So, have you ever wondered why basically almost
every tank you've ever seen has the exact same
basic shape? Right, like whether it's in a blockbuster
movie or... Or just on the evening news, or sitting
quietly in a military museum somewhere. It's
always the same. You've got the tracks running
along the sides, the driver sitting low in the
front, the engine tucked safely away in the back,
and the main gun mounted in this rotating turret
right on top. It just feels like an obvious,
almost inevitable design now. Exactly, but somebody
actually had to invent it. And that is our mission
for this deep dive. Today, we are looking at
a stack of sources, primarily Wikipedia article
excerpts, that are focused entirely on this one
machine called the Renault FT. And it is a truly
fascinating piece of machinery. It really is.
Our goal today is to unpack how a tiny, I mean,
we're talking a seven ton French machine designed
in 1916, right in the thick of the First World
War, completely revolutionized armored warfare.
It's an engineering survival story, unlike almost
anything else we see in military history. Yeah,
we're going to see how it set the permanent blueprint
for modern tanks and how it stubbornly survived
on active battlefields all the way into the 21st
century. Which goes far beyond just a timeline
of battles. What we're really dissecting today
is a master class in how a single piece of brilliant,
pragmatic engineering can outlive its intended
purpose by decades. That's a well way. When you
look at the Renault FT, You aren't just looking
at an old tank. You are looking at the Genesis
point for an entire category of technology. So
let's set the stage for that Genesis point. The
year is 1915, bleeding into 1916. The First World
War is locked in this horrific, static trench
warfare. The stalemate. Right. And a French artillery
officer, Colonel G .B .E. Estienne, has this
vision. He wants a tracked armored vehicle to
cross no man's land and just break the stalemate.
So he goes to Louis Renault. A name most people
probably know. Yeah. Even if you don't know military
history, you definitely know that name from the
automotive world. So Estienne basically asks
Renault to build him a tank and Renault flat
out refuses. Just says no. Just says no. He tells
the Colonel his company is already at maximum
capacity producing munitions and engines for
the war effort. And maybe more importantly, he
says he has absolutely zero experience designing
tracked vehicles. Which, you know, if you look
at it from an industrialist perspective during
a total war economy, is a perfectly rational
response. Oh, absolutely. You can't just afford
to halt an active production line that's producing
vital artillery shells. Right, you can't just
pivot to experimental military hardware you've
never built before. But Colonel Estienne was
incredibly persistent. The sources say he actually
found out that a rival company, Schneider, was
already developing France's first operational
tank. So he uses that leverage. Yeah, he keeps
pushing Renault. Finally, during a chance meeting
in July of 1916, Estienne asks him to reconsider.
And for reasons the historical record doesn't
fully detail, this time Renault actually agrees
to take on the project. And the design that Renault
and his lead industrial designer, Rodolphe Ernst
Metzmeier, came up with fundamentally changed
the world. It really did. What's fascinating
here is the monumental shift in the design paradigm.
Let's look at the context of 1916. The early
British tanks or the French Schneider were essentially
massive, awkward. metal boxes. Huge iron bricks.
Basically. The tracks wrapped entirely around
the outer hull and the guns were sticking out
of the sides in Sponsons. And for anyone who
isn't familiar with naval or early armor terminology,
Sponsons are basically these fixed side mounted
blisters. The guns couldn't rotate freely. Right.
So meaning if you wanted to aim at something
in front of you or behind you, you often had
to literally turn the entire massive tank. Precisely.
