The first unofficial biography of Sir Basil Liddell Hart (1895-1970). Nobody had more influence on Anglophone military thought over the last 100 years. He was born in the reign of Victoria, came of age in the year before the Great War, and wrote doctrine from the year after. In 1925 (when he was still 29 years of age), the rising Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), desperate for good press, encouraged The Daily Telegraph to hire him as military correspondent. From that year, he published journalistic reports every few days, magazine articles every few months, and about one book per year, for a total of at least 35 books. He claimed to have been published in 42 countries and 31 languages.

He was yet more prolific as a letter-writer. His own archive contains almost 1,000 correspondents. He garnered inside information, which raised the value of his journalism and thence the books based on his journalism. By the 1930s, he directly advised ministers and flag officers.

Most of his policies, prescriptions, and predictions seemed discredited by the Second World War. However, during the 1950s, he popularized himself as prodigy, family man, intellectual, war hero, exposer of hard truths about the Great War, rigorous historian, author of British doctrine, strategist, fearless journalist, Army insider and outside critic, political sage, opponent of appeasement, secret guru to Britain's government during the Second World War, misunderstood proponent of negotiated peace, maligned proponent of a low-cost war, inventor of Blitzkrieg, America's adopted hero, Israel's inspiration, academic, writer, and mentor to a new generation of historians. In 1965, his memoirs cemented the narrative. In 1966, he was knighted by the Queen and photographed for the National Portrait Gallery.

Previous memorialists and biographers relied on what Liddell Hart said or wrote late in life - about what he had said or written early in life. Since then, new archives of correspondence have been opened. This biography is the first to cite those archives. It gives a fresh and objective insight into Liddell Hart's life, thought, and legacy.

The proposed mechanical solutions to the stalemate of the Great War (1914-1918) included big-wheel landships, wheeled bridge-pushers, trench-straddling personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery, and machine-gun carriers. The preferred acquisition was named "tank," but even the tank remained contested, between different weights, armaments, types of mobility, and protection levels. The doctrine too remained contested. Indeed, many of the same questions are asked today. Should tanks surprise the enemy or be preceded by bombardment? Should tanks assault by day or night? Should they be concentrated or distributed? Should they be combined with all arms, some arms, or no other arm? Should they lead or follow other arms? Should they sustain a penetration or hit and run? Should they hold objectives or rally to the rear? Should they aim at enemy fortifications, or infantry, or artillery, or supplies, or headquarters? Going back to the archives and the battlefields, this book reviews the doctrines and battles of the Great War, and rediscovers the enduring principles of mechanized warfare. 254 pages, 23 maps, 23 tables of data, 26 photographs

Sir Basil Liddell Hart (1895-1970) is the strongest influence on Anglophone military thought. From the 1920s, he influenced doctrine, force structure, and acquisitions. By the 1950s, he was the official historian of Britain's tank arm, and the self-declared inventor of Blitzkrieg. He died in 1970, a knight of the realm, feted as the greatest expert on tanks in the world.

Liddell Hart's thinking about tanks is more interesting and varied than he or his disciples portrayed. During the Great War, he advocated for pedestrian infantry as the decisive arm. In the 1920s, he embraced JFC Fuller's call for fully-mechanized combined arms. He even advocated for a small, all-tracked army, on the promise that it could end wars in days. Yet he soon embraced one-man tankettes and fancied that all arms could be amalgamated around them. He campaigned for a ban on tanks weighing more than 5 tons. During the 1930s, he prioritized fast, light tanks, each accommodating only one machine-gun and two men. He promised that they could race around the enemy's front, infiltrate the enemy's rear, raid industry and infrastructure, and return days later, without a battle.

During the Second World War, he realized some of his mistakes, but still complained about heavier tanks, bigger guns, and thicker armor, and reimagined a light tank force for hit-and-run raids. The first three chapters of this book review Liddell Hart's early preference for pedestrians over tanks, his switch to tanks over pedestrians after contacting JFC Fuller (then the tank arm's most senior officer), and his confused and selective engagement with tank technologies.

Chapters 4 to 10 explain his interwar views on, respectively, current heavy tanks, tankettes and carriers, light tanks, medium tanks, infantry tanks, cruiser tanks, and finally (of all things) motorcycles.

Chapter 11 reviews his post-war thoughts on the future of tanks, and reveals previously overlooked restatements of his interwar views.

