The ARL 44 was a French heavy tank produced just after World War II. Only sixty of these tanks were ever manufactured^[1] and the type was quickly phased out. Image File history File links Size of this preview: 791 × 599 pixelsFull resolution (1507 × 1142 pixel, file size: 969 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) File historyClick on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time. ... Tank classification can be done either by weight or by role. ... Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... Military vehicles are commonly armoured to withstand the impact of shrapnel, bullets or shells, protecting the soldiers inside from enemy fire. ... MG may refer to: Mel Gibson, actor Match Game, U.S 1970s Game Show Champion Air IATA airline designator Myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease MG (car), British automobile manufacturer, now part of Chinas Nanjing Automobile Group mg (editor), Emacs-compatible Unix text editor Machine gun Madagascar (ISO 3166-1... Combatants Allied powers: China France Great Britain Soviet Union United States and others Axis powers: Germany Italy Japan and others Commanders Chiang Kai-shek Charles de Gaulle Winston Churchill Joseph Stalin Franklin Roosevelt Adolf Hitler Benito Mussolini Hideki Tōjō Casualties Military dead: 17,000,000 Civilian dead: 33,000...

Development

During the German occupation some clandestine tank development took place in France, mostly limited to component design or the building of tracked chassis with either a pretended civilian use or with a German Navy destination. These efforts were coordinated by CDM (Camouflage du Matériel), a secret Vichy army organisation trying to produce matériel forbidden by the armistice conditions, with the ultimate goal of combining these components into the design of a possible future thirty ton battle tank, armed with a 75 mm gun. The projects were very disparate, including those for a trolleybus, the Caterpillar du Transsaharien (a regular cross-Sahara track and rail connection) and a tracked snow blower for the Kriegsmarine to be used in Norway. Firms involved were Laffly and Lorraine; also a military design team in occupied France, headed by Maurice Lavirotte, was active.^[2] From The U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms - Joint Publication JP1-02 dated 05 January 2007: Clandestine Operation: An operation sponsored or conducted by governmental departments or agencies in such a way as to assure secrecy or concealment. ... Vichy France (French: now called Régime de Vichy or Vichy; called itself at the time État Français, or French State) was the French state of 1940-1944 which was a puppet government under Nazi influence, as opposed to the Free French Forces, based first in London and later in Algiers. ... A trolleybus (also known as trolley bus, trolley coach, trackless trolley, trackless tram or simply trolley) is an electric bus powered by two overhead wires, from which it draws electricity using two trolley poles. ... A heavy duty walk-behind two-stage snow blower. ... The Kriegsmarine (or War Navy) was the name of the German Navy between 1935 and 1945, during the Nazi regime, superseding the Reichsmarine. ...

When in August 1944 Paris was liberated, the new provisional government of France did its utmost to regain the country's position as a great power, trying to establish its status as a full partner among the Allies by contributing as much as possible to the war effort. One of the means to accomplish this was to quickly restart tank production. Before the war France had been the world's second largest tank producer, behind the Soviet-Union. Combatants Free French Forces French Resistance Germany Commanders Philippe Leclerc Raymond Dronne Henri Rol-Tanguy Jacques Chaban-Delmas Dietrich von Choltitz # Strength 2nd Armoured Division, French resistance 20,000 Casualties 1,500 dead French resistance 71 dead, 225 wounded Free French Forces[1] 3,200 dead, 12,800 POW The...

However French pre-war light and medium designs had become completely outdated and there was no way to quickly make up for the time lost and immediately improve their component quality. It might be possible though to compensate for this by sheer size. A large and well-armed vehicle might still be useful, however obsolescent its individual parts were, especially as the British and Americans seemed to be behind Germany in heavy tank development, having no operational vehicles that could slug it out with a Tiger II. An important secondary goal of the project was simply to ensure that France would in the future have a sufficient number of weapons engineers; if these couldn't be employed now, they would be forced to seek other occupations and much expertise would be lost. Obsolescence is a made up word referring to the state of being which occurs when a person, object, or service is no longer wanted even though it may still be in good working order. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Tiger II is the common name of a a German heavy tank of the Second World War. ...

Consequently it was decided to produce 600 heavy tanks, to be designed by the Direction des Études et Fabrications d'Armement (DEFA) in which engineers from the former APX (the army Atelier de Puteaux) and AMX (the Atelier de Construction d'Issy-les-Moulineaux state factory) design teams were concentrated, and built by the Atelier de Construction de Rueil (ARL), the army workshop. The type was named ARL 44. The specifications were not at first overly ambitious and called for a thirty ton vehicle with 60 mm of armour and armed with a 75 mm gun, conforming to the earlier CDM intentions.

