We've covered quite a few tanks now
on Inside the Chieftain’s Hatch
but most of them have tended to be
either late war or post war designs.
Now, at the other end of the spectrum
and it's often said that the best tanks
in the beginning of World War two belonged to France,
so where better to come
and check it out for ourselves?
Bienvenue a France, et le Musee des Blindes au Saumur.
In today's episode, the R35.
In the interwar period France
was making do with basically two kinds of tank:
FT and its descendants, and the D1 and D 2.
The D1 was a little bit inadequately armored,
the D2 was too heavy to perform the light tank role
that the FT was performing.
It really only existed as a backstop to the B1 program.
There the situation remained until 1933
when Hotchkiss got a little bit bored of waiting
for the French government to issue
a set of requirements to replace the FT
and it started its own program.
This nudged the French Armaments Advisory Council into action.
They issued a set requirements.
It was going to be a two-man tank,
8-10 kilometers an hour, three centimeters of armor,
and a machine gun or two
and maybe a small caliber main gun.
In effect this was an FT replacement,
a direct descendant.
Renault came on board with the ZM prototype.
However, the requirements were changing rapidly
more rapidly than Renault could keep up with.
Testing with the French 25 millimeter anti-tank gun
indicated that perhaps 3 centimeters was too weak
and you needed four.
However Renault was either fixing bugs
or improving the tank,
they couldn't do both at the same time
and eventually things came to a head with German rearmament
and the decision was made to simply build the Renault
as it worked as opposed to the Renault improved to the requirements.
The hull consists of three major parts
that have been bolted together
and as you can see it's got a very good slope in the front.
The problem is that casting technology
was still rather in its infancy
at the time and the armor wasn't what it should have been.
Testing showed that it was
vulnerable not only to 25 millimeter anti-tank gun fire in places,
in some places they could punch through
with eight millimeter AP.
Components on the front on the left-hand side
you start off with a rearview mirror.
A neat feature you don't often see in tanks of the time.
A little bit further inboard we have the siren
and then further forward of that
we have a light with a sheltered housing for low visibility.
The asymmetric nature of the tank is visible,
the driver is on the left hand side,
the right hand side is the gearbox
which then connects forward to the steering system
to the sprocket wheels at the front of the tank.
As you come around to the side of the tank,
we’re going to start off with the sponson bin,
it’s a push button release system, a little bit unusual.
It's not a huge bin,
it's really just going to be some of the tools
that you'd use to maintain the vehicle.
Further forward you'll see the marker lights
which seem to be relatively common
on French tanks at the time,
they are amber at the front, red at the rear
and they'll basically simply
at night mark out the outside edges of the tank.
Moving further down to the running gear
it is basically a development of the AMR 35 light tank
that Renault had been building previously.
It has two bogies each with a single pair of road wheels
a sort of a Horstmann suspension system.
Further forward it has, I guess I'll call it a half-bogie,
it's a simple single wheel on a bell crank.
The tracks are single pin,
very short pitch with guide horns on the outsides.
To change out the track pin,
they're held in place by a little plug.
You knock out the plug
and then you can have the pin come out on the other end.
That is it for the side, next the back.
As you can expect with the tank this small trench
crossing capability was considered to be a bit of a problem.
The solution was the same as its predecessor tank, the FT.
They added a tail to many of these little Renaults
in order to get across a wider gap.
If it had a tail the spare wheel would be mounted
on the tail instead of on the back door here.
The exhaust you can see comes out the back of the tank,
comes around to the left, forward to the muffler,
and then back down again.
Behind the two doors which are already unbolted,
you're going to see the engine on one side
and the cooling system is on the other.
The engine is a 5.9 liter 4-cylinder,
puts out about 85 horsepower,
gets the tank to about 20 kilometers an hour.
Not exactly blinding speed
but this was an infantry tank,
it wasn't really supposed to go much faster the infantry
it was supporting in the first place.
You can also see an interesting feature here
is for the hand crank where it meshes
in to the crank shaft down here through this little port.
On the left-hand side you're going to see the belts
which drive the radiator fan,
it's a water-cooled system,
and here we have one of the wrenches used
in the track tensioning system which is underneath here:
Pull out a cotter pin undo this retaining bolt,
that loosens up the teeth which are here,
and that allows you to then adjust the tension
by use of this bolt down here.
When you’re done, obviously
reverse the process, off you go.
Two ports on the left hand side on the rear deck.
The first one here is the fuel filler cap.
