As Robert Doughty demonstrates throughout Pyrrhic Victory,
French strategy was considerably better thought out than is usually allowed and
the evidence considered herein previously suggests that French tactical
practice and thought was likewise more competent than is usually accepted. Both
the Marne and the Champagne operations of 1918, illustrated the essential
problem of offensive operations on the Western Front. The close planning needed
for a successful offensive appears to have been only possible in the initial
period of an operation, usually indeed only in the first part of the first day
of such an operation. After that, whatever measures were taken prior to the
attack to continue the struggle, the offensive power of the attacking forces
would slowly weaken, due to an increasing lack of cohesion and slowing of its
operational tempo, as the defensive forces grew correspondingly more powerful.
The weakness in Allied offensive strategy before Foch took charge had been the
expectation that one large operation could be used to break the German defences
and achieve a breakthrough on the Western Front. Only by mounting a series of
co-ordinated offensives could the Germans be successfully pushed back across
the Western Front, such as those that the Battle of Soissons and the Champagne
operations were part of. Was the difficulty of maintaining the tactical success
of operations after the initial advance an inherent and insuperable problem of
fighting on the Western Front or a failure of the armies involved to find ways
to avoid this? The evidence presented in this book strongly suggests that it was
the former. It is difficult to see how with the means available operations
could have been conducted more successfully. Without better mobility on the
battlefield and communications equipment, such as arrived for the next world
war, it was extremely difficult to regain cohesion in units that had been
fighting for a day or more, which in turn prevented a high tempo of operations
being maintained. Various ways of dealing with these problems were tried; at
Champagne the front-line divisions with 21 CA were retired for a day to refresh
themselves, a tactic that seems to have worked if we compare the results with
those divisions that were kept fighting. It certainly helped maintain better
cohesion among the attacking troops.
The major problems for the Artillerie spéciale [AS] were that of its material and its effective integration with the infantry and artillery of the French army. In relation to the latter issue, there was simply not enough time to fully develop combined-arms warfare, although it seems likely that 1919 would have seen an even better developed French combined-arms approach. By then, the French infantry (at every level) should have been more au fait with tank tactics, as there would have been more time to disseminate effectively the established doctrine, particularly in relation to the infantry commanders. Foch had identified that tanks would be a crucial component of the Allied armies in 1919, when he expected the German army to be defeated. He said that ‘the aviation and the tanks should receive the greatest development possible’ for the campaign in 1919. The expected campaign in 1919, of course, never occurred but if it had there would have been a considerable number of tanks involved in the French army operations, including the new Char 2C heavy tank. Pétain wrote a memo to Foch on 8 September 1918 setting out his plans for 1919. He told Foch that ‘the battle of 1919 will be the battle of aviation and the tanks’. He was planning to use 360 heavy tanks and 3,360 light tanks per 30 kilometres of front for the next year’s offensives.
The evidence presented does not show that the performance of
the AS was flawless; mistakes were clearly made at various junctures but in the
midst of war this is only to be expected. An examination of the performance of
the AS during the war shows it to be a military organisation that was adaptable
and remarkably effective, particularly considering the primitive material it
had to work with. This in itself suggests that the traditional view of the
Great War French army, that it was steadfast but rather dim, is at considerable
variance with the facts. In reality, it had became very effective by 1918 at
fighting both in semi-open and positional warfare, although there is a clear
need for more detailed research on this.
In relation to the tanks themselves, the issues revolve
around two distinct areas; the technical problems and the organisation
questions concerned with manufacture. Concerning the technical issues, most of
these were probably inevitable as tracked vehicles were a new and undeveloped
technology. However, certain problems really should have been avoided, such as
the inadequate width of the St Chamonds’ tracks or the forward-mounted petrol
tank of the Schneiders. The technical problems of the medium tanks were
eventually for the most part solved by the end of the war, which is some
achievement considering that they were in effect tested on the battlefield. The
Renault was a very successful design, marred only by technical problems that
were inherent in automobile technology of the time. Thus, of the three designs
of tank used during the war, the light tank was excellent and the two medium
tanks were serviceable. If the Schneider was simply an armoured box on tracks,
primarily the result of wanting to get a tank into service as quickly as
possible, the St Chamond was the victim of the over-ambition of its designers.