They were incredibly difficult to steer, prone
to getting completely bogged down, and suffered
from massive blind spots. Renault and Ernst Metzmeier
threw that entire rule book out the window. Thank
goodness. They separated the tank into distinct
functional zones. They isolated the crew compartment
in the front, partitioned the hot, noisy engine
compartment in the back, and introduced the absolute
key innovation. The turret. Yes. They placed
the main armament in a fully rotating turret
on the roof. I always think of it as the equivalent
of someone finally figuring out exactly where
the steering wheel and the gas pedal belong in
an automobile and just permanently setting the
standard. That's a great way to put it. Because
before the FT, engineers were just guessing at
what a tank should be. The FT answered the question
so definitively that the core layout has never
fundamentally changed. It did set the standard,
but it's really crucial to understand that they
didn't arrive at that layout just because it
looked Elegant. Right. It wasn't an aesthetic
choice. Not at all. It was born from severe,
uncompromising engineering constraints. Louis
Renault was a pragmatist. He looked at the internal
combustion engines available in 1916 and realized
they simply couldn't effectively power the 30
or 40 ton behemoths the military was dreaming
of. They just didn't have the horsepower. Exactly.
So he imposed a strict weight limit on his own
project. Seven tons. Which, just to put in perspective
for you, An American M1 Abrams today weighs around
70 tons, so 7 tons is almost nothing for an armored
vehicle. But that weight limit forced some brilliant
workarounds. Like to deal with the cratered terrain
of the Western Front, they designed tracks that
were automatically kept under tension. Because
early tanks were constantly throwing their tracks.
Basically derailing in the mud, yeah. The FT's
self -tensioning system mitigated that. They
also bolted this really prominent rounded metal
tailpiece to the back of the hull. It looks a
bit strange on the back. It does. It looks weird,
but it allowed this tiny vehicle to cross wide
trenches without falling in backwards. The engineering
elegance really shines in the internal systems
too, specifically the cooling. They needed to
keep the engine from overheating, but they also
had a severe problem with the human element.
Right, keeping the two -man crew from suffocating.
Yes, suffocating on engine exhaust and the cordite
fumes from firing the gun. So they solved both
issues simultaneously. The engine's radiator
fan was actually designed to suck fresh air through
the front crew compartment. Oh. Yeah, pulling
it over the driver and the commander and then
forcing it out through the rear engine compartment.
It provided internal ventilation and engine cooling
in a single lightweight mechanism. That is just
brilliant. But here's where it gets really interesting,
though. We need to talk about what this machine
is actually called. Ah, the naming myth. Yeah.
If you consume any media about World War I, like
history books, documentaries, video games, you
have almost certainly heard this tank referred
to as the FT -17. Almost everywhere. And you'll
often hear commentators confidently explain that
FT stands for faible tonnage, meaning lightweight
in French, or maybe francissus de tranché, meaning
trench -crosser. Yes, it's one of those historical
myths that sounds so perfectly plausible that
it just became accepted fact. But the source
material is definitive here. None of that is
true. None of it. The letters XT did not stand
for anything descriptive at all. It was simply
a two letter internal production code used by
the Renault factory for all their new commercial
and military projects. Literally just a filing
system. It just happened to be the next available
letter combination in their administrative filing
cabinet. Wait, so if FT is literally just a random
factory code, where did the 17 come from? Because
every reference I've ever seen adds that number.
The number is entirely an invention of postwar
historians. The Renault company never once referred
to it as the FT -17 during the conflict. Really?
Yeah. Historians likely appended the 17 long
after the war to denote 1917, which was the year
it was ordered in large numbers. Originally,
the prototype was burdened with a highly literal
just incredibly clunky designation. Oh, right,
the automatrieuse schnee. Exactly. Which translates
to motorized machine gun with tracks. I can totally
see why that didn't catch on with the truths
in the mud. It definitely didn't. It was our
persistent Colonel Estienne who successfully
advocated for a simpler terminology. He pushed
the military to adopt the word char. Which is
the French word for a cart or a wagon. Right.
It's the standard term for a tank. Those that
officially became the char FT. It's wild how
history will collectively rename an object and
invent a whole retroactive mythology for a simple
factory code. It happens more often than you'd
think. I bet. But getting back to the physical
design, the sources detail how that iconic turret
on top wasn't just a one -and -done invention.
It went through a really fascinating trial and
error process. Well, the turret is the defining
feature, but manufacturing it was a massive headache.