It is a self-sealing tank, 166 liters gets the vehicle
all of that 80 kilometers of range.
Not fantastic. Further forward is the cap for the radiator,
nothing particularly dramatic about that:
Insert coolant here.
The turret is a standard one,
it’s the APX-R and it’s is in common
with the Hotchkiss of the same era.
A couple of significant features,
the first is the lack of a turret door.
The way in and out is this little
thing at the back here upon which I am seated.
The other significant feature is the cupola,
a little dome at the top which is completely
inexplicable to me
and I don't know what they were thinking.
It does rotate so that your single little vision
slit can see whatever it is that you want to see,
within limits.
The poor man is stupidly overworked.
The merits, or lack of merits, of the one man turret are long debated.
Suffice to say it does have the advantages
of being small hard, to hit well,
armored for the weight,
and if you wanted it to it could fit on an FT
or D1 or something like that,
and about ends the list of merits.
Communication is not a problem
because there isn't any.
If you are not the command tank good luck
trying to see what your commander is trying
to tell you to even that little slit at the front
or maybe on the sides of the turret,
and if you were lucky enough to have a radio,
which was not common at all,
the ER 54 would be down in the hull in a stowage bin.
The gun is the 37 millimeter SA-18
and it was chosen primarily for economic reasons.
Firstly there was a whole lot of ammunition
already sitting around French storerooms.
Secondly even a lot of the guns didn’t need to be built:
Simply take them off the old Renault FT tanks
which were being decommissioned
and mount them straight on to the new turret.
In terms of capability,
the 37 perhaps left something to be desired.
The high-explosive round can be compared
unfavorably to an M203 40-millimeter grenade launcher
like you might find underneath a rifle today,
and the armor-piercing round was even worse,
it did about two centimeters.
Famously enough a few vehicles got up-gunned
with a longer barrelled SA-38 gun.
This added a complete additional centimeter of penetration
bringing it up to three, which, quite frankly, is pathetic.
The remainder of the offensive firepower
was conducted by use of the 7.5 millimeter machine gun.
Ammunition capacity in total was about
2,400 rounds of drum magazines
for the 7.5 and about a hundred rounds for the 37.
Because the AP round was so terrible
they didn’t really carry many,
and the vast majority, maybe 80% was High Explosive.
There seems to have been little practical
standardization on tactical markings.
Prior to September 39 it was common:
The battalion within each regiment,
there were two battalions,
was determined by the color blue or red.
The company was determined by the card suit
and the platoon was determined
by a background shape either a circle,
a square or a triangle.
Afterwards there was a change.
Companies now will be determined by the color,
the platoons by the card suit although
a company commander would have all four suits
painted on the side of his tank.
There was one unit, the 23rd BCC,
that said “to heck with it all”
and simply invented its own system of lines and Vs
and even to this day
nobody's ever been able to decipher it.
Inside I am trying to think of the correct
superlatives to describe the ergonomics
of this fighting position.
I am torn.
I don't know if it's “atrocious”, “god-awful” or “horrendous”,
but suffice to say, it's a death trap.
So my first problem was simply getting in
through the hatch at the back,
and this locking lever which is supposed to lock the hatch
in place of course will dangle right down…
and let's just say the family jewels
were in danger as I came in.
Having successfully negotiated this obstacle,
the next problem was the fixed recoil guard.
In fact it's double purpose,
it’s not just a recoil guard it is also the system for aiming.
This does not move out of the way or anything
best you can do is up or down,
and that was the next obstacle
for the various parts of my anatomy to avoid.
Once I came down in there is no seat.
I'm seated on some component of the engine
which I am probably not supposed to be seated on.
The closest thing he has is a sling,
there are attachment points on each side
for a leather sling which could be used.
Um. yeah I don't know if you would or not.
The rest of the controls,
well he does have a regular hand traverse on the left,
nothing too astonishing there.
The elevation is controlled,
we saw this before with Matilda,
its two hand grips with a trigger
on the right hand side
and a shoulder mount for elevation.
The sight is mounted to the left
and the seven point five millimeter
machine gun is mounted on the right.
The vision dome on the top,
in order to rotate it because no handles
or anything he actually has to use his head.
His helmet will mesh up with this dome
and you can look around using that.
I don't know what they were thinking.
They were obviously and do things on the cheap,
but still I don't know what they were thinking.
Suffice to say my feet are well up on the floor,
on the right hand side is the power shaft,
directly behind me without a firewall although
I don't know if there is supposed to be one or not,
is the engine bay.
