The Liddell Hart Memoirs Vol II
About this book
Basil Liddell Hart is regarded as one of the greatest military thinker of the last century. The second volume of his Memoirs opens in the spring of 1937. The author had been long in the forefront of scientific historians and commentators on military, strategic and international affairs. His books, articles, papers, lectures, his columns as the Military Correspondent and a leader-writer of The Times had given him international status, even in Germany. When Chamberlain succeeded Baldwin as Prime Minister, he appointed Leslie Hore-Belisha as his War Minister, with instructions that he wanted to see ‘drastic changes’. Within a few weeks, Hore-Belisha had enlisted Liddell Hart into what he called the ‘partnership’. The combination of the far-sighted, zealous reformer and the dynamic, ambitious politician was to achieve real progress towards modernisation of the Army. It was a partnership that perhaps saved Britain from complete destruction in Hitler’s war; pursued to the end, it would certainly have saved her countless setbacks, thousands of lives, and much moral and economic damage in the years that followed. The circumstances of the dissolution of the ‘partnership’ set the pattern for the remainder of the book and reflect the grim events which culminated in the collapse of France in 1940. Liddell-Hart memoirs give an unparalleled account of the forces and personalities which governed those years, seen from a unique, inside viewpoint at the top. Here is appeasement, inertia, resistance to change, evasiveness and folly in high places, recorded in new and terrible detail as they tumble one after another in a mad helter-skelter to a war fought at the wrong time, in the wrong places, for the wrong reasons. For the author there was personal distress. Throughout the twenties and the thirties his views on future warfare had often been rejected as impracticable in his own country — only to be adopted by her enemies. He, more than anybody, knew the power of his theories when put to practical use, how they could be combated, and how grossly ill-equipped Britain and her Allies were to do so. Now, with the Chamberlain Government’s amazing volte-face from appeasement to muddle-headed belligerence, his realism was derided as unwarranted pessimism. It was no consolation to him that when the attack came, the German assaults followed exactly the patterns he had predicted for so long. “The greatest military thinker of the 20th Century whose ideas have revolutionised the art of war” — GENERAL CHASSIN “Nearly all German tank strategy was based on Liddell Hart’s teachings” — GENERAL VON MELLENTHIN “The theoretical originator of mechanised warfare. I was one of his disciples” — GENERAL GUDERIAN “No expert on military affairs has better earned the right to respectful attention than Liddell Hart” — PRESIDENT KENNEDY “He still remains the foremost exponent of military matters in this country” — F.M. SIR CLAUDE AUCHINLECK “Britain’s greatest military historian of our times” — F.M. VISCOUNT MONTGOMERY OF ALAMEIN Captain B.H. Liddell Hart (1895-1970) was an historian who made military history and theory interesting and understandable to the general reader. He was military writer for several London newspapers, as well as Military Editor of the ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’. He was knighted in 1966. Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent digital publisher.