North Africa, the front-line generals even wrote a letter of thanks to Hart, attributing the victory in North Africa to his theoretical guidance. Liddell Hart enjoyed such a high reputation because the modern theory of mechanized warfare co-founded with the British general Fuller, as well as the principle of indirect military line he expounded, had a major impact on the military thinking and practice of the Entire Western World before and after World War II.
Lieddell Hart was born in England in Paris, France. His father was a historically knowledgeable and highly literate Protestant pastor who was then the president of an Israeli-American church in Paris. At the age of 8, he returned to England with his parents to settle down. After completing his preparatory studies in 1913, he entered the historic Corpus Corpus College of Cambridge University in England to specialize in history.
He developed a keen interest in military history, especially in tactical history, especially in the Eastern countries, which enjoyed the reputation of "the master of the warriors", which made him particularly admired. Since then, he has aspired to "devote himself to the study of war."
In 1914, World War I broke out. Hart resolutely threw himself into the army and was assigned to the Royal Yorkshire Light Infantry Regiment as a soldier. After a period of military training, he accompanied his infantry battalion to the Western Front in Europe to fight against the Germans as a junior officer. In 10 months of battlefield experience, this polite young scholar performed heroically, rushing to the front of each battle and being wounded twice.
However, he is not the kind of person who only knows the courage of the puppeteer. He had a brain that was good at independent thinking, and although he resolutely obeyed the combat instructions of his superiors, he was disgusted by the stereotypical tactics of blindly carrying out brute force fighting from the front that prevailed at that time. In his view, the "trench-to-trench" slaughter is a "waste of soldiers' blood" without any military art, and we should explore a new method of warfare that takes less effort and succeeds more.
At the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1917, his unit caught an enemy in front of him by surprise through clever maneuvering. The battle made him begin to feel that it was much more reasonable to carry out the operation by indirect routes than the frontal impact of the machinery. In addition, from the first use of tanks by the British in this battle, he was keenly aware that the heavy use of this new weapon was bound to cause a military revolution.
It was at this time that Hart was gassed by enemy forces during a battle in July. This third injury destroyed his health and he lost the opportunity to make a career on the battlefield. However, this allowed him to transfer to the rear command organization and use the scholarly brain to study military scholarship.
Towards the end of the war, the British Army authorities decided to make a major revision of the existing rules and regulations of operations, selecting a group of insightful young officers from the army to participate in the work. Hart's talent caught the attention of Shangfeng. The War Department appointed the young man in his twenties to write the most important tactical part of the Infantry Training Manual. In this manual, he boldly expounded the idea of mobile warfare in contrast to the traditional idea of position warfare.
In June 1920, Liedel Hart met for the first time in the country with Colonel Fuller, the planner of tank warfare at the Battle of the Somme. The latter, who was 17 years older than him, was ostracized by a group of conservative-minded senators in power for vigorously advocating the idea of "mechanized war."
Hart firmly believes that the emergence of two new technologies, tanks and aircraft, will inevitably make the military field face an innovation. He took fuller's side in a clear-cut manner, at the forefront of the spoken out for the modernization of the army, without hesitation that it would ruin his promising promotion in the army.
In 1925, he was hired as a special military correspondent for the Daily Telegraph for 10 years. It was this year that he first proposed the theoretical idea of "blitzkrieg". He wrote: The secret of blitzkrieg warfare lies partly in the tactical combination of aircraft and tanks, partly in the direction of attack and the suddenness of the attack time, but most importantly, after the breakthrough, the armored forces should independently and rapidly advance before the large troops arrive, and develop into strategic depth. Militarily, this was indeed a far-sighted theoretical proposition at the time.
However, Hart's ideas were regarded by those in power in the British military as a grotesque idea. Britain's rival, the German army, realized the potential value of this new theory of warfare, accepted it, and used "blitzkrieg" to attack British troops and their allies when they launched The Second World War more than a decade later, achieving a great success that shocked the world. Of course, this was not Hart's fault, but the misfortune of the military reformer.
In 1927, dissatisfied with the repression of conservative forces in the military circles, he resolutely retired from active service with the rank of lieutenant. Over the next decade, he served as military editor of the British Encyclopedia, special military correspondent and defence adviser to the Newspaper Tims, military correspondent for the Daily Mail, and lecturer at cambridge university, positions that gave him the convenience of studying the art of war from a wide range of perspectives.
In 1929, based on the results of many years of research, he wrote and published the book "The Decisive War in History". This work analyzes a large number of examples of warfare in the Western world over the past 2,500 years, and initially expounds the strategic thinking of indirect line. In 1936, when the Spanish Civil War broke out, he went to the front line of the Iberian Peninsula as a special military correspondent for several major British newspapers. At that time, the Western countries openly assisted franco-led Spanish National Army in attacking the Spanish Republican Army and used it as a testing ground for new weapons such as tanks.
The Spanish Republican Army fought flexibly in the defense of the capital Madrid, destroying a large number of tanks of the Spanish National Army. The military leaders of many European countries, as well as some old-fashioned military leaders of the Soviet Union, used this as a pretext to assert that tanks were large and useless to terminate the development of armored mechanized units. Hart, with a large number of field communications, pointed out that the problem was not the tank itself, but the error in the use of this advanced weapon, and resolutely defended the theory of "mechanized warfare" that Fuller and himself had adhered to for many years.
After the end of the Spanish Civil War, he returned to England and in 1937 served as a personal adviser to the British Minister of Defence, Jorbert Belisha, assisting the latter in his rearmament activities. His ideas contradicted the mainstream of the military circles, and he resigned after a year of work. In 1939, World War II broke out in Europe.
This war has brought unprecedented devastation to people. But the astonishing success of the Nazi Germans in the early stages of the war with large-scale mechanized blitzkriegs also proved how far-sighted the theory of warfare that Hart and other military reformers had been advocating since the end of the last world war.
By this time, Hart's age and health had not allowed him to serve the battlefield again, and he continued his research on the theory of war in London. In 1939, he revised and republished the book "Decisive Wars in History", renamed "Indirect Line Strategy", and systematically expounded the military principle of "indirect line". This military doctrine was widely used by many British generals during the War. After the war, Hart's reputation in European and American military theory grew.
In 1946, the Indirect Route Strategy was renamed "Strategic Theory" and reprinted, and it was widely translated and published in various countries in the world. Military academies in many countries regard it as a benchmark teaching material, and many famous generals in the West regard it as a classic. He himself continued to research and write. When "Strategic Theory" was revised and published again in 1954, he made a sharp criticism in the preface to the republishment of the role of nuclear weapons prevailing in the West, and once again showed the theoretical courage not to follow the tide.
Hart spent the second half of his life in diligent writing, balding, myopic eyes, and a thin body, dying in the studio at the age of 75. Throughout his life, he did not pursue material pleasures, and most of his income was used to buy books. Therefore, the legacy left to his son is a small library. The military theory advocated by Hart throughout his life certainly has many fallacies. In particular, it is obviously wrong to exaggerate the role of tanks, aircraft, and other new weapons, and to superficially misinterpret and criticize Clausewitz's profound ideas. However, his style of daring to make military innovations and studying hard and rigorously is undoubtedly commendable.
References: "Modern and Contemporary History of the World", "The Complete Documentary of the Second World War", "The Legend of the British Famous Generals"