However, it can be argued that the St Chamond was wrong for all the right
reasons; if the track and engine problems had been cured it would have been a
formidable presence on the First World War battlefield, particularly with its
36-calibre long 75mm high-velocity gun, a more powerful gun than initially
carried on the Second World War German Pz. Kpfw. IV, for example. Both medium
tanks were more sensibly armed than those of the British which, although
heavier, carried only 57mm guns, in practice no more effective than the 37mm
carried on the Renault. However, there was simply not enough time, resources
and experience to resolve all the problems that arose during the war. In
addition, 30 St Chamonds were still in combat as late as September 1918, so the
effort of their manufacture was not entirely wasted. Where all the French tanks
were poor compared with the British designs was in their trench crossing
abilities; the Schneider and Renault could only cross a 1.8 metre-wide trench
while the St Chamond was only slightly better (2.5 metres) but substantially
less than the British Mark V (4.5 metres). Although Steven Zaloga characterises
the Schneider as a ‘bitter disappointment’ to the French, this is far too harsh
a judgement. The success of the French tanks on the first day at Soissons was
as much due to the Schneiders (and to a lesser extent the St Chamonds) as to
the Renaults, the latter only coming into action at the end of the day’s
fighting. These designs were undertaken in wartime utilising undeveloped
technology and brought from specification to use within 13 months, less in the
case of the Renault. This is all the more remarkable when it is compared with
later tank designs; for example, the German Tiger I took 15 months to enter
service and the US M3 took 21 months during the Second World War.
The tanks of the Great War were pushing to the very limits
of contemporary automotive technology. The mechanical reliability of the French
tanks looks unimpressive but it is worth comparing experiences in the next
world war, after a further 20 years of automobile development. For example, the
French medium tanks’ propensity to catch fire was surprising to contemporaries
but experience since then has demonstrated that this is an habitual problem for
tanks. By comparison, fire was a considerable problem for the early Panthers;
in a five-day period in July 1943, a quarter of the Panthers in an operation
simply caught fire. In an attack on 11 July 1944, one German company lost 10
Tigers; only two were to enemy fire, the other eight caught fire. Eighty-two
per cent of the Allied tanks hit during the Normandy campaign then caught fire.
By comparison, Steven Zaloga believes the Renault’s performance and endurance
was ‘miraculous by Great War standards’, which probably accounts for it still
being in service, albeit modified, 20 years after the Great War. Estienne’s
complaints in 1917 about the quality of drivers were still a concern for tank
commanders in the next world war. For example, there were great difficulties
with training tank drivers in Nazi Germany; many conscripts had not even driven
before and this was in a society where motor vehicles were much more prevalent
than during the Great War. The sorry story of the French heavy tank designs
should also be compared with the difficulties in developing a heavy tank in the
next world war and after, which are littered with unsuccessful designs such as
the US T32 and M103 heavy tanks or the British A39.
While comparing the material of the two world wars, it is
also instructive to consider some aspects of armoured operations of the Second
World War. Many of these were not well-conducted, with less excuse as they took
place after 20 years of armour developments. One good example would be
Operation Goodwood during the Normandy campaign. Three British armoured
divisions, with over 1,000 tanks, attacked well-organised German positions
south of Caen. The tanks were given inadequate infantry support, which was also
very badly co-ordinated during the operation. The plan required the tanks to
advance on a 2,000-metre front across a 4,000-metre deep plain, with little
cover and few hull-down positions available. Over 400 tanks were lost over
three days, along with 6,000 casualties across the three tank divisions. In
relation to tactics, as late as 1944, the Japanese Army was using tanks for
infantry support in a manner that would have been recognisable to Great War
armour practitioners; the tanks were used in direct frontal attacks and ‘after
the infantry reached their objective the tanks were withdrawn without
attempting to exploit the limited gains’. Tank-infantry training was also a
problem in the Second World War; American Colonel Wright wrote in May 1943 of
the difficulties that the US Army was having with this. The US infantry
commanders were all agreed that this training was necessary but always had
excuses as to why this had not happened; there was no time available, the
infantry training was incomplete. He reported that the US 751 Tank Battalion
was almost wiped out in one action because: ‘in four successive attacks, the
infantry refused to follow him [the tank commander]. Four times he took the
objective and each time he had to pull back, trying to pull the infantry
forward, the Germans in the meantime re-obtaining the position.’ This situation
would have been very familiar to AS veterans.
