General Heinz Guderian, who had one of the most creative military minds of the 1939-45 War, has died at Fussen, in Bavaria, at the age of 65. . He was born at Kulm, in west Prussia, late'r the Polish " Corridor," in 1888, the son of an army officer. Kurt Schumacher, the late Socialist Democrat leader, came from the same small town, and though Guderian was older the two men knew each other from youth. His father expressed the wish that he should become an officer and he was sent, with his brother, to the Karlsruhe cadet school in Baden. From there he was later transferred to the chief cadet school at Gross-Lichterfelde, near Berlin. During the 1914-18 War his career alter- nated between regimental and staff duties, and by 1922 he had a wide knowledge of the army and its organization which stood him in good stead when he came to build up a formidable new arm of the service. It was Hitler, in the 1930s, who gave him the opportunity to put into practice the idea of a mobile armoured army which will stand as his contribution to the theory of war. Other men had the same idea, or a similar one: General Fuller. General Martel, and Captain Liddell Hart in Britain, and General de Gaulle in France, to all of whom he made acknowledgment. Some are apt to say, therefore, that he owes his place in military history merely to the fact that he alone found a political ruler to back him. But there was more to it than that. He joined to his creative imagination a dynamic energy and opportunism. As chief of staff to the inspectorate of motorized troops and later as chief of staff to the armoured troops command, he was given the authority and the resources to build up a powerful mobile armoured force. Then, in 1938, he was ap- pointed chief of mobile troops and promoted general of Panzer troops, and within a year could test his new model army in battle- in the invasion of Poland. The accuracy of his conception was immediately proved by the speed with which he broke through the Polish " Corridor " and drove through Wizna to Brest. But it was the campaign in the west which was his most remarkable achievement. Here his unorthodox method of leading his armoured and motorized forces-giving them the " green light to the very end of the road " -was as successful as the original conception. In the Russian campaign the Panzer army was at first even more successful. But soon they had to contend with a new and dangerous enemy-space and depth. " The very end of the road " was now a very long way away. Moscow did not fall-and he fell out of favour. When he was finally reinstated, after the conspiracy of July 20, in which he had no part. he was given the wholly unsuitable post of Chief of Staff, in which his fighting qualities could not help him. This last phase of the war was the phase, too, through which it was difficult for a high German officer to pass with moral credit, unless with risk to his life. He remained attached to Hitler, though not without hesitation and doubts, for which he had to pay in the last months of violence and defeat with utterances which did him no credit. Yet it must be said that he had dared to oppose Hitler when his sense of decent soldierly behaviour was affronted. As his volume of recollections, Panzer Leader, showed, he was a typical product of his Prussian traditions. He never pretended to have conspired against Hitler or to have quarrelled with him, except to prevent him making mistakes. But the German general who in 1944 ext6rted from Hitler permission to withdraw two S.S. brigades which had committed monstrous atrocities in Warsaw- and it was not an isolated act-deserves the tribute as well as the blame for the qualities nourished by his upbringing and his back- ground. GENERAL H. GUDERIAN CREATOR AND LEADER OF THE PANZERS
Sir Basil Liddell Hart died yesterday at the age of 74. Captain B. H. Liddell Hart, as he was known for much of his life. was the foremost military critic in Britain and probably in the world between the wars. While he had not the imaginative range of the other outstanding military writer of his day, Major- General J. F. C. Fuller, he had the intellectual range of a first- class scholar and in the narrower field of tactics, weapons, military training and organization, he was without equal. The basic changes in mechanized warfare to which the Army owed much of its eventual success in the Second World War had all been ad- vocated by Liddell Hart in the 1930s. His strength as a military critic came perhaps from his belief in the Clinese proverb, - Doubt is the beginning of wisdom ". He investi- gated every conceivable doubt be- fore he made up his mind, so that if he sometimes rode a good idea to death he seldom espoused a bad one. His ideas were always tested against the precedents of military history, of which he had a formid- able knowledge, and he held that the conditions