miletus12
Squadron vice admiral
To get yourself lost, just follow the signs.
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Post by miletus12 on Aug 26, 2022 6:13:44 GMT
Start 5 minutes in to get past the commercials for a certain despicable online game and get to the history. The time is WWI and the nation of France is fighting for her life against those "people". Tanks look like a good idea to get past machine guns and barbed wire and to make up for the manpower shortages. How about some tanks then? If it were not so deadly serious this would be a farsa de guerra or war satire. From the land of Voltaire and Sartre, could the generals and politicians be any different? And of course, you know somehow that the incompetent, evil Unreconstructed Confederate, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would somehow be involved in the French political farce? As for the American push for the Renault light tank, that is something Lazerpig gets wrong. It was actually a no-name by the name of George Marshall, who worked for Pershing, who sold that imbecile, John Pershing, on the idea of the Renault tank after the bloodbath lessons of Chateau Thierry had been absorbed by US First Army. (Not the American army's most shining moment that one. M.). I do admit that Joseph Joffre, on his all-American wine-tasting and mistressing tour, did tell the USG ( Peyton March specifically.) about Operation Meatshield and suggested the Americans go ahead and to stick it to the Anglo-French high commands about Operation Bullet Stopper. He might have mentioned in addition that tanks were a good idea to Peyton. It was part of his revenge against those politicians who had fired him. That would be the incompetent, but well-meaning Aristide Briand and the utterly despicable Petain boot-licker Pierre Roques. I do not want to get too far into the weeds, but Joffre had a hard case of the back-stabbies over the Salonika fiasco, which was incidentally really all his fault, though I do admit that Joseph Gallienni might have been looking for payback and used it as an excuse to send Joffre on that mistress-hunting tour into the American Midwest. Were we discussing tanks?
I suppose we should mention that this French hero... was one of those in spite of, not because of, enablers for Louis Renault to go build his little 2 man tank. I owned a Renault car for over a decade... It never failed me. Better than the USG issue Chevy I* was issued. Every other month that thing broke down and I had to turn it in for repairs. I despise Chevies. M. Postscript: The Char 2C would have been a disaster. It was a disaster. Still it was/is probably better than the British tanks which inspired it, though. |
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miletus12
Squadron vice admiral
To get yourself lost, just follow the signs.
Posts: 7,470
Likes: 4,295
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Post by miletus12 on Aug 29, 2022 22:00:23 GMT
Butterfly Effect. Louis Emile Train could have done what Orville Wright did when confronted with a similar situation. Nosed her in for blank ground and prayed he was good enough to fly her into the ground and somehow survive the crash. Louis did not make the correct call. He killed a rather important butterfly. So; what was the outcome when Henri Buteaux died as a result of Louis Emile Train's incompetent and unfortunate pilot decision making?  German machine gunners aimed for the "vee". Just to be fair...  American Civil War re-enactors, the 14th New York Zouaves. Aimed for the red, Johnny Reb did.  Berdan sharpshooter. Still did not get it right. Johnny Reb aimed for the brass.  Aim for the belt buckle? Union soldiers applied dirt. The cloak covered the chevrons. That blue was remarkably hard to separate out against weather. How about the WWI French of 1916?  Nope. Shoot for the canteen. The helmet was a good idea.  They are getting there. Clothing technology is IMPORTANT. |
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miletus12
Squadron vice admiral
To get yourself lost, just follow the signs.
Posts: 7,470
Likes: 4,295
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Post by miletus12 on Oct 25, 2022 22:56:25 GMT
The Somua S35. Maxine Weygand put his stamp on it.
What is not well covered here is that the French, prior to the obvious German breakout of the Versailles Treaty (1935) were thinking of their armored forces, especially their cavalry, not so much in terms of the Reichwehr, but in terms of Russia's Red Army. If no one else was paying attention to Tukhachevsky and deep battle, the French general staff was. Some of their answers to deep battle turned to be as disastrously wrong as it was against German maneuver warfare, but that was because the Gamelin faction had overcome the Weygand wing of the French army. Equipment wise the Somua S-35 was supposed to be an answer to the problem of the Russian T-26 and BT series tanks more than it was to the German panzers. The idea was that the S35 would be used to fight the reconnaissance mission and it would carry a radio as part of its armament.
