page_title: Jean Baptiste Eugène Estienne
section_title: First World War
hierarchical_section_title: Jean Baptiste Eugène Estienne / First World War
caption_attribution_description: Slovenčina: 17 mars 1916, essais de la machine Fouché n°1C à Vincennes.
context_page_description: Jean Baptiste Eugène Estienne was a general of artillery and a specialist in military engineering, one of the founders of modern French artillery and French military aviation, and the creator of the French tank arm. He is considered by many in France to be the Père des Chars.
context_section_description: At the outbreak of the First World War Estienne was made commander of the 22nd Artillery Regiment serving with Philippe Pétain's division. At the Battle of Charleroi he shocked his German opponents by the precision of his artillery fire, which was well directed due to close cooperation with aircraft. But even Estienne's competence could not save the French infantry from being destroyed by machine gun fire. In order to protect soldiers in trench warfare, he imagined mobile personnel shields to assist them.
  Having long been an advocate of indirect fire methods, Estienne now began to search for viable ways to provide close support with field guns. On 23 August he made his famous statement Messieurs, la victoire appartiendra dans cette guerre à celui des deux belligérants qui parviendra le premier à placer un canon de 75 sur une voiture capable de se mouvoir en tout terrain ("Gentlemen, the victory in this war will belong to which of the two belligerents which will be the first to place a gun of 75 [mm] on a vehicle able to be driven on all terrain"). However, as suitable vehicles were lacking at the time, nothing more could be done.
  In the summer of 1915 he learned that Eugène Brillié of the Schneider Company and Jules-Louis Bréton (then a member of parliament) were developing a barbed wire-cutter on a tracked Holt-type chassis. He wrote several letters during the autumn of 1915 to Joseph Joffre at GQG (the French GHQ) with his ideas about using such tracked vehicles. These letters never got further than Joffre's staff.
  On 1 December 1915 Estienne wrote a personal letter to Joffre, in which he proposed that the French army undertake a similar project. In particular, he advocated the creation of a force of all-terrain armoured vehicles large enough to assist 20,000 infantrymen to break through the full depth of a German defensive position. Armed with light artillery, the vehicles would also serve to transport men, equipment and supplies across the 40 km or so that separated French assembly areas from the open terrain behind the German defensive positions.
  He was invited to explain his ideas further to Joffre's Deputy Chief of Staff, General Jules Janin, during a personal visit on 12 December. Three days earlier, he and Pétain had attended a demonstration of the chassis of the Schneider CA tank. He realized that unknown to him Schneider had been constructing an armoured tracked vehicle since May, and immediately understood that the existence of such a prototype, even though incomplete, might well prove a decisive argument for the creation of an armoured force. He was proven right on 20 December when an official plan was conceived to produce the Schneider CA. The same day he contacted Louis Renault to convince him to build tanks, but the industrialist refused. During a personal visit to Joffre on 18 January 1916 he convinced the supreme commander that the plan was sound.
  Estienne himself was not at first personally involved in the development of the new tanks. He suggested some ideas that were duly taken notice of, but otherwise had no effect on the preparations for construction and production. Two of his personal enemies, Undersecretary Jean-Louis Bréton (who resented that Estienne had taken over his project) and Colonel Emile Rimailho (the co-inventor, with Deport and General St. Claire Deville, of the famous French 75 mm field gun), cooperated to build the ill-fated Saint-Chamond tank.
  During a chance meeting on 16 July, Renault informed him that his company was developing a light tank (the Renault FT), but Estienne was not in a position to make any promises. In August he and Bréton traveled together to London, where they tried to convince the British government to postpone the first use of tanks until the French tanks were ready. They were unsuccessful, but the British action had a beneficial side effect in that the first use of the British Mark I tanks on 15 September created a euphoria that accelerated developments and on 30 September Estienne was appointed Commander of the Artillerie Spéciale: the French army's tank arm
caption: The Souain tank prototype crossing a trench on 9 December 1915. Colonel Estienne attended these decisive trials
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