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j'ordos - If you can fix it me for me to do this full time and get paid for it, then updates will flow like wine. Until then expect 2-3 weeks between updates. ;)

Duritz - I must confess I'm still not sure where the 1930s French Army sits on the production vs upgrade scale. If they are at the German end then I can see them regularly interrupting production to fit the latests mods as you describe, but if they are at the American end then they will probably avoid doing any mods to an existing production line unless they have to.

Looking at some of the delays of OTL it looks very 'production' orientated, with gaps of many years before changes are made (H35 then the H38, the R35 then R39/40). But I don't know if this was lack of money, lack of desire to change or a deliberate policy to maximise production. Any thoughts on this?

Vann the Red - I think there have to be changes to doctrine, if nothing else the Spanish are using a heavily modified version of French tactics (due to lack of trucks and artillery as much as anything else) and winning. That will surely spark some lively debate in the military academies. ;)

Of course the big prize will be the French working out that smaller tanks units are viable, indeed desirable, and so spread their tanks across a dozen or more strong units instead of a few super strength armoured units. But that preference will take a great deal of work to dislodge...
 
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I would think that any extensive "real combat" use would generate an extensive list of desirable tweaks/upgrades, no matter how sound the basic design. [Same for doctrine--even if it "works", there will be analysis & faults founds and corrected (or made worse in some cases!).] Given there's no existential or even serious threat at the moment, could see the French keeping production low and regularly tweaking rather than freezing the design to maximize output; even more so since their tanks are winning. That's logical anyway--though as Pip's description of French armament industry suggests logic might take a back seat.
 
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Duritz - I must confess I'm still not sure where the 1930s French Army sits on the production vs upgrade scale. If they are at the German end then I can see them regularly interrupting production to fit the latests mods as you describe, but if they are at the American end then they will probably avoid doing any mods to an existing production line unless they have to.

Looking at some of the delays of OTL it looks very 'production' orientated, with gaps of many years before changes are made (H35 then the H38, the R35 then R39/40). But I don't know if this was lack of money, lack of desire to change or a deliberate policy to maximise production. Any thoughts on this?

I guess the big difference from OTL is that the French had no external pressures so changes happened slowly and based on observed changes elsewhere, or some sort of developmental/mechanical breakthrough. It was all about money. Numbers were built to correspond to the cash available rather than unit sizes. Units were designed to accomodate the number of tanks made and to keep them homogenous. There was very little standardisation of size or structure within the armoured units.

In TTL they have operational experience that will create internal pressure for change. Officers talking from experience have a lot more pull than theoretical experts demanding changes. Plus money is less tight, especially after the money from the sale of arms to Spain. Now that Hitler wasn't an immediate threat, they wouldn't have the same focus on increasing numbers but could focus on developing what they had and getting some uniformity.

Dury.
 
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j'ordos - If you can fix it me for me to do this full time and get paid for it, then updates will flow like wine. Until then expect 2-3 weeks between updates. ;)

Sure, no problem! How much do you need? Let me just check my bank account and... ehrm... do you accept Monopoly money? :)

Of course the big prize will be the French working out that smaller tanks units are viable, indeed desirable, and so spread their tanks across a dozen or more strong units instead of a few super strength armoured units. But that preference will take a great deal of work to dislodge...

Well as we're already dreaming maybe they can just forego the MS and Bloch altogether to get the Dewoitine D520 or even the Arsenal VG33 in the air in sufficient numbers? :p
 
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Duritz - I must confess I'm still not sure where the 1930s French Army sits on the production vs upgrade scale. If they are at the German end then I can see them regularly interrupting production to fit the latests mods as you describe, but if they are at the American end then they will probably avoid doing any mods to an existing production line unless they have to.

Looking at some of the delays of OTL it looks very 'production' orientated, with gaps of many years before changes are made (H35 then the H38, the R35 then R39/40). But I don't know if this was lack of money, lack of desire to change or a deliberate policy to maximise production. Any thoughts on this?

Pip

I've been doing some digging and...

