What Are You Reading?

To Antietam Creek, D. Scott Hartwig. Soon, Midnight in the Pacific.

 

About Burnside's difficulty in crossing the Rohrbach Bridge? Horrible thing is that Antietam Creek can be forded on foot. I've been there and it's not that deep. Then there's the ford a bit down river too. Must be feng-shui where Burnside had this thing about cross water or something. If anyone doubts that, look at Fredericksburg (I).

 

There's some technical discussion and quite a bit on early use in the Pacific War--Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Philippines, Midway, among other locations.

 

The Fighting 30th Division: They Called Them Roosevelt's SS by King, Hilborn & Collins

The SS fought them, felt they were their equals and said that much. The division thought of that as a compliment and wanted to add the SS runes on their division logo. Marshall rated them as the best US infantry division in the ETO.

 

Sir Basil Liddell Hart (1895-1970) is the strongest influence on Anglophone military thought. From the 1920s, he influenced doctrine, force structure, and acquisitions. By the 1950s, he was the official historian of Britain's tank arm, and the self-declared inventor of Blitzkrieg. He died in 1970, a knight of the realm, feted as the greatest expert on tanks in the world.

Liddell Hart's thinking about tanks is more interesting and varied than he or his disciples portrayed. During the Great War, he advocated for pedestrian infantry as the decisive arm. In the 1920s, he embraced JFC Fuller's call for fully-mechanized combined arms. He even advocated for a small, all-tracked army, on the promise that it could end wars in days. Yet he soon embraced one-man tankettes and fancied that all arms could be amalgamated around them. He campaigned for a ban on tanks weighing more than 5 tons. During the 1930s, he prioritized fast, light tanks, each accommodating only one machine-gun and two men. He promised that they could race around the enemy's front, infiltrate the enemy's rear, raid industry and infrastructure, and return days later, without a battle.

During the Second World War, he realized some of his mistakes, but still complained about heavier tanks, bigger guns, and thicker armor, and reimagined a light tank force for hit-and-run raids. The first three chapters of this book review Liddell Hart's early preference for pedestrians over tanks, his switch to tanks over pedestrians after contacting JFC Fuller (then the tank arm's most senior officer), and his confused and selective engagement with tank technologies.

Chapters 4 to 10 explain his interwar views on, respectively, current heavy tanks, tankettes and carriers, light tanks, medium tanks, infantry tanks, cruiser tanks, and finally (of all things) motorcycles.

Chapter 11 reviews his post-war thoughts on the future of tanks, and reveals previously overlooked restatements of his interwar views.

Chapter 12 reveals his slow, contentious rebound as official historian of the tank arm. Publicly, he leveraged the work to cement his reinvention as the neglected prophet of the sorts of technologies and doctrines normalized during the Second World War. Privately, as I reveal here for the first time, he was inattentive to the work, and played the principals against each other, except where convenient to his reinvention. Thus, his lessons are hit and miss.

Liddell Hart always prioritized speed and stealthiness, which still deserve our attention. Yet we also need to beware of reductionism to speed and stealthiness, at the expense of other aspects of mobility, survivability, and lethality. Liddell Hart offers insights into the speed of Blitzkrieg, and the stealthiness of raids. However, his opus continues to encourage Western regression to fast charging, light footprint, portability, ready deployability, cost savings, and raiding. These ideals are worthy, but need to be balanced. Against inferior adversaries, in easy terrain, they can be spectacular. Against peer competitors or in difficult conditions, they become costly and indecisive. This book helps us to implement his ideals realistically.

 

The first unofficial biography of Sir Basil Liddell Hart (1895-1970). Nobody had more influence on Anglophone military thought over the last 100 years. He was born in the reign of Victoria, came of age in the year before the Great War, and wrote doctrine from the year after. In 1925 (when he was still 29 years of age), the rising Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), desperate for good press, encouraged The Daily Telegraph to hire him as military correspondent. From that year, he published journalistic reports every few days, magazine articles every few months, and about one book per year, for a total of at least 35 books. He claimed to have been published in 42 countries and 31 languages.

He was yet more prolific as a letter-writer. His own archive contains almost 1,000 correspondents. He garnered inside information, which raised the value of his journalism and thence the books based on his journalism. By the 1930s, he directly advised ministers and flag officers.

