Welcome back to Saumur. We are touring the Char B1 Bis,
and we're going to do the interior of course, the crew positions,
starting off with the turret for the commander/gunner/loader…
Part of the problem was that when the cash-strapped French army
were re-arming in the interwar period,
they were also trying to upgrade some of the earlier tanks
and they had one-man turrets such as the FT which had a narrow turret ring
and it was a lot cheaper to simply design one basic turret design
that was going to be used on everything.
The B1 bis introduced new turret, the APX 4,
which included a longer gun than the shorter one mounted on the earlier B1.
To get in and out, there was only the one large door on the back here,
which you could also simply sit on when you weren't in combat.
The original cupola was a domed contraption, which did rotate,
but it had no hatch on the top. Daft design, and so when the Germans
captured them and they pressed them into their own service,
the first thing they did was replace the cupola
with something a little bit more normal with doors at the top
that you can get in and out of the tank in the more traditional fashion.
I also wouldn't read too much into the radio mount back here,
most of the pre-war French tanks went into battle without radios.
Curiously, turret was the most difficult part of the entire tank to create.
It was harder to create the turret than the rest of the tank,
so a number of tanks were sent in from the factories without turrets,
basically as 75 millimeter assault guns.
Now, improved or not, getting in and out through this hatch is a serious problem,
there’s a couple of issues.
Firstly, it's very long and elongated and not very wide.
A bigger problem, however, is that there is no seat for the commander
and it's a long drop to the bottom,
so you want to be getting in and out of this thing very carefully.
You can see it's quite a tight squeeze,
even pieces of my belt are getting caught,
so I'm not even going to try
the “oh my god the tank is the fire test” through this hatch.
Fortunately, there are doors elsewhere in the tank.
Once one is down inside the one-man turret, well…
it’s not crowded, until you realize how overworked you are,
but what worries me more
is the fact that since he’s not sitting on a seat or anything,
if the tank is being thrown around, he is being thrown around,
and there’s all sorts of things that he could bash his head against,
although I do note that there is some foam
on the interior lining of the cupola ring.
Traverse is either electric or manual, a full circle under electric
is about 30 seconds. Not bad, especially given the time.
To his front, the sight is mounted directly above the coaxial machinegun.
It has been disconnected right now by use of this plunger from the main gun and…
because there’s no weight of the gun to balance it, you’ll see
it’s independent of elevation and about ten degrees of traverse each way.
I don’t know why you’d do it,
but it is an option, it was a common thing at the time.
To the right, the 47, the breech guard will fold out of the way
if you're using the hatch at the back, through which, of course,
if you haven't figured it out, that is where the camera is right now.
The gun has a muzzle velocity
of about 650 to 700 meters a second out of the 34 caliber length gun.
This will punch the armor-piercing round through about
4 centimeters of armor sloped at 30 degrees at 400 meters. Not bad.
About 50 rounds of 47 were carried in the tank,
most of which were not in the turret.
There's not really much else to say for the commander's position.
If he was lucky, he had a sling that he might use
to support his weight, but I really can't see why he would do it.
So that’s it, let’s go down.
If you come down from the turret and you look aft to the firewall,
on the left-hand side of the firewall you can see this
multifaceted door here, with a little viewport.
Taking to the museum staff, the only reason we think that this port exists
is so that you look to the rear and see whether or not your engine
has caught fire, which doesn't strike me as being very reassuring.
However if you open it up you will see the passageway,
at the bottom of the passageway is the escape hatch,
at the very end is that other hatch at the engine deck,
you see also the steering gear,
and to the right-hand side is the engine and radiator.
The engine was originally an inline 6 putting out
somewhere in the mid 200 horsepower.
It was eventually replaced by a Renault v12 cranking out over 300.
That was then connected to the five-speed transmission.
There are four fuel tanks in the tank: two 100 liter tanks
and then on the right-hand side of the tank only is an additional 200.
On the left-hand side instead is the radiator.
Now in this particular tank the interior has been modified, the big silver thing
on the left-hand side is actually the current fuel tank, it looks like.
Down somehow underneath the commander
is going to be the radio operator, the fourth man in the crew,
and this is a fuel tank which was installed at some point
when they turned this vehicle into a runner,
so they didn't have to use the original fuel tanks at the back, but the radio,
if it was mounted (and, in fairness, on the Char B1s they usually were),
would be on the left hand side.
The radio was originally a little Morse code only thingy,
the ER 53, range of about 15 kilometers,
although later on it was upgraded to a voice capable version.
Outside of that, and if he was lucky, he might have some sort of a cushion
to sit on, and his only other function because he can't see anything,
would be to hand ammunition up to the commander.
