The Twenty Years’ Truce
3.2. The Military Thinkers
one, the USSR, no longer acknowledged religion) and ve were located in, or focused on, Europe. Taking various factors such as economics and politics into account, some of the powers were becoming relatively stronger, others weaker. However, the nature of relations among the Great Powers remained essentially as it had been, a fact that neither the creation of the League of Nations nor the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 was able to change. The great di erence lay in that the rulers who had seized power in the
“totalitarian” countries were neither aristocratic, nor cosmopolitan, nor moderate. As self-declared have-nots, these countries openly announced their dissatisfaction with the status quo and their determination to alter it even at the cost of all-out war. Still, there is little doubt that, in 1939, not even Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, was able to make the majority of his fellow Germans show much enthusiasm for the renewal of hostilities. If anything the spirit was one of resignation, a hope for some miracle that might save them at the last moment.12
The Soviet Union purged its armed forces (one of the Bolsheviks’
greatest fears had always been “Bonapartism”) and at the same time rebuilt and reequipped on an impressive scale, glorifying the military as the workers’ bulwark that would one day liberate the earth from its nefarious capitalist exploiters.
Finally, the great democracies’ retreat from any kind of enthusiasm for war proved permanent. In 1939–41, and to a very considerable extent thereafter, they went to war only reluctantly and expected the worst.
temporary respite. Scarcely had the guns fallen silent than people started looking into the future on the assumption that the Great Powers of this world had not yet nished ghting one another.
Which gave rise to the question: How was this to be done?
To virtually all of those who tried, the point of departure was the need to avoid attrition, reopen the way toward decisive operations, and reduce the number of military casualties on the battle eld. The casualties themselves had been the direct result of the superiority of the defense as brought about by modern repower, hence the most pressing problem was to nd ways to bypass or overcome it. One of the rst serious theoretical treatises to look at the problem was written by an Italian general, Giulio Douhet. An engineer by profession, during the early years of the century Douhet had become fascinated with the military applications of the internal combustion engine. A little later he was also found dabbling in futurist ideas concerning the spiritual qualities allegedly springing from those two speedy new vehicles, the motorcar and the aircraft, claiming that they possessed the ability to rejuvenate the world and Italy in particular.13
As a sta o cer in 1915–18, he was in a position to observe, and re ect on, the twelve abortive o ensives the Italian army had launched across the River Isonzo. Surely there had to be a better way of doing things—one that, in fact, he had already promoted during the war itself, arguing in favor of the creation of a massive bomber force and its use against the enemy. His masterpiece, Il Commando del Aereo (the command of the air), was published in 1921 and, as the title suggests, tried to do for the air what Mahan had done for the sea. In his own words, “the form of any war … depends upon the technical means of war available.” In the past, rearms had revolutionized war; then it was the turn of small- caliber rapid- re guns, barbed wire, and, at sea, the submarine. The most recent additions were the air arm and poison gas, both of which were still in their infancy but possessed the potential to completely upset all forms of war so far known.14
Douhet surmised correctly that as long as war was fought only on the surface of the earth, it was necessary for one side to break through the other’s defenses in order to win. However, those defenses had become stronger and stronger until the ability to maneuver past them and take strategically important targets such as cities and industrial areas became impossible. Sheltered by this reality, the civilian population carried on almost undisturbed. As we saw, it was by mobilizing that population that the belligerents were able to produce what it took to wage total war and sustain the ght for years on end.
The advent of aircraft changed this situation. Capable of ying over battle lines and natural obstacles, and possessing a comparatively long range, aircraft were free to attack centers of population and industry. Because no e ective defense against such attacks was possible—given that the air could be traversed in all directions with equal ease and there was no predicting which target would be hit next—any war would have to start with a massive attack on the enemy’s air bases so as to establish “command of the air.”
That having been achieved, and extrapolating from the events of 1916–18, Douhet suggested that forty aircraft dropping eighty tons of bombs might have “completely destroyed” a city the size of Treviso. A mere three aircraft, he calculated, could deliver as much repower as a modern battleship in a single broadside, whereas a thousand aircraft could deliver ten times as much repower as could the entire British navy—counting thirty Dreadnoughts—in ten broadsides. The kicker was that the price tag of a single battleship would buy about a thousand aircraft. As Douhet pointed out, moreover, even these calculations failed to take account of the fact that the science of military aviation had just begun and that aircraft capable of lifting as much as ten tons of bombs would soon be built.
Carrying Douhet’s views further, investments in armies and navies would by necessity come to a halt, and given that the new weapon was inherently o ensive in nature, most of the aircraft ought to be not ghters but bombers. And instead of being grafted on to the
army and navy, such air eets would be formed into an independent air force. At the outbreak of the next war, that air force would be launched like a shell from a cannon. Having obtained command of the air in this sense by destroying the enemy’s air elds, the attackers would switch from military to civilian objectives. Using gas as the principal weapon, the aim should be not merely to kill but to demoralize. Leaping over the enemy’s ground defenses, a war waged by such means might be over almost before it had begun. By minimizing the casualties of both the attacker and the defender (whose population, feeling the e ects of war directly, would force the government to surrender) represented a humane alternative to an endless battle of attrition. To carry out the air o ensive, Douhet proposed a comparatively small force made up of elite warriors, a vision that meshed well with the anti-democratic, fascist ideas he also entertained.
