In 1931 the French cavalry came up
with a new system of organization for the units.
It was going to have three types of vehicle.
The lightest was the AMR, the Automitrailleuse de Reconnaissance,
and this was a very simple light-armored vehicle designed to sneak and peek,
and just find out where the enemy were.
The next vehicle in the series was the AMD, the Automitrailleuse de Decouverte,
and what this would do was to identify what it was that the AMRs had discovered,
with the understanding that they might actually
had to get into a bit of a firefight to do so.
The third vehicle was the Automitrailleuse de Combat.
This was the heavy fighting vehicle of the cavalry units.
Now, the divisions, the DLM and the DLC,
were given the traditional cavalry roles of reconnaissance and security duties.
However, although the primary fighting force of the French army
was still going to be the infantry division,
the AMC had to be capable of full-on fighting.
The requirements that were drawn up in 1934
was an average speed of 30 kilometers an hour,
about 4 centimeters of armor, a 47mm gun and about a 200 mile range.
In a situation kind of similar to that which prevailed in the US at the time,
because as the main fighting force only the infantry were allowed to have tanks,
the French cavalry had come up with some other name hence the AMC,
but in reality what the French cavalry really wanted,
no matter what they called it, was a tank.
The contract was given
to Société d’Outillage Mécanique et d’Usinage d’Artillerie,
which was a subsidiary of Schneider.
This is something of a mouthful to say quickly
even if you have a vague understanding of French, a bit like I do,
and so what the solution was, was to simply shorten it down to an acronym
and for evermore thereon, the tank was known as the SOMUA.
The order for the prototype was given in 1934, it was delivered in 1935, April.
This is only a six-month lead time, and the reason it was so quick
is that there is actually very little new about this tank,
all the technologies and pieces had already been developed.
The only new item was the engine, which they simply purchased on the open market.
Before the trials of the prototype had been completed,
the prototype being the AC3,
in late 1935 the order for the first production batch was made.
This gives you the other name of the tank, the S35.
However, because the trials hadn't yet been finished,
and there were still design tweaks to be made,
first 50 vehicles off the production line are actually different to the remainder.
There was a requirement for 600 tanks, but these things are very expensive to make,
and only 300 were originally authorized.
So here we are again in Saumur
and we’re in front of what is one of the later model S35.
The tank is large for the era although relatively small
compared to the tanks that would come along only a couple years later.
It consists of four cast segments. An upper front and upper rear
and a two-piece lower hull, all of which are bolted together.
Components on the front, well, you’ve got the service light on the right hand side
The SOMUA plate was actually a matter of pride for the crewmen:
the ones that had been sent to Africa who converted to Shermans a little bit later,
they took the plates off their S35 and mounted them on to their Shermans.
Two positions, one for the radio operator, one for the driver, driver on the left.
The radio operator, as you see, has very little vision
and even less ability to contribute anything to the fight.
In theory, I guess, if he was feeling particularly brave
he could open up the visor a bit and discharge his personal weapon.
The armor is a reasonable 45 millimeters thick
and as you can see fairly well sloped,
at least until you get to the driver’s visors.
Coming a little bit further on down of course we have the two tow clevices,
a shrouded headlight for night driving, the siren and the marker light on the left.
The running gear is protected by these armored skirts,
they're about a centimeter thick. They're hinged at the top,
so you undo the bolts and lift it up for maintenance.
If you look at a photograph of what is underneath here
you're going to see something extremely similar to the Czech LT Vz 35,
and the reason for this is that Schneider and Skoda
actually worked together to create the tank, thus in addition
to the running gear the gearbox on the SOMUA is very similar as well.
It consists of two large bogies, each of which has two sub bogies
with four wheels, and they are mounted on leaf springs.
There is a ninth wheel on each side it’s the trailing wheel at the back,
that's mounted on an individual coil spring.
You'll find halfway down on the side a little hatch, this is an oil reservoir.
The track is single pin, it is held in place by cotter pins
and of course you do have return rollers.
Come around to the back of the tank now,
this is the access port for the coil spring I mentioned
for that last individual road wheel for lubrication purposes.
While I mention the road wheel, a little unique feature on this tank:
most tanks the tracks will have guide horns or center guides
to keep the wheels in the track.
Not so with this one, the wheels themselves have flanges
and you can see what's similar on the return roller here,
so in this case the wheels mesh into the track
instead of shall we say the other way around.
