Landships II

I received this correspondence a while ago from a source I can't disclose. If the sender's identity were to become known it could cause him serious professional problems, so I've removed anything which might suggest who he is. I can't say any more than that. Seriously. Let us just say that he has studied aspects of French Tank development in extraordinary depth.

There's a lot of it, but please read what follows. Perhaps our collective knowledge can come up with something:

I The Rimailho-affair. It is very well documented - indeed by Estienne himself also as a file has survived, that he prepared against the possibility anyone would try to lay the blame for the Saint-Chamond debacle on him. Estienne might have been the Father of the Tanks but he wouldn't be held responsible for this one! Also a file exists from Schneider that convincingly argues that their competitors used bribery to obtain the second production order (and insinuating both Mouret and Thomas were involved) - so Schneider could parry the accusation of having forced FAMH into building an overly large vehicle by their refusal to share the patent of the tail. We even have the reaction of Rimailho himself. He freely admits he is solely responsible for the design and then expresses his pride in what he sees as the most advanced tank of its day, faster, better armoured and far better armed than its British counterparts. That he used his influence to change the specifications is fully justified by the excellent results. It was only natural for him to have put his second and improved gun in and he is not ashamed to have earned his money by supplying the troops with a superior weapon, the sole deficiency of which was its Schneider ancestry. As you can see, Rimailho wasn't averse to a little rhetoric. We can conclude that the facts are pretty clear, but the possible interpretations differ. Émile François Léon Rimailho is a villain or a hero depending on your conceptual framework. He apparently fought very courageously in 1914. After the next World War Rimailho was a villain only. He had been a high-ranked collaborator in the Vichy regime, providing it with a corporatist ideology. From then on his name was taboo - at least in military circles. He is never mentioned by Touzin, nor by Ramspacher in Chars et Blindés Français. This explains why Jeudy is so circumspect in his mention of the engineer, only indicating his importance in another context: Si le Saint-Chamond est en grande partie l'oeuvre de Rimailho, un officier d'artillerie reconverti dans le privé pour s'être estimé insuffisament récompensé...  at the same time stressing that trait in his character he sees as most relevant. Earlier he has cited Rimailho's work on the crucial point: "c'est encore à la Compagnie de Saint-Chamond qu'on doit l'initiative, assez mal accueillie au début, de placer le canon de 75 de campagne lui-même dans le char d'assaut." Rimailho was the technical director.

II. The Mouret-affair. This is undocumented. And precisely in this lay the grounds for our suspicion. Where have all the documents gone? It seems only one man had the position and knowledge to make them disappear: Mouret. And what then could his motive have been? It must have been a cover-up for either extreme incompetence or outright fraud. But the good general was not incompetent. Again the circumstantial evidence can only enhance our suspicion. The mere fact that he on his own granted a contract for the development of a very major weapon system nobody else apparently knew of but the direct parties involved, is indicting by itself. We can only assume Mouret expected the project to have the same outcome as Johnson's Medium D: cancelled after a capital had been spent on development. But then something happened nobody at the time could have forseen. The first use of the Mk I brought the British people to a state of "tankeuphoria". Suddenly the focus of attention was on this obscure weapon and on Mouret himself. He obviously panicked, putting all possible effort in an attempt to turn a fake project into a real one. Jeudy's remark: tant il est vrai que l'on s'est assez légèrement lancé dans l'aventure de ce monstre de 62 tonnes, allant jusqua'à ne pas tracer de grand plan ni de dessins des aménagements du futur matériel avant de metre en construction le premier (rapport parlementaire du 10 mai 1918) does not refer to the Char 2C proper, as it might seem at first blush, but to the events in 1916: the investigation was unable to find any specifications for the original contract.

Of course all this is merely a hypothesis. Perhaps I have done great injustice to a perfectly honest officer. It is possible to entertain a more complicated alternative scenario. We know that Renault was contacted just before FCM on the matter of constructing a large 130 hp vehicle, capable of carrying a 120mm "petard". It could be that Mouret had been too self-assured about the outcome of this, had made some rash promises to some parties and then, when it failed, in haste shifted the project to FCM to avoid loss of face, and deceived everyone involved (including himself) that things were going well until September when he no longer could avoid facing reality. He then turned to his only resort: Renault who after all had some knowledge of the affair anyway. By a happy coincidence Ernst-Metzmaier had been inspired by the original demand to instigate some studies of his own, so Renault was able to oblige Mouret on the condition that the latter no longer opposed the FT-17 (thus making Jeudy's remark so much more innocent). Mouret then destroyed the relevant papers to make it seem as if there had been a continuous Renault project, with the contract with FCM merely preparing for a possible production. This is less likely (simply because it's more complex), but still plausible.

