Captain Basil Liddell Hart

[Jim O]

A CELEBRATED military writer and strategist was investigated by MI5 during the Second World War because he appeared to have acquired one of the biggest secrets — details of the Normandy landings, four months before they took place.

Captain Basil Liddell Hart, Britain’s leading strategist on tank warfare, who was later knighted, shook the Government and military establishment when they discovered that he even knew the names of the beaches on which thousands of Allied troops were due to land on June 6, 1944.

He delivered his bombshell in the form of a report that he showed to Duncan Sandys, then a junior minister in Winston Churchill’s Government, in March 1944. Other copies were sent to Lord Beaverbrook, then Lord Privy Seal, Sir Stafford Cripps, then Minister of Aircraft Production, and three American generals.

Sandys, who was Churchill’s son-in-law, was not one of the few people in the Government who knew about Operation Overlord but as parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Supply he had some knowledge of what was brewing and tipped off General Hastings Ismay, deputy secretary to the War Cabinet, about the report.

The repercussions of what appeared to be a serious security breach that could have had fatal consequences had the Germans learnt of the contents of the report are revealed in the files released by the National Archives.

Churchill had to be told...

Full article: Army writer came close to exposing secrets of D-Day - Britain - Times Online

[Jim O]

More, from Basil Liddell Hart:

Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart (31 October 1895–29 January 1970), usually known before his knighthood as Captain B. H. Liddell Hart, was an English military historian who is considered to have greatly influenced the development of armoured warfare in the 20th century, and strategic theory. He used "Liddell" (his mother's maiden name) as part of his surname from 1921.

Liddell Hart began publishing his theories during the 1920s in the popular press. Paradoxically, Liddell Hart saw theories similar to or even developed from his own adopted by Germany and used against the United Kingdom and its allies during World War II with the practice of Blitzkrieg.


Liddell Hart was born in Paris to a Jewish family and educated at Cambridge University. He joined the Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.

Liddell Hart served as an officer in the British Army during World War I, where he witnessed trench warfare. He served at the battle of the Somme and was decorated for bravery. He set out in the following years to discover why the casualty rate had been so terribly high during the war and arrived at a set of principles that he considered the basis of all good strategy; principles which, he claimed, were ignored by nearly all commanders in World War I.

He reduced this set of principles to a single phrase, the indirect approach, and two fundamentals:

• Direct attacks against an enemy firmly in position almost never work and should never be attempted
• To defeat the enemy one must first upset his equilibrium, which is not accomplished by the main attack, but must be done before the main attack can succeed.

In Liddell Hart's words,

In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there; a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance.

He also claimed that

The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men.

This argues that one succeeds by keeping one's enemy uncertain about the situation and one's intentions, and by delivering what he does not expect and is therefore not prepared for.

Hart explains that one should not employ a rigid strategy revolving around powerful direct attacks nor fixed defensive positions. Instead, he prefers a more fluid elastic defence where a mobile contingent can move as necessary in order to satisfy the conditions for the indirect approach. He would later cite Erwin Rommel's Northern Africa campaign as a classical example of his theory.

He arrived at his conclusions after studying the great strategists of history (especially Sun Tzu, Napoleon, and Belisarius) and their victories. He believed the indirect approach was the common element in the men he studied. He also claimed the indirect approach was a valid strategy in other fields of endeavor, such as business, romance, etc.

He retired from the Army Educational Corps as a Captain in 1927 (after being placed on half pay from 1923 because of two mild heart attacks in 1921 and 1922, probably the long-term effects of gassing which he suffered during World War I), and spent the rest of his career as a writer. His continued use of his rank angered the military establishment, since it was considered bad form for an officer junior to Major to continue to use his rank in civilian life. He was initially a military and tennis analyst for various British newspapers (Daily Telegraph and The Times) which he kept up until the Second World War. Later he began publishing military histories and biographies of great commanders who, he thought, were great because they illustrated the principles of good strategy. Among these were Scipio Africanus Major, William Tecumseh Sherman, and T.E. Lawrence. Shortly after World War II he interviewed/debriefed many of the highest ranking German generals and published their accounts as The Other Side of the Hill (UK Edition) and German Generals Talk (condensed US Edition). Later Hart was able to convince the Rommel family to allow him to edit the surviving papers of the German Field Marshal into a form which was published in 1953 as the pseudo-memoir, The Rommel Papers.

