Pre-World War II Involvement with British fascism Impatient with what he considered the inability of democracy to adopt military reforms and taking a "very conventional soldier's view of politics", Fuller became involved with Sir
Oswald Mosley and the British
fascist movement. He had already lectured to the fascist-leaning New Britain Group in 1932. He also became a member of the clandestine
far-right group the
Nordic League by July 1939, By March 1936 he was reported to claim that Mosley was an obstacle to fascism in Britain. His wife also became involved in BUF activities, attending Mosley's
Earls Court Exhibition Centre in July 1939 and dinner meetings with Fuller's fellow far-right conspirators during the
Phoney War.
Involvement with foreign fascism After preparing a report on the party organisation of BUF in October 1934, Fuller travelled to Nazi Germany in January 1935 alongside Oswald Mosley's confidant
William Edward David Allen on a mission to study the
Nazi Party structure and was the only foreigner present at the first Nazi German armed manoeuvres. A rare Italophile within the BUF ranks after 1935 and a member of the British Union of Friends of Italy, he acted as the military
correspondent for the
Daily Mail from the Italian camp during the
Italian invasion of Ethiopia (1935), comparing Mussolini's invading force to the
crusaders and the
Hussites. He came to believe that the Nazis had created a "scientific" state. On 20 April 1939, Fuller was an honoured guest at
Hitler's 50th birthday parade (attending "with official disapproval" along with
Baron Brocket), watching as "for three hours a completely mechanised and motorised army roared past the Führer." Afterwards Hitler asked, "I hope you were pleased with your children?" Fuller replied, "Your Excellency, they have grown up so quickly that I no longer recognise them." Fuller's ideas on mechanised warfare continued to be influential in the lead-up to the Second World War, ironically less with his countrymen than with the
Nazis, notably
Heinz Guderian who spent his own money to have Fuller's
Provisional Instructions for Tank and Armoured Car Training translated. In the 1930s, the German
Army implemented tactics similar in many ways to Fuller's analysis, which became known as
Blitzkrieg. Like Fuller, theorists of Blitzkrieg partly based their approach on the theory that areas of large enemy activity should be bypassed to be eventually surrounded and destroyed. Blitzkrieg-style tactics were used by several nations throughout the Second World War, predominantly by the Germans in the invasion of Poland (1939), Western Europe (1940), and the Soviet Union (1941). While Germany and to some degree the Western Allies adopted Blitzkrieg ideas, they were not much used by the
Red Army, which developed its armored warfare doctrine based on
deep operations, which were developed by Soviet military theorists Marshal
M. N. Tukhachevsky et al. in the 1920s based on their experiences in the First World War and the
Russian Civil War. He delivered a talk on "The Hebrew Mysteries" to the Nordic League in March 1939, and in mid-1939 was a speaker for
The Link at its "most violently pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic branch" in Central London. Prior to the war, he was a regular guest at
George Pitt-Rivers's estate in
Hinton St Mary, worked closely with
George Drummond, the "madly pro-German and anti-Jew" chairman of
Drummonds Bank and president of the
Northampton branch of The Link, and was known to the MI5 as an associate of Philip Tonstall Farrer (an ex-intelligence officer with Nazi links), the German prince , and
Archibald Maule Ramsay (the founder of the Right Club). He continued to speak out in favour of a peaceful settlement with Germany. In July 1939, he was reported by the
Evening Standard as the prospective BUF candidate at the 1940 general election. In October 1939, he conferred in private with
Barry Domvile and
Lancelot Lawton; a source described him on the occasion as "very interesting but very bloodthirsty". Between October 1939 and February 1940, he took part in a series of secret meetings held by the
Marquess of Tavistock, a Hitler enthusiast, to discuss plans for
collaboration with the Third Reich.
