Major-General John Frederick Charles "Boney" Fuller (1 September 1878 – 10 February 1966) was a senior British Army officer, a military historian and strategist, a fascist, and an occultist.
During World War I, Fuller became a staff officer in the Tank Corps and helped plan the tank attack during the Battle of Cambrai. His Plan 1919 for a fully mechanised offensive against the German army was not implemented, due to the end of the war.
As a military theorist, Fuller was highly prolific and his ideas influenced army officers in Britain, Germany and the USA. He emphasised the potential of new weapons, especially tanks and aircraft, and was regarded as one of the progenitors of blitzkrieg.
After retiring from the Army, Fuller became an admirer of Nazism, and a member of several fascist and pro-Nazi organisations including the British Union of Fascists and the Right Club. In 1940 he was involved in two coup plots against the British government. Despite this, unlike many other British fascists, he avoided internment, possibly due to his military connections.
Early life Fuller was born in Chichester, West Sussex, the son of Alfred Fuller (1832–1927), an Anglican clergyman, and Selma Marie Philippine (1847- –1940), née de la Chevallerie, of French descent but raised in Germany. Alfred Fuller retired as rector of Itchenor and moved to Chichester, where his son was born.Friendship in Doubt- Aleister Crowley, J. F. C. Fuller, Victor B. Neuberg, and British Agnosticism, Richard Kaczynski, Oxford University Press, 2024, p. 11Perdurabo- The Life of Aleister Crowley- The Definitive Biography of the Founder of Modern Magick, Richard Kaczynski, North Atlantic Books, 2002, p. 599Tucker, Spencer C., The European Powers in the First World War: An Encyclopedia, Routledge, 2013, , p. 280 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 CollegeFuller, Memoirs of an Unconventional Soldier, Ivor Nicholson and Watson Ltd., London, 1936, ch. 1 and, later trained for an army career at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, from 1897 to 1898. His nickname of "Boney", which he was to retain, is said to have come either from an admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte,Brian Holden Reid, J. F. C. Fuller: Military Thinker, Macmillan, 1987, p. 3. or from an imperious manner combined with military brilliance which resembled Napoleon's.Trevor N. Dupuy, Curt Johnson, David L. Bongard, Harper Encyclopedia of Military Biography, HarperCollins, 1992, p. 268
Military career Pre-World War I Fuller was commissioned into the 1st Battalion of the Oxfordshire Light Infantry (the old 43rd Foot) on 3 August 1898. He served in the Second Boer War in South Africa from December 1899 to 1902, and was promoted to lieutenant on 24 February 1900 a couple of months after arriving there. In the spring of 1904 Fuller was sent with his unit to India, where he contracted typhoid 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 – Margaretha "Sonia" Karnatzki, the daughter of a Warsaw doctor. Instead of returning to India, he was reassigned to Volunteer units in England, serving as adjutant to the 2nd South Middlesex Volunteers (amalgamated into the Kensingtons during the Haldane Reforms) and helping to form the new 10th Middlesex. Fuller later claimed that his position with the 10th Middlesex inspired him to study soldiering seriously.Ian F.W. Beckett, Riflemen Form: A Study of the Rifle Volunteer Movement 1859–1908, Aldershot: Ogilby Trusts, 1982, , p. 202.Fuller, Memoirs of an Unconventional Soldier, pp. 10-21. In 1913, he was accepted into the Staff College, Camberley, starting work there in January 1914.A. J. Trythall, "Boney" Fuller: The Intellectual General (1977)
World War I During the First World War, Fuller was a staff officer with the Home Forces and with VII Corps in France, and from 1916 in the Headquarters of the Machine-Gun Corps' Heavy Branch which was later to become the Tank Corps. In September 1917, he held discussions with the Minister of Munitions Winston Churchill at the Tank Corps Headquarters in Bermicourt. He helped plan the tank attack at the 20 November 1917 Battle of Cambrai and the tank operations for the autumn offensives of 1918. His Plan 1919 for a fully mechanised offensive against the German army was never implemented. After 1918, in January of which he was promoted to brevet lieutenant colonel, he held various leading positions, notably as a commander of an experimental brigade at Aldershot. He participated in the Allied Tank Committee in London in February 1918.
