Introduction

The Renault UE was a small armored tracked vehicle created to carry supplies to the front lines. It carried a crew of 2, no armament, and had a tilting supply bin at the rear. It usually towed a tracked/wheeled trailer and was also used to bring mortars and 25mm anti-tank guns to the front as well.

The Book

This book is the first in Editions du Barbotin's Focus series. This series is meant to provide a detailed view of the subject vehicle instead of the general overview provided by their TrackStory line. The book has 50 pages measuring 6.75" x 9.5" with text in both French and English. It was written by Pascal Danjou with color profiles by Eric Schwartz and English translation by Claude Gillono and was published in 2007 by Editions du Barbotin.

Review

The book is divided in three parts. The first part is 14 pages long and covers the history of the UE, including the various production batches. It is illustrated with black and white pictures from the period including the armed casemate version for China and some very nice detail photos and plans for the trailer used to transport the UE.

The second part is the real meat for us modelers. It consists of 30 pages of color photos covering the UE and trailer at the Saumur Tank Museum in France, as well 4 color photos of the UE2 with AMX casemate at the Trieste Museum. The photos cover just about every detail you would want to see. There are some period photos of the engine outside of the hull as well as modern photos of the engine as installed in the Saumur vehicle. There are close-up photos of the road wheels, idlers, drive sprockets, treads, battery compartment, driver's cockpit, and the tilting bin. The only thing missing are detailed photos of the vehicle commander's cockpit. There doesn't seem to be much in there from the glimpses you see of it in other photos. The trailer is given the same type of detail walk-around.

The third part has two pages of 1/35 scale 5-view color profiles of the UE model 1931 and the UE2 Model 1937. Unfortunately, both profiles have a problem as far as the position of the bogies is concerned. The leading edge of the first road wheel should be even with the trailing edge of the drive sprocket. Since there is a gap in the profiles, this means the bogies are scrunched together too tightly. The rear bogie seems to be in the same place as on the Tamiya kit. At first I thought this was an error in the Tamiya kit, but when I compared it to photos of the real thing, they seemed to match the kit.

Conclusion

I think this book makes a very good start to Editions du Barbotin's Focus series. The book was invaluable to me as I did my in-box review of the Tamiya UE kit which can be found here on Armorama.