Samuel Griffith went to New College, Oxford University, after retiring on March 1, 1956. He had made contact with Basil Liddell Hart by the middle of 1957, and Liddell Hart soon agreed to read and comment on Griffith’s dissertation. Liddell Hart made extensive comments on the dissertation as it was being read, and Griffith mentions reading Liddell Hart’s Strategy: The Indirect Approach. Griffith also believed that Chinese strategy was fundamentally different than Western strategy, with the possible exception of Liddell Hart’s strategy. Griffith also assumed, and consequently asserted without evidence, that Mao Zedong’s strategy was consistent with Sunzi. This was also due to Griffith’s connection between guerrilla warfare, Mao, and Sunzi, a connection that was particularly strong because he had translated Mao’s On Guerrilla Warfare when he was in China. Griffith also asserted that Communist strategy, even before Mao, was based on Sunzi. It was also important for the dissertation to try to determine whether Sunzi had been influential in Western military thought before the twentieth century. Griffith’s biases, in addition to those of Liddell Hart, affected his choice of translation terms as much the introductory explanation of Sunzi.

Basil Liddell Hart created the term “indirect approach to strategy.” It was first articulated in 1927, and then appeared in its fully developed form in his 1929 book The Decisive Wars of History, which would eventually be republished as Strategy: The Indirect Approach in 1967. Liddell Hart’s views on warfare made him a controversial figure in the 1920s and 1930s, and his legacy after his death in 1970 remains unclear. For a time in the 1930s he was considered one of the greatest writers on war, if not thegreatest, at least in the Anglo-American world. His reputation collapsed at the beginning of World War II, but had recovered after the war so that by the late 1950s he was once again, at least in Samuel Griffith’s eyes, the most important strategist in the world. Today he is entirely unknown outside a very narrow academic community. His contributions to strategic thinking in the 1920s and 1930s were distorted by two factors: his commitment to preventing Britain from repeating its performance in World War I, and his need to earn a living as a writer. He took intellectual shortcuts, found the answers in history that he wanted to find regardless of the evidence, and argued for negotiating with Hitler during World War II. Liddell Hart had played an important role, along with his friend J. F. C. Fuller, in promoting mobile, mechanized warfare, particularly tanks.