Weygand is not perfect. He is a cavalry centric fellow and compounds the mistake further in 1930 when the French disbanded their combined arms armored force in 1919 and split tank functions between the infantry and cavalry. The big mistake he makes in 1931 is to split cavalry into light medium and heavy machines by purported mission to mimic chasseurs, dragoons and the heavy cavalry (lancers to British readers). The actual experience was that a combined arms force of standard tanks and infantry moving together under the cover of artillery was the correct way to use armor in controlled methodical battle. The idea of Napoleonic type cavarly charges and envelopments was about as crazy in 1931 as it was in 1917.
The French (D'Estienne not Weygand) do get the Kegresse half track lorried infantry (dragoons) right, but Weygand, in his own thinking, does not understand that the "one tank fits all mission roles" idea which d'Estienne figured out but could never get the French to build, was the correct read on French WWI experience.
You can refer to the video for the design history of the Somua S35 as the AMC or what we would recognize today as the French army medium tank intended to fight as the main battle tank in the French army if they followed a sane doctrine. It is a decent tank aside from the turret. By 1935 standards there is nothing else in the world that comes close to it. Even in 1940 it is going to hold up to its nearest competitors, the A11 Cruiser, the BT 5 and the Panzer III.
The problem is that blasted turret and fighting compartment. The French are not stupid. They are working on the rather complex and difficult to cast and bolt together APX -2 2 man turret which they intend for the Somua hull. The problem is that the bunglers *(Renault specifically) who were responsible for this improved turret had subcontractor issues (graft and corruption) that disastrously delayed development and delivery. Plus Renault was pushing their own AMC design the AMC(R) 35 for the same mission the Somua tank was to fulfill. Politics, the Belgians, and Renault's attempt to monopolize tank production led to no delivery of the APX-2 for the AC4 Somuas and so guess what turret the Somua trundles off to was in 1939 and 1940? The same one as the Char B2, a one man turret.
French labor troubles and industrial sabotage (British readers familiar with the industrial sabotage found in British tank programs during wartime, particularly during the construction of the Valentines, Covenanters and Crusaders all the way through the Cromwells and Churchills, will recognize this problem.) contributed to the delivery of tanks with missing hatches, gun stabilizers, optics and RADIOs. It was not just the Somuas, but the Hotchkiss and Renaults and the Schneiders and just about any nationalized manufacturer had this problem. The Reds sabotaged everything they touched. (America experienced this disease with Curtiss and Brewster aircraft workers. The cure for them was to replace the identified non workers and management with women and send those expletive deleteds to die as bullet stoppers in New Guinea. Draft the scum and ship them out. Let them practice their Marxist Stalinism on the Japanese. M.)
Anyhow, the Somuas had to be kludged and the ones so kludged was not what the French army intended in the original design. The one man turret requirement due to a population shortage is probably a myth. It was a holdover for infantry tanks because the FT17s were that way and there was a desire to use up the spare 1 man turrets on the new infantry tank runners. Plus Renault could not get it together to sell their AMC34 / 35.
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miletus12
Squadron vice admiral
To get yourself lost, just follow the signs.
