Kerensky wrote: ↑Mon Apr 13, 2020 7:27 pmIn France, they had the short barrel, relatively light armor Panzer IV, and some early Panzer IIIs, with majority of their tanks still being Panzer Is and IIs. They were outgunned and out tonned by the Char B and Somua S35.
German tank design still behind the curve in France.
I think that kind of stuff gets reduced a bit too much to armor and firepower. French tanks had those, but they lacked basically everything else, which is why they failed. And with that I don't mean training and doctrine, which obviously played huge roles as well, but instead the interior design of the tanks.
Basically all French tanks had one-man turrets, meaning the commander had to lead the tank, be aware of the surroundings while also having focus on a target, communicate with the crew, load the gun, fire the gun, and track the shot once it was fired. That is utterly insane and drastically lowers the combat-efficiency of a tank. Some of these things were mutually exclusive. You couldn't keep watch of a target and your surroundings at the same time, you couldn't keep watch and load the gun either. You had no means to successfully track a shot, as you could either target it as the gunner or watch from your commanders-position, not both at the same time. Internal communication was garbage, radios were almost non-existant, and when they were around they were of low range and most often using morse-code, which meant platoon or company commanders had little means to actually lead their units even if they weren't busy doing 10 other things inside the tank already. Not to mention the utterly atrocious vision.
Compare that to German tanks, which had far more radios, proper devices for internal communication, larger turrets, and specific crew-roles, which allowed the commander to actually command the tank and/or his unit. The gunner could track the target, the commander could track a shot better than the gunner could after it was fired, meaning the commander could help the gunner adjusting the aim, the loader would load the gun, meaning neither the commander nor the gunner had to lose sight of the target or suroundings in the meantime. What they lacked in armor of firepower, they could make up by much better efficiency and coordination, allowing to work as a unit and outflank any possible stronger vehicle.
Not to mention that the majority of french tanks were their two-men infantry tanks. They had less S-35s and B1s than Germany had Panzer IIIs and IVs, and Germany wasn't exactly running huge amounts of those. In fact, many of the S-35s were rushed to the front straight from the factories, lacking parts of their equipment and allowing for no training of the crew. No tank looks good under those conditions. And while the infantry-tanks had good armor, at least in theory, their guns were almost as useless as the machine-guns of the Panzer I, especially against other tanks. The few that actually ended up getting a decent gun were either too few or came to late to make a difference.
It is easier to upgrade a gun (to some extent) or put more armor on a tank than it is to overhaul the entire enterior. Which makes the German tanks the better foundation for further development, even if their capabilities of the beginning of the war weren't quite there yet.
I once thought the French might have had the best tanks of that time (at least until the Soviets truly put out some T-34s and KV-1s), but that opinion changed drastically once I found out just how ill-equiped they were outside of their armor and (partially) their gun.
