Tanks - France: books - history, types and construction

Le grand album des automitrailleuses de la Victoire

The idea of placing a machine gun on a car chassis is as old as the automobile itself. At the very beginning, around 1900, the words used to designate this assembly were diverse: some spoke of "automotive machine gun", others used the expression "war automobile". Often these were simple torpedoes equipped with machine gun mounts like the famous Panhard-Genty sent to Morocco at the end of 1907. Others were already authentic armoured cars like the CGV presented to the French army in 1906.
It was the Great War, which began in August 1914, which would give its definitive name to this new combat vehicle, with the word "automitrailleuse" and its derived form "autocanon".

Indeed, as early as October 1914, various touring chassis proved capable of withstanding the fire of small 37 mm cannons supplied by the navy, including crews. Thus a new and very unusual subdivision of arms was born in France, with sailors with red pompoms crisscrossing the roads of the front.
More logically transferred to the cavalry in 1916, this new equipment, mainly on Peugeot and Renault chassis, would await its moment of glory with each attempt to break through the front.

In this highly illustrated work, no model designed up to 1918, series or prototype, is forgotten, each is treated by giving first place to the illustration, following a sequence structured by the author's customary rigor of analysis and synthesis.

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Tous les blindés de l'armée française des origines à 1940

When France entered the war in September 1939, its rearmament effort since the adoption of the first new 1935 model equipment had been considerable: more than 2 700 modern combat vehicles - tanks and armored cars - had been delivered in four years by French factories.
And 1 800 others would come out at an accelerated rate after industrial mobilization, from September 1939 until the armistice of June 1940.

This effort, both little known and totally obscured by the disaster, was not a spontaneous generation. Its roots were in the previous war - in particular with the impressive production program of the Renault FT light tank - without forgetting that it was also in France that the first armed and armored combat vehicles were born, at the dawn of the 20th century.

Presented one by one in an encyclopedic form, all this equipment is gathered here in an absolutely complete panorama: 100 main vehicles (battle tanks and armored cars) and 284 variants and derived equipment (troop transports, bridge layers, mine-jumping tanks, etc.).
A concise and absolutely synthetic text, extremely precise genealogical tables, all the technical sheets of the main vehicles, a profusion of illustrations, made up of rare period photographs and sumptuous color profiles, all at constant scale, make this work the essential bible of the subject.

A completed reissue of the best-selling work of 2014, which had quickly become unobtainable.

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