Note:
I've finished my other book (The Storied Life of A.J. Fickry by Gabrielle Zevin, is very enjoyable, especially for someone who was in the retail book business for a number of years). I inadvertently started writing a -- very, very concise -- history of the Pacific War. And I anticipate resuming my Regieren blog soon, when I start rereading The Magic Mountain with my book club.
I also just browsed ahead in this book (A History of Europe) and discovered we end with the Reformation. So... I'm going to try to wrap this up before I move on to those other projects.
P.S. After writing the above I resumed reading Pirenne at page 536. *Sigh* Pirenne's account of the Renaissance and the Reformation is so like Mann's use of Settembrini and Naphtha that I feel like I should have been directed to Pirenne rather than to Goethe and Nietzsche to obtain a better understanding of The Magic Mountain. TMM is simply the European society of the early 20th century wrestling with the opposing social, intellectual, and moral trends of the 16th century. And all this continues today in the Age of Trump. For five centuries human society has attempted to transcend into a rational realm, and repeatedly failed. Each time we've tried to soar we've fallen back to earth like Goethe's Euphorion.
Now I'm feeling bad about finally convincing my book club to read TMM.
At this point, the two books I would suggest to people puzzled by TMM would be A History of Europe and The Brothers Karamazov.
But now for something completely different...
The main problem with both aircraft and armored vehicles during the Great War was the state of engine development. There simply weren't good enough (power for weight) petrol or diesel engines to power the things. The Renault design works around this to some extent by creating the lightest possible armored fighting vehicle.
If you look closely at the photos of the FT, it is amazing how many things the design got right (quite possibly by accident, but there's nothing wrong with that.) It took the Germans until the Panzer V (Panther) to adopt sloped armor, but the FT already has sloped armor. (Sloped armor increases the stopping power of a given weight of armor. And it increases the likelihood the shell will simply ricochet away.)
And look at those large front drive wheels. Future tanks would not copy this feature, but those steel wheels provide effective side armor protection for the driver, and thus do double duty.
But there are also some problems with the design. The one man turret set what would prove to be an unfortunate precedent for the French Army. It works fine when your primary weapon is a machine gun, as here, but when artillery is added and loading and aiming becomes more complicated, as was the case by 1940, then a single person was incapable of both manning the gun and staying aware of the battle going on around him. This is why three man turret crews became the norm in WW2. Now, if the French could have equipped their Char B1 tanks with something like today's 25mm to 40mm automatic chain guns, the history of the Battle of France might have been very different.
Mounting the engine in the rear did become the standard for tanks, but the Israelis -- who really know armored warfare -- have elected to put their engines in the front where it acts as additional armor protection for the crew. This also permits them to place a hatch at the back which makes egress easier. They can even easily load a few infantrymen or casualties without exposing them to small arms fire. This is also the standard layout for Infantry Fighting Vehicles, because they also need the door at the rear. Though back in 1918 all this would have been very hard to anticipate.
And finally, the English, by the end of the Great War, had realized that their huge lumbering tanks were also valuable as trucks -- I suppose I should say, "as lorries." Those Schneider CA1 tanks may have been failures as fighting vehicles, but they look like they could have been useful hauling men and material through a blasted battle zone. The difficulty of doing that was what stopped the German offensives of early 1918. This is also why I think the U.S. Army DUKW was as important as any fighting vehicle to winning WW2 -- transporting the stuff of war is as important as fighting.
And given what I now know of the impressive Jean Baptiste Eugene Estienne (thank you BBC), it really should have occurred to him that even the CA1 could have been adapted to carry an indirect fire weapon, like a mortar, forward to support an attack. He could have been the creator of the first mechanized version of horse artillery. Of course hindsight is always 20-20, but you really would think that a French artillery officer would have been alive to the importance of all aspects of cavalry operations. That, as Ney demonstrated so thoroughly at Waterloo, the best light and even heavy cavalry in the world can achieve only so much without proper support by horse artillery and/or dragoons. (I hope I've already written somewhere that I now think Ney isn't so much to blame for this as I used to think. I now think his horse artillery was decimated at Quatre Bras. I still need to research his strength in dragoons.) This was a lesson the Germans learned in 1940 and they converted some of their Panzer Is (which was the German equivalent of the FT) into modern horse artillery which helped them on the Eastern Front.
Converted Panzer I.
