John Frederick Charles Fuller

Born Sept. 1, 1878, in Chichester; died Feb. 10, 1966, in Falmouth. British military historian and theoretician. Major general (1930).

Fuller served in the Boer War (1899–1902) and in World War I. He graduated from the Staff College at Camberly and subsequently taught at the college and served in staff posts. In 1926 he became military assistant to the chief of the Imperial General Staff, and in 1933 he retired from military service. During the 1920’s and 1930’s, Fuller published a number of works that explained the lessons to be learned from the military experience of World War I. He worked out a theory for creating a small, well-armed, mechanized army, capable of the mass use of tanks and air power to inflict sudden and heavy strikes on the enemy’s main groups and rear and thereby quickly terminate the war. He contributed to the newspaper Daily Mail, publishing articles on the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935–36 and the Civil War in Spain (1936–39). During the 1940’s and 1950’s, Fuller published a number of works on the history of World War II and on problems of military history; these works had an anti-Soviet bias.