The very first iteration was a circular turret
cast from solid steel. Okay. The major limitation
there was that it could only accommodate an 8mm
Hotchkiss machine gun. Which is devastating against
infantry in a trench, sure, but SDN realized
that, tactically, a machine gun can't blow up
a reinforced concrete bunker. Exactly. They needed
a variant of the tank that could carry an actual
cannon. You wanted to mount a 37mm Puto cannon.
The problem was metallurgical. The early attempts
to cast a steel carrot large enough to hold that
cannon just kept failing. Like breaking apart.
The steel would crack or deform as it cooled.
It was actually another heavy industry company
brought into the project, Berliat, that solved
it. They completely abandoned casting. It went
to plates. Right. They designed a polygonal turret
made of flat riveted steel plates. They call
it the omnibus turret. It was a universal design
that could be adapted right on the assembly line
to mount either the Hotchkiss machine gun or
the 37 millimeter cannon. It's almost like the
USB port of early tank design. You have a universal
interface, and you just plug in whichever weapon
system the mission requires. That's a very clean
way to look at it, though. I highly doubt the
mechanics wrestling a heavy 37 -millimeter cannon
into place in a muddy field felt it was quite
plug and play. Fair point, yeah. But tactically,
it gave the French command unprecedented flexibility.
They could mix and match their armor formations
based on the specific defenses they were facing.
And the way the French actually deployed these
FTs was a radical departure from the military
doctrine of the time. The sources note the French
high command was completely obsessed with the
idea of land battleships. The super heavy tanks.
Yeah, they were pouring massive amounts of money
into developing this monstrous tank called the
Char 2C. Because the prevailing thought was that
a tank needed to be an unstoppable, heavily armored
fortress. But Colonel Estienne envisioned a totally
different application of armor. He saw it differently.
He saw the FT acting like a mechanical cavalry.
He didn't want three or four slow lumbering targets
that enemy artillery could easily zero in on.
He wanted to overwhelm the German defenses. with
a swarm of these small, agile NFTs. To execute
a swarm doctrine, you need massive numbers. And
the sheer scale of the manufacturing output here
is staggering for the 1910s. Over 3 ,000 of these
tanks were built by France, mostly in 1918 alone.
An incredible industrial feat. And the only way
they achieved that was because Louis Renault
made a highly unusual business decision. He waived
his royalties for the design. He gave it away.
Yeah, he allowed other heavy industry competitors
like Berliet and Sumiway to just mass produce
his tank. It effectively became the world's first
open source military hardware. Renault understood
that defeating the central powers required the
total mobilization of French industry. Keeping
the design proprietary would have been a massive
bottleneck. Exactly. By distributing the blueprints,
They achieved the production volume SDN's swarm
doctrine demanded. And that swarm made its big
debut on May 31st, 1918 during the Third Battle
of the Aisne. A force of 30 FTs successfully
engaged and broke up a German infantry advance.
Now they eventually had to pull back because
they outpaced their own infantry support. Right,
went a little too fast. But the proof of concept
was absolutely there. They were highly mobile,
their small silhouette made them really hard
to hit, and they were terrifying in a pack. It
became so beloved by the troops that it earned
the nickname the Victory Tank. But there's a
highly ironic footnote in the sources regarding
the Victory Tank and the United States. Yes,
the technological exchange between the Allies.
When the U .S. entered the war in 1917, their
armored corps was basically nonexistent. They
had nothing. They saw the FT's success and essentially
said, we need thousands of those. Right. They
placed an order to build 4 ,400 modified versions
domestically, calling it the M1917. On paper,
it's a great plan. French factories are pushed
to the absolute limit, so let's utilize untouchable
American manufacturing power. Makes perfect sense
on paper. But the friction of transferring that
technology was immense. The sources show that
the delays in converting metric French blueprints
to American imperial measurements and tooling
up the factories were just catastrophic. So catastrophic
that not a single American -built M1917 made
it to Europe before the armistice in November
1918. Not one. The French actually had to lend
the American Expeditionary Forces 144 of their
own Renault NFTs just so the U .S. had tanks
to train and fight with. It's a stark reminder
that having a blueprint is very different from
having an operational assembly line. But while
the U .S. production arrived too late for the
First World War, the post -war life of the FT
is where the story broadens massively. Okay,
let's unpack this. Because once the ink dries
on the armistice, the Renault FT doesn't just
get retired to a museum. It basically goes on
a geopolitical world tour. Everywhere. It becomes
the foundational tank for almost every nation
on earth looking to build an armored force. The
sources list deployments in the Russian Civil
War, the Chinese warlord era, and in South America,
where Brazil used imported NFTs to crush domestic
revolts throughout the 1920s. It became the ubiquitous
tool of state power in the interwar period, and
its deployment during this time included major
tactical milestones. During the Rift War in North
Africa, Spanish forces utilized NFTs at the Alhusemas
Landing in 1925. This is a wild detail to me.
