After a three-hour parade of the thoroughly motorized, armored Wehrmacht, Hitler greeted Fuller on the receiving line and said, “I hope you were pleased with your children.” Fuller is said to have replied, “Your Excellency, they have grown up so quickly that I no longer recognize them.” The Germans—particularly panzer commander Guderian—would later largely credit Fuller’s writings with their development of blitzkrieg tactics, though historians debate whether the defeated Guderian meant this more as postwar politeness than praise.

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While Fuller realized that war with Germany would almost certainly erupt again, he deluded himself into thinking that white brothers under the skin would wage chivalrous battles, eventually settle on a winner and shake on it, “for chivalry was born in Europe,” he naively wrote.

While the government interned most members of the British Union of Fascists upon the 1939 outbreak of war, Fuller was left alone, probably because Winston Churchill intervened on his behalf. Yet Fuller loathed Churchill, of whom he once wrote to his friend Basil Liddell Hart, “The war as it is being run is just a vast Bedlam with WC as its glamour boy; a kind of mad hatter who one day appears as a cowpuncher and the next as an air commodore—the man is an enormous mountebank.”

In the 1930s Fuller had embarked upon a second career as a writer, ultimately penning some 45 authoritative books and hundreds of popular-press articles and scholarly papers. He wrote about everything from war to yoga (the latter extremely avant-garde at the time) and became a precursor of today’s retired generals anxious to freelance as media talking heads. Indeed, Fuller was Newsweek’s “military analyst” during much of World War II.

For all his foibles and failings, Fuller was a visionary. In the early 1930s he predicted, as Anthony Trythall wrote, “future armies would be surrounded by swarms of motorized guerillas, irregulars or regular troops making use of the multitude of civilian motorcars that would be available.” Fuller also mused that one day “a manless flying machine” would change the face of war. Early on he was intrigued by the development of radio, not only for communication but also as a way to control robot weapons. He also thought then-primitive rocket technology would one day lead to the development of superb anti-aircraft weapons.

And as early as the 1920s, Fuller was a proponent of amphibious warfare. He envisioned a naval fleet “which belches forth war on every strand, which vomits forth armies as never did the horse of Troy.” Indeed, he foresaw future navies as being entirely submersible. On the negative side of the balance sheet, Fuller also championed the military use of poison gas, particularly when spread by airplanes. Even as late as 1961, with the publication of his book The Conduct of War, he blamed resistance to chemical warfare on “popular emotionalism.”

If Fuller had a fatal flaw as a tactician, it was that he derided the importance of putting infantry “boots on the ground.” To him, combat was simply a matter of wool uniforms versus steel armor—and that seemed to him a no-brainer. Of course, Fuller had failed to consider the development of portable, shoulder-fired and helicopter-borne antitank weaponry.

Maj. Gen. J.F.C. Fuller, CB, CBE, DSO (Ret.) died on Feb. 10, 1966. Had he lived another 16 months, he’d doubtless have gained considerable satisfaction from Israel’s total rout of the Egyptians, Syrians and Jordanians in the June 1967 Six-Day War, using Fuller-doctrine tank tactics in what was later dubbed “the Jewish blitzkrieg.”

“Boney” Fuller was indeed a prophet—albeit a cantankerous, irritating and bigoted one—in his own time.

For further reading, Stephan Wilkinson recommends: “Boney” Fuller: Soldier, Strategist and Writer, 1878–1966, by Anthony John Trythall, and Fuller’s own The Conduct of War, 1789–1961.

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