Liddell Hart was knighted in the New Year's Honours of 1966.

The principal posthumous biography of Liddell Hart, Alex Danchev's Alchemist of War: The Life of Basil Liddell Hart, written with the cooperation of Liddell Hart's widow, is startling for its candor. Among its revelations are that Liddell Hart connived at the planting of an endorsement of his own work in the English language version of Panzer Leader, the autobiography of Heinz Guderian. Although Guderian greatly admired Liddell Hart's work, and avidly read his newspaper columns, the German language edition of Guderian's autobiography gives Liddell Hart's work no greater preference than that of his contemporary, J.F.C. Fuller whom Guderian also admired.

More recently Mearsheimer writes that little of Hart's work was original and that his impact is largely the result of his prolific writings after World War Two, rather than the originality or even importance of his contributions to military strategy prior to that time.

Liddell Hart's personal library is now ensconced within the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College London.



Partial bibliography

• B. H. Liddell Hart, A Greater Than Napoleon: Scipio Africanus (W Blackwood and Sons, London, 1926; Biblio and Tannen, New York, 1976)
• B. H. Liddell Hart, Great Captains Unveiled (W. Blackwood and Sons, London, 1927; Greenhill, London, 1989)
• B. H. Liddell Hart, Reputations 10 Years After (Little, Brown, Boston, 1928)
• B. H. Liddell Hart, The decisive wars of history (1929) (This is the first part of the later: Strategy: the indirect approach)
• B. H. Liddell Hart, The Real War (1914-1918) (1930), later replublished as A History of the World War (1914-1918).
• B. H. Liddell Hart, Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American (Dodd, Mead and Co, New York, 1929; Frederick A. Praeger, New York, 1960)
• B. H. Liddell Hart, The Ghost of Napoleon (Yale University, New Haven, 1934)
• B. H. Liddell Hart, The Defence of Britain (Faber and Faber, London, 1939; Greenwood, Westport, 1980)
• B. H. Liddell Hart, The strategy of indirect approach (1941, reprinted in 1942 under the title: The way to win wars)
• B. H. Liddell Hart, The way to win wars (1942)
• B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy: the indirect approach, second revised edition
• B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy: the indirect approach, third revised edition and further enlarged London: Faber and Faber, reprint: Dehra Dun, India: Natraj Publishers, 2003
• B. H. Liddell Hart, The Tanks - A History of the Royal Tank Regiment and its Predecessors: Volumes I and II (Praeger, New York, 1959)
• B. H. Liddell Hart, The Memoirs of Captain Liddell Hart: Volumes I and II (Cassell, London, 1965)
• B. H. Liddell Hart, Why don't we learn from history? (Hawthorn Books, New York, 1971)

[Lancer44]

Quote:"More recently Mearsheimer writes that little of Hart's work was original and that his impact is largely the result of his prolific writings after World War Two, rather than the originality or even importance of his contributions to military strategy prior to that time."

I can agree that Hart's "History of WWII" is not the best.
But reading his works after 1940 Fall of France and Dunquirk...
He could say, point by point - "I told you it."

With his early knowledge of "Overlord",I have a feeling that Hart worked it out himself...
Perhaps he get some little tip. He knew - everyone in the world knew that Invasion is imminent, he knew French Coast perfectly.
Why not? He had enough time to think about it. His bet was right.

Cheers,

Lancer44

[Jim O]

He had to have had some help if he actually knew the code names of the Normandy beaches and their locations. Even the Germans were fooled by the mock concentration of troops opposite Pas-de-Calais and associated misinformation about an invasion of Norway.

From Operation Overloard: The invasion of Fortress Europe:

The Transportation Plan was carried out by more than 11,000 fighters and bombers (in comparison to the Luftwaffe's defense of 400 aircraft) which dropped 195,000 tons of bombs during more than 200,000 sorties or runs.17 These bombs were dropped on rail and road networks, German airfields, radar centers, military bases, and artillery batteries, to pave the way for the Allied troops that would follow. Not all of the bombs were dropped in the invasion areas in an attempt to convince the Germans that they would be attacking at Pas-de-Calais, in fact, only one-third of the bombs were dropped near the Normandy invasion area.....


