To Change an Army: General Sir John Burnett-Stuart and British Armored Doctrine, 1927-1938 by Harold R. WintonReview by: Tim TraversThe American Historical Review, Vol. 94, No. 5 (Dec., 1989), pp. 1387-1388Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1906426 .

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Modern Europe 1387

Fuller was not just a military writer, as many may have believed, but also a Darwinist straight out of his nineteenth-century education, who had a be- lief in the occult and in psychology and who ultimately dabbled in fascism, all for the purposes of making it plain that, if peace was a complex matter, so naturally was war.

Reid bases his work on a large collection of papers that have become available only within the last twenty years in the Liddell Hart Collection at King's College, London, in the Public Record Office, and elsewhere, and he uses a wide variety of printed sources, in many cases book reviews and memoirs. He has been rather lucky in his ability to trace the intellectual background of a military man in that Fuller was close friends with B. H. Liddell Hart but often separated from him so that there is a wealth of correspondence between these two intellectuals who had an immense influence in their own lifetimes. What is also fortunate is that Fuller was such a character and irritated people so much that he was just the sort that everyone would comment on if they wrote much at all, even if they read practically nothing. Tim Travers in his recent work The Killing Grounds (1987) has shown how the army in the First World War removed people like Fuller. Fuller was saved from this because he had not yet become that difficult or that senior before the war ended.

Reid takes the reader through the periods of Fuller's intellectual development and shows how his writing reflects at first the environment in which he worked but then increasingly the broader world that he saw and the clash of armies that he again anticipated. For each period after the end of the First World War and for Fuller's notable Plan 1919 for a major tank breakthrough, which might or might not have worked as the general was no technician, Reid examines one or more of Fuller's many books. There is a final chapter that covers the period from the beginning of the Second World War to Fuller's death in 1966.

This is a book for both intellectual and military historians. It is thoughtful, explanatory, and at times arrogant.

ROBIN HIGHAM

Kansas State University

HAROLD R. WINTON. To Change an Army: General Sir John Burnett-Stuart and British Armored Doctrine, 1927-1938. Foreword by PETER PARET. (Modern War Studies.) Lawrence: University Press of Kan- sas. 1988. Pp. xviii, 284. $29.95.

Harold R. Winton has written an exceptionally well-balanced book about the problem of modern-

ization in the British army in the 1920s and 1930s. Although the focus is often on General Sir John Burnett-Stuart, in fact the book is really con- cerned with the perennial question of why the British army was slow to mechanize in the interwar period. Winton commences by pointing out that there have been three explanations for British problems in mechanization: first, that the army was wedded to old concepts, organizations, and ideas and was unwilling to make dramatic changes; second, that the army never had the money or the popular support for changes in doctrine and organization; and third, that the lack of a clear Continental commitment, plus the need to garrison the empire, retarded concepts of ar- mored warfare.

Before coming to his own conclusions in that debate, Winton argues that the problem is com- plex and that the army was actually split into a spectrum of attitudes toward mechanization rang- ing from those of the revolutionaries, reformers, and progressives to those held by conservatives, reactionaries, and the indifferent. Apparently that spectrum of response remained throughout the interwar period, though one wonders whether the same range of attitudes would have been true of other armies in the same period or, indeed, whether it was typical of the British army in the twentieth century. In his conclusion, Winton comes to a rather generalized evaluation of why British mechanization was slow, particularly after 1929, but he stresses the problem of the imperial defense mission in sidetracking the speed of mechanization. Other explanations Winton gives for the relative lack of mechanization are military conservatism, organizational inertia and rivalries, technological uncertainty, conflicting personali- ties, political indifference, some social hostility, and chance. In other words, Winton lumps to- gether the elements of the three original explana- tions, highlighting the imperial commitment and including the element of chance. Thus, there are no simple answers, which is what one might expect given the wide-ranging ramifications of what mechanization implied in political, social, eco- nomic, and intellectual terms.