The dream of avoiding warfare by attrition was also alive in the great prophet of mechanized land warfare, John Frederick Fuller.15 Even as a young o cer, Fuller had given evidence of a formidable intellect expressed by an interest in everything from Greek philosophy to Jewish mysticism. In the years before World War I, he made great e ort to discover the principles of war, of which he settled on nine: direction, concentration, distribution, determination, surprise, endurance, mobility, o ensive action, and security.’6
In numerous publications—Fuller was a proli c writer who, however, often tended to overstate his case—he argued that war, like every other eld of human life, was decisively a ected by the progress of science. Like Douhet, he considered the most important fruits of science to be the internal combustion engine (on which depended the airplane and the tank) and poison gas. For him, future warfare on land would center on the tank and the mechanization of artillery, reconnaissance, engineering, signals, supply, and maintenance units. Fully mechanized, an army would enjoy almost as much freedom of movement as did ships at sea. Now armies could once again maneuver against each other, concentrating
against select sections of the enemy front, breaking through, and bringing about victory at comparatively low cost.
In the debates about tanks and mechanization, his views, coming as they did from an ex–chief of sta of the most advanced mechanized force in history, commanded particular respect. Yet even barring his most extreme ideas—say, that armies should consist of tanks alone and every infantryman provided with his individual tankette—many of his suggestions have come to pass.
Considering himself not merely a military reformer but a philosopher as well, Fuller went on to spin an immensely complicated network of intellectual propositions on the nature of war, life, history, and whatever. Combining all these di erent strands, many of his historical writings were decidedly brilliant.
However, much of his theorizing was decidedly half-baked, tied as it was to his interest in mysticism and the occult.
In the history of twentieth-century military thought, Fuller’s name is almost always associated with that of his younger contemporary and friend Basil Liddell Hart.’7 Unlike Fuller, Liddell Hart was not a professional soldier, but rather studied history at Cambridge before enlisting, received a commission, and fought in France. Gassed at the Somme, Captain (throughout his life he enjoyed emphasizing the military rank he had attained) Liddell Hart spent the rest of the war in England training infantry recruits. It was in this capacity that he rst started thinking seriously about the best way to prepare for, and wage, armed con ict.
Concerning his intellectual development, two points are worth noting. First, like so many of his generation who were educated in public schools, Liddell Hart was brought up on the notion that war was akin to sport and games. In his memoirs, he explains that he was good at football—not because his coordination and technique were in any way outstanding, but because he could envisage all various combinations of play and foresee where the ball was likely to end up. Second, and again like so many of his contemporaries, Liddell Hart ended the war as a fervent admirer of the British
military establishment, which after all had just fought and won the largest armed con ict in history to date.
However, within a few years he reversed himself, joining the then fashionable trend of disillusionment with the war in general and with its conduct at the hand of the British high command in particular. In criticizing that conduct, his stature as the popular journalist he became after the war and interest in sports were to come in handy. Like Fuller, Liddell Hart concluded that sending men into the maws of machine guns had been the height of folly, the origin of which was to be found not in simple bloody-mindedness but in the writings of the greatest of all military philosophers, Carl von Clausewitz. To Liddell Hart, this was the prophet whose clarion call had misled generations of o cers into the belief that the best, indeed almost the only, way to wage war was to concentrate the greatest possible number of men and weapons and launch them straight ahead against the enemy.18 In 1914–18 the “Prussian Marseillaise” had borne its horrible fruit.
To restore the power of the o ensive and save casualties, in his early writings Liddell Hart recommended “the indirect approach.”
Rather than attacking the enemy head-on, he should be thrown o balance, achieved by combining rapidity of movement with secrecy and surprise, with attacks carried out by dispersed forces (so as to conceal the true center of gravity for as long as possible), coming from unexpected directions, and following the least expected route, even if this meant overcoming topographic obstacles. Above all, every plan had to possess “two branches”—drawn up in such a way as to keep the opponent guessing concerning one’s true objectives.
Any plan should also be su ciently exible to enable an objective to be changed if it turned out to be too strongly defended.
All such maneuvers were to be carried out in two-dimensional space, along lines of communications, overcoming all natural and arti cial obstacles, while trailing “an umbilical cord of supply,” and against an enemy who presumably was both intelligent enough to understand what was going on and capable of engaging in countermaneuvers. War, consisting essentially of movement, was
presented almost as if it were some kind of sophisticated game played between opposing teams. This was particularly true of Liddell Hart’s mature work. The older he became, the more pronounced his tendency to give tactics a short shrift. Other subjects such as mobilization, logistics, intelligence, command, communication and control, and questions of killing and dying were also lightly skipped over. Reading his most famous and oft-reprinted book, Strategy: The Indirect Approach, one might be excused for thinking war was about operational movement and very little else.
