Tank Chats  

1 word: AMAZING! Keep up the great work.

They are now part of my standard Friday viewings and have encouraged me to be a friend and patreon of the museum. Fascinating and I love these more in-depth explorations.

Loving the long video!

Amazing as always. But it way better if you remove the sound when you play the war footage at the beginning of the video

Nice slice of information, especially the social context around the 'development hell' that plagued interwar French armor.

I'm intrigued at how the first Schneider and this one have vaguely similar running gear.

I laughed at that as Schneider is a big customer of ours.

You should probably start doing that again.

Just installed some Schneider electrical components on a job last week. I was telling my co-workers that Schneider made tanks, and they were shocked.

As someone who works for subcontractor manufacturing parts for Schneider: You guys should get back to it. Would be way cooler.

That is so sweet!

Maybe buy him something from the museum online shop to say thanks, especially with Christmas approaching 😊

You've got to have a very intelligent and curious 7 year old kid for him to be interested in such voluminous talks!

From your name, your son will also be able to help you plot out the Future of Humanity

Cherish that intergenerational passion - and I think it says something about how good this channel is considering it can appeal to all ages, and /how/.

There is only so many ways you can say "here is this prototype only 5 where built it was/wasnt very good (insert sassy David Fletcher remark)" =( I like the French prototypes, but you don't get any satisfying history with tanks that have always sat around or became target practice

I dont. So many things done the wrong way. @ Jessie What French prototypes are you talking about? 500 S35, 7700 AMX13 and 3571 AMX30 were build.

@@Paciat you basically named a single vehicle of WW2, and two of the cold war area. The first was mediocre at best, the other was a very successful light tank and the last was basically just a 10t lighter Leo. 1 with a weird HEAT projectile and arguably less successful.

@@Tankliker And your point is? Get out of your tank hatch and you will notice that the second part of my comment is a response to Jessie comment calling amx tanks as prototypes. But most French tanks were designed badly. S35 included.

@@Paciat my point is, that you haven't named a single prototype. What about the AMX 50 series? ELC's? Sumoa? There are a lot of prototype and could have been models yet all you did was name three production models completely missing his question.

He was wrong. Cavalry comes from french cheval and that means horse.

Don't trust the bottom 10% of high-school graduates. He will be invariably wrong.

@@vorrnth8734 Being rude literally comes from horse in French and they have never apologized for it

But it's also important to remember that the tanks was not the main reasons the German Panzer divisions worked so well. What made them so effective is something the Germans had already perfected which were their sturmtroopen from WW1. These were adapted into panzergrenideer batalions and later divisions which worked exceptionally well with the tanks. The tanks securing the open fields and the panzergranideers securing the more difficult terrain with the air force defending them. The British didn't really have storm troop batalions and without them tanks were easily halted by obstacles and small fortifications. The effectiveness of stormtroops had already been proven in 1918 with the massive spring offensive. The tanks just added the final component to that success which was the firepower to directly punch through heavy army formations. The German army was very effective cause it was able to take the strengths of both France and Britain. It had a large well trained professional army of about 800k just like Britain did but it also had a massive and well motivated conscript army of around 5 million like France did. Germany also had about twice the industrial power of Britain and nearly twice the population of France so it could keep pace with them on both fields at the same time. During the interwar period while the German army was only 100k they kept up their standards very strictly and their small size meant that by 1932 they were arguably the best trained army in the entire world. Then you also had the very successful expansion to that 800k which instead of being done by just throwing new units in divisions was done very carefully to take away experienced soldiers to help train the new ones but not break up the effectiveness of the old divisions. That combined with lots of training of those new professional divisions over the course of 5 years put them nearly on par with the British. The conscripts were quite a bit above their French counterparts as they had been training for 5 years already and had already seen combat in Poland as well as in Denmark and Norway. You also had the fact that while there was a division between the professionals and the conscripts in the German military they were still part of the same army in contrast to the British professionals and French conscripts which meant they could coordinate much better. Though while the British professionals didn't do so well in France they proved their worth a year later in the tank dominated wastes of North-Africa by defeating an Italian army 8 times their size.

o

​@@MrMarinus18comment worth reading thank you. I will study how Panzergrenadiers compared with French Dragons Portés in equipment and tactics.