...The reconnaissance and deception activities carried out by the Allies, also gave them a large advantage over the Germans. The German preparation was also hampered by the activities of the French Resistance. There were three major operations going on to support the invasion. They were code-named, Ultra, Fortitude, and the Double Cross System.

Ultra was the Allied operation that decoded the German Enigma-encoded radio communication with computers. The information gathered from Ultra allowed the Allied planners to know where the German troops were and to where they would be moving. It also allowed them to know where the Germans believed the Allies were coming from and what they knew about the status of the invading army.

Fortitude was the main deceptive operation. It involved the creation of a fictitious FUSAG (First United States Army Group) which was poised to "invade" Norway. FUSAG was created by sending officers to Scotland who created radio traffic in a easily decoded cipher that mimicked that of a real invading army. This was also backed up by British Commando units that were sent to the shores of Norway as well as reconnaissance planes, in general trying to look like a pre-invasion force. Hollywood and other prop designers were also shipped to England where they created rubber and wood tanks, bombers, trucks, boats, ships, and other military vehicles, so that the Germans would over-estimate the amount of Allied troops and have to spread out their forces. Other fictitious armies were also created, some of them actually real, but still back in the US or fighting in the Pacific.

Operation Fortitude was helped to seem "real" by the efforts of the British Double Cross System. At this point in the war, all of the German spies in Britain had been turned into double agents, creating the Double Cross System. This system was used to reinforce the German's belief of a huge Allied army that was poised to invade Norway, Pas-de-Calais, and a feint at Normandy. These wild reports from the spies caused the Germans to first move massive amounts of troops to Norway and then to the Mediterranean, then to Pas-de-Calais, and back. Even well after the June 6 invasion Hitler was waiting for the "real" attack in Norway...

[Lancer44]

Originally Posted by Jim O

He had to have had some help if he actually knew the code names of the Normandy beaches and their locations. Even the Germans were fooled by the mock concentration of troops opposite Pas-de-Calais and associated misinformation about an invasion of Norway.

From Operation Overloard: The invasion of Fortress Europe:

I missed it... I though that he worked out locations only...
Anyway, where is original of his "report"?

Was it de-classified? Most probably it get highest "Top Secret" stamp than it was forgotten. If we discuss real thing we should see it...

Cheers,

Lancer44

[Jim O]

Originally Posted by Lancer44

I missed it... I though that he worked out locations only...
Anyway, where is original of his "report"?

Was it de-classified? Most probably it get highest "Top Secret" stamp than it was forgotten. If we discuss real thing we should see it...

All I have is the source that I linked to above which states in part:

The repercussions of what appeared to be a serious security breach that could have had fatal consequences had the Germans learnt of the contents of the report are revealed in the files released by the National Archives.

Churchill had to be told. So was General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. MI5 was brought in to try to find out who might have revealed the secrets of Operation Overlord to Liddell Hart.

The investigation came as a surprise to Christopher Andrew, the Cambridge University professor who is the official historian of MI5.

He said: “The most important Allied secret was where the D-Day landings were going to take place. Liddell Hart produced a paper that identified the beaches. I had not the slightest inkling this file existed.”

Evidently this is from files in the British National Archives recently made public.

The document itself (KV 2/2411) is referenced at this page but evidently is not available online at this time.

[temujin77]

Liddell Hart's works on mobile warfare were considered unorthodox and things of novelty when they were first published. Nevertheless, they were taken to heart by officers such as Charles de Gaulle of France and Heinz Guderian of Germany before the European War began. By Sep 1939, LH's student (so-to-speak) Guderian proved to the world the worth of LH's works. "When the theory [of mobile warfare] had been originally developed in Britain, its action had been depicted in terms of the play of 'lightning'", said LH. "From now on, aptly but ironically, it came into worldwide currency under the title 'Blitzkrieg' -- the German redering."

I wonder if the comment of "lightning" in English had anything to do with the German adoptation of the term "Blitzkrieg"?

LH's quote was taken from the Last Lion Vol II by William Manchester.