Adolphe Kégresse
His all-terrain half-tracks were invented for Russian winters, but ended up playing a significant role in World War Two
IT WAS FORTUNATE for Adolphe Kégresse that, for much of the Romanov rule of Russia from 1613, French was the lingua franca of the court. When Tsar Nicholas II, recently smitten with the automobile bug, decided in 1905 to hire a personal chauffeur with the necessary mechanical expertise to maintain his cars, it was towards France that he looked. Kégresse soon proved his worth and was appointed head of the mechanical department of the Russian imperial garage. As one might imagine, the garage was not an oily rag backstreet affair. The Tsar’s obsession had seen his fleet swell to 21 cars with a driver for each and an annual budget of 126,000 rubles, the equivalent of around a million pounds in today’s money.
Kégresse had been born in 1879 in the French Alpine commune of Héricourt in the Haute-Saône region close to the Swiss border. After completing his education at a technical school in the nearby city of Montbéllard, he started working in Glay for Jeanperrin Frères, which had recently expanded its bicycle business into motorbikes and automobiles. In 1900 he enlisted in the 1st Marine Artillery Regiment for a three-year stint as an engineer. On returning to civilian life he headed off to St Petersburg and his post with the Tsar.
Famously bitter, the Russian winters made motoring at best hazardous and at worse often impossible. In 1910 Tsar Nicholas gave Kégresse the task of adapting a vehicle for use in the snow or on ice. From the mid-1800s inventors had been exploring the idea of continuous flexible tracks to drive over difficult terrain, the results being variously described as an ‘endless railway’ or a ‘stiff chain’. The term ‘caterpillar’ arrived in 1904, coined by a soldier at the Aldershot military base when he watched the progress of a tractor under test.
Kégresse’s big idea was to apply the tracks only to the rear of the vehicle, leaving the front end and steering gear as standard – in other words, he’d invented the half-track.
He devised a bolt-on bogie system fitted to the vehicle’s rear axle, comprising a continuous belt running over a large driving wheel with a large idler wheel at the other end and a number of smaller supporting wheels between. Rather than using clunky and heavy interlocking metal plates, the track was a lightweight reinforced canvas belt with metal inserts and rubber pads spaced around it for grip.
The idea worked amazingly well and in 1913 Kégresse set about converting part of the Tsar’s fleet. Delaunay-Belleville, Mercedes, Packard and the home-grown Russo-Balt cars were given the Kégresse half-track treatment. As an option for ‘off-piste’ action in deep snow he also fitted skis on the front wheels, creating what amounts to the world’s first snowmobiles. Undoubtedly much fun was had by the Tsar and his courtiers as they whooshed around his Winter Palace estate.
Kégresse applied for a patent on his system in 1917, neatly coinciding with the October Revolution. With revolution underway and the Tsar toppled, Kégresse thought it prudent to head back to France. However, the new boys in charge of Russia knew a good idea when they saw one and continued with the half-track conversions. Even Lenin, who despite his socialist views was not adverse to the odd bourgeois luxury, had his new Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost kitted out with a Kégresse system. Back in France, Kégresse was snapped up by André Citroën, who immediately saw the commercial potential of his invention. Citroën teamed Kégresse with engineer and associate Jacques Hinstin to further refine the system and bought the old Clément-Bayard factory at Levallois-Perret to produce the new CitroënKégresse-Hinstin.
A master publicist, Citroën mounted a series of highly publicised endurance epics for the new vehicle. A five-vehicle convoy crossed the Sahara in 1922 on a 2000-mile trek to Timbuktu, taking 21 days – a journey that would take a camel train six months. More extraordinary expeditions followed, through African jungle and across Asia, making the name Kégresse world-famous.
The Kégresse was produced in a multitude of versions and, in the late 1920s, the US Army purchased several Citroën-Kégresse vehicles for evaluation and eventually a licence to use the system in its own design that would result in the production of over 40,000 M2 and M3 half-tracks during World War Two.
Adolphe was awarded the Légion d’Honneur for his achievements, but left Citroën in 1935 on the death of André Citroën and the company’s acquisition by Michelin, continuing his design work from his country house in Croissey-sur-Seine, to the west of Paris. Barely remembered or acknowledged now is that Adolphe Kégresse also invented and patented the dual-clutch gearbox that he called ‘AutoServe’, fitting a working prototype into a Citroën Traction Avant in 1939. It was another four decades before Porsche revived the idea with its PDK transmission.
Neither was Kégresse completely done with tracked vehicles. At the outbreak of war he developed a miniature, tank-like tracked bomb remotely controlled by wire that, after the Germans discovered the prototype when they overran Kégresse’s workshop, was eventually put into production by the Wehrmacht as the Goliath. Kégresse died from a heart attack in 1943, sadly before he could enjoy the sight of the liberating Allied armies parading through Paris in their M3 half-tracks.