The changes from the H35 to the H39 are: a new engine (120hp 1938 model Hotchkiss), a longer gun (37mm, also circa 1938) and some minor improvements to suspension and tracks. A program to upgun existing H35's was given high priority but was far from complete by June 1940.

I also discovered the AMC35 failed trials but was accepted due to the fact the Rhineland remilitarisation was underway. The cavalry just went ahead and ordered it and the French material Commission wouldn't block it for political reasons. Still, they only ordered 200 odd.

The AMR33 was found to be too unreliable during early production (no idea how it got through trials) and the AMR35 was designed to replace it almost immediately it begun production. Only 123 AMR33's were made. The new version placed the engine in the back :)eek:), and a stronger suspension was also fitted. Several varients were made but once again financial and technical problems delayed production, which didn't start until 1936. Even though only 200 were ordered, they hadn't all been delivered by June 1940.

The R35 was designed to replace the FT-17 but technical defficulties with production (begun in 1936) meant the WWI era Renaults were still in frontline service by 1940. It was the most numerous tank at the time of the Battle of France but it's design was almost stationary since 1935. Alterations were planned to the suspension of existing tanks but the war crisis put paid to the plan and only newly built tanks carried the changes. This is sometimes referred to as the R40.

The Char B1's were ordered in 1937 but only 350 odd were delivered by June 1940.

The S35 was all the cavalry wanted but they couldn't afford enough so they used H35/39's to fill in their formations.

It would appear to me as if the major issue was a lack of urgency in updating their designs,coupled to a lack of operational testing. Then, even when the budget allowed and they'd found something worth fixing they had difficulties in getting changes into production and overall capacity was limited.

So the Spanish Intervention fixes their money problems (to a degree) but will likely mean a much smaller tank force as production was limited and one of the soul mass produced types (the H35) is heading overseas exclusively. Operation testing should improve, as should technical understanding but without a breakthrough in the industrial set up (apparently the Christie suspension couldn't be used as it would require extensive retooling of factories) their problems will continue...

Where's that leave France... bugger me! I'm just lucky you've gotta come up with the answers! :)

Cheers,
Dury.
 
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Chapter CX: Une Entente Commerciale?
Chapter CX: Une Entente Commerciale?

For all the grand talk by politicians on both side of the channel the Entente Cordiale never brought about a substantial change in Anglo-French relations. While it is technically correct to say the original Entente never broke down, that only points out quite how limited it’s original form was. The Entente Cordiale was never actually a formal alliance or pact; instead it was an ‘entente’ (understanding) on a handful of colonial issues in the Orient, Africa and North America. As those issues were considered long settled one could truthfully say that the original agreement had not been broken and indeed remains unbroken to this day. What certainly did ‘break’ in the mid 1930s was the illusion held by much of the political class that there was a meaningful alliance between France and the British Empire.

The political differences that broke up the diplomatic Entente have been discussed previously, our concern in this chapter are the Franco-British ‘Understandings’ that existed outside of diplomacy and grand strategy, and how they fared as diplomatic relations deteriorated. We will begin in the economic sphere where the most striking feature is how weak the trade links were, Empire exports to France totalled just under £23 million while imports from France came to less than £20 million. While these are certainly large sums, when one remembers that in a previous chapter we saw that imports of beef alone totalled well over £35 million a year they are not that impressive. There is of course the issue of invisible exports and imports, that portion of trade that does not involve tangible goods or physical objects, for Britain that has always meant insurance, banking, shipping and above all income from over-seas investments. These figures were both notoriously hard to calculate, save well in arrears when accounts were settled, and a vital matter for the Treasury, transforming staggering visible trade deficits into healthy overall surpluses; invisible annual trade surpluses of £300 million or more were not uncommon throughout the 1930s. Francophiles were often tempted to suggest that some of this tidal wave of invisible earnings came from France, when in fact it was instead the nations of South America, China and the United States that provided the bulk of these earnings. The example of the Southern Railway and the Chemin de Fer du Nord will serve to illustrate why France was just as tough for Britain’s invisible traders as their visible brethren.