Loader’s position on the right-hand side behind the gun
and all I can say is God help the poor man.
He has no seat, and of course, the roof is just up here,
so he has no headroom either.
I have been kind of squatted down in this position for maybe five minutes
and my knees and legs are killing me.
I can only assume that he was going to sit on the floor.
Now full disclosure, this is a false floor, it's about maybe 8-9 centimeters
above the real floor, and it was added after the war
as a sort of protection system for the mechanicals underneath.
But still, I guess to put things into perspective, this entire cabin
is maybe two meters wide and two meters long,
the driver excluded from this 2x2 square.
The book says that there are 74 rounds of 75 millimeter in here
together with 50 rounds of 47, and an additional 250 for the machine gun.
And I am not seeing it. I have no idea where
all this ammunition is supposed to go together with the crew.
The gun. It is ABS 1929 SA 37, it's all of 17 calibers long,
does a whopping 200 meters a second. It is a low, literally, low velocity gun.
AP rounds did exist, but they weren't any more effective than the 47,
but they did have a more useful anti-fortificational role.
The 7.5 is stowed by way of drum magazines,
again pretty much around the whole tank, and you can see
it's similar to, let's say, if you've been to Afghanistan recently,
in a DP 28 we would occasionally come across.
And that is it for this, the last position now is going to be the driver.
So now we move forward to the driver’s position,
it was not actually very easy to get into because of this fixed back here,
but once I'm here it's actually not bad.
Certainly, I am still a little bit too tall to comfortably drive this vehicle,
but I actually can drive it, unlike some others.
The situation to my front is very familiar-looking:
you have a steering wheel, you’ve got three pedals on the floor,
you have a 5-speed gearbox plus reverse, no problem!
When you steer with the steering wheel, you can see underneath
there is a chain system, so it goes from the wheel to a rack to a chain
to adjust the steering at the back. There is an alternate form of steering,
it is these two handles here, which you would have worked
more or less as you'd expect. You pull right and guess what, you'll turn right,
but what you'll see is that these handles are both connected to the accelerator,
so as I pull back the accelerator goes down. This ensures
that there is enough power going to the steering system to make it work.
To see out, he does have a vision block to his front,
the visor door will swing open and closed.
There is a small traversable periscope up here,
it has an arc maybe about yay big.
There is a small little vision slit on the left,
to give him some vision on the left-hand side,
and, most importantly, because he is also the gunner,
behind these covers here would be the eyepieces for the stereoscopic sight,
which would by way of linkage, connect to the main gun, the 7.5 centimeter,
which is manually elevated.
And of course, there is no traverse, purely done by turning the whole vehicle.
Just a note before we get out, the interior color, the yellow,
is apparently a standard pre-war, after the war they went to white,
and today French vehicles are a kind of a light green inside.
So that's pretty much it for the crew compartment, time to get out.
There was an additional attempt to upgrade the B1, it was the B1 Ter.
What this added was a little bit more frontal armor, new track and side armor,
a bit of traverse for the 75 mm gun and a two-man turret,
although the prototypes were only built with a one-man turret.
The two prototypes were evacuated during the fall of France to North Africa.
However the ship upon which they were placed
was sunk by the Luftwaffe just off the coast of France.
She lies in relatively shallow coastal water
and there have been a couple of attempts to dive upon her
and maybe even recover the two tanks,
however the conditions are very, very difficult
and I'm not aware of any successful attempts.
All in all about 369 of the vehicles were built,
although keeping exact records is very difficult,
because, frankly, the factories were more interested in production
than in keeping track of what was going on.
For a vehicle that had officially entered service a couple of years previously,
however, its service record is a little bit checkered,
because too many of the vehicles were being delivered straight to the troops
and then straight into battle, coming fresh from the factories,
so that meant that the troops didn't have enough time to train on them,
to learn how to maintain them, or how to best utilize them.
Indeed so many were simply broken down and abandoned
that the Germans captured and pressed into service a 160 of them,
plus the Italians also kept a few.
All in all the vehicle could have done well had it been used in the role
for which it was intended, but it really wasn't.
The problem was that it was too specialized in function
and the one-man turret was too limiting, so it never really achieved
the potential that its thick hide implied that it could have.
I hope you found the tour of the B1 Bis informative,
and as ever, I'll see you in the next one.
Although production began in 1936, the actual first battalion of 35 tanks
was not stood up until 1935…
No, 1938, because you can't go back in time. That would be silly.
But with German rearmament going on, it was deemed advisable
to quit monkeying around trying to develop new tan…
You're laughing! You're not helping me here.