I think the idea was to make them blend in with the horizon when viewed from a trench periscope. The vivid colors are quite appealing, I agree.

Some Somua tanks were painted with a very particular camouflage, the bottom of the body was painted brown to simulate the color of the ground, the middle of the tank was painted in different shades of green to simulate the colors of the vegetation while the top of the turret was painted blue-gray to confuse it with the color of the sky. It was a camouflage in 5-6 colors it was very original

Thats interesting!

@@PossiblyIgor Thanks!

@@woff1959 It's quite interesting in general, the role of minor nations in WWII, like the Ukrainian partisan roles or the Australian role.

@@PossiblyIgor And they get overlooked a lot, which is a pity.

@@woff1959 Yeah, I am currently reading Churchill's WWII memoirs in which he barely mentions it.

Agreed.

French sort of do that to themselves by a culture of keeping military technology relatively inaccessible to the public even long after it is technically no longer secret. Either the government still keeps the stuff close to the chest or they do very little to help others use the information when asked for it. Another big headache is French developers often have a unique method of communicating with each, ways of writing and talking that makes sense to each other, but less sense to outsiders. Be it how they create statistics, make drawings, or what have you,. it takes practice and patience to comprehend a lot of French technical information. This further limits detailing French technology. Thankfully, more French and Anglophone historians are taking the time to actually pry the knowledge out of the French systems, so we are getting more data than we used to, but it is a process. All the more reason to throw support at institutions like Bovington and to buy the books that historians like Zaloga writes, so these people can afford to take the time necessary to overcome indifferent governments who see little to no value in aiding historians research.

Agreed. I love seeing the Somua her beautiful tank and I feel underrated like most French designs.

Leclerc is beautiful in its power... though I have to say the French have been very original and successful with their wheeled vehicles

@@genericpersonx333 they seem to have no problem selling everything to the Chinese to copy.

The LeClerc tank for one.

If only it had a two man turret with voice radios (a three man turret probably wasn't possible given the size of the hull and better engine access

French vehicles of WW2 are pretty underrated (outside of their light tanks though if they weren't all using FT turrets and shells they would be remembered better) shame only thing people see when they look at WW2 France is "haha cowards haha"

Same here. Always struck me as a good tank that found itself in the right place at the right time, but in the wrong hands. Compare it to the majority of medium tanks of the period, and it verily shines. Has a lot of the same qualities as the T-34 at an early stage actually - good all round sloped armour, good multipurpose gun that can defeat anything the enemy has at comfortable range (unfortunately, serviceability doesn't seem to have been one of those qualities) and the same general 'way of the future' air about it. Also, I'm not totally convinced about how big a drawback the one-man turret really was. Seems that most of the criticism of it comes from RU-vid comment sections and literature published decades after the war (and the comments stem from that, of course). Germany was the second biggest user, so I'd like to see what they honestly thought of it _at the time_, especially considering many of their own tanks had one-man turrets also. Somewhat of a drawback for sure, but was it really a battle/war-losing drawback, if the same tanks were otherwise used as part of a mutually supporting combined force, with sensible strategy and tactics, in a well organized fashion and to their best possible ability?

France wish it had these tanks back during the Franco-Prussian War

@@christiandauz3742 I think anyone would desire them priorto the actual invention of the tank lmao

He should really try to find a job where he can do this full time. 😉

That's his job, to know tanks.

Finn has coached him well.

@Paul Fellows He is.. really knows his stuff. Just great to watch

It IS very cramped. The Chieftain trying to get into it via the hatch was hilarious

Oh really ? This tank is so cheated in WoT...

Sorta like "Jabba the Hutt"?;)

Its amazing how much the Sherman took from this tank.

