Strategy by Captain B. H. Liddell Hart

Author:Captain B. H. Liddell Hart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2016-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

PART III—STRATEGY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR

CHAPTER XV—HITLER’S STRATEGY

The course of Hitler’s campaigns, before and after the outbreak of actual war in 1939, provided a most striking demonstration of the method traced in the earlier part of this book. In his first period he gave the strategy of indirect approach a new extension, logistically and psychologically, both in the field and in the forum. Later, he gave his opponents ample opportunity to exploit the indirect approach against him.

It is wise in war not to underrate your opponents. It is equally important to understand his methods, and how his mind works. Such understanding is the necessary foundation of a successful effort to foresee and forestall his moves. The peaceful Powers suffered a lot from ‘missing the bus’ through their slowness to gauge what Hitler would next attempt. A nation might profit a lot if the advisory organs of government included an ‘enemy department’, covering all spheres of war and studying the problems of the war from the enemy’s point of view so that, in this state of detachment, it might succeed in predicting what he was likely to do next.

Nothing may seem more strange to the future historian than the way that the governments of the democracies failed to anticipate the course which Hitler would pursue. For never has a man of such immense ambition so clearly disclosed beforehand both the general process and particular methods by which he was seeking to fulfil it. Mein Kampf, together with his speeches and other utterances, provided abundant clues to his direction and sequence of action. If this amazingly clear self-revelation of how his mind worked is the best evidence that what he achieved was not a matter of accident, nor of mere opportunism, it is also the clearest confirmation of the proverbial saying ‘What fools men are’. Even Napoleon did not show such contemptuous disregard for his opponents, and for the risks of unveiling his intentions. Hitler’s apparent carelessness in this respect showed a realization that men easily miss what is right under their eye, that concealment can often be found in the obvious, and that in some cases the most direct approach can become the least just as the art of secrecy lies in being so open about most things that the few things that matter are not even suspected to exist.

Lawrence of Arabia remarked of Lenin that he was the only man who had thought out a revolution, carried it out, and consolidated it. That observation can be applied also to Hitler with the addition that he had ‘written it out’. It is clear, too, that he had profited by studying the methods of the Bolshevik revolution, not only in gaining power, but in extending it. It was Lenin who enunciated the axiom that ‘the soundest strategy in war is to postpone operations until the moral disintegration of the enemy renders the delivery of the mortal blow both possible and easy’. There is a marked resemblance between this and Hitler’s saying that ‘our real wars will in fact all be fought before military operations begin’.

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