J. F. C. Fuller

John Frederick Charles Fuller
He was a highly prolific author whose ideas reached army officers and the interested public, also influencing the development of Blitzkrieg theories in Germany. Fuller early in his life was an occultist associated with Aleister Crowley, but distanced himself from Crowley around 1911. After his retirement, Fuller became a member of the British Union of Fascists, was on the party's Policy Directorate, and was considered one of Mosley's closest allies. He was also a stated member of the Nordic League. Although he was not interned or arrested during the war, he was the only officer of his rank not invited to return to service during the war. Fuller spent his last years believing that the wrong side had won the Second World War.
Nickname	"Boney"
Birth date	1 September 1878(1878-09-01)
Place of birth	Chichester, West Sussex, England
Death date	10 February 1966 (aged 87)
Place of death	Falmouth, Cornwall, England
Allegiance	United Kingdom
Service/branch	British Army
Years of service	1899–1933
Rank	Major-general
Service number	16
Unit	Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry
Commands held	14th Infantry Brigade
Battles/wars	Second Boer War First World War
Awards	Companion of the Order of the Bath Commander of the Order of the British Empire Distinguished Service Order
Other work	Military historian, occultist, author

John Frederick Charles Fuller, CB, CBE, DSO (1 September 1878 – 10 February 1966) was a British Army officer, military historian and strategist, notable as an early theorist of modern armoured warfare, including categorising principles of warfare. He was also the inventor of "artificial moonlight".

Biography

Fuller was born in 1878, in Chichester, West Sussex, England. After moving to Lausanne with his parents as a boy, he returned to England at the age of 11 without them; three years later, at "the somewhat advanced age of 14," he began attending Malvern College and, later, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst from 1897 to 1898. He was commissioned into the 1st Battalion of the Oxfordshire Light Infantry (the old 43rd), and served in South Africa from 1899 to 1902. In the spring of 1904, Fuller was sent with his unit to India, where he contracted enteric fever in autumn of 1905; he returned to England the next year on sick-leave, where he met the woman he married in December 1906. Instead of returning to India, he was reassigned to units in England, serving as an adjutant to the 2nd South Middlesex Volunteers (amalgamated into the 7th Middlesex during the Haldane Reforms) and helping form the 10th Middlesex, until he was accepted into the Staff College at Camberley in 1913 (starting work there in January 1914).

During World War I, he was a staff officer with the Home Forces and with 7 Corps in France, and from 1916 in the Headquarters of the Machine-Gun Corps' Heavy Branch which was later to become the Tank Corps. He planned the tank attack at Cambrai in 1917 and the tank operations for the autumn offensives of 1918. His Plan 1919 for a fully mechanised army was never implemented in his lifetime, and 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 mechanisation of armies. However, in what came to be known as the "Tidworth Incident", he turned down the command of the Experimental Mechanized Force which was formed in 1927. The appointment also carried responsibility for a regular infantry brigade and the garrison of Tidworth on Salisbury Plain. Fuller believed he would be unable to devote himself to the Experimental Force and the development of mechanized warfare techniques without extra staff to assist him with the additional extraneous duties, which the War Office refused to allocate.

His ideas on mechanised warfare continued to be influential in the lead-up to World War II, ironically more with the Germans, notably Heinz Guderian, than with his countrymen. In the 1930’s, the Wehrmacht implemented tactics similar in many ways to Fuller's analysis, which became known as Blitzkrieg. Like Fuller, practitioners of Blitzkrieg partly based their approach on the theory that areas of large enemy activity should be bypassed to be eventually surrounded and destroyed. Blitzkrieg style tactics were used by several nations throughout World War II, predominantly by the Germans in the invasion of Poland, Western Europe and the Soviet Union. While Germany, and to some degree the Western Allies, adopted Blitzkrieg ideas, they were not much used by the Red Army which developed its armoured warfare doctrine based on deep operations. Deep operations was developed by Soviet military theorists, among them Marshal M. N. Tukhachevsky, during the 1920s based on their experiences in World War I and the Russian Civil War.

