Post by Diarist on May 23, 2014 11:39:05 GMT 1
Life and career
Born in Paris on 31 October 1895, the son of an English Methodist minister, Liddell Hart received his formal academic education at St Paul's School in London and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His mother's side of the family, the Liddells, came from Liddesdale, on the border with Scotland, and were associated with the South-Western Railway. The Harts were farmers from Gloucestershire and Herefordshire. As a child he was fascinated by aviation.
On the outbreak of war in 1914 Liddell Hart volunteered to become an officer in the Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. He fought on the Western Front. Liddell Hart's front line experience was relatively brief, confined to two short spells in the autumn and winter of 1915, being sent home from the front after suffering concussive injuries from a shell burst. He was promoted to the rank of captain. He returned to the front for a third time in 1916, in time to participate in the Battle of the Somme. He was hit three times without serious injury before being badly gassed and sent out of the line on July 18, 1916. His battalion was nearly wiped out on the first day of the offensive, a part of the 60,000 casualties suffered in the heaviest single day's loss in British history. The experiences he suffered on the Western Front profoundly affected him for the rest of his life. Transferred to be Adjutant to Volunteer units in Stoud and Cambridge, he spent a great deal of time training new units. During this time he wrote several booklets on infantry drill and training, which came to the attention of General Sir Ivor Maxse. After the war he transferred to the Army Educational Corps and was given the opportunity to prepare a new edition of the Infantry Training Manual. In this manual Liddell Hart strove to instill the lessons of 1918, and carried on a correspondence with Maxse, a commanding officer during the Battle of Hamel and the Battle of Amiens. These battles provided a practical demonstration of tactics for attacking an entrenched enemy.
In April 1918 Liddell Hart married Jessie Stone, the daughter of J. J. Stone – who had been his assistant adjutant at Stroud – and their son Adrian was born in 1922.
Liddell Hart was placed on half-pay from 1924. He later retired from the Army in 1927. Two mild heart attacks in 1921 and 1922, probably the long-term effects of his gassing, precluded his further advancement in the downsized post-war army. He spent the rest of his career as a theorist and writer. He worked as the Military Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph from 1925 to 1935.
In the mid to late twenties Liddell Hart wrote a series of histories of major military figures, through which he advanced his ideas that the frontal assault was a strategy that was bound to fail at great cost in lives. He argued that the tremendous losses Britain suffered in the Great War were due to her commanding officers not appreciating this fact of history. He believed the British decision in 1914 to directly intervene on the Continent with a great army was a mistake. He claimed that historically "the British way in warfare" was to leave Continental land battles to her allies, intervening only through naval power, with the army fighting the enemy away from its principal front in a "limited liability". In the histories he wrote on Scipio Africanis Major (1926), the Great Captains (1927) and Sherman (1929) he made the argument for maneuver warfare and taking the indirect approach to reach one's objectives. In the thirties Liddell Hart continued along this vein, and added the admonition that in the Great War Britain had moved away from her traditional strategy of using her naval superiority to attack her adversaries in places unexpected and at times of her choosing, and instead committed herself to a large army of conscripted men who fought on the Continent in direct confrontation with continental armies. The idea of keeping the British army off the continent thereby keeping British casualties low appealed to many people, including Neville Chamberlain.
Source: Wikipedia - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._H._Liddell_Hart
Born in Paris on 31 October 1895, the son of an English Methodist minister, Liddell Hart received his formal academic education at St Paul's School in London and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His mother's side of the family, the Liddells, came from Liddesdale, on the border with Scotland, and were associated with the South-Western Railway. The Harts were farmers from Gloucestershire and Herefordshire. As a child he was fascinated by aviation.
On the outbreak of war in 1914 Liddell Hart volunteered to become an officer in the Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. He fought on the Western Front. Liddell Hart's front line experience was relatively brief, confined to two short spells in the autumn and winter of 1915, being sent home from the front after suffering concussive injuries from a shell burst. He was promoted to the rank of captain. He returned to the front for a third time in 1916, in time to participate in the Battle of the Somme. He was hit three times without serious injury before being badly gassed and sent out of the line on July 18, 1916. His battalion was nearly wiped out on the first day of the offensive, a part of the 60,000 casualties suffered in the heaviest single day's loss in British history. The experiences he suffered on the Western Front profoundly affected him for the rest of his life. Transferred to be Adjutant to Volunteer units in Stoud and Cambridge, he spent a great deal of time training new units. During this time he wrote several booklets on infantry drill and training, which came to the attention of General Sir Ivor Maxse. After the war he transferred to the Army Educational Corps and was given the opportunity to prepare a new edition of the Infantry Training Manual. In this manual Liddell Hart strove to instill the lessons of 1918, and carried on a correspondence with Maxse, a commanding officer during the Battle of Hamel and the Battle of Amiens. These battles provided a practical demonstration of tactics for attacking an entrenched enemy.
In April 1918 Liddell Hart married Jessie Stone, the daughter of J. J. Stone – who had been his assistant adjutant at Stroud – and their son Adrian was born in 1922.
Liddell Hart was placed on half-pay from 1924. He later retired from the Army in 1927. Two mild heart attacks in 1921 and 1922, probably the long-term effects of his gassing, precluded his further advancement in the downsized post-war army. He spent the rest of his career as a theorist and writer. He worked as the Military Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph from 1925 to 1935.
In the mid to late twenties Liddell Hart wrote a series of histories of major military figures, through which he advanced his ideas that the frontal assault was a strategy that was bound to fail at great cost in lives. He argued that the tremendous losses Britain suffered in the Great War were due to her commanding officers not appreciating this fact of history. He believed the British decision in 1914 to directly intervene on the Continent with a great army was a mistake. He claimed that historically "the British way in warfare" was to leave Continental land battles to her allies, intervening only through naval power, with the army fighting the enemy away from its principal front in a "limited liability". In the histories he wrote on Scipio Africanis Major (1926), the Great Captains (1927) and Sherman (1929) he made the argument for maneuver warfare and taking the indirect approach to reach one's objectives. In the thirties Liddell Hart continued along this vein, and added the admonition that in the Great War Britain had moved away from her traditional strategy of using her naval superiority to attack her adversaries in places unexpected and at times of her choosing, and instead committed herself to a large army of conscripted men who fought on the Continent in direct confrontation with continental armies. The idea of keeping the British army off the continent thereby keeping British casualties low appealed to many people, including Neville Chamberlain.
Source: Wikipedia - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._H._Liddell_Hart