J. F. C. Fuller

Major-General John Frederick Charles "Boney" Fuller (1 September 1878 – 10 February 1966) was a high-ranking British Army officer, military historian, strategist, fascist, and occultist. During the First World War, he served on the staff of the Tank Corps and contributed to the planning of the tank assault at the Battle of Cambrai. His proposed Plan 1919, a fully mechanized offensive against Germany, was never carried out because the war ended. As a military thinker, he wrote extensively, and his ideas shaped officers in Britain, Germany, and the United States. He stressed the importance of new weapons like tanks and aircraft and is considered a forerunner of blitzkrieg. After leaving the army, he admired Nazism and joined several fascist and pro-Nazi groups, including the British Union of Fascists and the Right Club. In 1940, he was part of two coup plots against the British government. Unlike many other British fascists, he was not interned, possibly because of his military connections.

Fuller was born in Chichester, West Sussex, to Alfred Fuller, an Anglican clergyman, and Selma Marie Philippine de la Chevallerie, who was of French descent but raised in Germany. Alfred retired as rector of Itchenor and moved to Chichester, where his son was born. As a boy, Fuller moved to Lausanne with his parents, but returned to England alone at age 11. At the relatively late age of 14, he started at Malvern College, and later trained for the army at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst from 1897 to 1898. His nickname "Boney" supposedly came either from his admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte or from a commanding manner and military skill that reminded others of Napoleon.

Commissioned into the 1st Battalion of the Oxfordshire Light Infantry on 3 August 1898, Fuller served in the Second Boer War in South Africa from December 1899 to 1902, becoming a lieutenant on 24 February 1900. In spring 1904, his unit was sent to India, where he caught typhoid fever in autumn 1905. He returned to England on sick leave the next year and married Margaretha "Sonia" Karnatzki, daughter of a Warsaw doctor, in December 1906. Instead of going back to India, he was assigned to Volunteer units in England, serving as adjutant to the 2nd South Middlesex Volunteers and helping form the new 10th Middlesex. Fuller later said his work with the 10th Middlesex made him take soldiering seriously. In 1913, he entered the Staff College, Camberley, starting in January 1914.

During World War I, Fuller was a staff officer with Home Forces and VII Corps in France, and from 1916 with the Heavy Branch of the Machine-Gun Corps, which became the Tank Corps. In September 1917, he discussed tank matters with Minister of Munitions Winston Churchill at Tank Corps Headquarters in Bermicourt. He helped plan the tank attack at the Battle of Cambrai on 20 November 1917 and tank operations for the 1918 autumn offensives. His Plan 1919 was never used. Promoted to brevet lieutenant colonel in January 1918, he later held leading roles, including command of an experimental brigade at Aldershot, and served on the Allied Tank Committee in London in February 1918.

After the war, promoted to brevet colonel in January 1919 for valuable war services, Fuller worked with colleague B. H. Liddell Hart on new ideas for army mechanization, pushing for the British Army to modernize. He was chief instructor at the Staff College, Camberley from 1923, then a GSO1 at the War Office, becoming military assistant to the chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1926. In the "Tidworth Incident," he refused command of the Experimental Mechanized Force formed on 27 August 1927, because the post also included a regular infantry brigade and garrison duties at Tidworth Camp, and the War Office would not give him extra staff to focus on mechanized warfare. Winston Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, consulted him on warfare development in summer 1928. Fuller became a major-general in 1930, refused command of the Second Class District of Bombay, and retired in December 1933 to write full-time.

Frustrated by what he saw as democracy's failure to adopt military reforms, and holding a conventional soldier's political views, Fuller joined Sir Oswald Mosley and the British fascist movement. He enlisted in the British Union of Fascists in mid-1934, sat on its Policy Directorate, and was considered one of Mosley's closest allies. He had lectured to the fascist-leaning New Britain Group in 1932. By July 1939, he was a member of the clandestine far-right Nordic League, and also joined Lord Lymington's British Council against European Commitments (formed September 1938), the Imperial Fascist League, and became an editor of the *New Pioneer*.