On his retirement in 1933, and impatient with what he considered the inability of democracy to adopt military reforms, Fuller became involved with Sir Oswald Mosley and the British Fascist movement. As a member of the British Union of Fascists he sat on the party's Policy Directorate and was considered one of Mosley's closest allies. In the 1935 general election Fuller stood against the foreign minister and future Prime minister Anthony Eden.

On 20 April 1939 Fuller was an honoured guest at Adolf Hitler's 50th birthday parade and watched as "for three hours a completely mechanised and motorised army roared past the Führer." Afterwards Hitler asked, "I hope you were pleased with your children?" Fuller replied, "Your Excellency, they have grown up so quickly that I no longer recognise them."

Fuller was a vigorous, expressive and opinionated writer of military history and of controversial predictions of the future of war.

Magic & Mysticism

Fuller was an early disciple of English poet and magician Aleister Crowley and was very familiar with his, and other forms of, magick and mysticism. While serving in the First Oxfordshire Light Infantry he had entered, and won, a contest to write the best review of Crowley's poetic works - he was apparently the only entrant to the contest. This essay was later published in book form in 1907 as The Star in the West.

After this he became an enthusiastic supporter of Crowley, joining his magical Order, the Argenteum_Astrum (A.A.), within which he became a leading member, editing Order documents and its journal, The Equinox. During this period he wrote The Treasure House of Images, edited early sections of Crowley's magical autobiography The Temple of Solomon the King and produced highly-regarded paintings dealing with A.A. teachings: these paintings have been used in recent years as the covers of the journal's revival, The Equinox, Volume IV.

After the Jones vs The Looking Glass case, in which a great deal was made of Aleister Crowley's bisexuality (although Crowley himself was not a party to the case), Fuller became worried that his association with Crowley might be a hindrance to his career. Crowley writes in chapter 67 of his Confessions:

"...to my breathless amazement he fired pointblank at my head a document in which he agreed to continue his co-operation on condition that I refrain from mentioning his name in public or private under penalty of paying him a hundred pounds for each such offence. I sat down and poured in a broadside at close quarters. "My dear man," I said in effect, "do recover your sense of proportion, to say nothing of your sense of humour. Your contribution, indeed! I can do in two days what takes you six months, and my real reason for ever printing your work at all is my friendship for you. I wanted to give you a leg up the literary ladder. I have taken endless pain to teach you the first principles of writing. When I met you, you were not so much as a fifth-rate journalist, and now you can write quite good prose with no more than my blue pencil through two out of every three adjectives, and five out of every six commas. Another three years with me and I will make you a master, but please don't think that either I or the Work depend on you, any more than J.P. Morgan depends on his favourite clerk."

After this contact between the two men faded rapidly. However, Fuller continued to be fascinated with occult subjects; in later years he wrote about topics such as the Qabalah and yoga.

Military Theories

Fuller is perhaps best known today for his "Nine Principles of War" which have formed the foundation of much of modern military theory since the 1930s, and which were originally derived from a convergence of Fuller's mystical and military interests. The Nine Principles went through several iterations; Fuller stated that they can

...be reduced to three groups, namely, principles of control, resistance, and pressure, and finally to one law - the law of economy of force. Thus the system evolved from six principles in 1912 rose to eight in 1915, to, virtually, nineteen in 1923, and then descended to nine in 1925, with the added advantage that these nine can be merged into three, and these three into one law.

The Nine Principles involve the uses of force (combat power). They have been expressed in various ways, but Fuller's 1925 arrangement is as follows:

1. Direction: What is the overall aim? Which objectives must be met to achieve the aim?
2. Concentration: Where will the commander focus the most effort?
3. Distribution: Where and how will the commander position their force?
4. Determination: The will to fight, the will to persevere, and the will to win must be maintained.
5. Surprise (Demoralisation of Force): The commander's ability to veil their intentions while discovering those of their enemy. Properly executed Surprise unbalances the enemy – causing Demoralisation of Force.
6. Endurance: The force's resistance to pressure. This is measured by the force's ability to anticipate complications and threats. This is enhanced by planning on how best to avoid, overcome, or negate them and then properly educating and training the force in these methods.
7. Mobility: The commander's ability to manoeuvre their force while outmanoeuvring the enemy's forces.
8. Offensive Action (Disorganisation of Force): The ability to gain and maintain the initiative in combat. Properly executed Offensive Action disrupts the enemy - causing Disorganisation of Force.
9. Security: The ability to protect the force from threats.