As we move a little bit further back behind the very tight mud scraper here,
the large sprocket wheel. Now two types of sprocket wheel were available
depending on what type of track you had.
The first 50 tanks came with a short pitch track,
there were 144 links per side and each link was 75 millimeters long.
The later models, the main production model,
was 103 links per side each of which was 105 millimeters in pitch.
There was one additional change planned for the running gear of the tank
and that was to raise the idler at the front up a little bit,
it was a bit too low for good obstacle clearance.
Last thing I'll mention while I'm kneeling down here
is the marker light at the rear.
One of the easiest visual distinguishers between the first 50 vehicles
and the main production batch is the side.
The first 50 did not have these two hatches on the side,
what they had instead were more grills.
Now this was actually not a very convenient vehicle to maintain.
Even the later versions, in order to remove out the engine,
you still had to unbolt the entire rear half of the tank
from both the bottom and the front.
Still things were improved. Initially took about 23 hours of work,
all told not man hours, to change out an engine on the first tanks that were made.
However, the later versions, they managed to get this number down to about 13.
So opening up the hatches immediately behind the firewall,
you're going to see the engine.
The engine is a 190 horsepower V8 and it will get the tank to a sustained speed
of about 35 kilometers an hour and a burst speed of about 41.
Now, one of the problems that we have though,
it is a bit inconvenient even to access these hatches,
is that in order to open this door now we've taken advantage of the fact
that the retaining clip has rusted in place.
Ordinarily you would spin the turret, open up this top hatch here,
reach down, there's a handle you'll pull that forwards,
it releases the latch you can then open up this door.
Then you reach around to the back, there is another handle in here,
which releases the rear hatch.
Which is not light, I should add.
Now inside here you're going to see the duct
for the intake for the radiator system, which is on the far side,
and at the back what looks like a drum brake
is actually part of the gearbox system.
At the back of the tank, you can see the twin exhausts,
which come down and are then deflected off to the left,
presumably so somebody can stand behind here
and use the tank as cover without being poisoned.
You can see the size of the bolts very easily back here.
These are, of course, the ones that are holding
the top half of the tank to the bottom half of the tank.
Couple more tow clevices and a large tow hook for a trailer
I will come back to momentary.
Finally, of course the wonderful SOMUA badge.
A little extra point to note here, these little access ports,
if you look on the inside of the tank,
I actually can't see what they're supposed to access.
Perhaps there was something there originally, it’s not there now.
If you open the right-hand side of the tank,
you see the large space for the cooling air for the radiator
and a little bit forward you're going to see the fuel tank.
Well, technically there were two fuel tanks
although there's only one filler port, just up here.
One fuel tank was a hundred litres, the other was 410,
and they were equipped with overfill valves for safety.
Unfortunately, the crews that were being sent in the battle
with these brand-new tanks that had just showed up
weren't really aware of the intricacies of the overfill valve,
so they'd fill up the tank until it filled,
and it turns out they're only filling the hundred liter tank. This meant
that the tank suffered a reputation for being extremely short-ranged,
when the tank ran out of fuel after only traveling about 40 kilometers.
Now in reality the tank was rated to do about 230 kilometers on the road
if you knew how to fill the 410-liter tank in addition to the 100.
Now the French also wanted
to have the cavalry units be a little bit self-sufficient logistically,
so to do this they developed the Lorraine 37 L.
Most people will call it the Lorraine schlepper,
which was the name that the Germans gave the vehicle.
It will carry some ammunition on itself
and then it would have a tracked trailer carrying about 565 litres of fuel.
Unfortunately, although they were supposed to be on issue
of three Lorraines per cavalry squadron of twenty tanks,
just like the tanks the deliveries of the Lorraines never met the requirements,
so as a result would not be incredibly unusual to find some of the trailers
being towed on the tow pintle I mentioned earlier behind the SOMUA tank.
Moving a little bit forward,
on the right-hand side you can see there is no access hatch.
Instead what you have are these stowage rails and you can do a couple of things.
One is you could simply strap your backpack to it
or more commonly you would see one or perhaps more of these side panniers,
which are very simply attached by hooking onto the side.
And that brings us to the end of the tour the exterior the S35
and we'll be back of course in part two to have a look inside.
See you then.
The contract was given to the Société d’Outillage Mécanique et d’Usinage…
d’Artillerie.
Société d’Outillage… Ah, dammit.
The Société d’Outillage de Mecan… eh…
It could be worse. It could be Selbstfahrlafette.