of the next war could often be foretold from a really objective study of the last. The tragedy was that it was left to the Germans to vindicate his ideas. General Guderian, who first put his ideas to the test in France in 1940, never hid his debt to Liddell Hart as the " pioneer of a new type of warfare on the greatest scale ". Nor did Rommel, who wrote in 1942 that the British would have avoided most of their defeats if they had paid more attention to Liddell Hart's teachings. The success of his theories contrasts oddly with this failure to get them accepted. Like many reformers he did not see that the reforms themselves were only half the battle. The more he was in the right the more he annoyed the soldiers at the top who alone had the power to put them into effect. Much of this bitterness at what in his Memoirs he calls " the grooved ways of orthodoxy " evaporated after the war and there can be few senior Army officers today who have not been influenced by his teachings. Basil Henry Liddea Hart was born in October 1895, in Paris, and educated at St Paul's and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he was reading history when the First World War broke out He was commissioned in 1914 in The King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, and served at Ypres and on the Somme as a company commander. As with so many thoughtful sol- diersof his generation.the slaughter of the Somnme, and in particular the success of an attack at Mametz Wood which revived the use of surprise, strongly influenced the cast of his mind in later life. The aim of nearly aU his tactical think- ing thereafter was to outwit the enemy, preferably by a paralysing combination of surprise and mobility, and to avoid head-on collisions that were bound to lead to carnage. He shared the ideal of Marshal Saxe. " that connoisseur of the art of war" as he described him. who argued that a reallv able general might win a campaign without ever fighting a battle at alL The immediate outcome of his experiences was a book on the Sonme offensive. written while he was recovering from wounds in 1916, and his evolution of battle drill. The latter was adopted by the War Office after the war but later fell into disuse. Its value was rediscovered in 1940. and battle drill became a leading feature of all Army trairing in the Second World War. After the war, at the age of 24. he was asked by General Sir Ivor Maxse to re-draft the Infantry Training Manual. Some of his innovations were removed by the War Office. but with General Maxse's backing he made consider- able changes in the offical doc- trine. His draft of the manual included 'what he named the "expanding torrent" method of attack, which was a development of the infiltration tactics intro- duced in 1917-18. This was taken up eagerly by the Germans a decade later. and became the key pattern of the Germnan Blitzkrieg m 1940. In 1924 Liddell Hart was selected for the Royal Tank Corps. but was found unfit for general service and placed on half pay. He retired from the Army in 1927. In 1925 he had written an essay called ' The Napoleonic Fallacy" Later expanded in his book Paris or the Future of War, which was the first chaUenge to the Napoleonic doctrine, then univer- sally accepted, of total war. He argued that the war aim of a nation should be " to subdue the enemys will to resist, with the least possible human and economic loss to itself", and that the destruction of the enemy's armed forces was therefore only a means towards the real ob- jective, and not necessarily an inevitable or infallible means at that. The essay is an outstanding example of his qualities of intel- lectual drive, courage, and clarity of argument. His career as a military wrlter began at this time, first as military correspondent for The Daily Tele- graph, after-the death of Colon.l Repington. In 1934, when the Government launched its rearma- ment programme, he was appointed military correspondent of The Times and principal adviser on defence. He conducted a campaign in The Times for the oloser coordination of defence, urging the appointment of a Minister of Defence with a combined staff drawn from all three Services. The Government did appoint a Minister for the Co- ordination of Defence. with a small staff. in 1936. but this felD far short of what had been advo- cated by The Times_ Much his most important work between the wars. however. was his constant advocacy of mechaniza. tion. His enthusiasm for the tank began in a way that was char- acteristic of his open-mindedness. when he went to the War Office to persuade Maior-Gencral J. F. C. Fuller that a certain infantry manoeuvre could defeat tanks. After half an hour's conversation he saw that he was wrong, and from that moment never wavered in his belief that armour was the key to future war. He realized that the tank, misused in the First