I've finished my other book (The Storied Life of A.J. Fickry by Gabrielle Zevin, is very enjoyable, especially for someone who was in the retail book business for a number of years). I inadvertently started writing a -- very, very concise -- history of the Pacific War. And I anticipate resuming my Regieren blog soon, when I start rereading The Magic Mountain with my book club.
I also just browsed ahead in this book (A History of Europe) and discovered we end with the Reformation. So... I'm going to try to wrap this up before I move on to those other projects.
P.S. After writing the above I resumed reading Pirenne at page 536. *Sigh* Pirenne's account of the Renaissance and the Reformation is so like Mann's use of Settembrini and Naphtha that I feel like I should have been directed to Pirenne rather than to Goethe and Nietzsche to obtain a better understanding of The Magic Mountain. TMM is simply the European society of the early 20th century wrestling with the opposing social, intellectual, and moral trends of the 16th century. And all this continues today in the Age of Trump. For five centuries human society has attempted to transcend into a rational realm, and repeatedly failed. Each time we've tried to soar we've fallen back to earth like Goethe's Euphorion.
Now I'm feeling bad about finally convincing my book club to read TMM.
At this point, the two books I would suggest to people puzzled by TMM would be A History of Europe and The Brothers Karamazov.
But now for something completely different...
The Renault FT tankette
I ran into a feature on this little tank from the Great War, on the BBC's website, HERE. It's a nice piece on its own, but there are some things left out.
The main problem with both aircraft and armored vehicles during the Great War was the state of engine development. There simply weren't good enough (power for weight) petrol or diesel engines to power the things. The Renault design works around this to some extent by creating the lightest possible armored fighting vehicle.
If you look closely at the photos of the FT, it is amazing how many things the design got right (quite possibly by accident, but there's nothing wrong with that.) It took the Germans until the Panzer V (Panther) to adopt sloped armor, but the FT already has sloped armor. (Sloped armor increases the stopping power of a given weight of armor. And it increases the likelihood the shell will simply ricochet away.)
And look at those large front drive wheels. Future tanks would not copy this feature, but those steel wheels provide effective side armor protection for the driver, and thus do double duty.
But there are also some problems with the design. The one man turret set what would prove to be an unfortunate precedent for the French Army. It works fine when your primary weapon is a machine gun, as here, but when artillery is added and loading and aiming becomes more complicated, as was the case by 1940, then a single person was incapable of both manning the gun and staying aware of the battle going on around him. This is why three man turret crews became the norm in WW2. Now, if the French could have equipped their Char B1 tanks with something like today's 25mm to 40mm automatic chain guns, the history of the Battle of France might have been very different.
Mounting the engine in the rear did become the standard for tanks, but the Israelis -- who really know armored warfare -- have elected to put their engines in the front where it acts as additional armor protection for the crew. This also permits them to place a hatch at the back which makes egress easier. They can even easily load a few infantrymen or casualties without exposing them to small arms fire. This is also the standard layout for Infantry Fighting Vehicles, because they also need the door at the rear. Though back in 1918 all this would have been very hard to anticipate.
And finally, the English, by the end of the Great War, had realized that their huge lumbering tanks were also valuable as trucks -- I suppose I should say, "as lorries." Those Schneider CA1 tanks may have been failures as fighting vehicles, but they look like they could have been useful hauling men and material through a blasted battle zone. The difficulty of doing that was what stopped the German offensives of early 1918. This is also why I think the U.S. Army DUKW was as important as any fighting vehicle to winning WW2 -- transporting the stuff of war is as important as fighting.
And given what I now know of the impressive Jean Baptiste Eugene Estienne (thank you BBC), it really should have occurred to him that even the CA1 could have been adapted to carry an indirect fire weapon, like a mortar, forward to support an attack. He could have been the creator of the first mechanized version of horse artillery. Of course hindsight is always 20-20, but you really would think that a French artillery officer would have been alive to the importance of all aspects of cavalry operations. That, as Ney demonstrated so thoroughly at Waterloo, the best light and even heavy cavalry in the world can achieve only so much without proper support by horse artillery and/or dragoons. (I hope I've already written somewhere that I now think Ney isn't so much to blame for this as I used to think. I now think his horse artillery was decimated at Quatre Bras. I still need to research his strength in dragoons.) This was a lesson the Germans learned in 1940 and they converted some of their Panzer Is (which was the German equivalent of the FT) into modern horse artillery which helped them on the Eastern Front.
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