Chapter 12 reveals his slow, contentious rebound as official historian of the tank arm. Publicly, he leveraged the work to cement his reinvention as the neglected prophet of the sorts of technologies and doctrines normalized during the Second World War. Privately, as I reveal here for the first time, he was inattentive to the work, and played the principals against each other, except where convenient to his reinvention. Thus, his lessons are hit and miss.

Liddell Hart always prioritized speed and stealthiness, which still deserve our attention. Yet we also need to beware of reductionism to speed and stealthiness, at the expense of other aspects of mobility, survivability, and lethality. Liddell Hart offers insights into the speed of Blitzkrieg, and the stealthiness of raids. However, his opus continues to encourage Western regression to fast charging, light footprint, portability, ready deployability, cost savings, and raiding. These ideals are worthy, but need to be balanced. Against inferior adversaries, in easy terrain, they can be spectacular. Against peer competitors or in difficult conditions, they become costly and indecisive. This book helps us to implement his ideals realistically.

From an unsettled Poland in the 1920s, immigrants come to America, strangers in their origins, but compatriots in their country of choice. Their descendants find themselves fighting for Hürtgen Forest, inside Nazi Germany. In December 1944, a strange truce brings medics from both sides together in harmony to save lives, during one of the most brutal battles of the war. An impetuous gift is made, from one side to the other, that eventually is willed to a professor. He thinks little of it, until he stumbles upon a painting that prompts a journey of discovery, of an intertwining of lives, across generations, oceans, and wars.

THE RISE AND FALL OF WESTERN TANKS tells the story of how the wealthiest, most industrialized, and most democratic states led the world in tanks from the Great War through the 1920s, but lost their lead in the 1930s. The Soviet Union and Germany (incorporating Czechoslovakia) built the largest tank forces, reverse-engineered Western tanks, and innovated for themselves.

AS THIS BOOK SHOWS, Western soldiers and officials complained at the time, while propagandists pretended otherwise. Western governments deferred official inquiry until peacetime, then they forgot their promises. Politicians spun the story to avoid blame or monopolize credit. Official historians ignored the record. Private historians nationalistically and lazily followed suit.

IN THIS BOOK, you can read what the developers and users said at the time, illustrated with more than 200 photographs and 14 graphs and tables, based on a dataset with more than 500 tank types, across 9 countries - from gun size to cost, from Canada to Japan, from the First World War to the Second.

THE RISE AND FALL OF WESTERN TANKS combines history and science to resolve a controversy that has endured for almost a century.

THE RISE AND FALL OF WESTERN TANKS tells the story of how the wealthiest, most industrialized, and most democratic states led the world in tanks during the Great War, but lost their lead by the Second World War.

THIS SECOND VOLUME asks whether Western states caught up during that war - or even during the first decade of the Cold War. You can read what the developers and users said, the technical reports from the fronts, the political inquiries, the spin and propaganda, the promises, and the betrayals.

THIS BOOK adds another 200 photographs and 17 graphs and tables, based on a dataset with more than 500 tank types, across 9 countries - from Canada to Japan, from 1916 to 1955, from gun capacity to ground pressure.

THE RISE AND FALL OF WESTERN TANKS tells the full story of "The Great Tank Scandal," and its cover-up, for the first time.

THE TIGER TANK was dramatically more powerful than any other tank when deployed in 1942. Why were the Allies taken by surprise? How did the Germans preserve its secrets?

After 20 years of research on three continents, across 25 battle maps, 31 tables of data, more than 500 photographs and drawings, and previously unidentified first-hand accounts, these volumes reveal what Allied technicians discovered and what the propagandists covered up and distorted. Thus, we can learn more about the Tiger as it really was, rather than the hearsay that history books perpetuate.

THIS FIRST VOLUME explains what foreigners knew about Germany's heavy tanks from 1926 to 1943; how the British decrypted signals about Tigers months before confirmation in the field; how the Soviets fought Tigers eight months before sharing intelligence with Allies; how the Western Allies fought Tigers seven weeks earlier than they realized; how the French were the targets of the first deep battle involving Tigers, but the Americans captured the personnel and components, while the British captured the imagery.

The capture of Tiger 231 is stranger still. British units claimed it, but a Canadian commanded the company that first fired on it, and a Canadian engineer was the first to exploit it; although it lay within Allied lines, the Germans demolished it; they rated the demolition as thorough, but two British technicians heroically and accurately analysed the wreck; yet propaganda and political spin proved more enduring, even today.

