"Generals are always fighting the last war"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Google Books has this snippet which it claims comes from _The Canadian Forum_ Vol. 67(No. 768), April, 1987, p. 67.  If  you believe that, buy my bridge:

  "_Why the Blitzkrieg Works_ THE INEVITABLE American remarked a little while ago that the Germans were preparing for this war, the French were preparing for the last war. "

  My guess, of course, is that it was really written in 1940.

  Anyway, there's this:

  1948 Winston S. Churchill _The Second World War_ I (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985) 426: It is a joke in Britain to say that the War Office is always preparing for the
last war.

  JL

Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Fred Shapiro
Subject: "Generals are always fighting the last war"
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Someone has asked me for the origin of the saying "Generals are always
fighting the last war." I have something similar to this in The Yale Book
of Quotations from Barbara Tuchman (1962), but I imagine it predates her.
Any ideas or evidence as to early usages or origin?

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and YALE BOOK OF QUOTATIONS
Access and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press
Yale Law School ISBN 0300107986
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu http://quotationdictionary.com
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