While considering the Second World War, it is worth noting
that the French army’s performance in 1940 has cast a shadow over the French
army’s performance in general during the twentieth century. The evidence
considered in this volume strongly supports the idea that the French army
developed an effective offensive methodology (often referred to as the bataille
conduite or methodical battle) in the First World War, of which tanks were an
integral part. That this methodology may have been outmoded from the late 1920s
onwards is another argument but it is from the inadequacy of the French army’s
inter-war doctrine and dismal performance in 1940 that the bataille conduite
and French offensive methodology in 1918 have often been judged so severely.
Specifically in relation to the French tanks, for example, André Loez argues
that the failure of the French tank force in 1940 had its roots in the
disastrous debut of the French tanks during the Nivelle Offensive, primarily
because the experience in 1917 cemented the idea of the tank as an
infantry-support arm in the collective mind of the French army. This argument
fails to understand that the French tanks in the Great War were used as what
would be known later as infantry-tanks because that was the only role that the
existing technology could support. The AS was quickly amalgamated into the
infantry after the war, something that Estienne opposed as he recognised that
it could be developed as a highly mobile exploitation arm and needed to be
separately organised to do this effectively. However, during the war he
accepted that the tanks could do no more than act as direct infantry support,
as all his wartime writing demonstrates. Thus, whatever failings can be traced
in the inter-war handling by the French of their tank programmes, the French
tanks during the war were used in the most sensible way and it simply
unhistorical to argue otherwise.
The essential point to consider when evaluating the
performance of the AS is that there was no prior experience of tank operations
on which to base judgements about how these might transpire. Andrew Lambert has
said about the submarine pioneers of the American Civil War that they had to
‘invent submarine operations’ and the AS officers and men had to likewise
invent tank operations from scratch. Leader of the Great War British tank
corps, Clough Williams-Ellis wrote that the difficulty of training the British
tank crews was that no-one had any experience of tank warfare and therefore it
was ‘upon the spirit of prophecy alone that they must rely in their
preparations’. In evaluating the AS, the important factors are not what was got
wrong, as mistakes were inevitable, but how effective the responses were to
mistakes. The prime example of such a response was in the reaction to the
terrible events of 16 April and the wholesale re-evaluation the AS made to its
approach over the two weeks following this event. As has been described, there
was a very rapid and effective re-evaluation of tactics made after the
Juvincourt engagement, leading to a significantly better showing in the 5–6 May
action at Laffaux. Indeed, such was the effectiveness of the AS and its
officers that the French army had a sound tank doctrine in place by the end of
1917, after just three engagements, which only required small modifications to
accommodate the differences between the medium and light tanks. Despite this,
the tank regulations were subject to continuous discussions within the AS right
up to the declaration of the Armistice. One example would be the discussion
about the ratio of machine-gun to 37mm-gun Renaults, which continued into 1919.
The final tank Instruction of 14 July 1918 was adopted in 1919 as the French
army’s tank doctrine, with the most minor of changes from that of December
1917, mainly those needed to deal with the retirement of the medium tanks and their
replacement by the British Mark V*.