As France had been rather isolated from engineering developments in the rest of the world, the designers based themselves on types they already knew well, mainly the Char B1, the Char G1 and the FCM F1 — contrary to what some sources state^[3] the ARL 44 was not directly derived from the earlier ARL 40 project. It was tried to use the components developed between 1940 and 1944, though most soon proved to be incompatible. As a result of the reliance on older types, the ARL 44 was to be fitted with a very old-fashioned suspension system with small roadwheels, using the same track as the Char B1, limiting maximum speed to about thirty km/h. The suggestion to use a more modern foreign supension system was rejected as it would have compromised the tank's status as a purely French design. A Talbot 450 hp or Panhard 400 hp engine was envisaged. Progress was very slow as there was a lack of resources and much infrastructure in the Paris region had been destroyed. Even finding paper and drawing materials was difficult.^[4] The Char B1 was a French heavy tank manufactured before the Second World War. ... The Char G1 was a French replacement project for the Char D2 medium tank. ... The FCM F1 was a superheavy tank developed in France. ... The front suspension components of a Ford Model T. Suspension is the term given to the system of springs, shock absorbers and linkages that connects a vehicle to its wheels. ...

In February 1945 a meeting took place between the engineers and the Army. The tank officers quickly pointed out that building a tank according to the original specifications was pointless as such a vehicle would be inferior to even a M4 Sherman, a type that could be obtained for free from the Allies in any numbers so desired. It was therefore decided that the ARL 44 would be fitted with 120 mm of sloped armour, bringing the weight, which even in the conceptual stage had already grown to 43 metric tons, to 48 tons. The armament should consist of the most powerful gun available; sadly this would probably be the American 76 mm or with some luck the British 17-pounder; 90 mm guns had not been made available by the Allies. The M4 Sherman was the primary tank produced by the United States for its own use and the use of its Allies during World War II. Production of the M4 Medium tank exceeded 50,000 units, and its chassis served as the basis for thousands of other armored vehicles such... Sloped armour was developed as a defensive measure by the French SOMUA (Société dOutillage Mécanique et dUsinage dArtillerie) right before the outbreak of World War II. It was a technological response to the trend of fitting increasingly bigger guns on battle tanks. ... The 76 mm M1 Gun was a American Forces WWII-era tank gun, which replaced the 75 mm gun on late M4 Sherman tanks, and was equipped on all M18 Hellcat tank destroyers. ... The 17-pounder (17-pdr) was a 77 mm anti-tank gun developed by the United Kingdom during World War II. It was the best Allied anti-tank gun of the war, able to defeat all German armor and the equal of all their guns up to the massive 88...

Only a wooden mock-up had been completed by an engineering team headed by Engineer General Maurice Lavirotte, when the war ended. However, the end of hostilities did not mean the end of the entire project. To maintain some continuation in French tank design and bolster national morale, it was decided to build sixty vehicles, even though there was no longer any real tactical need for them. In March 1946 the first prototype could be tested. The Atelier et Chantiers de la Loire built the ACL1 turret, fitted with the American 76 mm gun; this was later replaced by a Schneider turret based on the one designed for the Char F1 and fitted with the 90 mm DCA naval AA-gun which had a muzzle velocity of 1000 m/s (AP; 1130 m/s HE) and a muzzle brake — the ARL 44 was thus the first French tank to feature this item. A guns muzzle velocity is the speed at which the projectile leaves the muzzle of the gun. ... The muzzle brake of the 105 mm gun on an AMX 10 RC fighting vehicle. ...

Mainly due to the change in armament, the development and production of the turret would be drawn out; it was not until 1949 that turrets could be fitted to hulls produced in 1946 and placed into storage. Forty hulls had been completed by FAMH and a further twenty by Renault. They were fitted with captured German Maybach HL230 600 hp engines (real output 575 hp), brought back by a mission headed by General Molinié in the summer of 1945, repeating the course of events with the Char 2C, which after the previous war had also received captured Maybach engines.^[5] The HL230 is a water-cooled 60° V12 gasoline engine designed by Maybach. ... Char 2C Alsace The Char 2C was a super heavy French tank developed, although never deployed, during the First World War. ... Several Maybach 57 and 62 models at the 2005 Concours dElegance in Pebble Beach, CA. Maybach-Motorenbau GmbH (IPA: ), founded by Wilhelm Maybach and his son Karl, was a German manufacturer of engines for Zeppelins and later, large and luxurious automobiles. ...

