The Saltcellar War

By Mayo Mohs

HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR by B.H. Liddell Hart. 768 pages. Putnam. $12.50.

The scene insinuates itself early in the reader's mind. The place is London, one of those comfortable, leathered clubs with high-back wing chairs and good port. Across the table, C. Aubrey Smith, his mustache drooping imperially, leans forward in his scarlet mess dress tunic to rearrange the saltcellars, silverware and apples on the table before him. There are proud mutterings of hussars, lancers, and Royal Scots Greys, tones of awe for the Panzergrenadiers. "There they were," he announces with grave mien. "And over here, a thin red line."

Despite the Four Feathers mood that clings to it, Sir Basil Liddell Hart's last work is magisterial. On active duty in World War I, he rose only to the rank of captain in the British army before being gassed in 1916; yet, as his country's foremost military historian, he became a matchless armchair general and indeed, as pioneer advocate of fast-moving armored columns, a teacher of generals. Liddell Hart worked on this history for a quarter-century; he died last year while correcting proofs. Quite literally, it is his epitaph, and an appropriate one. For along with a crisp style, skill and precision, it carries the anachronistic imprint of a boy who grew up loving games and came to view war as the most fascinating game of all.

As the story begins, we meet again those bungling French and British statesmen, the chaps who need not have gone to war at all, at least not at such a time on such a scale. Selling out Czechoslovakia with its 35 trained and ready divisions cut the heart out of effective opposition to Hitler in Central Europe. Allied military planners, on Liddell Hart's evidence, were little better than the politicians. He credits them with inviting Hitler's invasion of Scandinavia with loudly proclaimed plans to mine Norwegian ports and cut off the flow of iron ore from Sweden. Sir Basil thinks somewhat more highly of the German generals. But even they, he admits, succeeded in their dramatic 1940 breakthrough on the Western front partly by accident. Their initial plan for the invasion of France was a right-flank wheel through Belgium along the lines of the 1914 Schlieffen plan, which might easily have been met and thwarted. The strategy was dropped, however, when a German major, flying in a snowstorm, was forced down in Belgium with a full set of war plans that was seized by the Allies. The substitute plan sent General Heinz Guderian's spectacular armored thrust through the seemingly impassable Ardennes to catch the French near Sedan, a critically weak point in their defenses.

Sir Basil's compendium of Allied disasters does not end there. Perhaps the worst tactical blunder was Eisenhower's decsron in late summer 1944 to withhold supplies, especially gasoline, from Patton's Third Army, then rolling across France, in order to give more to Montgomery's forces, which were slogging through the Low Countries. Eisenhower did it to placate Monty and hold the Allies together as a team, but Liddell Hart contends that a supply shortage need not have affected either army. The crucial extra supplies to Montgomery were consumed by a buildup for the projected airborne landing near Tournai, which was canceled. The gasoline thus tied up, he argues, would have sent Patton's tanks to the Rhine in September, probably to ensure a surrender in the fall. Half a million Allied military casualties occurred after September, Liddell Hart notes--as well as millions of other enemy and civilian casualties.

While Liddell Hart's more controversial conclusions center on Western Europe, he ranges over all theaters of the war. His command of German strategy in Russia, and the Soviet counteroffensive, is prodigious; his respect for the Russian soldier worthy of Eisenstein. "The advancing host," he writes, "rolled on like a flood, a nomadic horde. The Russians could live where any Western army would have starved, and continue advancing when any other would have been sitting down."

When it comes to war in the Pacific, Liddell Hart follows the lead of others in arguing that the atomic bombs "under whose dark shadow the world has lived ever since" need not have been dropped. Sir Basil also points out that Pearl Harbor was hardly so unprecedented an act as it first seemed. He quotes with some glee from the London Times, which, in 1904, applauded the Japanese fleet for their similar surprise attack on the Russian squadron at Port Arthur. The architect of that enterprise, Admiral Togo, had learned many of his naval lessons in England, where he had undoubtedly been impressed by Lord Nelson's bold attack on Copenhagen in 1801--without a declaration of war.

For all its richness and intricacy, there are some surprising omissions in the book. In Europe, for instance, the invasion of Southern France is mentioned in its planning stages, but not in execution. The liberation of Paris, a marvelous clash of military and political priorities, is merely marked on a map. As his countryman A.J.P. Taylor has noted, Liddell Hart also totally skips home-front problems and attitudes that decisively affected the conduct of the war. There is almost no reference to fascism or the Hitlerian atrocities that contributed to the rage of the Allies and perhaps to such questionable policies as the demand for unconditional surrender, which Liddell Hart deplores. Concentration camps evoke a reference, but there is nothing on the Slavic and Jewish slave labor that helped Germany fight on. Resistance movements in Yugoslavia and Italy get a few lines, no mention at all in France. A strange ellipsis concerns one of Liddell Hart's heroes, Erwin Rommel, whose suspected involvement in the 1944 plot against Hitler is ignored, along with his forced suicide.

Some of these omissions are justified by the incredible compression needed to shoehorn so vast a subject into a single volume. But some gaps suggest there was much in the war that Liddell Hart found too messy or too uncomfortable to handle. In the neat world of tabletop warfare, partisans, after all, are not saltcellars but at best grains of salt. Civilian support, or lack of it, is as difficult to assess as the cheers of a soccer crowd; only the plays count. Genocides, massacres, megalomaniacal tyrants are just not part of the game.

That view may seem rather touchingly professional, and appropriate to a work of this kind. Yet it is precisely because the second World War was such a formidable human catastrophe that mankind has since had disturbing second thoughts about wars of any kind. Books of strategy that present World War II as a rational exercise, however, inevitably suggest that war can still be a rational international option rather than the tragic last of last resorts. War as a game, as this book so thoroughly demonstrates, is frightening in its fascination, a temptation from which the world cannot easily free itself. War is a disaster, not an intellectual hobby. Mayo Mohs

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