France pioneered invention of the tank. The FT-17 was one of most successful tanks early era of armored warfare. Yet when WW 2 rolled around French tanks had some questionable and obsolete design. And not so good armored warfare doctrine. Why did France lag behind in tank technology and tactics ?
The simple reason is that France did not have the social capital to afford sweeping investment in mobile warfare. There were certainly real economic reasons, but those were obstacles that could genuinely have been overcome. Were there a will there would have been a way. But France as a nation hadn't the stomach for it. The losses France had suffered were simply catastrophic - most of the war on the Western Front was fought on her own soil and some of the most industrialized provinces at that - and the burden of the war was disproportionately on her shoulders. The resulting demographic malaise, literally a decade of empty classrooms, was combined with the Great Depression. Needless to say, the Republic was wracked by social turmoil.
In a bitter irony the French military establishment would be captured in a dark mirror of the institutional and social factors that had trapped the army in mobile warfare taken to its excessive extreme in the years leading up to the Great War. A particular kind of politics played an outsized role in dictating training: suspicion of the military establishment. To combat it a clique of politically fervent nationalist officers led a creeping monopolization of training for the purposes of inculcation in the values of the Republic. As such despite having three years of active to other nation's two, the French recruit did not necessarily learn much more about his craft in the field than his counterparts.
Attaque a outrance as originally conceived was a viable, cohesive doctrine of mobile warfare hinging on skillful, sudden deployment of the Soixante-Quinze to destroy the enemy caught in the open with storms of fire that would prove itself in the Miracle on the Marne. However the primacy of the social agenda led many less fervently republican officers to nevertheless go along with the ideological programme and make the best of the situation where a recruit would assuredly be filled with Gallic furor but practical training was not so guaranteed. Despite recognizing the major flaws in their approach, the French Army as an institution internally rationalized taking that doctrine of blood and bayonet to its extreme.
In similar fashion, the aftermath of its heroic efforts in the first World War compelled French governments to invest in static war of position. The trauma indelibly stamped on the national psyche simply would not permit the possibility of losing an inch of sacred soil ever again or the wastage of men in the open field. The proportionally small French defense budgets and the best personnel became tied up in this societal straitjacket. Like the officers who had turned
attaque a outrance into a disaster, much of the interbellum French Army from top to bottom recognized the Maginot line as folly even as they went about putting it in place. Whatever else might be said about Charles de Gualle, he is unquestionably on the record for advocating a universally mechanized army. Nevertheless without the political capital to abandon defensive belts in depth for lengthy, expensive exercises to test such a radical shift in doctrine - nevermind actually reorganizing the entire army on those lines - the French Army did what it did before WW1. It made the best of it.
However, it goes too far to say that French armor was categorically obsolete. The French SOMUA S35 has a well deserved reputation as a monster in the early years of WWII. Most of the German tanks in that era were Pzkwgn Is and IIs. The faults of French tanks were by and large the very same ones seen in Germany's vehicle park at the time, including one of their best the Czech designed 35(t). This was simply unavoidable when mass armored warfare was still in its teething stages.
I've read that the Pre-WW2 French Navy had some different ideas about what naval war would look like and the plans to match, but the only non-traditional design I've seen is for this
combat cruiser. I was wondering if you could shed some light on this, or at least let me know how fake those drawings are.
When you say "Pre-WW2", do you refer to the interwar period specifically, or in a more general sense? France was on the cutting edge of naval developments throughout the 19th century.