Description

The ARL 44 in Saumur: one of the two surviving vehicles

The ARL 44 clearly shows that it is based on earlier French heavy tank design. The hull is long, over nine metres, but relatively narrow, just as a vehicle meant to cross wide trenches. The covered suspension, with its many small roadwheels, that had already been outdated in the thirties, is the most obvious sign of its basic Char B1 ancestry. The type has often been compared to the many "Super Char B" projects from before the war. Its speed is likewise limited, the lowest of any fifty ton tank built after the war. This was also partly due to the lack of a sufficiently strong engine; it had originally been intended to compensate for this by using a more efficient petro-electrical transmission. This kind of transmission has as a major drawback that it very easily overheats and the ARL 44 as a result was fitted with an impressive and complex array of ventilators and cooling ducts; the engine deck was made to extend behind the track to accommodate them all. The hull glacis plate is 120 mm thick^[1] and reclined at about 45°, giving a line-of-sight thickness in the horizontal plane of about 170 mm. This made the ARL 44 the most heavily armoured French tank until the Leclerc. Within the glacis, low on the right side, a 7.5 mm machinegun is fitted in a fixed position. Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... A glacis, in military engineering (see Fortification and Siege) is an artificial slope of earth in the front of works, so constructed as to keep an assailant under the fire of the defenders to the last possible moment. ... The gunners position, looking down from the turret roof. ...

The turret was the most modern looking part; it's also an obvious makeshift solution, somewhat crudely welded together, made necessary by the simple fact Schneider as yet couldn't produce complete cast turrets large enough to hold a 90 mm gun. The turret front was a cast section though. As the turret was positioned near the middle of the tank, even when pointing to the back the gun would have a large overhang; to facilitate transport it was therefore made retractable into the turret. The turret was rotated by a Simca 5 engine.

In all, the ARL 44 was an unsatisfactory interim design, afterwards often called the "Transitional Tank", which main function was to provide experience in building heavier vehicles. The main lesson learned was for many engineers that it was unwise to construct too heavy types and this opinion was reinforced by the failure of the tank project that the ARL 44 formed the transition to: the much more ambitious heavy AMX 50. Only after a gap of sixteen years France would in 1966 again build a main battle tank, the AMX 30. Overview Perhaps the most successful post-war French armored vehicle design, the AMX-30 main battle tank was designed by GIAT Industries with a focus on good firepower and superior mobility. ...

Operational History

The ARL 44s equipped the 503e Régiment de Chars de Combat stationed in Mourmelon-le-Grand and before the end of 1950 replaced seventeen Panther tanks used earlier by that unit. In service the ARL 44 was at first an unreliable vehicle: the brakes, the gear box and the suspension were too frail. A special improvement programme remedied most of these shortcomings. The ARL 44 made only one public appearance, ten vehicles participated in the Bastille Day parade on 14 July 1951. When the American M47 Patton became available, which type also had a 90 mm gun, they were phased out in 1953 and used as targets.^[3] The rumour that most ARL 44s were exported to Argentine is unfounded.^[6] Year 1950 (MCML) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Panther ( ) was a tank fielded by Nazi Germany in World War II that served from mid-1943 to the end of the European war in 1945. ... This article is about the French holiday. ... is the 195th day of the year (196th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1951 (MCMLI) was a common year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... The M47 Patton was the second tank of the Patton series, and one of the U.S armys principal main battle tanks of the Cold War, with models in service from the early 1950s to the late 1950s. ... Argentina is a country in southern South America, situated between the Andes in the west and the southern Atlantic Ocean in the east. ...

Two ARL 44s survive until today. An ARL 44 can be seen in the Musée des Blindés in Saumur and another one at the 501st-503rd Tank Regiment, Mourmelon-le-Grand. Located in the Loire Valley of France at the city of Saumur, the Musée des Blindées or Musée Général Estienne is one of the worlds leading tank museums. ... Saumur is a small city and commune in the Maine-et-Loire département of France on the Loire River, with an approximate population of 30,000 (in 2001). ... The 501st-503rd Tank Regiment (French: ) is an armoured cavalry unit in the French Army. ...

References

See also

• Conqueror tank - contemporary British heavy tank
• T29 Heavy Tank - contemporary American tank

The FV214 Conqueror was a British Main Battle Tank of the post-war era, sometimes classified as a heavy tank. ... The Heavy Tank T29 was an American tank project started in March 1944 to counter the new German tanks. ...

External links

• Specifications and Description