These principles of war have been adopted and further refined by the military forces of several nations, most notably within NATO, and continue to be applied widely to modern strategic thinking. Recently they have also been applied to business tactics. Fuller also developed the idea of the constant tactical factor, which states that every improvement in warfare is checked by a counter-improvement, causing the advantage to shift back and forth between the offensive and the defensive. Fuller's firsthand experience in World War I saw a shift from the defensive power of the machine gun to the offensive power of the tank.

Books by Fuller

Fuller was a prolific writer and wrote over forty-five books. The following is only a small selection of his works.

• The Star in The West: a critical essay upon the works of Aleister Crowley (Walter Scott Publishing Co., London, 1907)
• Yoga: a study of the mystical philosophy of the Brahmins and Buddhists (W. Rider, London, 1925)
• The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant (Murray, London, 1929)
• Grant & Lee: a study in personality and generalship (Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1933)
• Memoirs of an Unconventional Soldier (Nicholson & Watson, London, 1936)
• The First of the League Wars (Eyre and Spottiswoode, London, 1936) [About the Italo-Ethiopian War]
• The Secret Wisdom of the Qabalah: A Study in Jewish Mystical Thought (W. Rider & Co., London, 1937)
• Armament and History. The Influence of Armament on History from the Dawn of Classical Warfare to the End of the Second World War (C. Scribner's Sons, London, 1945; republished in 1998 by Da Capo Press, New York)
• The Second World War, 1939-1945: a strategical and tactical history (Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1948)
• The Decisive Battles of the Western World and their Influence upon History, 3 vols. (Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1954-6). A two-volume edition, abridged by John Terraine to omit battles outside the European continent, was published in the early 1980s.
  • Volume 1: From the earliest times to the battle of Lepanto
  • Volume 2: From the defeat of the Spanish Armada to the battle of Waterloo
  • Volume 3: From the American Civil War to the end of the Second World War
• The Generalship of Alexander the Great (Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1958). On Alexander the Great of Macedon.
• Julius Caesar: man, soldier and tyrant (Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1965)
• A Military History of the Western World, 3 vols. This is the American publication of The Decisive Battles of the Western World and their Influence upon History. Titles of individual tomes are same as in the British edition. Originally published: (Funk and Wagnalls, New York, 1954-7). Republished: (Da Capo Press, New York, 1987-8).
  • v. 1; ISBN 0-306-80304-6.
  • v. 2; ISBN 0-306-80305-4.
  • v. 3; ISBN 0-306-80306-2.
• Fuller, J.F.C.; Aleister Crowley (1994). The Pathworkings of Aleister Crowley: The Treasure House of Images, James Wasserman (ed.), New Falcon Publications,U.S.. ISBN 1561840742. 

Bibliography

• "Boney" Fuller: The Intellectual General by A.J. Trythall (London, 1977)
• Alaric Searle, "Was there a 'Boney' Fuller after the Second World War? Major-General J. F. C. Fuller as Military Theorist and Commentator, 1945-1966", War in History, 11/3 (2004), pp. 327–357.
• Generals, by Mark Urban (London, 2005) — the chapter on Fuller is available as a PDF

External links

• Two Biographical Works Examine the Life of a Great British Historian and Military Thinker
• Major General J.F.C. Fuller (1878-1966)
• Major General J.F.C. Fuller (1878-1966) Instauration May 1977 Vol. 2, No. 6
• The Star in the West
• The Foundations of the Science of War hosted by U.S. Army Command & General Staff College
• Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure hosted by U.S. Army Command & General Staff College