John Frederick Charles Fuller (1878-1966) – Brief Profile & History

TThrough development of armor operations and visionary theo­ries of modern warfare, John Fuller established himself as the fore­most military analyst of the twentieth century. His writings on tactical problems, political and social aspects of war, and military history had a significant impact on the leaders of World War II and the postwar era.

Born on September 1, 1878, in Itchenor in Southern England to a clergyman and a German-educated French woman, Fuller gained a commission from Sandhurst in 1898. After a brief posting in Ireland, he sailed with his regiment to South Africa in 1899, where he led English infantry and native black soldiers against the Boers.

Fuller returned to England after the war and, except for a tour in India, remained there with his regiment or attached to var­ious schools for the next fifteen years. During this time, Fuller be­came interested in the principles of war and developed a theory that tactical penetration rather than envelopment would be the key to future battle successes. To publicize his ideas, Fuller began to write and publish magazine articles and pamphlets on military mobilization, training, and deployment. These writings, combined with his interest in magic and the occult, attracted critics and op­ponents who would make Fuller’s career difficult.

During the early days of World War I, Fuller, while serving in various staff positions in France, confirmed his idea that penetra­tion was the key to victory, noting, however, that in the trench warfare of machine guns, barbed-wire obstacles, and heavy artillery, no weapon existed that could successfully break through the enemy front lines. Introduced to tanks for the first time in 1916, Fuller ‘recognized that they were, at last, the means of successful penetration.

When the British Tank Corps was formed in December 1916, Fuller secured the position of the unit’s chief general staff officer and was promoted to lieutenant colonel. He then planned the first massed tank attack that penetrated the German lines and gained victory at Cambrai on November 20, 1917. This attack marked the coming of age of armored warfare and established tanks as an im­portant batdefield weapon.

Fuller continued as the primary planner for British tank op­erations and developed Plan 1919 as a final offensive to end the war. Plan 1919 called for a penetration attack by more than four thousand swift new tanks with long-range operations capabilities. On completion of the breakthrough, another one thousand tanks would exploit the opening to penetrate deep into enemy territory, destroying their command-and-control structure. Airplanes would support the attacks by bombing and strafing supply centers and German reinforcing units. World War I concluded before Fuller could execute Plan 1919, but it did provide the deep-battle, or “blitzkrieg,” concept that would dominate the early stages of the next worldwide conflict.

Fuller returned to England after the armistice and success­fully lobbied for the permanent establishment of die Royal Tank Corps. Now, in addition to his prewar opponents, he made ene­mies of the British cavalry establishment, who opposed the re­placement of their horses with iron machines. Fuller, never one to suffer fools gladly, or to avoid controversy, responded, ‘There is nothing too wonderful for science. We of the fighting services must grasp the wand of this magician and compel the future to obey us.”

In addition to his staff work, Fuller also broadened his writ­ings in support of his military theories. His Tanks in the Great War (1920) and The Reformation of War (1923) contained many ideas advocating uses of armored warfare contradictory to current mil­itary thought and practice. Military leaders around the world found Fuller’s books both extremist and visionary. In 1926, Fuller, now head of the Staff College, published his lectures as The Foundations of the Science of War. Also during this period, Fuller befriended, and became the mentor of, fellow military the­orist Basil Liddell Hart, who, except for a brief falling-out over politics, remained his cohort and partner for their remaining years.

Fuller joined the Imperial General Staff in 1926 and contin­ued his writing. He maintained his advocacy of penetration warfare and angered his superiors and allies by emphasizing the inefficacy of relying on fixed defenses. About the Maginot Line, he correctly stated that it would become “the tombstone of France.” In 1927 and again in 1930, Fuller turned down command assignments and retired from the army as a major general in 1933. His last book, published while on active duty, Field Regulations III (1932), which further delineated his persistent contention that armored offen­sives were the future of warfare, became extremely popular outside Great Britain, and both the armies of Germany and the Soviet Union adopted it for study by their general staffs.

After his retirement, Fuller briefly entered politics as a Fas­cist candidate for Parliament; his writings of this period contain lightly veiled anti-Semitism. He also joined the Daily Mail (Lon­don) as a military correspondent and covered the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War. He offered to return to ac­tive duty when Britain entered World War II, but he was never re­called despite the fact that allies and enemies alike studied and implemented his theories throughout the war.

WitH the peace, Fuller turned his writing toward military his­tory. His Armament and History (1946) offered a brilliant study of the relationship between weapons development and historical events, while his three-volume Military History of the Western World (1954r-56) covered military developments from the earliest times through World War II. By the time of his death on February 10, 1966, at Falmouth, England, at age eighty-seven, Fuller had pub­lished more than forty books and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles.

Fuller, nicknamed “Boney” because of both his small stature and domineering manner, was a brilliant tactical and strategic thinker whose ideas, particularly those on maneuver armored war­fare, influenced most of the European military leaders of his age. An unusual soldier because of his extreme intelligence and his out­spokenness, Fuller was truly an original thinker. His influence sur­vives today through his writings and those of his protege Liddell Hart. While Fuller’s ideas on the importance of the penetration and exploitation capabilities of armored forces remain valid today, his overall theories on the art of war are not as universal as those of his fellow theorists Karl von Clausewitz, Antoine Henri Jomini, and Sun Tzu.

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