Landships II

Well, "Wow" indeed. I was somewhat disappointed that it aroused so little enthusiasm. In fact, if you put "Première guerre mondiale" into their search engine, you get a lot more treats, including film of a) the Delaunay-Belleville spg carriage and b) the Renault GJ porteur de munitions. But you'll have to do the hard work yourself.

Strange that I've never come across this establishment before. There's some terrific stuff in it. Sometimes just putting a few keywords in Google produces enjoyable results.

BTW, if you watch a lot of these films a recurring theme emerges - that of two poor soldiers trying to manhandle a succession of clearly useless devices intended to carry ammunition across the battlefield, while a large party of immaculately dressed officers (and almost always Louis Breton) stand watching the poilus slither about in the mud.

Bonjour

During WW1, Jules Louis Breton, deputy of the National Assembly, was Sous-Secrétaire d'Etat aux Inventions (inside the "Sous-Secrétariat d'Etat à l'Armement et aux munitions" from Albert Thomas).

Then, Jules Louis Breton, was "Directeur des Inventions, des Etudes et des Expériences Techniques", inside Ministery of Armaments from Louis Albert Loucheur.

This films (and photos) were made in the Technical Cinematography Section of this Inventions Directorate.

After the war, Jules Louis Breton, left this Directorate with all his war archives (films, photographic negatives, papiers archives et photos albums).and he was the creator of the CNRS.

Jules Louis Breton is dead in 1940. 

The place of all these archives (not really personnal archives) was not in CNRS and it is only in 1965 that, papiers archives et photos albums, were given to the National Archives (Now in Perrefitte-sur-Seine National Archives - Box serie numbers 398 AP).

The films, from the Technical Cinematography Section of this Inventions Directorate, was given to the C.N.C. to be digitized (before 2010) . . . . 

Some years ago, all photographic negatives were given to the Ecpa-d  Fort d'Ivry, and now digitized.

For these photos, all is now, on Imagesdefense.gouv.fr (Ecpa-D website).

Très bonne journée - Michel

There's an article in GBM on the 75mm SPGs based on the FT chassis. 

François Vauvillier "1916-18 des Chenilles pour le 75" in "Histoire de Guerre Blindés & Materiel" No. 89, Oct-Dec 2009, pp.70-74.

Summary of this is on Landships II.

There are so many interesting clips in this archive ...

Did you see the video of the French Army testing the Ford 3-ton tank - https://images.cnrs.fr/video/6524?

There's a brief clip of a 155mm St Chamond howitzer firing. I was always puzzled what the rails on top of the trail were for - it seems it was so the

stretcher with the projectile and cartridge could be aligned with the breech.

There's also a brief clip of the Schneider device to improve the mobility of the 220mm gun - it looks very frail. Schneider abandoned this in favour of the

Autopropulseur - the largest SPG built at the end of WW1. 

Charlie