J. F. C. Fuller

J.F.C. Fuller (September 1, 1878 – February 10, 1966), full name John Frederick Charles Fuller, was a British general, military historian and strategist, notable as an early theorist of modern armored warfare, including categorizing principles of warfare. He was also the inventor of "artificial moonlight".

Fuller was born in Chichester, West Sussex, England and educated at Malvern College and Royal Military Academy Sandhurst from 1897 to 1898. He proceeded to become 2nd Lt at Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and to serve in South Africa from 1899 to 1902. He then attended Staff College at Camberley and served as an adjutant to a territorial battalion. During World War I, he was a staff officer with the Home Forces and in France and from 1916 worked in the Heavy Branch, which was later to become the Tank Corps. He planned the tank attack of Cambrai and the tank operations for the autumn offensives of 1918. His Plan 1919 for a fully mechanized army was not put into action. After 1918, he held various leading positions, notably as a commander of an experimental brigade at Aldershot.

In the 1920s, he collaborated with his junior B.H. Liddell Hart in developing new ideas for the mechanization of armies.

Upon his retirement in 1933, impatient with what he considered the inability of democracy to adopt military reforms, he became involved with Sir Oswald Mosley and the British Fascist movement. His ideas on warfare continued to be influential in World War II, as much with the Germans, notably Heinz Guderian, as with his own country.

He also was a long-term acquaintance of Aleister Crowley and was familiar with his, and other forms of, magick and mysticism.

In addition to his military accomplishments, Fuller was a vigorous, expressive and opinionated writer of military history and of controversial predictions of the future of war.

Books by Fuller

Fuller was a very prolific writer. Only a small selection of his works is covered here.

The Star in The West, A Critical Essay upon the Works of Aleister Crowley(London, ?)
Yoga: A Study of the Mystical Philosophy of the Brahmins and Buddhists(London, 1925)
The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant (New York, 1929)
Grant & Lee (London, 1933)
Memoirs of an Unconventional Soldier (London, 1936)
The Secret Wisdom of the Qabalah: A Study in Jewish Mystical Thought(London, 1937)
The Second World War, 1939-1945 (New York, 1949)
A Military History of the Western World, 3 vols. (New York, 1954)

Books by Fuller

Further reading