World War. promised the soldier flexibility by allowing him to vary the direction of attack with great rapidity, and mobilitv by enabling him to penetrate behind the enemy's front and cut his vital arteries of supply. Along with the handful of soldiers who were the pioneers of armoured warfare, including FuUer. Hobart. Martel. Lindsay, Broad and Pile. Liddell Hart expounded the new doctrine in all its aspects. He had been consulted about the creations of the Experi- mental Mechanized Force in 1927. and he continually pressed the potential value of night assaults. As early as 1932 he suggested the idea of creating artificial moonlight to help the exploitation of night attacks, which came to fruition only in the last phase of the war. He was also one of the chief advocates of armoured personnel- carriers to enable the infantry to keep up with the armour in the pursuit, which enormously en- larged the scope of infantry tactics in the war. But the Germans were apter pupils than the British. In his history The Tanks (probably his finest book) he described with understandable bitterness the op- position of much of the Army. particularly the Cavalry, to the tank. and their longing to get back to " real soldiering " with horses. As he wrote in 1933, the Army's expenditure on horsed cavalry could not be justified unless the War Office had a scheme for breeding bullet-proof horses. Dis- creditable and stupid though this opposition was later shown to be, the advocates of the tank probably contributed to it by their own aipparent fanaticism. To Liddell Hart the need for mechanization was so self-evident that he under- estimated the need for tact and understanaing in dealing with his opponents at the War Office. He was a comnplex man who comnbined an extraordinary appetite for creative aid critical thinking with a passionate desire for fame and approbation that anounted to vanity. It was possibly this that led him to make the mnistake of becoming personal adviser to Hore-Belisha. the new Secretary of State for War. in 1937. Had the collaboration been strictly sub-rosa it might have been of the greatest value, for the changes he urged were much needed: the formation of several more annoured divis, ions, for instance, the complete mechanization of the infantry divi- sions, and the expansion of our anti-airccaft forces under a single command. But his position as an eminence grise was so blatant and his relations with the soldiers at the top so unfortunate, that hacklea were raised on all sides, until the War Minister and his Cl.G.S (:Lord Gort) ceased to be on speak- ing terms with each other. The partnership with Hore- Belisba failed to push through his cherished reforms, and he with- drew from it amicably in the sum- mer of 1938. But he was never able to forget the failure. and though he was much more philo- sophical about it after the war he stiU regarded himself as a prophet without honour in his own country. His inmmediate intention on end- ing the partnership was to apply the spur of pubEc criticism, as Military Correspondent- of The Times, to further Hore-Belisba's efforts at the War Office. His health, however. was not good. and there was a difference of opinion over the British Govern- ments's guarantee to Poland, which The Times endorsed but vbi,ich he regarded as impossible of fulfil- ment and as likely to precipitate war when the country's defences were stiU unprepared. He resigned from The Times in 1939. Though much of his most impor- tant work was in the form of news- pgk,er articles, the media most con- genial to him were books. memo- randa and letters. Throughout his life he was an indefatigpble corre- spondent and kept a vast collection of indexed documents and papers. The result was that few correspond- ents ever got the better of him in print, where he made his points far more effectively than in conversa- tion. He was seldom willing to com- mit himself to an opinion until he had mastered aill asAects of the par- ticular subject, so that when he fin- ally came to out it on paper, even as journalist, he could hardly bear to write less than two columns. He could neveTtheless turn his hand to more popular jouinlism. and wrote regular war commentaries for the Daily Mail from 1941 until the end of the war. His interests were by no means limited to nmlitary studies. He was keen on nearly all games. and began his journalistic career as Lawn Tennis Correspondent of the Man- chester Guardian. At his prep school he developed a gooy form of bowling which umdenned op- posing schools until a new head- master preferred defeat to uo- oilhodoxy, and in later life he was a fiendish exponent of croquet After the war he spent much time writing his history of the tanks in the Second World War. (Altogether. he was the author of some 30 books.) He thought much about the advent of nuclear weapons. which