ALL THE ARMORED VEHICLES OF THE FRENCH ARMY - From Origins to 1940

2nd edition of Tous les blindés de l'armée française des origines à 1940, by François Vauvillier.

When France entered the war in September 1939, its rearmament effort since the adoption of the first new-model equipment in 1935 had been considerable: more than 2,700 modern combat vehicles — tanks and armoured cars — had been delivered over four years by French factories. A further 1,800 would roll off the production lines at an accelerated pace after industrial mobilization, from September 1939 until the armistice of June 1940. This effort, both little-known and entirely overshadowed by the disaster, was no spontaneous generation. Its roots lie in the previous war — notably in the impressive production programme for the Renault FT light tank — not forgetting that it was also in France, at the dawn of the 20th century, that the first armed and armoured fighting automobiles were born.

Presented one by one in encyclopaedic form, all of these vehicles are brought together here in an absolutely comprehensive panorama: 100 principal vehicles (combat tanks and armoured cars) and 284 variants and derived types (troop carriers, bridgelayers, mine-clearing tanks, etc.). Concise and authoritative text, highly detailed genealogical tables, full technical specifications for the principal vehicles, and an abundance of illustrations — comprising rare period photographs and superb colour profiles, all to a consistent scale — make this work the indispensable bible on the subject.

The author François Vauvillier, born in 1951, founder in 1984 of Histoire & Collections, and currently editor-in-chief of the quarterly GBM, has established himself over the decades as the foremost specialist in French military vehicles of the first half of the 20th century. A tireless researcher, he divides his time between his Parisian home and Brittany. The author of countless articles, he published in the 1980s two reference works on French Army uniforms in 1940 before turning to motorized subjects with L'automobile sous l'uniforme 1939-1940 (1992) and, more recently, his Tous les ... series covering, manufacturer by manufacturer and in the greatest detail, the constructors who worked for the national defence. He presents here a revised and expanded reissue of his best-selling 2014 work, which had quickly become impossible to find.