The Chemin de Fer du Nord (The Northern Railway, generally called the CF Nord) was, as the name suggests, the railway company covering the north of France. As in Britain the railway companies of France had amalgamated into several large groupings, though the groupings had occurred over a far longer period and, contrary to the typical national pattern, the French groupings had occurred with far less government intervention. They key difference between the two nations railways was financial, where the Big Four in Britain were all making a healthy profit, even the debt laden London & North Eastern Railway, in France the situation was not so bright. As a whole the French railway companies were running at a very considerable loss, a combined loss of almost 5 billion Francs (some £60 million) in 1936 alone. However this headline figure hid a wide variation; the unwieldy named Chemins de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée (Paris to Lyon and the Mediterranean Railway, unsurprisingly this was typically shortened to the PLM) had an excellent year as Spanish bound trade in and out of the Mediterranean ports skyrocketed, while at the other extreme lay the unfortunate CF Nord which racked up yet another staggering loss. The simple problem for the CF Nord, and the Rothschild family that owned it, was that while their routes were strategically valuable (not least the rail links from Paris to the Channel ports and western Belgium), they weren’t actually very busy. The exception was the cross-channel routes, the jewel in the crown of the CF Nord, indeed to believe its critics the only jewel the company possessed. It is at this point that the Southern Railway enters the scene.

RalsgDN.jpg

A 231 C Nord at the head of a 'Flèche d’Or'/'Golden Arrow' service just outside Calais. The Golden Arrow was the first cross channel luxury train to actually be co-ordinated properly, a feat previously confined to trans-continental trains such as the Orient Express or the Rheingold. The service ran from London Victoria to Paris Gare du Nord via a purpose built luxury ferry between Dover and Calais, though of course the CF Nord maintained it was actually a Paris-London service that happened to carry people on the way back. The Golden Arrow had been one of the benchmark luxury services of the 1920s, being an all Pullman car service on the British side and all CIW (Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, the makers of carriages for the Orient Express) service when in France. However between the depression and the rise of air travel the service had fallen on relatively hard times, being forced to include merely first class, and even second class, carriages on the trains to make up the numbers. It is interesting to note that the new class of locomotive the Southern Railway developed for the service were christened the Lord Nelsons and all named after famous British admirals, the majority of which had made their name sinking the French. There was no counter by the CF Nord however, the 231 C Nords on the French side of the route were given neither individual names nor even a class name, to the owners and operators of French railways their engines were mere machines, nothing more.

CF Nord’s British partner for the cross channel routes was, naturally enough, Southern Railway. The advent of the train ferry, which allowed a sleeping carriage to be loaded onto a ferry and transported across the channel without waking the occupants, had made the night train from London to Paris a lucrative route for both parties. Financial problems in the 1920s had seen the CF Nord sell its ferry and shipping operations to raise money and had left it dependent on the Southern to provide the ferries. This precedent was taken one step further in early 1937 when CF Nord proposed selling its part of the cross channel route to the Southern. In exchange for a large up front payment the CF Nord would give the Southern a concession to run the entire route, keeping all receipts and without paying for track access. The board of the Southern never got a chance to reply; the French government got to hear of the plan and immediately vetoed it. At the end of the resulting round of argument, claim and counter-claim the Southern’s management were left bemused and the CF Nord’s mostly unemployed; CF Nord was forcibly ‘merged’ with Chemins de fer de l'État (State Railways, CF l'État the largest railway group in France and, as the name suggests, it was owned by the state). It has been suggested this was the aim of the Rothchild family all along, as part of the merger they received compensation, shares in the public corporation that owned CF de l'État and seats on the board. Certainly they got a far better deal than the other struggling rail companies that were 'rescued' by merger with CF de l'État both before and after. In any event the CF Nord Affair was just the latest in a series of incidents that convinced the majority of British bankers and financiers to look elsewhere for their invisible trade opportunities.