III. Estienne and the Char 2C. This is very well documented. But there are major interpretative difficulties. We know that Estienne initially vehemently opposed the construction of superheavy tanks. Then, a year later, he seems to have made a U-turn and becomes one of their most ardent proponents. This could be explained by the fact that in the beginning Estienne had to secure the very viability of the FT-17 project; once this had been achieved, the way was open for less essential projects, like the Char 2C. Of course the more parsimonious - and thus more likely - explanation would be that Estienne in reality never changed his mind at all. Can a case be made for this hypothesis?

Let us first consider the strategic situation. Pétain and Estienne were preparing for the decisive offensive of 1919. Tanks were to play a crucial role. The forseen tactic would be that of concentrated mass attacks. Swarms of FT-17's would overwhelm the enemy. To sustain such an offensive, huge amounts of inexpensive tanks were needed. It was vital to ensure that these FT-17's would really be there. Without them no victory was possible. So heavy tanks still posed a danger. Every tank of 40 tons produced, caused about 15 FT-17's not to be produced.

That Estienne was well aware of this, is shown by his actions as member of the committee investigating the FCM 1A prototype. Had he had a real intention to fight with heavy French tanks in 1919, he would have put this excellent design into production. Instead he chooses the heaviest version, the "C", and changes its specifications (longer hull; heavier armament, thus larger turet, thus wider hull) turning it into a monstrosity that couldn't possibly be ready in any numbers for the 1919 offensive - if only because it would take a full year to complete even the prototype. It's inconceivable Estienne didn't understand this.

Nevertheless, to have heavy tanks would still be very useful. Pétain (unaware of his friends earlier measures) asks Estienne to consider two options: either to produce the FCM 1A, or to finish off this project and exchange FT-17's for Liberty tanks. He himself prefers the latter course. To understand Estienne's response we must know that at the time the French politicians had grown very discontent with the whole state of affairs in their national tank development. The British success at Cambrai naturally had made them wonder whether such results were to be expected through the use of their own armoured forces. After all Pétain's motto was: J'attends les Américains et les chars. What exactly was the capability of these tanks, on which the whole future of the nation depended? They were mortified to discover that the Schneider and Saint-Chamond were impotent duds and the FT-17 was an unimpressive diminutive vehicle with unproven (and thus dubious) fighting value that was only just reaching the troops. There was only one kernel of gold in the midden: the magnificent FCM 1A, a vehicle simply oozing superiority. And the same one Pétain now carelessly proposed to do away with. The backlash could lead to his fall, or at least to the FCM 1A being forced upon him. Either possibility would lead to failure in 1919. And failure implied a further fall: that of the already crumbling social order. Besides, exchanging FT-17's was little better than not producing them in the first place. And there really was no money to buy enough Liberty's as the national debt was sky-rocketing as it was. A fine mess.

Estiennes answer forms a clever solution to these problems. It stresses again and again the crucial point: the FCM 1A should be improved, not finished (Je préfèrerais la deuxième solution en l'orientant vers de chars notablements plus lourds, de manière à réaliser un progrès...). The concept of improvement serves many purposes. It keeps Pétain from finishing off the project. It meets the concerns of the politicians as the best design is made even better. It prevents its immediate production and at the same time justifies this. It shows the allies how deeply serious the French are about their contribution to the war effort. These to Estienne are then the intended functions of the Char 2C: serving as a test bed; preventing the FCM 1A; warding off criticism; serving as leverage in begging for allied tanks (hopefully given for free).

