Warfare in Europe 1919–1938

Geoffrey Jensen, Geoffrey Jensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351873734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Although ostensibly a time of peace, one of the richest and most fascinating periods in military history falls between the two world wars. With good reason, even today military theorists look to these years for relevant lessons. The articles and papers collected together in this volume highlight the major themes and developments of interwar military affairs in Europe, including the new doctrines of tank warfare, air power, German "Blitzkrieg", and Soviet operational art. They also demonstrate the important place of the major armed conflicts of the period, such as the Russian and Spanish Civil Wars, in European history.

Part I
Military Thought and Doctrine

[1]
British Influence and the Evolution of the Panzer Arm: Myth or Reality? Part I

Azar Gat

Liddell Hart's reputation as one who decisively influenced the proponents of armoured warfare in Germany during the interwar period has been marred and thrown into question by revelations that this reputation was largely self-propagated, and that to create it he actually exploited the plight of the German generals were after the Second World War, unscrupulously manipulating their evidence for his own ends. His personal contacts with the German generals, his role as the one who recorded and presented their war histories to western readers, and his strong public support for them bound the generals to him by feelings of gratitude, self-interest, and dependency.¹ John Mearsheimer has fully exposed Liddell Hart's persistent efforts and elaborate techniques in using his connections with the German generals for extracting, inviting, and planting accolades, which he later inflated beyond their original context, modified, inserted in key publications, and disseminated widely by any possible means. As Mearsheimer has shown, three cases were of particular significance for Liddell Hart: Guderian, Rommel, and Manstein.

In Manstein's case Liddell Hart's efforts did not bear fruit, despite the fact that the field marshal was heavily in his debt. Liddell Hart intervened to relieve the hardship and humiliation which Manstein endured in the prisoner-of-war camp. On Manstein's request he arranged for his wife and child to be transferred to his sister's house in the French zone of occupation in Germany. He campaigned against Manstein's being tried as a war criminal, assisted in his defence when he was put on trial, and fought for his release after he had been convicted. He took under his care the publication of the English edition of Manstein's war memoirs, Lost Victories (1958), and as late as the 1960s intervened to secure a place at Cambridge for Manstein's son. Yet, despite his gratitude, Manstein withstood Liddell Hart's attempts to make the latter the inspiration behind the Ardennes operation which Manstein had conceived and which had led to the Allies' collapse in the West in 1940. This, however, did not stop Liddell Hart from putting his words in Manstein's mouth in his Memoirs.²

Liddell Hart had more luck with Rommel's family. The field marshal's widow and son were very anxious that Liddell Hart should prepare an English edition of his papers. On his persistent urging, Rommel's family and his chief of staff in North Africa, General Fritz Bayerlein, provided flimsy but reasonable evidence that Rommel, like most German officers, had known of Liddell Hart during the 1930s and had probably read some of his writings, though Rommel himself had not been converted to armour before 1940. The evidence further showed that during the war Rommel had on two different occasions mentioned the failure of his British opponents to adopt the theories of armoured warfare originally developed by 'British military critics' (Bayerlein explained that Rommel had meant Fuller and Liddell Hart). In one of his papers Rommel had also specifically referred to an article Liddell Hart had written during the war. Liddell Hart, however, only accepted the job of editing Rommel's papers after extracting from Rommel's family and from Bayerlein statements that made Rommel nothing less than his 'pupil' who had been 'highly influenced by his tactical and strategic conceptions'. He inserted this statement in the English edition of The Rommel Papers (1953), but failed to make Bayerlein have it incorporated in the German one.³

The most important case for Liddell Hart, and the one in which he achieved his crowning success, was that of Guderian, Germany's foremost armour pioneer. The two corresponded extensively from September 1948. The brisk and abrasive Guderian had made himself quite a number of enemies in the German army, and was interesting in getting his side of the story told. Liddell Hart's interviews with the German generals, The Other Side of the Hill (1948), had been published before he and Liddell Hart made contact, but Liddell Hart was planning a second, enlarged edition of the book. Six months after they began their correspondence he informed Guderian that he intended to devote a whole chapter to him in the new edition. At about the same time he inquired if Guderian had considered writing his war memoirs. Guderian, who was receiving no pension, was then living with his wife in one room under conditions of virtual poverty. As he wrote to Liddell Hart, publishing his memoirs was, if nothing else, a means for him to earn a living.⁴ Liddell Hart took it upon himself to find British and American publishers for the memoirs and also put Guderian in touch with British and American journals. Getting the memoirs accepted for publication in the West proved, however, very difficult. Two publishing houses, Collins and Cassell, successively rejected the typescript, describing it (rightly) as 'full of self-pity and unrepentant nationalism, typical of a German officer of the nationalistic school'.⁵ Liddell Hart worked hard to soften and remove the problematic passages in the book, find another publisher, and, finally, secure the best financial terms for Guderian. When the book, Panzer Leader (1952), became a bestseller, he asked for the 25 per cent of the royalties which Guderian himself had offered him for his immense trouble. His request remained unanswered, for Guderian had just died.