appalled him, and the possibility of unima,inable carnage if there were a head-on collision between nuclear powers. Though highly sceptical of the credibility of nuclear threats a, a deterrent, he was equally scepti- cal about the chances of limitimn an atomic conflict once it started. He remained convinced that the only hope for the west in war would be to refrain from initiating the use of nuclear weapons and that the inherent - advantages of defence over attack would materially help to redress the balance against a numerically superior aggressor. It was natural that he should pre- fer a conventional strategy, because nuclear weapons. if used. threaten- ed to negate all that he had stood for. He was affronted by brute force in any form. for to him, as to Marshal Saxe. war was above all an art In 1965 he published two vol- umes of menoirs: direct. muscular persuasively argued and firmly stamped with the Liddell Hart im press they threw a sharp light on the military history of our times As one critic remarked, they establisbed beyond all doubt the superiority of the pen over the sword. In 1969, he delivered his long awaited one volume history of the Second World War after 22 years work to his publishers. SIR BASIL LIDDELL HART Foremost military critic between wars
Major-General John Frederick Charles Fuller, C.B., C.B.E., D.S.O.- " Boney " to the Army, who died yester- day at Falmouth at the age of 87, was a soldier of original and unorthodox type. Professionally, his outstanding contribu- tion was to armoured warfare in the First World War, but he will be longer remem- bered as a writer. Had he been less testy and capricious his influence might have been greater than it was, since he would always have been arresting. It was, how- ever, considerable and, ironically, most of all in Germany, where it helped to shape commanders and ideas prominent in the Second World War. His favourite general was probably the Federal leader in the American Civil War. Ulysses S. Grant. to whom he devoted a volume and whom IJi iI1IKCU With Lee in another. In the second his prejudice, his major fault, especially if com- bined with interpre- tation, appears all too obviousiv: while Grant can hardly put a foot wrong lee behaves on occasion like a fool. His virtues were manifold. He - went imto history " to cx- pl0t an(d expound his ideas, and this he did magnificently. His critical armoury was superb; his gift of description very good; his understanding of character shrewd-except when anger raised smoke between him and his subject. l-e was one of the most eminent of modern military writers, if not the most. One quality he did not profess: kindliness in his ink. In the Second World War, when the tide had well turned, his journalism fell off; " Boney " had no more tops to whip. Over his later work, includ- ing the fine three-volume work on decisive battles, there broods something loftier and sadder than the earlier acerbity: dismay and horror, fear lest the world should be moving into the grip of a single global tyranny. Here his many-sided high- mindedness took another form, that of fierce denunciation of mass slaughter. He loathed brutality. His most damning verdict was: " He is a thug ". One of his last published books was Tlhe Generalslzip of Alexander the Great, an amazing effort on the part of a man who had no Greek, makes fascinating reading and was kindly received. He was born at Chichester, the son of the Reverend A. Fuller, on September 1. 1878, and educated in Switzerland and at Malvern before entering Sandhurst. In August, 1898, he was commissioned in The Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and embarked for South Africa ,with the Ist Battalion before the end of 1899. There he served throughout the war, for the last six months as intelligence officer with native scouts. He was promoted to captain in June, 1905. After Volunteer and Territorial adjutancies and a spell of regimental duty, he passed into the Staff College in 1913 and was still a student at the outbreak of war ini August. 1914. His service began with junior administra- tive and staff appointments at home, and he did not go overseas until July, 1915, when he became G.S.O.3 on the staff of the VII Corps in France. He received his majority in September of that year. In February. 