Nevertheless, within Winton's explanations, there emerges a strong theme that is perhaps undervalued, namely, the British difficulty in de- veloping doctrine. Just as the prime weakness of the British army before and during World War I was the reluctance or inability of the high com- mand to develop doctrine, so the same kind of confusion over mechanization and tank theory plagued the army throughout the interwar period. The main battle lines drawn were between, on the one hand, the concept of an armored formation composed mainly of tanks and capable of pene-

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1388 Reviews of Books

trating deep into enemy lines in a Continental war and, on the other hand, the concept of a motor- ized, or perhaps lightly armored, cavalry division capable of performing reconnaissance and screen- ing roles for motorized infantry but not designed specifically for a European war. On one level, the debate was an argument for the value of those forces on the Continent, as against their use in imperial policing; but, on another level, it was really an argument over the internal logic of the tank, as opposed to mechanization in general. Just as the discussion over the machine gun before and during World War I really focused on the ques- tion of whether the gun was significant enough to be an independent weapon, so the role of the tank was really at the bottom of the mechanization debate. Had the tank been recognized as signifi- cant enough to be given a fully independent role, then mechanization would have conformed to the tank and not the other way around. But that basic debate was not resolved, and, without a coherent doctrine, it was difficult to produce a convincing case for mechanization. Winton summarizes the result: "Britain went to war in 1939 with neither an effective armored division nor a coherent doc- trine of armored warfare" (p. 209).

One cannot help concluding, while taking into account the other serious obstacles to mechaniza- tion that Winton enumerates, that the original thesis of military conservatism propounded by J. F. C. Fuller and B. H. Liddell Hart has some merit. That is particularly the case when linked with the army's preoccupation with imperial de- fense. The career of Burnett-Stuart reflects that situation. As a convert to mechanization, he had frequently to fight against conservative officers such as Chief of the Imperial General Staff Mont- gomery-Massingberd. Yet Burnett-Stuart himself was much concerned with imperial defense and thus eventually came to different conclusions from the advocates of the tank, even while strongly supporting the concept of armored units (p. 237).

Winton has produced an excellent book that places the question of mechanization within the whole complex interaction of army, technology, personalities, economics, society, and politics and shows how difficult it was for intelligent people such as Burnett-Stuart to make choices.

TIM TRAVERS

University of Calgary

F. H. HINSLEY et al. British Intelligence in the Second World War: Its Influence on Strategy and Operations. Volume 3, part 2. New York: Cambridge Univer- sity Press. 1988. Pp. xvi, 1038.

In this final volume of a study of British intelli- gence, strategy, and operations during World War II, F. H. Hinsley and his associates deal with the last year of the war in Europe. Among the subjects covered in the 746-page narrative are a fulsome description of Overlord and the subse- quent campaigns in the West, the Soviet offensives and those of the Allies in Italy, the German withdrawal from the Balkans, the final stages of the sea and air wars, and German weapon devel- opments. Also included are thirty appendixes, which clarify, among other topics, Poland's and France's contributions to figuring out Germany's Enigma machines, which were much greater than previously thought, and Britain's lack of fore- knowledge of the plot against Hitler. The volume concludes with an outstanding, if scaled-down, bibliography, a thorough index, and a helpful list for researchers of series prefixes and delivery group designators used for signals to overseas commands. As in the preceding volumes, the authors make use not only of high-level Ultra intercepts but also of tactical intelligence, photo reconnaissance, and decoded Japanese dispatches to support their contentions.

The book's over4ll theme is that the amount of intelligence available to the Western allies by the last year of the war reached truly monumental proportions, but even at this point the extent to which intelligence disclosed key information and could be used in operations varied a great deal. It did not, for instance, lead most evaluators to deduce that Germany's Ardennes operation was in the offing. Nor did it give advance notice of Russia's offensive against Romania in August 1944 or of several other Soviet campaigns in 1945. It did, however, give a relatively accurate picture of the location and quality of enemy forces and equipment in the West and in Italy, and Enigma decrypts followed in detail the Wehrmacht's with- drawal from southern Greece and the Aegean Islands. In addition, the book provides an excel- lent synthesis of Allied operations late in the war as well as the intelligence involved, and it also corrects some errors contained in earlier pub- lished works, including several official histories. Among other revelations the authors assert that the Allies had considerable knowledge of the many new weapons the Germans were bringing on line during 1944-45; that, although there were some Ultra references to Nazi concentration camps, there were none to "extermination" camps (p. 736); and, continuing a theme brought out in volume 2, that, despite reservations, British au- thorities as early as the summer of 1943 "con- cluded that while the Germans were researching on atomic energy, their primary objective was not the production of weapons but the development

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