Existing comment:
John Fredrick Charles Fuller
(1878-1966)
Founder of Modern Armored Warfare
JFC Fuller is considered to be the founder of modern armored warfare, and a supreme military theoretician. During World War I, he planned the surprise attack at he battle of Cambrai on November 20, 1917, initiating the first massed tank assault in the history of warfare. Cambrai was a success because Fuller insisted that the tanks be massed for attack.
After World War I, it was discovered that Swinton had conceived of the use of tanks in much the same way as Fuller had employed them -- but Swinton's concept had been lost in the rush to employ tanks. Fuller's contribution was to define the tactics and to have them obeyed by Corps and Divisional commanders. After Cambrai, Fuller launched a crusade for the mechanization and modernization of the British Army.
Through the interwar period, Fuller wrote voluminously and his doctrine on employment of tanks adopted by German pioneers or armored warfare and became the basis for the "Blitzkrieg" warfare, through which the German Armies mastered the continents in 1939-1941. |