War Office and retirement After the war Fuller, who in January 1919 was promoted to brevet colonel in recognition of "valuable services rendered in connection with the War", collaborated with his colleague B. H. Liddell Hart in developing new ideas for the mechanisation of armies, launching a crusade for the mechanisation and modernisation of the British Army. Chief instructor at the Staff College, Camberley from 1923, he served at the War Office as a GSO1 became military assistant to the chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1926. In what came to be known as the "Tidworth Incident", Fuller turned down the command of the Experimental Mechanized Force, which was formed on 27 August 1927. The appointment also carried responsibility for a regular infantry brigade and the garrison of Tidworth Camp on Salisbury Plain. Fuller believed he would be unable to devote himself to the Experimental Mechanized 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. He was consulted on the development of warfare by Winston Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the summer of 1928. Fuller was promoted to major-general in 1930 and after refusing the command of the Second Class District of Bombay retired in December 1933 to devote himself entirely to writing.Trythall, "Boney" Fuller: The Intellectual General (1977)
Political activism Pre-World War II Involvement with British fascism Impatient with what he considered the inability of democracy to adopt military reforms and taking a "very conventional soldier's view of politics", Fuller became involved with Sir Oswald Mosley and the British fascist movement. He enlisted in the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in mid-1934. He sat on the party's Policy Directorate and was considered one of Mosley's closest allies. He had already lectured to the fascist-leaning New Britain Group in 1932. He also became a member of the clandestine far-right group the Nordic League by July 1939,Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918–1985, (1987), p. 80 a member of Lord Lymington's British Council against European Commitments (formed in September 1938) and of the Imperial Fascist League, as well as an editor of the New Pioneer (founded in December 1938), the monthly organ of English Array, a fascist group led by Lord Lymington. By March 1936 he was reported to claim that Mosley was an obstacle to fascism in Britain. His wife also became involved in BUF activities, attending Mosley's Earls Court Exhibition Centre in July 1939 and dinner meetings with Fuller's fellow far-right conspirators during the Phoney War.
Involvement with foreign fascism After preparing a report on the party organisation of BUF in October 1934, Fuller travelled to Nazi Germany in January 1935 alongside Oswald Mosley's confidant William Edward David Allen on a mission to study the Nazi Party structure and was the only foreigner present at the first Nazi German armed manoeuvres.
A rare Italophile within the BUF ranks after 1935 and a member of the British Union of Friends of Italy, he acted as the military correspondent for the Daily Mail from the Italian camp during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (1935), comparing Mussolini's invading force to the crusaders and the Hussites. Following his return, he was quizzed about the war by Winston Churchill at a Buck's Club dinner in the company of B. H. Liddell Hart and Lord Trenchard.
Fuller also travelled to Spain in March 1937, October 1937 and April 1938; his coverage of the Civil War, published in several outlets, was written from an "extremely pro-Nationalist" perspective, according to a War Office report.
Fuller visited Nazi Germany regularly and came to know a number of the Nazi Party leaders. He frequently praised Adolf Hitler in his speeches and articles, once describing him as "that realistic idealist who has awakened the common sense of the British people by setting out to create a new Germany". (p. 217) He came to believe that the Nazis had created a "scientific" state. On 20 April 1939, Fuller was an honoured guest at Hitler's 50th birthday parade (attending "with official disapproval" along with Baron Brocket), watching 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's ideas on mechanised warfare continued to be influential in the lead-up to the Second World War, ironically less with his countrymen than with the Nazis, notably Heinz Guderian who spent his own money to have Fuller's Provisional Instructions for Tank and Armoured Car Training translated. In the 1930s, the German Army implemented tactics similar in many ways to Fuller's analysis, which became known as Blitzkrieg. Like Fuller, theorists 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 the Second World War, predominantly by the Germans in the invasion of Poland (1939), Western Europe (1940), and the Soviet Union (1941). While Germany and to some degree the Western Allies adopted Blitzkrieg ideas, they were not much used by the Red Army, which developed its armored warfare doctrine based on deep operations, which were developed by Soviet military theorists Marshal M. N. Tukhachevsky et al. in the 1920s based on their experiences in the First World War and the Russian Civil War.
World War II Pro-Nazi activities At one meeting of the Right Club, which had been set up in May 1939, Fuller declared the need for "a bloody revolution" in Britain and added "I am ready to start one right away." He delivered a talk on "The Hebrew Mysteries" to the Nordic League in March 1939, and in mid-1939 was a speaker for The Link at its "most violently pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic branch" in Central London. Prior to the war, he was a regular guest at George Pitt-Rivers's estate in Hinton St Mary, worked closely with George Drummond, the "madly pro-German and anti-Jew" chairman of Drummonds Bank and president of the Northampton branch of The Link, and was known to the MI5 as an associate of Philip Tonstall Farrer (an ex-intelligence officer with Nazi links), the German prince , and Archibald Maule Ramsay (the founder of the Right Club).
He continued to speak out in favour of a peaceful settlement with Germany. In July 1939, he was reported by the Evening Standard as the prospective BUF candidate at the 1940 general election. In October 1939, he conferred in private with Barry Domvile and Lancelot Lawton; a source described him on the occasion as "very interesting but very bloodthirsty". Between October 1939 and February 1940, he took part in a series of secret meetings held by the Marquess of Tavistock, a Hitler enthusiast, to discuss plans for collaboration with the Third Reich.
Plots to overthrow the British government