Page 68 - They Also Served

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John Fuller 1898.
The son of a clergyman, John Frederick
Charles Fuller was born in Chichester,
Sussex, on 1st September 1878. After
spending his childhood in Switzerland,
he was educated at Malvern College
before failing to get into Sandhurst
for being too small at 5 foot 4 inches
and light at 117 pounds. Eventually
he gained the required weight and
commenced training. Here, his imperiousness and admiration for Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte resulted in him acquiring the nickname ‘Boney’. Commissioned in 1898 into the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, he saw action in the Boer War but was scathing of his brother officers: ‘99 out of every 100 knew no more of military affairs than the man on the moon’. Serving as adjutant of the 10th Battalion, Middlesex Regiment, a TA unit, he began to study the art of war seriously and was duly accepted as a student at the Staff College, Camberley, on the last pre-war course in early 1914.
Fuller’s reputation as a prima donna and troublemaker saw him spend the early part of the Great War as a staff officer in the UK, which, ironically, ensured he survived the carnage of 1914–15. Finally, he insulted his commander, who sent him to France as a punishment, but which put him in his element as a staff officer. Fuller was one of the first to appreciate the need to break the stalemate of trench warfare and correctly identified the newly developed tank as the means to do this. Fuller was exasperated that his suggestion to use the tanks en masse was ignored at Arras in April 1917 but later got his wish when he was one of the planners of the first large-scale use of tanks at Cambrai in November 1917.
After the war, Fuller, now more commonly known as JFC Fuller, collaborated with Captain Basil Liddell Hart to develop new ideas of mechanisation to wean the army off the horse and onto armoured vehicles and motorised transport, a view not shared by many of the more conservative senior officers. After making his mark as chief instructor at the Staff College, Camberley, he was offered an experimental tank force at Tidworth Garrison. However, instead of accepting the appointment and using it to put his theories into practice, he quibbled about minutiae, such as the size of
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