John Frederick Charles (JFC) Fuller born September 1, 1878 in Chichester, Sussex, England. He died February 10, 1966 in Falmouth, Cornwall, England. An occultist, writer, British army officer, military theoretician, and war historian who became one of the founders of modern armored warfare. Commissioned into the British Army in 1899, Fuller saw awevice in the South Aftican War and was a staff officer in France during World War I. As chief of staff of the British tank corps from December 1916, he planned the surprise attack of 381 tanks at the Battle of Cambrai on November 20, 1917; this was the first massed tank assault in the history of warfare. After the war he launched a crusade for the mechanization and modernization of the British army. Chief instructor of Camberly Staff College from 1923, he became military assistant tot the chief of the imperial general staff in 1926. He was promoted to major general in 1930 and retired three years later to devote himself entirely to writing. Throughout the interwar period, Fuller wrote voluminously, his most notable works being Tanks in the Great War (1920), The Reformation of War (1923), On Future Warfare (1928), and Memoirs of an Unconventional Soldier (1936). His lectures (Field Service Regulations III, 1937) were adopted for study by the general staffs of the German, Soviet, and Czechoslovak armies. But in glorifying the tank as an almost independent and irresistible land battleship, Fuller was considered extreme, and his emphasis on the armored offensive alienated English military tacticians who were still imbued with the defensive doctrines of World War I. |
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