Plots to overthrow the British government In a plot organized by
John Beckett, Fuller was named as the Minister of Defence for a
Quisling government. General
Edmund Ironside had been implicated as a potential leader of the coup, with Fuller telling retired Admiral
Barry Domvile, a fellow Nazi sympathizer, on 12 November 1939, that "Ironside is with us." A fellow conspirator, Samuel Darwin-Fox, told an
MI5 agent that:"Italy would declare war almost immediately, that France would then give in and that Britain would follow before the end of the week. There would be a short civil war, the Government would leave first for Bristol and then for the Colonies, General Ironside would become dictator and after things had settled down Germany could do as she liked with Britain." Fuller was a regular attendee and occasional speaker at Norman Hay and
Lancelot Lawton's pro-Nazi Information and Policy group, which met weekly from January 1940; he left the final meeting on 23 May 1940 in alarm at the news of Captain Ramsay and
Norah Elam's arrest by the new
war cabinet under
Defence Regulation 18B and explained to the
Evening Standard that he had come for "a lecture on
egg farming". He agreed with Mosley, Liddell Hart and
David Lloyd George that it was in the interest of Britain and Europe to make a deal with Hitler after the
Battle of France in the summer of 1940 (he later called Churchill, whom he had still admired in 1937, "the greatest mountebank since Nero"). In November 1940, he offered to take part in organising aid for the fascist detainees.
Avoiding internment Fuller had been under suspicion for his Nazi sympathies for some time. In his war diaries (p. 201),
Alan Brooke commented that "the Director of Security called on him [in 1941] to discuss Boney Fuller and his Nazi activities", but failed to persuade him Fuller "had any unpatriotic intentions". Although Fuller was not interned or arrested, he was the only officer of his rank not invited to return to service during the war. There was some suspicion that he was not incarcerated in May 1940 along with other leading officials of the BUF because of his association with General Ironside and other senior officers. According to historian
Brian Holden-Reid, the decision not to arrest him was made by Churchill himself. Mosley himself admitted to "a little puzzlement" as to why Fuller had not been imprisoned, but Fuller's wife claimed he knew too much to ever be arrested. Ironside had in fact tried to appoint Fuller as his deputy while serving as the
Chief of the General Staff in September or October 1939, but the move was blocked by the
War Secretary Leslie Hore-Belisha.
Further pro-Nazi activities Fuller resumed his pro-Nazi activities by 1942. In July 1942, B. H. Liddell Hart also renewed the friendship that had been severed by Fuller in 1937. Fuller joined the fascist Constitutional Research Association, founded in 1941 by Major Harry Edmonds, and participated in private lunches at the
Charing Cross Hotel with its members, among them
John Middleton Murry, Admiral Domvile, and the Earl of Portsmouth (the former Lord Lymington) by 1943 and as late as 1944. He became a leading officer of the
British National Party, formed in 1942, and was a member of the National Front After Victory, organised at the end of the war by
A. K. Chesterton. In December 1944, he attacked Winston Churchill's policy of
unconditional surrender in the
Sunday Pictorial. His opposition to the Allied war doctrine was predicated on his fear of Soviet domination, and he postulated a
World War III by 1944.
Post-World War II After the war, Fuller published most of his writings in the obscure US journal
Ordnance, produced by the American Ordnance Association, whose secretary Leo A. Codd was a devoted enthusiast of his work since the 1920s. In 1949, during a meeting in
Cairo with
Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, the Secretary General of the
Arab League,
Robert Gordon-Canning tried to persuade him to accept Fuller's services as a lecturer with a view to inspiring new Arab campaigns against
Israel. In 1951, Fuller was asked by the American journalist Harold Montgomery Belgion, a critic of the
Nuremberg trials, to comment on
Duke of Bedford's proposal for demilitarising Western Europe. In 1954, he expressed his conviction that it should be the British aim to "blow up the Russian Imperialism internally" in a letter to the retired Lieutenant General
Giffard Le Quesne Martel. By 1951, Fuller became a propagandist and supporter of the
Munich-based
Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, and he contributed to the crypto-fascist West German journal
Nation Europa from 1951 to 1958. He later joined the
League of Empire Loyalists, formed in 1954. He spent his last years believing that the wrong side had won the Second World War. He most fully announced that thesis in the 1961 edition of
The Reformation of War. There, he announced his belief that Hitler was the saviour of the West against the Soviet Union and denounced Churchill and Roosevelt for being too stupid to see so. Fuller died in
Falmouth, Cornwall, in 1966. ==Military theories==