I think it was. Though by the time of the 1920s and 1930s I think that became the case due to the post-WWI economic environment

Bear in mind areas of France are quite dry including on the Mediterranean coast and the border with Spain. A mix of browns with a dash of green would be apposite. The current French Camouflage Centre Europe is a lighter version of the US woodland camo for this very reason.

Camouflage is very regionally specific, so in order to be practical regarding logistics and the having to repaint AFVs every time they moved to a different region, a general pattern would have to be adopted, thus the development of the German three colour style which was often down to individual crew choice.

@@simongee8928 true....also I always figured, although I could be wrong, that the camo scheme used on the S35 had something to do with how the French expected the tank to be viewed by the enemy (in the type of war the French were familiar with)....from low to the ground as from a trench or trench periscope, with the intention of making it blend in with the horizon and layers of low hills, walls, and vineyards. Not sure if it really worked, but it sure looked aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Those bold contrasting colors and outlines almost give it a French impressionist art feel.

From the video it looks like This S-35 was meant for the Mediterranean

Reminds me of the Soviet yellow-green tank camouflage

There is a photo of two 'German versions' on a parade. Hard to say if they could do it in combat but the photo has one in the commander's hatch and one sitting on the rear hatch/seat. So... speculation... The Germans forced the second crewman into the turret to be full time loader?? Stab II/Pz/Reg 22 (the second bn of the Pz regiment) was mixed with PzIV and Somuas at roughly 1:2 ratio in favour of the Somuas. PzAbt 206 and Panzer-Ersatz Abteilung 100 over in the US part of the Normandy campaign also had some Somuas in service.

It is said that the M4 Sherman cast hull was inspired by the Somua S35.

I too have an inexplicable fondness for this tank.

Straight from the front, maybe. But internally, not even close.

To respect the time flow, the Sherman looks like the Somua😊

Thought it was just me that thought it was a mini Sherman!

There is a good reason. I've read the US had ignored tanks after WW1. When it was decided to rebuild a US tank force in the late 1930's they looked at what other counties were doing, the easiest way to catch up and they liked this tank and took some of the idea's in development of the M2 which led to the M3 and M4. The Americans had the time to iron out the problems making the M4 very reliable.

@@binaway At least one Free French unit affixed the "Somua" plate on the Shermans they were issued, although the Sherman's 3 man turret and 75mm gun must have been a step up.

Yeah, would be interesting. I suspect the first-next-step would have been a medium tank in the M3 Grant, M11/39, or Char B2 line of thinking: Put the main gun on the hull so you don't need a three man turret. Pondering a lighter-tank is harder because the French command and control was so poor it would need reform for modern armoured warfare, but potentially we'd have seen a fake-gun/machine-gun command tank, with the regular tanks having clip-ammo for a two man turret. Guessing further into the future.... well eventually we have to assume that they'd go for a home-produced Medium Tank mounting the Matériel de 75mm Mle 1897. Then later a heavy tank much like the ARL44

FCM did actually work on 2 and 3-man turrets for the S35 to be produced by Vichy in 1942 that David was talking about. Since the original turret ring was much narrower than the hull could actually allow, it was easy to increase the turret ring to a respectable 1435mm or 56.5", similar to other 3-man turrets with a small gun. That was with the more powerful 47mm SA37 btw, more comparable to the German long 5cm. Otherwise, 2 and 3-man turrets were designed for most future tanks planned for 1941/42. G1, AMX-40 and B40.

@@pavarottiaardvark3431 Funny that you mention the M3 Grant. The S35 reminds me a little of a mini Sherman.

Those were all points of difference and I don’t think an6 of them were decisive in the outcome. He’s given you a good background into why the French were less successful with their tanks than the Germans and it had a lot more to do with the way they were used. For this reason, the Germans were able to make up for the fact that their tanks were mostly inferior to the French tanks. It wasn’t radios or one man turrets. It was poor training and running out of fuel (because the Germans had bombed or captured the fuel dump) or the fact that orders weren’t getting through… the list is almost endless. None of the things you describe are decisive matters and all can be worked around. The qualitative differences weren’t enough to matter and probably favour the SOMUA anyway.