Landships II

Following on from Vollketten's reference in the de Poix  thread to the coupled Boirault machines:

I've never been satisfied with the explanation of these two machines, even P. Malmassari's.

Boirault was a manufacturer of railway couplings, and seem to have formed the opinion that railway couplings were the answer to most problems. He therefore designed two "armoured trains", each consisting of three vehicles, joined together, naturally, with couplings. In each case, the petrol-electric power plant was in the central vehicle, and the fore and aft vehicles were to do the fighting.

Drawings of the two can be seen on p24 of PM's excellent Les Chars de la Grande Guerre.

One is described as being 350hp and comprising three Saint-Chamonds, nose-to-tail, joined by Boirault's sort of universal joints. The first thing that struck me was that these don't seem to be normal Saint-Chamonds; at least one looks more like the proposed 1917 version, shorter and with a much reduced overhang, shown on page 50. For the coupling to work, it looks as if the other two would have to lose a lot of their forward superstructure. But the design took place with the permission of Saint-Chamond and Col. Rimailho.

The other machine poses even more problems. PM says it's a 700hp vehicle, and that's it. The caption has no further description of the tank, but more of that in a mo. Some sources say that they were Renault FTs or Schneider CAs, but PM says that neither company wanted to get involved.

The suggestion that they were FTs appears to be a misunderstanding of a genuine trial in which two FTs were joined together with simple beams. It doesn't seem to have come to anything. De Poix surfaces again (after failing to get his tank design adopted, he transferred to the Artillerie Speciale), conducting an experiment with two stripped-down Schneiders joined together.

That leaves the mysterious 700 hp design. PM describes it, but it's not clear (at least, to me) where it came from. It differs from the 350p in that it has the power plant in the middle, but it has front- and rear-facing (amphisbaenic!) tanks, with what look like 75s mounted in turrets. It has double tracks, to reduce ground pressure.

The only conclusion I can come to is that this tank with the 75 was a completely new Saint-Chamond design - and a very major improvement on previous efforts. The inclusion of not one but two 75s would suggest Rimailho's involvement. When it was stopped, to save money and manpower, it seems that Boirault reverted to experimenting with existing or modified Saint-Chamonds.