The Battle of Cambrai in November and December 1917 was the Tank Corps’ greatest wartime success, as it punched a horde of tanks through the Hindenburg Line in a stunning example of Fuller’s penetration tactics. Fuller had wanted to lead the central charge, but his commander, Lt. Col. Hugh Elles, turned him down and directed the battle himself from his tank “Hilda,” becoming a fleeting national hero as a result.

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Still, Cambrai wasn’t a clear-cut enough victory to establish Tank Corps as part of the varsity. Field Marshal Douglas Haig instead relegated tanks to a defensive role, much to Fuller’s chagrin. The iron monsters were strung out along a 65-mile front, either dug into pits or otherwise fortified—parked pillboxes, in effect—where “this beast would squat and slumber until the enemy advanced,” Fuller later mocked, “when it would make warlike noises and pounce upon him.”

Fuller’s finest wartime moment was the promulgation of his Plan 1919. Believing World War I would continue into 1919, he suggested victory with a single penetrating, surprise, mass tank attack aimed not at killing lots of German soldiers but at reaching and killing the enemy “brain”—the rear-area command-and-communications infrastructure—and thus paralyzing the body. But Fuller’s most meaningful tactical concept came to naught, as the war ended in November 1918. Had it continued, Fuller today might be as widely known as Guderian, Montgomery and Patton.

Britain’s hidebound high command seemed to learn little from World War I, their American counterparts perhaps only a bit more. The military remained convinced that wars were won by men clad in woolen uniforms hiding behind rocks and shooting bullets at one another and that despite the growing civilian predilection for cross-country travel in gasoline-powered automobiles, mobility of armies was still best provided by horses. Few seemed to realize that armor trumped wool and machinery was stronger than muscle. Part of the problem was that professional officers liked horses and loathed greasy, smelly machinery. Even airplanes met with their disdain.

Through the 1920s, as Fuller grew increasingly disenchanted with the military and his inability to bring about real tactical reforms, the military became equally disenchanted with Fuller. The final straw was the “Tidworth Affair,” which began when the British army gave Fuller the plum command of an experimental tank force at Tidworth, on the Salisbury Plain. The posting, which marked the tactician’s last chance to champion his armored doctrine, turned sour when he voiced a variety of small-minded ultimatums, such as demanding a full-time secretary and refusing to “waste his time” commanding an infantry unit attached to the tank force. To top things off, he petulantly threatened to resign, which would have been a PR disaster for the army, as Fuller had far stronger support among the popular press than he did among the officer corps. The army managed to talk him out of quitting.

But instead of taking in Tidworth, Fuller was again sent to India on a minor fact-finding mission and was never again offered a command. In 1933, at the age of 55, Fuller retired as a major general. Biographer Anthony John Trythall summed up his turbulent career: “And so ended, a few years before what will almost certainly prove to have been the largest and longest mechanized war of all time, the military career of Britain’s most experienced and able tank officer, the victim of his own brilliance and energy, and of his own inability to trim his words and actions to the winds of political reality and human frailty.…He was…too clever, too rigid, too intellectually arrogant and self-reliant to be highly successful in a military career.”

Following his army retirement, Fuller became deeply involved with Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (not a completely unexpected development, given that Fuller was a Germanophile, a racist and an anti-Semite whose preferred boyhood nickname was “Fritz”). He visited Germany frequently and spent time with Hitler, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Rudolf Hess, all of whom he found “charming.” Fuller was one of only two British guests at Hitler’s 50th birthday party, in April 1939, and it was at that event he apparently spoke some of the most notorious words ever attributed too him.

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