The battles of Soissons and Champagne both illustrate that
the French infantry commanders, from divisional level to below, frequently
either misunderstood or decided to ignore the tank regulations, the latter being
likely in the majority of cases. The French army cannot be accused of failing
to promulgate information to its infantry and artillery commanders as numerous
notes on tank use were sent out on a regular basis. Of course, in a conflict
where infantry losses could be so high, it is easy to see why infantry
commanders took every opportunity to mitigate their own losses, even if this
was at the expense of the tank units. This led to many arguments between AS and
infantry officers; most often when the former tried to insist on sticking to
the prescriptions of the tank regulations. For example, the commander of 9 BCL
had a ferocious row with General Massent (commander, 7 CA) about using the army
reserve tank company on 21 July. This unit, AS325, was in the process of
reforming; both personnel and tanks were in no condition for combat and 9 BCL’s
commander refused to allow it to fight until it was properly ready. Massent
asked Gouraud (commander, IV Army) to dismiss the tank battalion commander and
he then issued orders for AS325 to go into combat the next day. The AS
commander of IV Army, Chef de bataillon Michel, then countermanded Massent and
returned AS325 to the army reserve. It can be observed that it took
considerable courage for an AS major to countermand the orders of a General,
even though the former eventually got Gouraud’s approval for his actions.
In addition, despite strenuous efforts to train as many
infantry units with tanks, there was simply not enough time during the fighting
in 1918 to train the whole army in combined-arms tactics. While we can
sympathise with the frustrations of the AS officers who believed that the
infantry commanders were not sufficiently aware of the tank regulations, this
has to be balanced out with the difficulties the infantry commanders were
already grappling with; their command was of vastly greater complexity than had
been the case in 1914 and infantry losses appeared to be almost impossible to
keep low. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that the tank regulations
gave very good results initially within each engagement, which then rapidly
diminished but this was usually nonetheless sufficient to defeat the German
defences, as has been discussed.
However, the French army and the AS certainly appear to have
been let down by the ministère de l’Armement in relation to the production of
the tanks. The ministers, Thomas and Loucheur, interfered on numerous occasions
well beyond both their responsibilities and competence, undoubtedly reducing
the effectiveness of the AS. Although most of the French writers after the war
attribute little difference between the ministries of Thomas and Loucheur as
far as the tanks are concerned, statistics show that production of the Renaults
increased substantially after Loucheur became minister. In mitigation, as
discussed, both ministers were hard pressed to overcome both the organisational
difficulties connected with French industry and the lack of resources,
particularly steel. What cannot be doubted, however, is their considerable
organisational flair; for example, during his tenure as minister, Thomas
increased 75mm shell production from 380,000 per month to over 6 million per
month. In addition, in the end a prodigious number of Renault tanks were
produced by the Armistice; nearly 2,000 by the Renault factory alone.
The attitude of Thomas and Loucheur to the tanks is probably
most easily explained as a simple failure to understand the tanks’ worth. This
appears to have been a genuine misunderstanding, although the difficulties they
subsequently presented to the tank programme are inexcusable, particularly in
their apparent determination to produce most of whatever tank the army wanted
least. Here we have an example of civilian rather than military opposition to
the tank, in contrast with the popular view that it was the civilians that
promoted the tank during the Great War. There is also ample evidence that
civilian bureaucratic in-fighting did nothing to help the French war effort;
for example, petty arguments were constant between Loucheur’s and Thomas’
staffs; in 1916, a request by the former for more telephones was turned down by
the latter, as they felt that Loucheur’s staff spent too much time on the
telephone.