1916, he went to the 37th Division as G.S.0.2 and in July to the headquarters of the III Corps in the same capacity. At the end of the year he became G.S.O.2 of the Tank Corps, then camouflaged under the name of Heavy Section, Machine-Gun Corps, and devoted himself to tank organi- zation and tactical training. He was in no sense one of the parents of the tank and had not even seen one before August, 1916, but was now a member of a remark- able group of relatively junior staff officers. active, intelligent, and far-sighted, who accomplished great work in the cause of the new weapon. Intellectually, he may have been the foremost. Without under- estimating the value of the tank in flatten- ing wire obstacles, he regarded it as above all a moral weapon, as it became. TRIUMPH OF THE TANK In April, 1917, he was appointed G.S.O.I. In July, 1918, he went to the War Office as Deputy Director of Staff Duties in a special tanks section. He held that appointment for four years, the period of the triumph of the tank in war and the ex- periments in mechanization in the postwar Army. For services during the war he received the D.S.O. in 1917, the brevet of lieutenant-colonel in January, 1918, and the brevet of Colonel a year later, and was twice mentioned in dispatches. He reached the substantive rank of Colonel in August, 1920. In January, 1923, Fuller came from half- pay to be chief instructor at the Staff College, where he spent three well-filled years. In February, 1926. he was selected by Sir George (later Lord) Milne, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, as Military Assistant. In this promising appointment he was, however. deeply disappointed because, largely owing to financial restric- tions, the drastic changes in weapons and equipment necessary for the creation of a mechanized army such as he envisaged were not forthcoming. In April, 1927, he became G.S.O.I at Aldershot. and then commanded brigades on the Rhine and at Catterick. In September, 1930, he was promoted Major-General. However, fie rather too scornfully refused the command of the Bombay District, was not again em- ployed, and retired in December, 1933. He had been created C.B.E. in 1926 and C.B. in 1930. In 1935-36 he spent some months of the Abyssinian War with Italian forces. He was now in an unhappy phase of flirtation with Fascism, which seems to have been due to high-mindedness having taken a wrong turning. Thenceforward for another generation books came steadily from his pen. Nearly, all were historical, but he showed how brilliant he could be theoreti- cally in On Future IYarfare, in parts astounding as a vision of what was to come. Fuller married Sonia, daughter of Dr. Karnatzki. of Warsaw, in 1906. He leaves no children. MAJOR-GENERAL J. F. C. FULLER HISTORIAN AND INFLUENTIAL MILITARY THINKER
Field Marshal Kesselring, one of the ablest German generals of the Second World War, died on Saturday at Bad Nauheim at the age of 74. His Blitz- krieg methods in Poland and his long, stubborn campaign in Italy showed that he possessed, rarely among mii"try corn- manders. an equal understanding of the command of air and land forces. Albert Kessehring was born on Novem- ber 30. 1885. of a middle-class familvy and was commissioned in a Bavarian artillery regiment in 1906. He served in the First World War, reachins the rank of captain. and was quickly pro- moted in the post- war Wehrrnacht. He served as a major in the DePartment of the Defence Ministry responsiblc for train- ing, and as a lieu- tenant-colonel at Army headquarters. Under Hitler he was promoted in 1935 to major-general and transferred to the Luftwaffe. The Luftwaffe was not then the effective w4'eapon it later proved to be, and Kessel- ring was given much of the credit for its- !bigh state of training He was responsible for many of its operations in the early phases of the war when aircraft and armour combined to make Blitzkrieg a terrifying and effective weapon. In the Polish cam- paign he commanded the First Air Fleet, and under his leadership the air attacks against Norway and on the westem front Were mounted. He was promoted to field marshal for these successes. and in 1942 assumed command of air operations in the Mediterranean and Africa. He took over the armies in Italy in 1943. wherc he fought a bitter defensive cam- paign, and in March 1945 replaced von Rundstedt as Oberbefeblshaber West and assumed command of all forces on the westem front. When the Soviet Army broke through south of lBerlin his command was extended to all forces south of the break- through. He surrendered to the American armies on May 6, 1945. Kesselring was held with the other Field Marshals in Dachau, and in the following year was extradited to Italy to face charges of responsibility for the murder of 335 Italian civilians and issuing orders for the shooting of civilians as reprisals against partisan activities. He was found Guilty by a British military court in Venice and sen- tenced to death, though it was said in evi- dence that it was Field Marshal Lord Alexander's opinion that Kesselring had fought fairly. The sentence was deplored by some of those who had fought against him, and was commuted to life imprison- ment. He was released in 1952, and after- wards became the president of the ex-service men's association, Stahlhelm. FIELD MARSHAL KESSELRING -H - THE ENEMY IN ITALY
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
