Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
The British tank development mess of 1930s till 1943 looks to me rather like an engineering and procurement bureaucracy failure.
Yes it does rather, but the British being the British need a scapegoat... in this case two.

Guderian seemed to be happy with what Fuller and Liddell-Hart propoosed as can be seen from his book General Der Panzertruppen Heinz W Guderian Memories... so maybe it was more a case that the British were half asleep?

It was principally the books and articles of the Englishmen, Fuller, Liddell-Hart and Martel, that excited my interest and gave food for thought. These farsighted soldiers were even then trying to make the tank something more than just an infantry support weapon. The envisaged it in relationship to the growing motorisation of our age, and thus they became the pioneers of a new type of warfare on the largest scale.

I learned from them the concentration of armour, as employed in the Battle of Cambrai. Further, it was Liddell-Hart who emphasised the use of armoured forces for long-range strokes, operations against the opposing army’s communications, and also proposed a type of armoured division combining panzer and panzer-infantry units. Deeply impressed by these ideas I tried to develop them in a sense practicable for our own army. So I owe many suggestions of our further development to Captain Liddell-Hart.
Surely an example of the proverb; A prophet is not recognized in his own land.