ARL 44

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ARL 44
The side view of a ARL 44
General characteristics
Crew	5
Length	10.53 m (35.5 feet)
Width	3.40 m (11.6 feet)
Height	3.20 m (10.5 feet)
Weight	50 metric tons
Armour and armament
Armour	120 mm
Main armament	90 mm DCA45
Secondary armament	2 × 7.5 mm MAC31 Châtellerault machine guns
Mobility
Power plant	Maybach HL 230, gasoline 575 hp
Suspension	vertical coil spring
Road speed	35.75 km/h (23.1 mp/h )
Power/weight	11.3 hp/tonne
Range	350 km

The ARL 44 was a French heavy tank produced just after World War II. Only sixty of these tanks were ever manufactured and the type was quickly phased out.

1 Development
2 Description
3 Operational History
4 External links
5 See also

[edit] 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 a pretended civilian use. 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. But by now French pre-war light and medium designs were completely outdated and there was no way to quickly make up for the time lost and immediately improve their component quality.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 pure quantity: a large and well-armed vehicle might still be useful, however obsolescent its parts were, especially as the British and Americans seemed to be behind Germany in heavy tank development. They had no vehicles operational that could slug it out with a Tiger II.

Consequently it was decided to produce 600 heavy tanks, to be designed by the Direction des Études et Fabrications d'Armement or DEFA, in which engineers from the former APX and AMX design teams were concentrated, and built by the Atelier de Rueil (ARL), the army workshop. The type was named ARL 44. The specifications weren't at first overly ambitious and asked for a thirty ton vehicle with 60 mm armour and armed with a 75 mm gun. An important secondary goal of the project was simply to ensure that France would in the future have a sufficient number of military engineers; if these couldn't be employed now, they would be forced to seek other occupations and much expertise would be lost for ever.

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. As a result the ARL 44 was to be fitted wit a very old-fashioned suspension system with small roadwheels, using the same track as the Char B1. 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.

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, which type could be obtained for free from the Allies in any number desidered. So it was decided the ARL 44 would be fitted with 120 mm 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 strongest gun available; sadly this would probably be the American 76 mm or with some luck the British 17-pounder; larger calibres could not be acquired.

A wooden mock-up had been completed by engineer Lavirotte when the war ended. The end of hostilities didn't mean the end of the entire project though. Purely to maintain some continuation in French tank design and bolster the national morale, it was decided to build sixty vehicles, even though there was no real tactical need for them any longer. In March 1946 the first prototype could be tested. The Atelier et Chantiers de la Loire built the ACL1 turret, fitted with the 76 mm gun; it 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.

The development and production of the turret would take a long time; not before 1949 the turrets could be fitted to the stored hulls which had been already produced in 1946: forty hulls were made by FAMH and twenty by Renault. They were fitted with captured German Maybach 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 motors.

[edit] Description

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 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.

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.

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.

[edit] 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. 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. An ARL 44 can be seen in the Musée des Blindés in Saumur.