The French chamber of commerce naturally declared this an irrational and foolish decision; France was open for business and investment, just not in areas she considered strategic. The counter argument was that the shifting French definition of ‘strategic industries’ was itself a major headache for those trying to do business in France. Many an importer had privately decided that ‘strategic’ meant ‘something a non Frenchman is doing well at’ and given up. Such discussion generally boiled down to insults, each side accusing the other of being at fault and for being too parochial. The British believed French industry would do all it could to involve dealing with foreign firms, even to the extent of paying a higher cost for lower quality, while the French diagnosed the problem as ‘Parochial Albion’ and blamed British companies for not even looking for opportunities in France. The protectionist tendencies of French industries are a matter for another book, but the parochialism, or otherwise, of Britain's captains of industry is very much our concern. As with so much in Anglo-French relations however, the answer does rather depend on how you define the terms; British companies were indeed parochial, for a given value of parochial.

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Notes:
You lucky people, not even the top of the page and you get an update. I do hope Davout is around to discipline his fellow Antipodean tanker for a breach of top of page etiquette. Now to the update, first off I must confess I'm not completely happy with this one, mainly as I'm not at all sure what the 'point' of all that text. But I’ve written it now so it seems a shame to delete it, hopefully it will be at least interesting. A part two on Franco-British relations to follow explaining the differing values of parochial.

Trade numbers are all historic, which I found somewhat surprising I must say. After some checking Britain did run a huge visible trade deficit even before the Depression but was always bailed out by invisible trade which ran an even bigger surplus. Trade with France genuinely was that small and more interestingly only imports had been hit by the depression; France was buying the same amount of British goods but selling far less to Britain. But then the French were only buying British because there was literally no French option, so it’s not surprising their imports didn’t change.

French rail deficits are not OTL; actually they were worse at around 6 billion Francs for 1936. I’m giving the south coast railways a big boost due to all that Spanish trade, but the northern railways will still struggle. Of course they could make money, they did after nationalisation, but that required vastly raising ticket prices which rail companies weren't allowed to do by French law. For some reason the Popular Front thought it evil if private companies raised ticket prices but a vital necessity when the state owned company did it a few weeks after nationalisation. Funny that. CF Nord was owned by the Rothschilds and they did play many financial games to keep control even as losses spiralled. OTL the Popular Front nationalised the whole lot and gave the existing owners shares in the new public company (a funny definition of nationalisation, but then this is France). TTL of course the government has dodged the issue and is only forced into it when they see the evil Brits about to get involved in a French railway.

The Southern Railway was generally the most profitable railway in Britain as it had less freight and more passengers (so common carrier and lorry competition didn't hurt so much). They were very keen on their south coast ferry runs and went to a string of ports across France, Belgium and the Netherlands with varying levels of luxury and always on their own ships. Even OTL they had the cash to buy out CF Nord so it's not unreasonable, certainly there were a lot of talks between the Rothschilds and Southern prior to nationalisation but that was apparently just about cross-channel ferries and the like. Without the get out of jail free of the Popular Front buying them out I figure the Rothschilds might take drastic measures, they weren't above being bold when thy were desperate.
 
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I would think the existence of the Sterling Area and Imperial Preference alone would serve to direct most investment to the Empire, formal or informal. Add in the French moving the goalposts and no wonder the numbers are so low.

Of course if Paris was really smart they'd let Southern pump a bunch of money into the northern lines, THEN nationalize it if/when the strategic need arose!

Curious: how does the British rail system rate at this time? I know later on there were problems, to put it mildly, but in the mid-30s?
 
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France looks so cute, so modern... Why do I feel the urge to shout "Bomb France!"?
 
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Interesting update El Pip, what state is the French economy in as a whole? I'm not sure how representative that update is of the wider picture but it does look like the situation is still rather stagnant and they don't appear to have any real ideas to improve it.
 
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Chapter CX: Une Entente Commerciale?
...first off I must confess I'm completely happy with this one, mainly as I'm not at all sure what the 'point' of all that text. But I’ve written it now so it seems a shame to delete it, hopefully it will be at least interesting.

Glad you're that happy with it even though you're not certain what the point is ;)

Wow, that was fast.

It's amazing what one can do with Monopoly these days :)
 
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Carlstadt Boy - I kept it below 2000 words, hence the relative speed of update.

