The French Army’s Tank Force and Armoured Warfare in the Great War: The Artillerie Spéciale by Tim Gale (review)

The French faced extraordinary challenges as they developed, fielded, and employed tanks in World War I. The idea of tanks came from a search in 1915 for new methods of overcoming tactical stalemate on the battlefield and rapidly coalesced into the manufacture of several different models in 1916. Much debate occurred at that time over what a tank could and should do, and much time and energy was consumed in overcoming technical problems associated with moving a heavy vehicle across a battlefield and having it fire at the enemy. Bureaucratic squabbles erupted over who would be in charge of various aspects of the tank’s development and who or what would provide the resources. At the same time, tanks entered battle not only to test technology but also to test concepts for the tank’s employment and to achieve operational and tactical success.

To tell the story of France’s tank force and explain how it became the largest and most technologically advanced of the war, Tim Gale did considerable research in the archives of the Service historique de Défense at Vincennes. Of the many strengths of Gale’s book, none is more impressive than his reliance on primary materials, including correspondence and after-action reports. He also used works by authors such as Jean Perré and Léon Dutil to enable him to rise occasionally above the minutiae of official correspondence. Adding to the value of the book, Gale capably covers some of the bureaucratic disagreements within the French military as well as some of the major battles, none of which were resounding successes, fought by tanks on the western front. Including the battles and the bureaucratic disputes enables Gale to analyze the introduction of a fundamentally new weapon system in an ongoing war.

Although the role and basic design of the tank may be relatively clear today, it was by no means clear during the war. In some cases sharp debates occurred not only over the role of the tank but over the type of armor, armaments, communications, fuel tanks, etc. for a tank. The new tanks were systems of systems and each system had to be developed in accord with the others. Trial and error, as well as casualties, gradually revealed the better (but not always the best) design or use of technology, and the French eventually fielded the FT-17, the most successful tank introduced during the war. Though the technology and employment of French tanks sometimes failed in 1917 and 1918, they were used, as Gale argues, in the “most sensible way” (p. 224) in the last battles of World War I. He emphasizes that French success with tanks indicates a higher level of military effectiveness than is usually attributed to the French.

Several weaknesses detract from the high quality of this book. First, it reads too much like a thesis or dissertation. Gale’s argument gets lost in details and in paragraphs not smoothly integrated into the narrative. Also, the author frequently uses abbreviations for units or items and compels the reader to refer to the abbreviation list at the front of the work. On pages 168–69, for example, Gale uses at least forty abbreviations, some of which are obvious (DI for Division d’infanterie) but others that are not (RMLE for Régiment de Marche de la Légion Étrangère). Additionally, the author provides insufficient information about developments in the British and German armies. A fuller explanation of what other belligerents were or were not doing could have made the narrative more understandable and useful for the reader.

Similarly, Gale frequently refers to General Heinz Guderian, who commanded the German XIXth Panzer Corps in May–June 1940 but who had no experience with tanks in World War I. He uses information from Guderian to evaluate French methods and technology in...