An upended Allied Renault FT-17 tank rises from a muddy frontline trench near Saint-Mihiel, France, in July 1918. (Library of Congress)

Irascible, overbearing, argumentative, condescending, a fan of woo-woo occultism and, ultimately, a Nazi sympathizer, J.F.C. Fuller was nevertheless a foresighted tactician

Major General John Frederick Charles Fuller was, during World War I and through the early 1930s, the British army's tank warfare go-to guy. He was the man who taught the Wehrmacht how to blitzkrieg, George Patton how to rumble and the Israelis how to kill Syrians. Yet he was an absolute un-Pattonlike, don't-mistake-me-for-Bernard Montgomery, I'm-no-Heinz-Guderian staff officer. The quintessential egghead, "Boney" Fuller was a tiny man with a modicum of actual combat experience whose bearing, manner and attitude were fully represented by his nerdy nickname.

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Irascible, overbearing, argumentative, condescending, a fan of woo-woo occultism and, ultimately, a Nazi sympathizer, J.F.C. Fuller was nevertheless a foresighted tactician and imaginative military theorist. He would have been hard-pressed to take a rifle squad into action, yet he did something few other professional officers at the time bothered with: He thought about how battles should be fought. Thought so long and hard, in fact, that he became what the Brits love to call "too clever by half."

Fuller failed to get into Sandhurst on his first try because he was too short (5-foot-4), too wispy (117 pounds at age 18) and had too small a chest (boney, presumably) to meet the British military academy's standards. Second time around he got in, though he later admitted, "I took no interest whatever in things military." Fuller preferred to read classics and write letters to his mother, yet he eventually secured a commission in the Oxfordshire Light Infantry.

About his first action, in the Boer War, Fuller observed: "We knew nothing about war, about South Africa, about our eventual enemy, about anything at all which mattered and upon which our lives might depend. Nine officers out of 10—I might say 99 out of every 100—knew no more of military affairs than the man on the moon and do not intend or want to know more." Fuller was so contemptuous of his fellow officers that, he wrote his mother, he even loathed playing cards with them during the voyage to South Africa. "That biped is a great deal too uninteresting for me," he sniffed, adding, "The army…needs primitive men who enjoy the heirlooms of prehistoric times such as hunting, shooting, etc."

Fuller saw his first real fighting in the Transvaal. He wrote his mother about a friendly fire incident in which a native trooper was wounded in the forehead. Fuller fed the man whiskey while trying to stuff his brains back in with the handle of a mess kit fork. His words reveal his lifelong racism: "Any ordinary civilized individual would have fallen down dead at once, but I suppose these semi-savages use their brain so little that it doesn't matter much if they lose a part of it."

The best months of Fuller's Boer War came when he was put in charge of 70 black scouts and given a 4,000-square-mile area of only partially pacified countryside to patrol. His recon platoon engaged in casual firefights, took and interrogated prisoners, raided, scouted for regular army units and generally operated independently. It was dangerous work, for the Boers particularly hated Brits who led the despised "kaffirs," and captured officers could expect to die in unpleasant ways.

The experience was for Fuller an on-the-job tactical education. It taught him about field operations—particularly frontal and flank attacks and whether to envelop or penetrate an opposing force—in a way Sandhurst never could. His South African foray instilled in Fuller two ideas that would become cornerstones of his tactical thinking: 1) mobility is all-important, and 2) a rapid, deep, penetrating attack is far more effective than the traditional slow-paced, beat-your-head-against-a-wall frontal assault.

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