Tank Scratchbuild: Painting the Schneider FA

In the previous posts (1,2) I designed and scratchbuilt an alt-history interwar tank, the Scheider FA. Now, I've painted and weathered the tank.

I used the French WWI and Interwar Camo set of airbrush paints from Vallejo for the base colours. I marked out the camo areas with putty, put down a colour, waited for the putty to dry, then

I wanted to use a canonical Schneider scheme for this tank, but interwar French camo schemes are not consistent or well-documented. After many hours of research, I decided to go with a made-up scheme, vaguely based on a Schneider CA1 scheme from 1918.

The black crosshatches near vision slits were meant to disguise their location from enemy snipers and anti-tank rifles.

The interior of the engine bay was primed with a dark red oxide primer, while the fighting compartment started with black primer, followed by a white layer, to create a few false shadows.

The crew models fit inside perfectly. I'm glad the sculpted uniforms and helmets turned out. I need to touch up a few interior details, but I wanted to get the bulk of the tank assembled first.

Loader, commander, and gunner in the turret, driver, backup driver/radio operator, and backup loader/mechanic in the hull.

Here's how the tank compares to two other classic French interwar tanks: the Char B1 and the Renault FT.

The Char B1 was converted from the Tamiya B1 Bis kit to resemble the Char B1 101 prototype created as a partnership between Schneider and Renault. The twin machine turret seems to be a Schneider specialty, as it (or derivatives) crop up a few times in the literature. 

The conversion involved replacing the engine deck, towing hook, and turret, as well as a few minor adjustments to the hull. This article from Panzerserra was very helpful. You can see how a good modeler would tackle the project, instead of my ambitious but somewhat eccentric approach.

The turret was sculpted using apoxie sculpt over a bottle cap, then detailed with plasticard and wire.

The towing hook was built from wire, plasticard, and spare bits of photoetch brass.

The Renault FT is a superb kit from Meng. I didn't convert it at all, except to add some more stowage to the trench-crossing rail.

"What's with the crudely painted yellow stars?" I hear you ask. You thought this post was just going to be tank pictures? Wrong! Time to learn.

The European Civil War, Continued

Alternate history is a good excuse to learn about actual history, provided you start with a plausible end goal and don't take shortcuts. If you want to answer the question "Why Didn't X Happen?" you need to be able to explain "What Did Happen And Why." Since no historian has ever successfully managed this feat, you're in for a delightful exercise.

To briefly summarize this alternate history (and to avoid overloading this post with citations and quotes), the Paris Peace Conference collapses in early 1919, partially due to the sudden death of President Wilson after the kidnapping of Kaiser Wilhelm. President Marshall is unwilling to enforce Wilson's vaguely explained Fourteen Points by force, and even less willing to keep American troops in Europe. Colonel House and Secretary of State Lansing are left to salvage the Peace Conference with only their economic and logistic support cards to play.

The prospect of renewed total war, on (as the public sees it) flimsy and bloodthirsty grounds, leads to mass desertion, unrest, and rebellion. The UK tries to extract her army from the continent to fight the spectre of Communism at home and abroad (and very real uprisings in her colonies). France and Belgium attempt to garrison the Rhineland with insufficient and demoralized troops. Grasping for an unambiguous victory to offset the moral opprobrium of the blockade, the Kaiser's kidnapping, and the tragic muddle of the Conference, Lloyd George commits to "expelling the Turk from Europe," with catastrophic consequences in India, Syria, and elsewhere.

These alternate 1920s are at least as tumultuous as the real world, but with the added chaos of a divided France. Communist uprisings (including the Three Day Soviet of Paris), the militant National Front created by Marshal Pétain in the Rhineland, the battered Third Republic, and a variety of industrial/technocratic corporate states vie for control of France.

Western Europe becomes a mirror of Mexico and China, prompting John Gunther to write, with some exaggeration, that "An unbroken belt of warlordism stretches from Lisbon to Shanghai."

Yellow Socialism, Eugene Schneider II, and The War That Will End Peace

Yellow Socialism, or Syndicalisme Jaune, sought to avoid dreaded Communism, or any form of collective bargaining, by the creation of corporate-funded (and essentially domesticated) unions. The movement (if it can be called that) was created and largely funded by Eugene Schneider II. Incidentally, you may notice very different tones in the English and French Wikipedia articles on the topic.

