Such was the scale of the French tanks’ failure in their first engagement in 1917, it was rumoured that the Artillerie Spéciale was in danger of being disbanded, yet, by the end of the war it was the world’s largest and most technologically advanced tank force. As such, this book provides a welcome new perspective on an important but much misunderstood area of the war. Whilst the British efforts to develop armoured warfare have been well chronicled, there has been no academic study in English on the French tank force - the Artillerie Spéciale - during the Great War. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the development of tank warfare, which both the British and the French hoped would give them a decisive edge in their offensives of 19. Instead a very different picture is now emerging of armies desperately looking to a wide range of often untested and immature scientific and technological innovations to help break the deadlock of the Western Front. Recent scholarship has challenged the assumption that military commanders during the First World War were inflexible, backward-looking and unwilling to exploit new technologies.
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