Renault R35

By the early 1930s the French infantry still leaned on the veteran Renault FT of the Great War, and wanted a modern char léger d’accompagnement — a light tank to walk the infantry onto the objective. In 1933 the army issued a specification for a cheap, well-protected two-man vehicle; Renault answered with a prototype in 1934, and the design was accepted as the Char léger Modèle 1935 R, universally known as the R35.

Deliveries began in 1936 and continued until the fall of France. With roughly 1,600 built it became the most numerous French tank of the 1940 campaign — the backbone of the independent tank battalions that supported the infantry along the entire front.

The R35’s strength was its protection. Hull and turret were both cast, up to 43 mm thick on a tank of barely ~10 t — proof against the German 2 cm and 3.7 cm guns at most battle ranges, and heavier than the armour of many contemporaries twice its role.

The firepower was the opposite story. The standard weapon was the short 37 mm SA 18 L/21, a low-velocity gun descended directly from the Great War FT — it could not penetrate much more than ~12 mm at 500 m and was near-useless against a Panzer III or IV frontally. A longer, harder-hitting 37 mm SA 38 L/33 was designed to replace it, but by May 1940 only a minority of R35s had received it. A coaxial 7.5 mm Reibel machine gun completed the armament.

The R35 carried just two men: a driver in the hull, and a commander in the cast APX-R turret. That one man had to command the tank, observe the battlefield, aim, load and fire the gun all at once — the same one-man turret flaw that hobbled every French tank of the period, here made worse by there being no third crewman anywhere to share the load.

Communications were as thin as the crew. Only company and battalion commanders’ tanks carried radios; the rest were led by flag and observation, so a French tank platoon could not react at the speed of the German companies it met, each of which had a radio in every vehicle.

A single Renault 4-cylinder petrol engine of ~82 hp drove the ~10 t tank to only about 20 km/h on a road, with a range near 130 km. That was deliberate: the R35 was built to keep pace with marching infantry, not to exploit a breakthrough, and its rubber-cylinder suspension gave a modest cross-country performance that the later R40 variant tried to improve.

French doctrine matched the machine. The R35 battalions were bataillons de chars de combat — independent units parcelled out to support infantry divisions along the length of the front, rather than massed into an armoured fist. Spread thin and tied to the foot soldier’s pace, they were rarely in the right place in the strength needed to blunt a Panzer division.

When Germany attacked on 10 May 1940, the R35 was the most common tank in the French order of battle, equipping some twenty-odd tank battalions. Its finest moment came in the counter-attacks: on 17 May R35 battalions formed the armoured weight of Colonel Charles de Gaulle’s hastily assembled 4e Division cuirassée at Montcornet, one of the few French thrusts that briefly threw the Germans onto the defensive before petering out for lack of infantry, fuel and air cover.

Where the R35 could close the range its armour held, but the short 37 mm rarely killed the enemy tanks it met, and the two-man crew and missing radios told against it in every fast-moving fight. Abroad the tank fought earlier still: some 50 R35s exported to Poland saw action in September 1939 before most withdrew into Romania. Others had gone to Turkey, Romania and Yugoslavia.

The armistice of June 1940 left the Germans with hundreds of intact R35s. Taken into the Wehrmacht as the Panzerkampfwagen 35R 731(f), they handled occupation, security and driver-training duties, while over 170 had their turrets removed and a captured Czech 4.7 cm PaK(t) gun fitted in an open superstructure — the 4.7 cm PaK(t) auf Panzerkampfwagen 35R(f), an early self-propelled tank destroyer in the same improvised spirit as the Marder series.

Germany also passed 124 R35s to Italy, which formed two battalions of the 131st Tank Regiment and shipped them to Sicily. There the obsolete little tanks fought their last offensive. At dawn on 10 July 1943, as the Americans came ashore at Gela, twelve R35s of Gruppo Mobile “E” rolled down from Niscemi against the beachhead. US naval gunfire from the cruisers Savannah and Boise tore the column apart; a few tanks reached the town — one, Sottotenente Angiolino Navari’s, pushing to within 300 m of the beach before it was knocked out — and by late morning the survivors had pulled back to Castelluccio.

The Renault R35 is the tank that best explains the paradox of 1940 from the losing side. It was cheap, reliable and — for its size — genuinely well armoured, and France built it in greater numbers than any other tank she fielded. On the defensive metric of protection it was a success.

But a tank is a system of firepower, mobility, protection and command, and the R35 failed three of the four. The short 37 mm could not kill, 20 km/h could not exploit, and a two-man crew with no radio could not out-fight an enemy that had thought harder about how tanks should be used. Built to walk the infantry forward at a war-of-1918 pace, it was overtaken by a way of war it had never been designed to fight.

• Steven J. Zaloga, French Tanks of World War II (1): Infantry and Battle Tanks (Osprey, New Vanguard).
• Peter Chamberlain & Chris Ellis, Tanks of the World 1915–1945 (Cassell).
• Werner Regenberg, Captured French Tanks Under the German Flag (Schiffer).
• Steven J. Zaloga, Sicily 1943: The debut of Allied joint operations (Osprey, Campaign).