During the early 1920s, Liddell Hart also became interested in mechanization, and in this so much of his thinking was “borrowed”
from his mentor, Fuller, that their friendship su ered for it.19 Thus it was little surprise that Liddell Hart’s vision of mechanized armed forces, as set forth in his Paris, or the Future of War (1925) as well as The Remaking of Modern Armies (1927), employed a combination of aircraft, tanks, and poison gas as weapons with which defenses could be skipped over or overcome, resulting in the war brought to a swift and cheap, if violent, end.
What prevented Liddell Hart from making a detailed forecast of the Blitzkrieg, with its characteristic combination of armored divisions and tanks, was his abiding revulsion for the horrors of World War I and his determination, which he shared with so many of his generation, that they not be repeated. From about 1931 on, this caused him to switch from attempts to devise more e ective ways to win toward thinking about less costly ways to avoid defeat.
Following Julian Corbett without bothering to acknowledge the master, he now claimed that the “British Way in Warfare” had always been to stay out of massive Continental commitments.
Instead the kingdom had relied on its navy to keep the enemy at bay (and harass and weaken him by means of well-directed strokes at selected points) and on Continental allies to deliver the coup de main. By 1939, Liddell Hart had convinced himself that “the dominant lesson from the experience of land warfare, for more than a generation past, has been the superiority of the defense over attack”; even in the air, as experiences in Spain had shown, “the
prospects of the defense are improving.” Therefore, instead of Britain repeating its World War I error—which had led to so many casualties— it could safely trust the “dauntless” French to stop the Germans. Britain itself, its armed forces thoroughly modernized and mechanized, should revert to its traditional strategy, relying primarily on blockade on the one hand and airpower on the other.
This had the additional advantage that it would make universal conscription and mass armies unnecessary—a preference for small professional forces that Liddell Hart, a liberal, shared with some thinkers like Douhet.
Compared with Douhet, Fuller, and Liddell Hart, Erich Ludendor was a towering gure. Much more than the rst two, he understood what modern war was like from the top, and unlike the last-named he did not regard it as some kind of eld game; “the war has spared me nothing,” he would write, having lost two sons. On the other hand, and again unlike Liddell Hart in particular, neither did he shrink from its horrors.
At rst, Ludendor was perhaps no more bigoted than was required of a German o cer of his generation. Indeed, during the war he once opened a proclamation to the Jewish population of occupied Poland with the words, “Meine liebe Jidden.” In the 1920s, however, in uenced by his second wife, he started dabbling with anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-freemasonry (he could never make up his mind which of the three international forces posed the greatest danger to Germany). He also took a part in the 1923 Nazi Putsch; for all this he has been rightly condemned.
However, this should not obscure the fact that his vision of future war was more nearly correct than any of the rest.
Having spent more than two years in charge of Germany’s war e ort, Ludendor did not believe that a rst-class modern state could be brought to its knees rapidly and cheaply by aircraft dropping bombs, or by eets of tanks engaging in mobile operations, however brilliantly. In part, his Der Totale Krieg merely continued the work of some pre-1914 militarist writers, such as Colmar von der Goltz and Theodor von Bernhardi, who had
advocated total mobilization and mass armies. And up to a point, his book recounted his own experience, which by attacking many of his less cooperative colleagues sought to explain why Germany had lost the war. Yet whatever the book’s precise origins and purpose, Ludendor ’s main thesis was that the developing technologies of production, transportation, and communication made modern war into much more than merely a question of armed forces maneuvering against one another for mastery of some battle eld.
Instead, war would now demand a nation’s total e ort, and therefore a total devotion of all resources to its execution.
To be sure, the next war would make use of all available weapons, including poison gas. Both civilians in their cities and soldiers in their trenches would be targeted, and the resulting casualties, destruction, and su ering would be immense. Therefore, by necessity, as important as the total mobilization of material resources would be the spiritual mobilization of the people—a point on which, as Ludendor and many of his countrymen saw it, imperial Germany with its old-fashioned, authoritarian system of government and its neglect of the working classes had been sadly de cient.
The implication of such mobilization was an end to democracy and the liberties it entailed, including not only freedom of the press but workers’ rights and capitalist enterprise as well. For either industrialists or union leaders (during the war, Ludendor had had his troubles with both) to insist on their own privilege was intolerable. Along with the entire nancial apparatus available to the state, they, too, were to be subjected to a military dictatorship.
And having experienced the process rsthand, Ludendor was under no illusion that the nation’s spiritual and material mobilization could be improvised. Hence the dictatorship he demanded, and for which he no doubt regarded himself as the most suitable candidate, was to be set up in peacetime and made permanent.
The next war would be a life-and-death struggle to be won by the belligerent with the greatest resources and the strongest will to mobilize and deploy them—which incidentally disposed of any