Most of his policies, prescriptions, and predictions seemed discredited by the Second World War. However, during the 1950s, he popularized himself as prodigy, family man, intellectual, war hero, exposer of hard truths about the Great War, rigorous historian, author of British doctrine, strategist, fearless journalist, Army insider and outside critic, political sage, opponent of appeasement, secret guru to Britain's government during the Second World War, misunderstood proponent of negotiated peace, maligned proponent of a low-cost war, inventor of Blitzkrieg, America's adopted hero, Israel's inspiration, academic, writer, and mentor to a new generation of historians. In 1965, his memoirs cemented the narrative. In 1966, he was knighted by the Queen and photographed for the National Portrait Gallery.

Previous memorialists and biographers relied on what Liddell Hart said or wrote late in life - about what he had said or written early in life. Since then, new archives of correspondence have been opened. My biography is the first to cite those archives. It gives a fresh and objective insight into Liddell Hart's life, thought, and legacy.

 

Sir Basil Liddell Hart (1895-1970) is the strongest influence on Anglophone military thought. From the 1920s, he influenced doctrine, force structure, and acquisitions. By the 1950s, he was the official historian of Britain's tank arm, and the self-declared inventor of Blitzkrieg. He died in 1970, a knight of the realm, feted as the greatest expert on tanks in the world.

Liddell Hart's thinking about tanks is more interesting and varied than he or his disciples portrayed. During the Great War, he advocated for pedestrian infantry as the decisive arm. In the 1920s, he embraced JFC Fuller's call for fully-mechanized combined arms. He even advocated for a small, all-tracked army, on the promise that it could end wars in days. Yet he soon embraced one-man tankettes and fancied that all arms could be amalgamated around them. He campaigned for a ban on tanks weighing more than 5 tons. During the 1930s, he prioritized fast, light tanks, each accommodating only one machine-gun and two men. He promised that they could race around the enemy's front, infiltrate the enemy's rear, raid industry and infrastructure, and return days later, without a battle.

During the Second World War, he realized some of his mistakes, but still complained about heavier tanks, bigger guns, and thicker armor, and reimagined a light tank force for hit-and-run raids. The first three chapters of this book review Liddell Hart's early preference for pedestrians over tanks, his switch to tanks over pedestrians after contacting JFC Fuller (then the tank arm's most senior officer), and his confused and selective engagement with tank technologies.

Chapters 4 to 10 explain his interwar views on, respectively, current heavy tanks, tankettes and carriers, light tanks, medium tanks, infantry tanks, cruiser tanks, and finally (of all things) motorcycles.

Chapter 11 reviews his post-war thoughts on the future of tanks, and reveals previously overlooked restatements of his interwar views.

Chapter 12 reveals his slow, contentious rebound as official historian of the tank arm. Publicly, he leveraged the work to cement his reinvention as the neglected prophet of the sorts of technologies and doctrines normalized during the Second World War. Privately, as I reveal here for the first time, he was inattentive to the work, and played the principals against each other, except where convenient to his reinvention. Thus, his lessons are hit and miss.

Liddell Hart always prioritized speed and stealthiness, which still deserve our attention. Yet we also need to beware of reductionism to speed and stealthiness, at the expense of other aspects of mobility, survivability, and lethality. Liddell Hart offers insights into the speed of Blitzkrieg, and the stealthiness of raids. However, his opus continues to encourage Western regression to fast charging, light footprint, portability, ready deployability, cost savings, and raiding. These ideals are worthy, but need to be balanced. Against inferior adversaries, in easy terrain, they can be spectacular. Against peer competitors or in difficult conditions, they become costly and indecisive. This book helps us to implement his ideals realistically.

 

From an unsettled Poland in the 1920s, immigrants come to America, strangers in their origins, but compatriots in their country of choice. Their descendants find themselves fighting for Hürtgen Forest, inside Nazi Germany. In December 1944, a strange truce brings medics from both sides together in harmony to save lives, during one of the most brutal battles of the war. An impetuous gift is made, from one side to the other, that eventually is willed to a professor. He thinks little of it, until he stumbles upon a painting that prompts a journey of discovery, of an intertwining of lives, across generations, oceans, and wars.