DonnieBaseball - The British railways are a long, long way ahead of OTL. As they are no longer a common carrier (which meant they had to accept any cargo from any station at government set rates) they've slashed a lot of empty and loss making services. Between that, the general pickup in Empire trade and Spain they're doing very well, hence why I thought the Southern (which was doing very well in OTL anyway) might have a lot of cash burning a hole in their pocket.

On the other point, more of that in the next update.

Kurt_Steiner - Force of habit? :D

Zhuge Liang - I'd say French railways are representative of the general thrust, the main difference is that the railways have a critical mass where as most French industry was kept small by lack of finance and government intervention.

In general French factories are small, full of old kit and are still running the same way there were in WW1. With a government that gives out contracts on the basis of keeping people in jobs rather than ability no-one has any incentive to change so hasn't. Certainly all the orders flooding in are highlighting quite how bad the problem is. As Durrys post above points out production delays were the norm and there was a crippling lack of factory capacity, particularly for anything precision or complex.

But as you say Sarraut has no idea how to fix things. He won't take the Popular Front route and nationalise everything and the political price of letting market forces do the work is giddying high. Plus of course both of those routes will cause massive short term disruption so there is not even a quick fix available.

j'ordos - Ahh pedantry, where would we be without it? Happier probably. :p

Nathan Madien - Obscure and questionably relevant details are my style. It seems popular. :)
 
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If Britain has such a (relatively) small role in the French economy, which countries are their main trade partners? Benelux? Post-Versailles states of Eastern Europe?
 
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Nice post El Pip. A train is close to a tank... :)

Apologies for my posting faux pas... but honestly, who here thought you were within two weeks of a post?!? I momentarily considered the fact it was the top of the page but then immediately dismissed my concern as just plain silly...

Thinking on tanks - I mean, what else would you think about! There're just so damn awesome - and the French will obviously mass produce the R35 as they did OTL and the S35 will also be produced in comparable numbers but I think we need to clarify what they would do with the H35. I mean the initial run went to Spain but this tank was mass produced (by French standards). So if the Spanish use it successfully but can't afford to take the full number then do France sell them elsewhere or keep them for themselves? Given your comments on not letting companies go without work these are the only two options... unless they design an updated version for French service and build that instead.

I'd suggest the most likely option is to keep it in mass production and sell to Spain as Spain needs, spruik it for overseas sales as a 'war winning' machine and use the left over machines domestically. H35's running around the little Entente? It would probably cost less than an LT35 per unit... but then again who cares when it has such success to its name! It could cost more and still be sold as a 'proven winner'.

Anyway, this plan may actually lead to Hotchkiss improving its plant and equipment. A little bit of foreign money and all that...

Just my two cents worth... erm, sorry I mean pence.

Dury.
 
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A very interesting update, Pippy. More than I've ever known about British and French railways. I look forward to part two of the analysis. Interwar France baffles me.

Vann
 
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A railway update always makes me warm and fuzzy on the inside. :)
 
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I suspected a railways update might draw Sir Humphrey out of hiding. Good to see you again, sir.

Vann
 
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Karelian - As far as I can tell the main British trading partners outside the Empire were the Americas (North and South) and Scandinavia. Invisible trade was much the same only far more concentrated in the US and South America.

Duritz - It's a fine plan with one minor issue - I can guarantee Hotchkiss wouldn't get the whole contract. Instead it would go to a selection of random industrial(ish) firms instead who would doubtless muck it up and introduce cost rises and delays as they get the hang of making H35/38s. Hotchkiss would get some work certainly, just only a part of a larger contract.

Letting Hotchkiss expand and invest is contrary to the whole point of pre-nationalisation French industrial policy - no one company must be too big or become better than it's rivals. I'm not saying it's sensible, but that was the French approach for years.

Vann the Red - See above, interwar France made so many decisions that confuse the hell out of me. I try to navigate my way through but I'm never completely sure if I'm not grossly misrepresenting things.

Sir Humphrey - Sir H, you return. I'd hoped a train or two would lure you out. Mixed news for the next update, it has a train in it but only briefly. Will that be enough?
 
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