This is the first amphibious tank assault in
recorded history. Exactly. Just imagine the shock
of that operation. Tanks rolling off specially
modified landing barges directly onto a hostile
beach. Unbelievable for 1925. The amphibious
armor tactics that would later define the Pacific
Theater and the D -Day landings in the Second
World War were pioneered on the coast of Morocco
using the Renault FT. And it wasn't just the
physical French built tanks spreading across
the globe. The design itself was heavily copied.
Italy took the core FT layout and built their
own standard tank, the Fiat 3000. And the Soviet
Union's origin story with armor is even more
direct. Oh, yeah, the reverse engineering. The
Red Army captured 14 burnt out derelict NFTs
from white Russian forces during their civil
war. They hauled them back to a factory, painstakingly
reverse engineered them and built an exact copy
they dubbed the Rusky Reno. The Russian Renault.
Right. And that reverse engineering process provided
the baseline industrial education for the Soviet
tank program, directly leading to their first
domestic design, the T -18. So because Renault
had waived those royalties and allowed so many
factories to build the FT, the engineering DNA
of this little tank just permeated the global
arms industry. Which leads to some truly bizarre
spinoffs. The sources highlight a Polish modification
tested in 1926. They took an FT, completely removed
that iconic rotating turret, and instead mounted
twin gas cylinders on the roof. Gas cylinders?
Yeah, the idea was to drive this chassis across
the battlefield to generate massive smoke screens
or potentially deploy chemical weapons. Wow.
It proves how adaptable that 1916 chassis really
was. But adaptability only goes so far. Let's
fast forward to the outbreak of World War II
in 1939. By 1939 armored technology has evolved
exponentially. The FT, despite its revolutionary
layout, is hopelessly outclassed. Yeah, let's
just look at the specs. We mentioned that seven
-ton weight limit. By World War II, its maximum
speed was seven kilometers per hour. Walking
pace. Literally a walking pace. It wasn't designed
to exploit rapid breakthroughs like a German
panzer. It was designed specifically to advance
slowly so it wouldn't outrun the infantry crossing
a trench. But the biggest liability was that
one -man turret. The cognitive overload on the
crew in an FT was staggering. It's just a two
-man crew. You have a driver in the hall and
the commander in the turret. That's it. That
means the single man in the turret had to observe
the battlefield, locate targets, load the weapon,
aim the weapon, fire the weapon, and kick the
driver in the back to tell him which way to turn.
All at the exact same time. All simultaneously
inside a sweltering, deafening metal box. Against
multi -crew tanks where those tabs were divided
among three or four guys, it was a death trap.
And if we connect this to the bigger picture...
The sheer number of these obsolete NFTs still
in the French arsenal in 1940 is the source of
a massive, tragic historical myth. The myth of
French inferiority. Right. Because there is so
much archival footage of French troops deploying
these slow World War I relics against the German
Blitzkrieg, a popular narrative took hold that
France was defeated because they just had no
modern equipment. It's a fundamental misunderstanding
of the fall of France. The source material is
very clear here. The French military actually
possessed modern tanks in 1940 that were, in
many respects, superior to the German armor.
Really? Oh, yeah. Vehicles like the Char B1 and
the Somui S35 were heavily armored and heavily
armed. So why were they using NFTs on camera?
