WI : Traffic Jam in the Ardennes

[DracoLazarus]

By the time of May 1940, the FT-17 tanks were pretty much recognised as useless, and pretty much a waste of space.
However, there is one place a waste of space could have impeded the Germans quite a bit. The Ardennes.

So, let's assume that an enterprising French officer posted in Sedan has in storage a hundred FTs without guns, rolls them over to the roads in the Ardennes, makes a roadblock there from the tanks, removes the engines, petrol and turrets, and leaves them there, leaving a few sentries with a radio just in case.

How much would the roadblock, combined with the sentries giving out the location of the German spearhead to the French HQ in an irrefutable manner, turn the German war plan on its head ?

 

[jsb]

By the time of May 1940, the FT-17 tanks were pretty much recognised as useless, and pretty much a waste of space.
However, there is one place a waste of space could have impeded the Germans quite a bit. The Ardennes.

So, let's assume that an enterprising French officer posted in Sedan has in storage a hundred FTs without guns, rolls them over to the roads in the Ardennes, makes a roadblock there from the tanks, removes the engines, petrol and turrets, and leaves them there, leaving a few sentries with a radio just in case.

How much would the roadblock, combined with the sentries giving out the location of the German spearhead to the French HQ in an irrefutable manner, turn the German war plan on its head ?

Why remove the guns?

Even if they are obsolete and are examples without running engines, they would do more good as MG pillboxes covering AT mines and barbed wire than as physical roadblocks that can simply be removed by anybody with winch or explosives?

 

[DracoLazarus]

Why remove the guns?

Even if they are obsolete and are examples without running engines, they would do more good as MG pillboxes covering AT mines and barbed wire than as physical roadblocks that can simply be removed by anybody with winch or explosives?

Because the French officer doesn't have a lot of spare manpower and has been ordered to man his section of the Maginot line.
But placing mines under the FTs and barbed wire around them is indeed a good idea to delay the Germans further.

 

[jsb]

Because the French officer doesn't have a lot of spare manpower

If you are leaving sentries then you have the manpower to put a gunner in each turret to turn them into a set of small forts that needs to be dealt with a each will buy a few minutes...

If you don't they are simply heavy lumps of metal that can be winched of the road in even less time its only 6.5 tons with all the bits in it.....

Not an FT but not much lighter than an empty one....

 

[Bad@logic]

It wouldn't accomplish anything of note and would be next to useless. There were times that the Germans ran into obstacles left by the Chasseurs ardennais during their advance in the Ardennes, as related by To Lose a Battle, but these were not covered by defensive fires and enemy resistance. The same about the variety of defensive obstacles that the Luxembourgeois had put up, which the Germans simply drove across during their advance across the country. If the Renault FTs are not covered by defensive troops, the Germans will simply push them off to the side of the road and keep moving. As with most things, defensive advantages only count if you actually have something to defend it with.

There are also far better ways to form a road block than the FTs anyway, which do have limited utility in 1940 as airfield defense vehicles, internal order units, training tanks, turrets that you can put on defense lines, and they're still capable of fighting Panzer Is and IIs if need be, so something of an emergency back up supply which is better than nothing strictly speaking. The French had parcs mobiles which were designed to be mobile fortification matérial, and had devised mobile anti-tank traps which they would push up in Belgium. They would be almost as useless without something to cover them, if I presume marginally more difficult to move aside and bypass, but they would be far less costly than abandoning hundreds of tanks.