Strategy In The Interwar Period

Strategy
Military historians have long fought over a precise definition for the “catch all” term known as “Strategy”. There has not been a consensus on how the term should be defined, but in terms of warfare in the 20th century, a good definition and the one that will be used for this paper defines strategy as “the development, intellectual mastery, and utilization of all of the state’s resources for the purpose of implementing its policy in war.” This definition is used because it covers the aspects of total war, which the Second World War was. The interwar period, or the two decades of uneasy peace that separated the First and Second World Wars, saw three major thinkers emerge that had a great effect on the way that the Second World War was to be fought. These thinkers were J.F.C Fuller, Basil Liddell-Hart, and Hans Von Seeckt. All three of these thinkers sought to create solutions to the problems created by the deadlock of the Western Front, but all three of them also neglected to search for or implement proper solutions that fit the definition of strategy that works for total war. For example,
Liddell-Hart’s definition of strategy was “the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy”, which demonstrates his thinking that warfare was a military matter, thus neglecting the broader aspects of war that a state assumes in fighting total war. This paper will discuss how the thinkers of the interwar period neglected to develop national strategies in favour of developing doctrine and operational art.

J.F.C. Fuller One of the great developments of the First World War was the creating of the tank. The tank was a piece of tactical and, eventually, operational genius, as it had the potential to break through the deadlock created by First World War artillery and small arms developments. This mainly British development gave birth to a whole new way of fighting war that would not see its perfection until the Second World War, but the tank nonetheless had an impact on the military thinking of several influential British officers. One of the most influential thinkers in terms of armoured warfare theory was Britain’s J.C.F. Fuller. Fuller had served at the Heavy Branch, Machine Gun Corps (which was essentially the first tank corps of the war and of history) and at their HQ at Bermicourt alongside several other British visionaries, such as Boots Hotblack, and Fuller’s GSO 3, Giffard le Quesne Martel. Hotblack’s creativity came about in the field of early armoured reconnaissance. Hotblack established methods for intelligence gathering through the use of the landships of the time and sought to improve ways that tanks could be guided at night and through difficult conditions, a difficult task on the muddy Western Front, while seeking ways to minimize tank breakdowns.

Martel was more theoretical in his approach. He envisioned three types of tanks in the future: the destroyer, which would support the infantry in accomplishing key ground objectives, the battle tank, which would be an enormous presence on the battlefield that was almost impervious to small arms and artillery fire, and the torpedo tank, which would use speed and manoeuvrability combined with accurate firepower to destroy the gargantuan battle tanks at close range. These tanks would operate out of tank-specific bases, exactly how navies and battleships did, and would act as true “land ships” during future wars. Martel’s ideas, although fantastic in nature, were far too impractical to be implemented, and he and his contemporaries had lacked any forethought into the influence of airpower in upcoming conflicts.

Fuller worked closely with these men, and his thinking and writings were heavily influenced by his wartime experiences in the Heavy Branch of the Machine Gun Corps. He envisioned some of his most grandiose concepts towards the end of the First World War, many of which would be implemented by later theorisers during the interwar period. His “Training Note No.16” had within it several faults and ambiguities, but also many good theories regarding armoured warfare. With the help of his staff, Fuller correctly estimated the daily supply consumption and requirements for each tank during offensive operations, and even came up with the novel idea of tracked “supply tanks” that would be better suited to carrying supplies across the broken area of no-mans-land than the lorries used on roads, thus theoretically giving armies a method of resupplying armoured vehicles and forward soldiers without the need to construct roads and pathways. One thing he did not envision in his plan was wider impact of this plan, which would have included having to divert resources away from other units to provide for an armoured offensive as well as the taxing of the nation’s resources in building these vehicles, including the tracked supply tanks.

Fuller also emphasized the need for surprise in mechanized operations, but once again failed to consider outside factors, such as the air superiority needed to keep the massing of armoured vehicles a secret.
Fuller remained a very influential figure throughout the interwar period and began to not only influence his fellow Britons, but also the Germans. Considering a German panzer division in 1940, one can see numerous parallels in Fuller’s ideas and the character of the division. In short, Fuller’s visions can be seen as identifying the operational problem in warfare of his time rather than the strategic solution. He himself wrote “If we employ mechanical means, [attacks] become feasible with a comparatively small force”. However, no army or nation had the means nor the will to completely mechanize its forces during the interwar period despite Fuller’s
writings.