It came down to catastrophic strategic deployment.
The French high command spread their modern tanks
too thinly across the front line, penny -packeting
them, while the Germans concentrated their armor
into massive spearheads. When the French lines
broke out of pure desperation, they pulled hundreds
of obsolete NFTs out of storage depots and threw
them into the fight. The visual of so many of
these antique tanks burning by the roadside painted
a very grim, highly misleading picture of French
technological inferiority. And the thousands
of NFTs that were captured lead us to the surprising
second lives of this tank. The German Wehrmacht
captured over 1700 of them. Now, they obviously
weren't sending them to the front lines against
Soviet T -34s. No, that would be suicide. They
found uses for them. They deployed hundreds for
airfield defense and internal security in occupied
territories. The sources even document German
forces using Renault NFTs for street fighting
in Paris during the 1944 liberation. It's a surreal
historical overlap. fighting in the streets of
Paris during World War II with a tank designed
in Paris during World War I. Just crazy. And
the geopolitical chaos of the era meant the FT
kept popping up on opposite sides of the conflict.
In North Africa, during Operation Torch, the
armed forces of Vichy, France actually deployed
NFTs against the allied invasion forces. That
means there were actual combat engagements where
French forces in Renault NFTs were actively trying
to fight against newly arrived American M4 Sherman
tanks. The technological mismatch there is almost
hard to comprehend. It is. But incredibly, World
War II wasn't even the end of the line. Let's
fast forward through the entire Cold War. You'd
think a 1916 tank is safely retired to museums
by now. But then we hit the 1980s. This is perhaps
the most astounding detail in the entire historical
record of the FT. During the Soviet -Afghan War
in the 1980s, combatants in Afghanistan were
still using these ancient NFTs as stationary
pillboxes and roadblocks. And it gets even crazier.
In 2003, during the U .S. occupation of Afghanistan,
American forces literally discovered derelict
Afghan military Renault NFTs sitting in scrap
yards in Kabul. Just let that image sink in for
a moment. A tank designed in 1916, an era when
airplanes were still made of wood and canvas,
sitting in a 21st century war zone where GPS
-guided munitions and drones are operating overhead.
It is absolutely mind -bending. It really closes
a historical loop that spans nearly nine decades.
From muddy trenches of the Western Front, to
the beaches of Morocco, to the streets of Paris,
and finally to the mountains of Afghanistan.
The FT bore witness to the entire evolution of
mechanized warfare. So what does this all mean
for you? Think about the technology you interact
with every single day. Your smartphone, your
laptop, maybe your car. It probably feels obsolete
after three or four years. We're conditioned
for it. We are completely conditioned to a rapid
cycle of technological replacement. Now imagine
a machine engineered at a time when horse -drawn
carriages were still sharing the roads with cars
that completely dictated the permanent layout
of all modern armor and physically remained in
active combat zones for over 85 years. What a
stunning legacy. The Renault FT is the ultimate
testament to getting a design right the first
time. It wasn't the biggest, it certainly wasn't
the fastest, but its layout was so perfectly
conceived that it could not be fundamentally
improved upon, only upgraded. And that leads
to a really fascinating thread to pull on. The
Renault FT's iconic shape, the turd on top, the
crew in the front, the engine in the back, wasn't
necessarily born purely from a stroke of theoretical
genius. Right. As we discussed, that layout was
heavily forced upon its designers by the strict
weight limitations and the severe weakness of
early 20th century engines. They had to organize
it that way just to make the machine move. That's
true. It raises an important question for you
to explore on your own. What other foundational
technologies in our modern world have been permanently
locked into their current shapes? Not because
it's the absolute best way to do it, but simply
because of the temporary technological limitations
of the specific era in which they were born.
How much of the modern world we take for granted
is just the legacy of an old workaround? That
is a brilliant question to leave off on. Next
time you see a tank in a movie or on the news,
you'll know exactly why it looks the way it does,
and you'll know the name Louis Renault. Thank
you so much for joining us on this deep dive
into the little French tank that conquered the
world. We'll catch you on the next one.