Armored Warfare; An Annotated Edition of Lectures on F. S. R. III. (Operations Between Mechanized Forces)

Harrisburg, PA: The Military Service Publishing Company, 1951. First American Edition [stated] Third Printing [stated]. Hardcover. xix, [1], 189, [3] pages. Diagrams. Some cover wear and some page soiling. Foreword by S. L. A. Marshall. This is one of the Military Classics series. Fifteen Lectures on: Armed Forces. Their Command and the Principles of War; Fighting Troops. Their characteristics and Armament; Strategical Preliminaries to Joining Battle; Battle, Information; Protection; Protection (continued); the Attack; The Attack (continued); The Attack (continued); The Defense; The Defense (continued); Night Operations; Warfare in Undeveloped and Semi-civilized Countries; Movements by Sea, Land and Air; Orders, Instructions, Reports and Messages; and Intercommunications Appendices: I. The Theory of Penetration; II Tank Nullah Tactics; III Bush and Forest Warfare; and Alexander the Great's Anti-Scythian Tactics. Major-General John Frederick Charles "Boney" Fuller CB CBE DSO (1 September 1878 – 10 February 1966) was a senior British Army officer, military historian, and strategist, notable as an early theorist of modern armored warfare, including categorizing principles of warfare. With 45 books and many articles, he was a highly prolific author whose ideas reached army officers and the interested public. He explored the business of fighting, in terms of the relationship between warfare and social, political, and economic factors in the civilian sector. Fuller emphasized the potential of new weapons, especially tanks and aircraft, to stun a surprised enemy psychologically. During the First World War, Fuller was a staff officer with the Home Forces and with VII Corps in France, and from 1916 in the Headquarters of the Machine-Gun Corps' Heavy Branch which was later to become the Tank Corps. He helped plan the tank attack at the 20 November 1917 Battle of Cambrai and the tank operations for the Autumn offensives of 1918. His Plan 1919 for a fully mechanized offensive against the German army was never implemented. After 1918 he held various leading positions, notably as a commander of an experimental brigade at Aldershot. After the war Fuller collaborated with his junior B. H. Liddell Hart in developing new ideas for the mechanization of armies, launching a crusade for the mechanization and modernization of the British Army. Chief instructor of Camberley Staff College from 1923, he became military assistant to the chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1926. In what came to be known as the "Tidworth Incident", Fuller turned down the command of the Experimental Mechanized Force, which was formed on 27 August 1927. The appointment also carried responsibility for a regular infantry brigade and the garrison of Tidworth Camp on Salisbury Plain. Fuller believed he would be unable to devote himself to the Experimental Mechanized Force and the development of mechanized warfare techniques without extra staff to assist him with the additional extraneous duties, which the War Office refused to allocate. He was promoted to major-general in 1930 and retired three years later to devote himself entirely to writing. Fuller's ideas on mechanized 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 Armored Car Training translated. In the 1930s the German Army implemented tactics similar in many ways to Fuller's analysis, which became known as Blitzkrieg. Fuller was the only foreigner present at Nazi Germany's first armed maneuvers in 1935. Condition: Good.

Keywords: Tanks, Battle, Principles of War, Armed Forces, Attack, Defense, Night Operations, Penetration, Tank Nullah Tactics, Bush Warfare, Jungle Warfare, Forest Warfare, Anti-Scythian Tactics, Military Strategy, Cambrai, Internal Security, Desert Warfare. S

[Book #82849]

Price: $75.00

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