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Post by miletus12 on Oct 30, 2022 16:38:17 GMT
French artillery.That is almost redundant when one approaches the subject in the last 200 years. If you look at the "science" of artillery, the nation that has led from the front, has been France. Let's take the obvious developments. 1. The basic modern measurement system invented for the new French Republic was the metric system or the base 10 system based on the gram, millimeter, second units so familiar to most of the world. Even the Americans use it for military ballistics (except the Navy). The reason why is simple. The new French Republican army needed to simplify training for its most technical branch, its artillery. They needed to standardize ordinance, ballistics and the ability to use simplified mathematics by the cannoneers who employed the artillery. That the measurement system also benefitted scientists was the bonus, but half a league onward gets kind of vague when the target is a bunch of maniacs on horseback charging at you with pointy sticks. When you use the height finder range bar and the gunner's quadrant in 1805 you want angles to be in mils and the readouts scaled in 100s of meters so you know it is 2.4 and that your shells will drop in front of those manaics and burst starting about 2,400 meters away from your position. You see; Napoleon not only invented barrage fire but had, thanks to the new Republican measuring system and the gunners it produced as a consequence, the most accurate and long ranged artillery in Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. 2. Henri Joseph Paixhans: Paixhans had designed an inertia hammer fuse that allowed timed delay aftera shell was thrown / projected out of tube artillery. As for Dahlgren, his own guns owed almost all of their essential features to Paixhans except for the rifling. Dahlgren guns were smoothbore and mainly shot guns because the Americans did not or would not duplicate Paixhans time delay fuse. Why did the American naval artillerists abandon rifling and Paixhan guns from 1844 to about mid American Civil War? It turns out that when the USS Princeton blew up, some very important people left this earth like Secretary of State Abel Upshur, Secretary of the Navy Thomas Gilmer, David Gardiner, Captain Beverly Kennon, the Chief of the Bureau of Construction and Repair, Virgil Maxcy of Maryland, and a slave named Armistead. 20 more people were maimed in the bursting of the Peacemaker, an Ericcson copy of a Paixhans gun that had been bungled with too long a caliber, The shell may have worked as intended IF not for a new phenomenon called muzzle choke where the drive bands on the shell seize up in the rifling because of initial overpressure and that turns the guin into a bomb when the delay fuse in the shell initiates inside the barrel. 3. Which brings us to Charles Ragon de BangeThe Armstrong system of the previous decade, which was the first widely used interrupted screw system had a nasty problem called thread-lock which also was combined with muzzle choke. If the gun did not blow up and kill the gun crew, the primitive and rather leaky inadvertent "recoiless rifle" would overpressure out the breach block and introduce the gun crew to pulmonary death by shock wave. The Confederates and the British found this one out the hard way. Charles de Bange mostly solved this one with his "door knob" compression seal obturator. It made for a slow clumsy way to open and close interrupted screw breech blocks that would be solved by Fletcher (US in 1888) and Wellin (same year) with stepped back interrupted threading, but that doorknob and pad system is still the basis for screw thread breach block guns down to the present. The other system, the Krupp sliding wedge requires a brass button with a lead or other soft metal seal band around the case rim and is expensive and far heavier to put into a gun. Basically de Bange's invention makes lightweight field guns (howitzers and rifles) possible and is SAFER than the blow out Krupp sliding wedge breach-block. Pneumatic recoil recuperator. the Canon de 75 modèle 1897There is no other piece of artillery in history that has the significance of this gun. It was either imitated or duplicated and still remains the first example of what is considerd a modern field gun. For France it was supplanted by howitzers in the Great War, but still formed the main basis of their direct fire support in the line. For the Americans it was 90% of their own tube artillery. In WWII this gun formed the main gun basis for HALF of the British medium tanks and 80% of the American ones. The Russian T-34/76 had inferior guns to the tanks armed with the copies of this French 75.
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miletus12
Squadron vice admiral
To get yourself lost, just follow the signs.
Posts: 7,470
Likes: 4,295
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Post by miletus12 on Dec 28, 2022 17:36:32 GMT
The French aviation industry was rebuilt after the disaster of WWII. They begged, borrowed and stole from the rest of the world from 1947 forward, but this was not something that others (United States, China and Russia) did not do.
What the French did, uniquely, was develop an independent national indigenous end to end supply chain for their final products. The Mirage III and her cousins were a much more succcessful iteration of jet technology than the Mig 17s, 19s and 21s against which she competed.
If you look at the history of western aircraft versus communist aircraft since WWII, whose planes have done well?
You have to take pilot quality into consideration (The Vietnamese and Chinese were good to outstanding, the Russians and the various Arab frontline states widely varied and the African nations were "mixed" to put it charitably when it came to flying Yaks, Sukhois and Migs. M.), but it is significant that FRENCH aircraft and I mean this, shot down a lot of junk and not just Russian flying garbage., I mean AMERICAN flying garbage, too, in the India / Pakistan Wars for example.
The Mirages, the Israeli clones, the Etendards, and later the Rafale have a deserved reputation for performance and capability as pilot's planes.
So, when people talk military aviation and the big three post WWII: It is not Sweden, the UK or China who play in that exclusive club with the utterly discredited Russians and the mixed bag Americans (F-35?), it is the very successful FRENCH. (Airbus is currently kicking Boeing's keyster. M.).
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