Although it has been argued that the French tank effort was
both effective and intelligently handled, albeit not entirely without flaws,
the question remains as to whether the effort was worth pursuing at all. There
have been arguments about the effect that tanks had on the Great War
battlefield ever since they first appeared. Estienne wrote in 1931 that ‘in my
opinion, the intervention of mechanised chariots on the field of battle gives
the historian the appearance of an event as important as the invention of
gunpowder and cannon’. By contrast, Foch told Repington in September 1918 that
‘it was an idea of amateurs that tanks and aeroplanes could win a war’ and that
tanks were ‘accessories’ to the infantry. More recently a number of scholars
have gone further and suggested that armoured warfare in the Great War was
‘marginal’, tanks being a ‘specialized luxury’. However, for the most part
contemporary opinion was much impressed by the tanks. Weygand contradicted his
old chief, by stating in his memoirs that France had won the war thanks to the
tanks, an opinion shared by Hindenburg. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Léon Dutil
argues that the Germans lost the war largely because they did not have enough
tanks. Herbert Sulzbach refers in his diaries to a meeting in August 1918 where
he discussed with his regimental commander a secret paper by Ludendorff. There
was general agreement that enemy tanks had an ‘unbelievable effect’ in recent
battles. It is difficult to determine whether the weight given in many post-war
German accounts to the effectiveness of tanks is not coloured by the quest to
explain defeat in terms that did not include a straightforward Allied military
victory. This seems unlikely with Sulzbach, who is a reliable front-line
witness. Heinz Guderian was writing as an advocate of armour but he was not
directly involved in any actions with French tanks during the war and it is
clear from his narrative that he was largely dependent on Dutil and the French
official history for his information on the French tanks. However, he was an
insightful military critic, in addition to being a successful military
commander, and therefore a useful judge of operational matters.
What is rather easier to quantify than the effect of tanks
in combat is their material and human cost, although in relation to the latter,
calculating very accurate casualty figures is problematical. A variety of
detailed post-war tallies give similar but not identical personnel losses and
cross checking the official casualty list with these suggests we can have
confidence that the official figures are broadly correct. The final official
figures were for troops lost in combat; 302 killed, 2,350 wounded, with 253
missing, presumed dead, just over 13 per cent losses. This compares with
infantry casualties over the war which ranged daily in combat from a maximum of
approximately 40 per cent to a minimum of 22 per cent.
Although the AS took troops away from the other arms, the
officers were initially mainly taken from the cavalry or the artillery depots
and there were thus not many useful officers taken away from the infantry. As
the war went on, officers coming into the AS were increasingly unfit for any
other frontline duties and thus their service with the AS was a bonus for the
army rather than a loss for the other arms. For example, when Maurice
Constantin-Weyer started his training with the AS in early 1918, he could only
walk with the aid of two sticks, two of his fellow officers had artificial
limbs and another had lost one eye. Marcel Rime-Bruneau had been hospitalised
for a year from his wounds in 1915 and then spent a year on non-frontline
duties, while undergoing a long series of surgical operations, before joining
the AS. In addition, the AS was comparatively small; on 1 August 1918, it
comprised of 1,017 officers and 18,141 men, including the infanterie d’accompagnement
with 45 officers and 1,581 men, serving over 3,500 tanks. This is compared with
the artillery service which had over a million officers and men serving 12,000
guns and the air service with 95,000 officers and men serving 3,300 aircraft.
Deygas also points out that the lives of infantrymen saved
by the tanks should be taken into account, although this is largely unquantifiable.
However, there are numerous accounts of the AS saving infantry units from
machine-gun positions, many of which have been discussed previously. In
addition, the tank crews frequently dismounted when their tanks were out of
action and added their machine guns to the infantry. For example, during the
fighting on 18 July, a tank commander from AS35, Brigadier Cellier, dismounted
his tank’s machine guns when the tank was immobilised and attacked the German
strongpoint that had fired upon him, in conjunction with part of his crew and
15 US infantrymen. The German position surrendered shortly after, Cellier and
his men capturing 15 officers, including a colonel, and 700 men.
The losses in material are rather more problematic to
analyse, if we want to judge the effectiveness of the French tanks. Although
the sources do not vary widely in relation to the total number of tanks lost or
damaged, there is an interesting question that was first posed by Balland in
the 1930s. He pointed out that only seven of the 29 tanks of Groupement XI
(with 1 US ID), on 18 July 1918, actually got into the ‘zone of fire’ and, of
those, six were destroyed. ‘Officially, the numbers of tanks destroyed in the
two groupements was 30%. In reality it was 80%.’ Thus, it is clear that there
is a problem revolving around which tanks are counted as having gone into
action; for example, should one count all the tanks that left the waiting
position (position d’attente) as getting into action, or should it be all that
left the departure position? Or should we count only those tanks that reached
the battle zone, as Balland suggests?