Having about a thousand heavy tanks in 1919 would be nice. How many of these must be planned as Char 2C? Should its production simply be initiated to calmly await the outcome? That would be dysfunctional. The production of even a small number of superheavies would prevent thousands of FT-17's from reaching the troops. Should production then really take off in the late summer of 1919 the stream of light tanks might dry up when they'd be most needed. Also the allies weren't likely to be impressed by such a carefree attitude. They had in principle agreed (November 1917) to supply France with Liberty's, but only when necessary. Estienne makes a little calculation. For each of the forty participating divisions 18 tanks to give a total of around 700. As this is the equivalence of about 25,000 FT-17's, this again shows he had no serious intention to have these built in reality (as indeed is proven by his letter to Clemenceau). Of course, he wouldn't have split them up anyway, as he planned for concentration. The real calculation was thus made the other way round, with its point of beginning that number that could serve both as leverage and as an instrument for procrastination. Production of so heavy tanks in such numbers required a very serious planning effort to begin with. Large demands would thus have the perverse effect of greatly delaying the real investments.

So Pétain demands 700 Char 2C to be ready next spring. That he didn't expect for this to really come about is shown by his silmultanous message to the allies that it is imperative that the French army should be supplied with 600 Liberty tanks. He then keeps manipulating the decision process. When the danger poses itself that Loucheur, the Minister for Armament, will be allowed to start production as quickly as possible, as there is no steel and labour quota for mass production anyway, he allows for a lesser production of light tanks. That this is sheer hypocrisy, is shown by the fact that when Loucheur after very great difficulties manages to make all parties agree on a production programme, Pétain suddenly increases the minimum production demands. When this causes further delays, he uses it as a pretext to at last end the project. His bad faith is however most clearly indicated by, again, improvement: the utterly ludicrous demands for all kinds of futuristic systems, the most grotesque of which is that for a 15 meter long tracked pontoon to accompany every single tank!

Now, if this hypothesis is true, it should not make us think any less of Estienne. Even when not folowing the lead of Ramspacher, whose work is indeed a cross between eulogy and hagiography, there is every reason to admire the general who clearly tried to act in the best interests of his country, which is perhaps more than we can say about Rimailho or Mouret... However it is also obvious that the Father of the Tanks was really more of a catalyst then a progenitor. It was Eugène Brillié who fathered the Schneider; Rimailho begat the Saint-Chamond; even the FT-17 was sired by Renault - so really Estienne was only responsible for the Char 2C, the very tank he sabotaged the use of! There lies a further, more bitter, irony behind this all: had the FCM 1A been produced, it would probably have made French tank development far superior to the German one; it's easy to conceive how a 30 ton offshoot with three-man turret and long 75mm gun might have prevented the catastrophe of 1940, even when the Germans had imitated the design.

In view of all this, Touzin's account in Les Véhicules Blindés Français borders on the mendacious. He starts with: La controverse sur le véritable inventeur du char d'assaut en France est définitivement close au profit du Général Estienne... and then gives a distorted interpretation of all crucial events to make this statement seem true. Thus the development by Brillié in 1915 is relegated to the end of the previous chapter and there pasted with the development by Fouché in 1916 to avoid naming Brillié! Therefore he has to hide from the reader the fact that the Fouché project leads to the Saint-Chamond. Then he makes it seem as if Renault had in the summer of 1916 only some vague ideas about a light tank (Ce constructeur a réfléchi au problème et a lui aussi l'idée d'un char léger). In the case of the Char 2C everything is garbled, making it seem as if the actions of Estienne at the end of 1917 were the at very beginning: le Général Estienne éprouve le besoin d'avoir un char lourd..., never naming Mouret in this context. We can only conclude Touzin avoided these difficult issues on purpose.

IV. Sales. There still remains another scandal. Have you ever wondered why the FT-17 was such an export success? The obvious explanations are of course largely correct. It was cheap, available in numbers, modern and freely distributed among satellite states. Also the British tanks weren't much of an alternative. Still the French used very aggressive sales methods, including outright bribery with well documented cases for the latter in the case of Belgium and Czechoslovakia. 

It will be clear from all this that there are huge gaps in our knowledge and far larger ones in my personal understanding. I'm rather in the dark about the career of Mouret (and why many contemporary sources name him Mourret...) and about the precise nature and extent of the investigations by the French National Assembly. I know after the war there was a huge controversy in the French press about these matters, but I've never researched it. Probably the French historians have extensive amounts of data on these subjects that they still have to publish.

That's it. Anyone any thoughts or information?

James H.