Eugene Scheider II was also interested in empire-building. In this alt history, he makes the leap from building with capital backed by state power to building with capital backed by borrowed state power. Le Creusot and Rhône basin pay lip-service to whatever central government is currently recognized. A shadow-state, more flamboyant than most.

Total war proved to be unprofitable for everyone; almost as unprofitable as total peace. Laws capturing excess profit (and were) circumvented by investing in capital, which was not taxed. All that built-up capital in factories, machine tools, raw goods, and skilled labour would go to waste (or require costly readjustments, or be sold below its war-inflated purchase price) if the threat of war vanished completely. 

There is a limit on what the consumer will pay for a refrigerator, even if it is stuffed with features. It's a big box that makes things cold. Diminishing returns kick in. But if there is a development limit on a "kill-someone-waaaay-over-there-machine" we have yet to reach it.

The most desirable state, from the perspective of post-WW1 industrial conglomerates, seems to be peace at home (the circumscribed model factory-home, where wages pass through a worker like rented beer), a lopsided peace with major trading partners, war scares on the borders, and a few wars in unprofitable and unsympathetic parts of the world to serve as testbeds, advertisements, training, and cautionary tales. That this system, in this alt-history thought experiment, accidentally slipped into warlordism cannot be surprising.

Eugene Schneider II seemed to want to create a model community to match his ideology, like Henry Ford's Fordlandia or Pullman's Pullman. In this alt-history, he added an army to defend it.

These two hundred men, the cream of financial France, are an  amazing plutocracy. They are as snobbish as a vintage sardine or a Rue de la Paix hat. Mere wealth cannot buy its way into this  velvety inner circle. The two most flagrantly conspicuous of modern French millionaires, Coty the perfume man, Citroen the automobile manufacturer, were not members of what is customarily called merely the ‘oligarchy’. The chosen insiders combine the 6hereditary distinction of family as well as the contemporary command of wealth. They rise straight from pre-Revolutionary times; they were the upper bourgeoisie during Napoleon; they worked  together, consolidated their power under Louis Philippe and Napoleon III. The last person really ‘taken in’ by the oligarchy is supposed to have been Eugene Schneider, the steel and arms merchant, about thirty years ago.

-John Gunther, Inside Europe, 1940, pg. 167.

The root of the munitions problem is the fact that only highly industrialized countries can profitably manufacture appreciable quantities of arms. These countries sell to those less industrialized. Ninety eight per cent of the total arms exports of the world comes from ten countries; about sixty-five per cent comes from Great Britain, the United States, France, and Sweden, the four greatest exporting countries. France, typified by Schneider-Creusot, supplied in 1932 no less than 27.9 per cent of the world’s total output of arms.

Schneider-Creusot, like all great arms companies, is several things — an arms firm, a myth, a steel works, a microcosm of the munitions industry, a national institution, a nightmare to pacifists, an idol to patriots, a military necessity to more than one country, and a whale of a good business. The directors of Schneider and the other firms in the Comite des Forges which do munitions business are quite mild-mannered gentlemen. They do not seem ferocious; but their business is the invention, manufacture, and sale of implements of death.

The arms companies are as incestuous as white mice. They play together and breed. This is because they are in a signal sense noncompetitive; good business for one means good business for the others; obviously if Schneider, say, gets a big order from Country X, other companies will have a better chance of business from Country Y, which is X’s unfriendly neighbor. As soon as one country buys a new military invention, other countries must buy it also. Arms firms may underbid one another for a contract in a single state; but internationally they all stand to gain.

Extraordinarily interrelated and intertwined, the arms firms lace the whole world in their net. Schneider and Vickers were connected through Sir Basil Zaharoff, munitions salesman extraordinary. Schneider controls Skoda, the great Czechoslovak munitions firm, through a French holding company, the Union Européenne. An allied bank finances a big Hungarian bank, which provides loans for Schneider sales. The Schneider interests are believed to  control an Austrian bank also, which is interested in the chief  Austrian steel company, the Alpine Montangesellschaft. But the Alpine concern is ‘owned’ by the German Steel Trust! And through a Dusseldorff firm, Rheinmetall, Schneider is believed to be linked to Krupp.

