Chris - this is no help at all, but I found a couple of pics the other day and forgot to bookmark them. One was a Fahrpanzer in the Hindenburg Line and the other was a 57mm on its Sockel mount in an emplacement in the Front Line. I'm really sorry - I've tried to find them again, but no luck, I'm afraid. I'll keep looking.
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Thanks James! I suspect they may have been but finding hard evidence is probably going to be impossible. If I put one in a Cambrai wargame I am sure some will argue. I guess it will have to be a "what-if".
Chris, I've just received the Jan 2008 issue of Batailles magazine that has an article on the St. Chamonds at Malmaison, and quite by coincidence it also has an article on the Fahrpanzer. It's in French, so I've only skimmed through it, but it seems to be the case that the Fahrpanzer had passed its peak on the Western Front by the end of 1915. Thereafter it featured mostly in Romania, where the ones the Romanians had bought were mostly captured by the Germans and Bulgarians, and then on the Macedonia Front, where the Allies in turn captured the Bulgarians' own and the ex-Romanian ones. Complicated.
It seems unlikely that any were installed in the line at Cambrai, although the author, François Hoff, does mention the one captured at Tilloy in April 1917 by the King's Liverpool. He does, though, say that the Fahrpanzers underwent a "progressive extinction" in the West, so it looks as if they would have been a rarity at Cambrai, if there were any at all.
Just read it properly. and the Romanians were the Germans' biggest customer for Fahrpanzers, 300 purchased, followed by Bulgaria, Switzerland, and Denmark.
-- Edited by James H at 15:04, 2008-03-26
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"Sometimes things that are not true are included in Wikipedia. While at first glance that may appear like a very great problem for Wikipedia, in reality is it not. In fact, it's a good thing." - Wikipedia.
