When French tanks were clearly superior to German tanks

March 1918 saw something new emerged from the Kaiser's trenches: Tanks.

German A7V Tank in 1918

The 7th Branch of the Kriegsdepartment had been working overtime ever since Allied tanks had been introduced in 1917.  By March, they had five production units ready that they hurled into combat to protect the flanks of Ludendorff's Big Push.  Great moving fortresses, their 57 mm cannon was actually secondary to the six (!) machine guns manned by the 18 (!) crew members.  Unreliable and ungainly, they were already obsolete.

The British were happy with their huge, lozenge-shaped Mark IV beasts, which were only slightly less ungainly.  The French, applying their typical clarite francaise, developed what we recognize as a modern design tank.  

French FT-17 Tanks in World War I

The FT-17 is unmistakable as a tank.  An armored vehicle with a cast, traversable turret housing a main gun, sitting atop a chassis flanked by twin tracks, with the engine in the rear - that can only be a tank.  It weighed a fifth of what the German A7V did, and had a crew of 2, not 18.  And the French built them in huge quantities.

Rather than the 21 A7V built by the Germans, the French built almost 3,700 FT-17s, enough to equip not only the Armee of the Republique, but Black Jack Pershing's Yanks, too.  The planned assault of 1919 called for 12,000 - 4,000 just for the American Army.

The French led in doctrine, too.  While the Germans viewed tanks as essentially mobile fortresses (the planned K-Wagen was to be 120 tons, forty feet long, with four 77 mm cannon and a crew of 27, including drivers who couldn't see out of the vehicle and who steered by command from the Captain), the French planned "swarm" assaults of fairly light weight armored units, with hundreds (in 1917/18) and thousands (1919) used to punch vast holes in the trench lines.  All that was required was radio control of the armored units, and mass air cover with dive bombers, and you would have had a complete Blitzkrieg, used against the Kaiserlich Deutsches Reich.

Of course, the French lost their nerve in the inter-war years, and forgot what they had learned.  The Germans didn't, and added to this store of knowledge, which is why we remember Guderian and Rommel and their dash to the English Channel and not Estienne and Pétain breaking the Western Front.

Interestingly, Estienne was also key in establishing the French military aviation wing.  A military polymath, it seems.