It is, of course, an old story that arms firms maintain an extreme  political impartiality in their business. They sell to each side in  any war. They sell to friend and foe alike. Pluck a bullet out of  the heart of a British boy shot on the North-west Frontier, and like  as not you will find it of British make. Paul Faure, deputy in the  French chamber, is in possession of photographs showing representatives of Turkey and Bulgaria buying arms at Creusot before the War which during the War were used against French troops; he has also a precious picture of Eugene Schneider on a yachting party with the Ex-Kaiser Wilhelm. French munition traffickers helped arm Abdel-Krim in his Morocco campaign against the French. The Turks used British cannon to beat the British at the Dardanelles; British battleships were sunk by British mines. 

-John Gunther, Inside Europe, 1940, pp. 172-173

Management and paternalism

Whilst capitalising on technical innovations and diversifying the productions (steel, iron ships military machine guns, tanks and artillery, then electricity and civil nuclear power), each generation of Schneider contributed to extending the factories and improving the town’s urban development.

In addition to their economic achievements, the Schneiders developed Le Creusot into a model industrial community by introducing a paternalistic policy and enforcing it in all aspects of the workers daily lives: housing, education, recreation, healthcare. Their visionary, philanthropic business model was paternalistic in the sense that the Schneiders provided employees decent and affordable houses, amenities, welfare provisions and overall improved living conditions.  They shaped the town’s architecture and at the same time, ruled the economic and social life of Le Creusot. . Within a few years, they acquired a worldwide reputation and hosted many visits from customers and Heads of States from France and around the world.

Until today, Le Creusot celebrates the memory of the Schneider family, the paternalistic leadership and culture they left behind. Doted around town, a series of statues immortalize each of the iron masters, while streets and working-class districts echo their names. Boulevard Henri-Paul Schneider for example is named after a tragically lost family child, or the miners’ district called Jean and Françoise Schneider. Throughout town, you will find evocative street names that plunge us back to industrial times.

To get a deeper insight into this charismatic family of iron masters and understand the scale of their impact on Le Creusot, a visit to the Chateau de la Verrerie, their former residence, is highly recommended!

-Creusot Montceau Tourisme (accessed 2024/01/02)

The Wipers Times
aka
Tumblr Shitposts (1916 edition)

Further Reading:

• 'European Diplomacy Between Two Wars, 1919-1939', (1972), Quadrangle.
• 'The Secret International: Armament Firms At Work' (1932), The Union of Democratic Control.
  
• Fredrick Manning, 'Her Privates We', 1930, Serpent's Tail Classics. (Which, as an aside, contains the first appearance of the phrase "fucked up" in print.)
• Harold Nicholson, 'Peacemaking 1919', (1933), Constable.
• Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, The Paris Peace Conference, 1919 (1942), particularly Vol. 3.
• Jamie Camplin, 'The Rise of the Plutocrats: Wealth and Power in Edwardian England', (1978), Constable.
  
• John Gunther, 'Inside Europe', (1940), Harper & Brothers.
• Robert Lansing, 'The Peace Negotiations', (1921), Houghton, Mifflin Co.
• William A. Schabas, 'The Trial of the Kaiser' (2018), Oxford.
  
• Samuel Kalman, 'The Extreme Right in Interwar France: The Faisceau and the Croix de Feu', (2008), Routledge.  
• Modris Eksteins, 'Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age', (1989), Lester, & Orpen Dennys.
  
• James E. Sheridan, China in Disintegration: The Republican Era in Chinese History, 1912-1949, (1975), Macmillan.
• John Gunther, 'Inside Asia', (1939), Harper & Brothers.
  
• Edward A. McCord, 'The Power of the Gun: The Emergence of Modern Chinese Warlordism' (1993), University of California Press.
• Carol Willcox Melton, 'Between War and Peace: Woodrow Wilson and the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia, 1918-1921', (2001), Mercer University Press.

I am also working through:

• Elvire de Brissac, 'Il était une fois les Schneider : 1871-1942', (2007), Grasset. 
• Jean Garrigues, 'Les patrons et la politique : de Schneider à Seillière', (2002), Perrin.

And knocking billowing clouds of rust off my French in the process.