As Mearsheimer has pointed out, the more Guderian's debt to Liddell Hart had grown, the more persistent Liddell Hart's enquiries became regarding his influence upon Guderian, and the more Guderian realized that he would have to contribute the kind of acknowledgement that Liddell Hart wanted to maintain the mutually beneficial relationship. When Guderian failed to respond to hints, Liddell Hart resorted to more direct measures. In the German edition of his memoirs, Erinnerungen eines Soldaten (1951), Guderian wrote the following paragraph:

It was principally the books and articles of the Englishmen, Fuller, Liddell Hart and Martel, that excited my interest and gave me food for thought. These far-sighted soldiers were even then trying to make the tank more than just an infantry support weapon. They envisaged it in relation to the growing mechanization of our age, and thus they became the pioneers of a new type of warfare on the largest scale.

Going over the English translation of the book, Liddell Hart was unsatisfied. He wrote to Guderian:

I appreciate very much what you said in the paragraph ... So I am sure will Fuller and Martel. It is a most generous acknowledgement. But because of our special association, and the wish that I should write the foreword to your book, people may wonder why there is no separate reference to what my writings taught. You might care to insert a remark that I emphasized the use of armoured forces for long-range operations against the opposing army's communications, and also proposed a type of armoured division combining panzer and panzer infantry units - and that these points particularly impressed you.

Coming after Liddell Hart's tremendous efforts over the publication and contract of the book, this request was not refused. Guderian inserted the substantive sentences of Liddell Hart's letter in Panzer Leader after the paragraph he had originally written for the German edition.⁶

Guderian's lavish acknowledgement established Liddell Hart's reputation for a generation as the inspiration behind the German Blitzkrieg. Such strong evidence left little room for doubt, especially as Liddell Hart took care to cover his tracks. He apparently removed his letter to Guderian and Guderian's letter of agreement from his archive. Only in the mid-1970s were the incriminating letters discovered in Guderian's records by his biographer, Kenneth Macksey, and replaced back in the archive.⁷

When manufactured evidence is revealed, the damage to one's case might be fatal. Liddell Hart's claim for influence on the Germans has lost credibility in the eyes of historians. At the very least it has become clear that he exaggerated this influence at the expense of Fuller and other British armour pioneers. At the same time, not only his significance but British influence as a whole on the evolution of the German Panzer arm, which was previously taken for granted, has now been called into question. And yet Liddell Hart's self-inflicted injury does not close the case, but merely opens it afresh. The fact that he was fraudulent does not necessarily mean that he was wholly incorrect. To establish how things really were, the evidence on the subject from the German sources of the interwar period itself must be looked into. This has simply never been done, Liddell Hart himself did not read German, and he was anyhow satisfied with what he had managed to extract from the German generals directly. His biographers too confined themselves solely to his own records. Only in recent years have historians, working on the other side of the hill on other subjects using die German documents, dug up some evidence relevant to our case. Although a great deal of the German archival material was destroyed by the war or lost, leaving considerable gaps in the record, the surviving material is substantial. In addition, open publications from the interwar period, particularly the general staff's semi-official Militär-Wochenblatt, a professional journal of high quality, provide a very useful and often parallel source which complements the official record.

There are many parallels between the current trends in the historiography of interwar British and German armour. As with Fuller and Liddell Hart, it has become apparent that Guderian monopolized the history of the Panzer arm. The many existing popular histories of the development of German armour merely paraphrase Guderian's Panzer Leader, and his biographers have not diverged from his own version either.⁸ Surprisingly for a subject that has attracted so much interest, a full-scale scholarly history of the German Panzer arm, based on the documents, has yet to be written. This study, of course, can fill the gap only partly. It will attempt to outline the genesis of the Panzer arm and the growth of its operational doctrine, with special attention to the British influence on these developments, including that of Liddell Hart. As will be shown, this influence was indeed, after all, decisive.

The first substantial modification to have been made in Guderian's version concerns the notion that the German army's serious interest in armour was born, and had always been associated, with him. This is very far from the truth. Contrary to its popular image as professionally conservative, an image fostered by Guderian's memoirs, the Reichswehr showed lively interest in armour in the 1920s. At that time Guderian was only beginning to develop as an armour man and was still remote from positions of influence. A study of the Reichswehr in the Seeckt era has recently highlighted all this in considerable detail.⁹ Compared with the Entente powers, Germany created a very small tank force only late in the First World War, and came out of the war with little practical experience in tank warfare. The stipulations of the Versailles Tr...