J.F.C. Fuller: Military thinker

by Brian Holden-Reid

Brian Holden Reid Reid explores Major-General J.F.C. Fuller's formative experiences, showing how his early life, his service in the Boer War and in India, and his friendships with many alienated intellectuals, including Aleister Crowley, combined to shape his mental outlook and, eventually, his study of the phenomenon of war.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Dr. Brian Holden-Reid, FRHistS, FRGS, FRSA, FKC, is Professor of American History and Military Institutions in the Department of War Studies and Academic Member of Council, Kings College London. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society (RHistS), the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Society of Arts, and in 2007 was he was awarded the Fellowship of King's College (FKC), the highest honour the college can award its alumni and staff.

Reviews

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

'There are two classes of people I have no time for. Those who run down and crah everyone above them and those who think that because they have read a little Military History everyone else is an ignoramus...Fuller comes into both catagories.'
Field Marshall Sir Archibald Motgomery-Massingberd

It is perhaps unfortunate tat Britain's foremost military thinkers of this, and probably any century should not only have been contemporaries, but shared many of the same concerned. Thus to many Major General JFC Fuller and Captain Sir Basil Liddell Hart are grouped together in a fairly straightforward manner as inter-war theorists with radical ideas concerning the use of the tank.

This association is shared in much of the literature (Strachan's European Armies and the Conduct of the war, and Paret's Makers of Modern Strategy being just two examples).

This is unfortunate for two reasons.

First, the more accessible and populist Liddell Hart has tended to emerge as 'the' important thinker, with Fuller an also-ran.

Second, the near inevitably concentration of their mutual advocacy of armoured warfare has tended to obscure the imporant, diverse and profound contributions made by both men to military thiking in general.

This is particularly so with Filler, tanted by his fascist leanings in the 1930s, his peculiarly difficult character and.....

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Albion

Major General JFC Fuller remains one og the most prolific and important milirary writers of the twentieth century. The originator in the 1920s of what later became famous as Blitzkrieg, he is also important for his attempts to establish a new philosophical framework for the study of war and for his wide-ranging military histories.

In this new book, BH Reid provides a detailed analysis of Fuller's military ideas and assesses their validity, The result is an intelligent and thoughtful, if occasionally confusing, work.

Reed's account gives full weight to the broad range of Fuller's interests. He demonstrates that Fuller was far more than just a theorist of tank warfare but, rather, an innovative thinker who sought to apply the ninteenth-century belief in the existence of universal laws of development 'to synthesize all knowledge about war into a greand theory founded on evolutionism' (page 18).

Reid explains and evaluates how Fuller tried to do this by examining the development of Fuller's ideas on sinjects including the principles of war, the impact of weapons on tactics, the relationship between war and society, and, of course, the mechanization of war.

Unfortunately, as Reid also explains, Fuller's contacts with mysticism and his tendency to cram facts into his theories sometimes led him astray. The result is that while his writings often constain extraordinary insights, they also constain fanciful notions that held him up to ridiculde and limited his influence during much of the interwar period.

One of the great achievements of Reid's study is that he convincingly explains how the same mind that count conceive of 'Plan 1919' - Fullers brilliant proposal to end World War I had it continued into that year and which contained....