Jean Perré gives another variant on this. His figures count
each tank’s engagement as a ‘tank engagement’, thus one tank could be engaged
multiple times in a battle, each one adding a ‘tank engagement’ to the list.
This has the unfortunate effect of masking how many tanks were actually in
action against the enemy. In terms of judging the effectiveness of the tanks on
the battlefield, Balland’s methodology seems to give a better indication of the
vulnerability of the tanks to enemy fire than methods that count the total
number of tanks engaged. However, there is simply not enough extant information
to apply this methodology to all the engagements of the AS, although it
strongly suggests that the official figures for tank losses in combat are lower
than they should be. In terms of judging the overall effort and contribution
made by the tanks to the French Army, these questions may be largely
irrelevant, as it could be argued that the tanks’ impact on the battlefield was
as much to do with their presence as with their direct combat fire.
The material cost of the French tank programme was carefully
examined by Deygas in the 1930s. He calculated that the amount of steel and
other metals used to construct the French tanks was around 35,000 tonnes. This
should be compared with the 100,000 tonnes of steel per month being used in
1918 solely for artillery munitions. The total cost of the Schneiders’
manufacture was 25 million francs, the St Chamonds cost 40 million francs and
the Renaults cost 150 million francs; a total of 215 million francs. Even
adding estimated indirect costs, the creation of this new arm cost no more than
450 million francs. By contrast, the 20 August 1917 Verdun attack cost 700
million francs in artillery ammunition and Malmaison cost around 500 million
francs. The consumption of petrol was relatively unimportant; in September
1918, the entire AS (i.e. the tanks and all other AS motor transport) consumed
3,000 hectolitres of petrol. During the same month, the French Army used
300,000 hectolitres for its 100,000 vehicles. Likewise, the expenditure of
ammunition was negligible compared with the army’s consumption as a whole. For
example, the tanks used 437 75mm shells during the Battle of Malmaison. By
comparison, between 17 and 22 October, VI Army’s artillery fired just over 1.5
million shells at the German positions in the artillery preparation for this
battle. Deygas estimates that the AS used less than 1,000 tonnes of shells
throughout the war. He also points out that tank fire was generally direct-fire
on an observed target, unlike artillery fire that ‘wasted’ many shells in
general bombardments. These figures show that the French tank programme used a
relatively small amount of the resources available to the French army.
It thus seems difficult to justify relegating the importance
of the French tanks as they were an integral part of many successful French
army operations during the war, for a comparatively small cost. Foch was, of
course, right to say that tanks were not a war-winning weapon; only within what
is now known as a combined-arms team could the tank operate effectively. It
took the French a comparatively short amount of time to arrive at a relatively
successful system of tank, infantry, artillery and air co-ordination, with all
the pressures of unprecedented industrial warfare to contend with at the same
time. Considering the resources devoted to the tanks, they repaid the
investment in full. As Dutil points out in relation to the Renaults, a single
machine gun required the same two-man crew as a tank, without the latter’s
mobility or protection.
It is probably accurate to state that the French Republic
had a ‘bureaucratic and unimaginative general staff’ at the start of the war
but the evidence shown in this volume suggests that it adapted to the rigours
of modern warfare, particularly in relation to armour, remarkably effectively
as the war went on. As Michel Goya points out, the French army went through the
deepest and most profound changes of its history during the war, finishing it
as the most modern army in the world. The French army’s achievement is all the
more remarkable considering the technological constraints of the time and its
initial disastrous performance in 1914. This suggests a revision of GQG’s reputation
is in order and it is clearly time for scholars to examine in detail other
aspects of the French army’s performance during the Great War. Returning to
Douglas Porch’s categorisation of the French army in the Great War, it is very
hard to see how its performance could reasonably be considered unintelligent,
particularly in reference to the performance of the officers and men of the AS.
