Citroën half-tracks on expeditions

André Citroën used long crossings to prove the Kégresse half-track and to publicise it. Five K1s left Touggourt on 17 December 1922 and reached Timbuktu on 7 January 1923, the first crossing of the Sahara by motor vehicle. Smaller missions followed in 1923–24 — Georges Estienne’s reconnaissance from Colomb-Béchar to Tessalit, Audouin-Dubreuil’s second crossing to Bourem, and Captain René Bertrand’s 3,000 km from Kabul to Tehran — and in 1925 Lieutenant-Colonel Courtot took six P4 Ts from Tunisia to Chad.

The Croisière Noire left Colomb-Béchar on 28 October 1924 with eight P4 Ts and seventeen men, among them the painter Alexandre Iacovleff and the film-maker Léon Poirier, and split at Kampala into four groups for Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, Mozambique and the Cape before meeting in Madagascar in June 1925; L’Éléphant à la Tour is the one car in a public collection. The Croisière Jaune left Beirut on 4 April 1931 with a Pamir group of seven half-tracks and set out from Tianjin two days later with a China group of seven P21s; two Pamir cars reached Gilgit across the Himalaya, the China group was held at Urumqi for months, and the expedition entered Beijing on 12 February 1932. Haardt died in Hong Kong on 16 March 1932.