This is a runner so they may not just have it installed
for maintenance purposes.
Ammunition will be stowed
on the right and the left
it will be stowed angled on the right
and vertical on the left.
Outside of that it's got a couple of vision slits
on the sides, used to be originally diascopes
in the original, say 50-100 vehicles,
and then they change to the more traditional vision slits.
And that's all I'm going to say for this.
God help any tank commander
or let alone any officer who's in here
trying to control the tank.
Oh, by the way, there's no intercom
you're used to using physical contact
to direct your driver,
try to see where you're going,
grab ammunition from down front,
load it into the tube, aim it, fire the coax,
and try to avoid running into holes in the battlefield.
I have no words.
I'm going to sit in the driver's seat.
So I have moved forward from the commander's position
to the somewhat more luxurious driver’s position.
That’s ‘somewhat’, it's a relative term.
I am seated on a cushion on the hull floor
and thus my feet are about as high as my posterior is.
Even at that my knees barely clear at the front panel.
This is a two-piece hatch
and you can see how reassuringly thick
this is with at least as a reasonable slope.
Of course the upper visor is supposed to come down,
it's held in place by a little friction lock here.
You unscrew this, you pull down on this,
and you pull…
that's the idea.
However, I suspect nobody has been crazy enough
to try to drive this vehicle in the last 70 years
with the visor down, it seems to be stuck in place.
If that lack of visibility wasn't enough
and you felt you wanted even less
what you could do is you could block up
your vision ports, one on each side so you
would be just stuck now
with the one direct forward.
I’ve got nothing.
The three pedals are as you would expect
the clutch is on the left
the brake is in the middle,
and the accelerator is on the right,
and the brake activates a single brake band
which appears to be leather
and the reason I can tell this is that the brake itself
is approximately six inches to my right of my foot.
The power shaft comes all the way
from the gearbox just behind the turret forward
to the brake and then into
the steering system front and right.
The gearbox itself is the four-speed,
so reverse forward, first back second, third and fourth,
and the steering is conducted
by use of these two horizontal grip tillers,
and I don't like these for two reasons.
Firstly it is going to get into way of legs
secondly I just naturally prefer a vertical tiller
instead of a horizontal one
and given how many vehicles later in life
had vertical tillers
I suspect I was not the only person
to come to that conclusion.
Really isn't very much else to say
about the driver’s compartment,
all in all I think this tank is not one
that you would want to get shot at in.
and even worse one.
that you would have to get out of in a hurry.
There's no spring loading on this,
I had to have help just to close it…
I got nothing.
I'm going to get out.
A number of versions of the R35 were made
varying from mine clearers to fascine carriers.
There was one combat development, the R40.
This was an elongated chassis,
it had a raised idler and a new suspension designed by APX.
This was something of a throwback,
it consisted of vertically sprung multiple
subcomponent bogies,
about 130 of these were made.
Production of the R35 itself in total is,
like other french tanks
which were being produced as fast as possible,
a little bit uncertain.
975 or so were delivered to the French army
by the start of the war.
This consisted of 21 51-tank battalions
plus an additional number in training
and maintenance, reserve and so on,
plus 40 or 45 that were serving overseas.
In addition about 200 had been created for the export market,
they saw service with Poland Yugoslavia,
Turkey and Romania.
The Germans and Italians, of course,
like any other tank that they captured
pressed it into service themselves,
and curiously they had some of the most
successful results, in the Balkans.
The reason being that this was somewhat
mountainous terrain and these diminutive
little vehicles were able to get up the small trails
and they were sufficiently well armored
to be able to deal with pretty much anything
that could be manhandled up those hills.
The tank did continue to see service
with the Free French and Vichy French,
not in that order, in North Africa and Syria
and some of the Syrian examples indeed were captured
and used by the Australians.
Overall the tank cannot really be considered
an astounding success.
Now, bear in mind part of the problem
was just the way it was used.
This was an infantry support tank
which was parceled out.
It was designed to be a supporting effort,
not a primary punch in itself.
Now for what the French were trying to build by the doctrine,
this actually did pretty well the problem
was that the French were building
for the wrong kind of war.
That was the R35 and we'll be back
in Saumur for the next one.
See you then.
And the high…
Not only was this tank vulnerable to 25 millimeter
a variety of variants were made…
A variety of variants?
Of course it was a vari…,
same root word…
the vertically sprung multiple multiple