THE TIGER TANK was dramatically more powerful than any other tank when deployed in 1942. How did the Germans preserve its secrets? Why were the Allies taken by surprise? What did they discover?
After 20 years of research on three continents, across 25 battle maps, 31 tables of data, more than 500
photographs and drawings, and previously unidentified first-hand accounts, these volumes reveal what
Allied technicians discovered and what the propagandists covered up and distorted. Thus, we can learn more about the Tiger as it really was, rather than the hearsay that history books perpetuate.

THIS SECOND VOLUME tells the story of Tigers on the Western front from February to April 1943: the Tigers leading the greatest Axis counter-offensive of the Tunisian campaign, through Faid, Sidi Bou Zid, and Sbeitla, on the way to American abandonment of Kasserine Pass; the counter-offensive against the British from Sidi Nsir to Hunts Gap; the "Tiger graveyard," where seven Tigers were demolished; the American claims to knock out Tigers at El Guettar Pass, where Tigers never fought; how Tigers saved Maknassy Pass, but went unobserved by the Americans; the American claim to knock out a Tiger in between these passes, and the match with Tiger 213; the reasons why Tiger 213 was never reported higher than company echelon; the daring German spoiling attack near Medjez; the failed British counter-attacks against a Tiger at Djebel Djaffa; the strange abandonment of this Tiger without demolition; the British failure to exploit this Tiger; and American acquisition of Tiger 712, its restoration, enshipment to America, and subsequent neglect; the huge British and French offensive across Goubellat Plain, and how Tigers contributed to its defeat; and Tiger 731's final battles, its demise, its capture without demolition, and the reasons why its capture went unrecorded.

THE TIGER TANK was dramatically more powerful than any other tank when deployed in 1942. How did the Germans preserve its secrets? Why were the Allies taken by surprise? What did they discover?
After 20 years of research on three continents, across 25 battle maps, 31 tables of data, more than 500 photographs and drawings, and previously unidentified first-hand accounts, these volumes reveal what Allied technicians discovered and what the propagandists covered up and distorted. Thus, we can learn more about the Tiger as it really was, rather than the hearsay that history books perpetuate.

THIS THIRD VOLUME focuses on Tiger 131 of the 504th: the first running Tiger to be exploited in the West, the first Tiger sent to Britain, the most studied Tiger, and the only running Tiger in the world today. This volume reveals the untold story of how Tiger 131 was captured on Gueriat el Atach in almost perfect condition, after fighting for two days, against parts of four battalions of tanks and six battalions of infantry. No less remarkable is its recovery and exploitation in Tunisia, how it got to Britain, its tardy and incomplete trials, the missing reports, the tank's relegation in disabled condition - during a politicized dispute about the relative merits of Allied tanks, and the falsification of its provenance to suggest that it was captured at Djebel Djaffa, three days earlier, by different units.

THIS THIRD VOLUME also describes: the campaigns in Sicily in 1943, mainland Italy from 1943 to 1945, France in 1944, and Germany in 1945; the Tigers captured in those campaigns; the widening gaps between the intelligence at home, what the users heard, and what their commanders, politicians, propagandists, and historians said; the first battles between the latest Allied tanks and the last Tigers; and the post-war fates of the surviving Tigers.

The German Tiger was dramatically more powerful than any other tank when deployed in 1942. Why were the Allies taken by surprise? How did the Germans employ Tigers while preserving their secrets? How did the Allies react? Was the Tiger a monstrous folly or ahead of its time?
"The Tiger Tank and Allied Intelligence" compares German designs and operations with Allied intercepts, interrogations, captures, estimates, and adaptations.
After 20 years of research in three countries, across 20 battle maps, 31 tables of data, 500 photographs and drawings, and previously unidentified first-hand accounts, these volumes reveal not just what the Allies knew but what the Allies missed, covered up, and distorted. Thus, we can learn more about the Tiger as it really was, rather than the hearsay that history books perpetuate.

This fourth and final volume in the series analyses Tiger's technologies, capabilities, and performance, in both German and Allied understanding. The chapters cover the trade-offs, productivity, cost-effectiveness, reliability, maintainability, life cycle, strategic mobility, tactical mobility, lethality, and survivability.

Would you dumb down to fit in?​​

Simon escapes the ridiculous Riverside University of London by exchanging with its American partner – the University of Sunshine Bayside, only to wake up to the wokest of woke colleges. Virtues are punished as vices, conformity trumps originality, and minds are melded – one falsehood at a time. Being good at his job is his first mistake. In election year, politicians, terrorists, spies, publicists, journalists, and bluffers compete to make an example of him in their fight for a new global society.

The professor is about to be taken to school...