The Char B1: The 'Real' Tiger Tank?

The Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger, or Tiger I, is one of—if not arguably the—most iconic tank of World War II. Ever since it was first deployed 81 years ago in 1942, it has been the stuff of legend. Some say that during the war it was a tank which induced sufficient fear that the mere rumour of one’s presence could halt localised advances and change the course of battle… and since the war’s conclusion its legend has only grown.

And yet, despite its undeniably legendary status, the Tiger I is an unbelievably contentious tank, one that divides historians alike.

This debate is an interesting one, but today we will be presenting and evaluating a different hypothesis: one in which we reject this dichotomy altogether, and instead present a new claimant for the most illustrious legend that the Tiger I possesses. But what other tank could claim such a mantle?

Well, this is the object of our awe today: the French Char B1. You may think we have gone a bit mad here… as this tank is decried by many as a sloth of a thing which was far too slow, equipped with a ridiculous short-barrelled and all but impossible to traverse short-barrelled howitzer. A tank often dubbed “the greatest First World War tank” to reflect just how obsolete its design was by the Second World War.

But today we will be presenting a counter to these negative claims, because what if the supposedly laughable and horrific Char B1 was actually the real Tiger I—a tank which filled its opponents with dread, which could shake off cannon fire and keep on going, and whose sheer power could alter the flow of battle entirely on its own?

The Char B1

Before we can assess whether or not the Char B1 was the real Tiger, it is vital that we understand its history. And like the Tiger, the development of the Char B1 was far from smooth. Design work began in 1921, and as with all interwar French military projects, the Char B1’s development was at the mercy of unstable governments and their ever-changing whims.

On top of this, the Char B1 also had to be designed around a French military elite that could not decide where they wanted to spend their money; one year the Renault offices were overflowing with cash, while the next year funding could all but disappear, as the French military decided that actually, no, a new breakthrough tank could wait—what we really need now is a new light machine gun, or battleships, or more money for the Maginot Line.

Renault persisted, however, despite this difficult design environment, and eventually the design work on the Char B1 was finally finished in 1934 after 13 long years.

Production of the neglected Char B1 then finally began in 1935, and would continue up until 1940, when France’s defeat at the hands of Germany rather destroyed the French Government’s need for new tanks. In this period two main variants of the Char B1 were produced: the “original” Char B1, and the “improved” Char B1 bis.

At this point let’s take the time to talk about the Char B1’s unorthodox and bizarre looks: if you ask a child to draw a “typical” tank, what they draw will not resemble a Char B1. With a girthy, yet stubby SA 35 75mm howitzer mounted on a fixed forward-facing casemate, a long frame accommodating a sizable 16.5-litre 6-cylinder Renault petrol engine, and a tiny little one-man turret on top housing a more modest 47mm cannon, the Char B1’s appearance certainly defies convention, even by the often bizarre standards of inter-war tank design.

This unorthodox appearance was the result of the Char B1’s unique development, which rather than looking ahead to the future to create the ultimate tank for the next conflict, harkened back to the Great War to create a tank that would have been perfect for the past. Envisioned as a self-propelled gun rather than a tank, French authorities initially requested a heavy armoured vehicle which could easily cross trenches—hence its long length—and easily bring heavy weaponry to bear against enemy fortifications—hence its 75mm howitzer mounted low in the hull, so it could be pointed into the vision slits of enemy fortifications. Midway through the Char B1’s development, however, it was reasoned that this self-propelled gun configuration might leave the Char B1 vulnerable to flanking attacks, so a solution was sought to give it a bit more defensive punch.

The solution? A little one-man turret plonked on top, equipped with a 47mm gun.

It can be easy to forget when it is otherwise dwarfed by the 75mm monster in the hull, but by interwar and early WWII standards a 47mm tank cannon was quite the sizable thing in its own right. For example, the British Mk.II Crusader only carried a 40mm cannon, and the most common German tank of the Battle of France, the Panzer II, only sported a 20mm autocannon. Although certainly not up to snuff when late-war heavy tanks began making their appearance, for its time a 47mm gun was perfectly adequate.

And not only were the B1’s guns big, but in fact the whole tank was big—a whopping 21 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 9 feet tall, and weighing in at 31 tons. A lot of this weight came from the tank’s armour, which was very thick due to its planned deployment against fortified positions: 60mm on the “original” Char B1 and 75mm on the “improved” Char B1 bis. For context, the main anti-tank gun employed by the Germans during the Battle of France, the Pak 36, when firing the best quality tungsten-core round available was only capable of penetrating a maximum of 64mm of armour.

In light of this, it isn’t surprising that the Char B1 was considered one of the most powerful tanks of its time. There’s no doubt that it represented a fearsome prospect on the battlefield, but if we wish to come to an informed conclusion regarding how “Tiger-like” the Char B1 is, we shouldn’t artificially venerate its merits. Every tank, no matter how groundbreaking, has its drawbacks; it is simply the reality of engineering, and the Char B1 is no exception. So to come to an informed conclusion, let us now look at those shortcomings.

For starters, the Char B1 may have had a fearsome main armament with its 75mm SA 35 howitzer, but it was implemented in an ineffective way. The major drawback was that it only had one degree of traverse in either direction, and even this was only intended for zeroing the cannon, and not for use in combat. Consequently the cannon could only be traversed by turning the whole tank.

Now, this isn’t quite the disaster it may first sound, because Renault did engineer some clever solutions into the Char B1 to minimise the issues caused by this. The first such solution was to combine the roles of the driver and the gunner in the tank, so that the same crew member had direct control of both the firing of the gun and the traversing of the tank, theoretically eliminating any inefficiency that would be generated by these normally two separate roles having to communicate in battle.

To further reduce complications from this, the Char B1’s traverse was also improved through use of a “Naeder Steering System”—a sophisticated hydraulic system which assisted the tank in traversing, allowing the Char B1 to make the sort of fast and precise pivots that many other tanks simply were not capable of. These certainly served to minimise the negative effects of the design dead end that Renault had engineered themselves into, but a minimisation is not an elimination, and the Char B1’s driver-gunners were still seriously overworked.

Another major drawback of the Char B1 was one that it shared with all French tanks: its one-man turret. The logic goes that regardless of how big it may or may not be, a tank turret has to perform the same basic functions—shooting and spotting. In typical tank design this sees the turret made large enough to accommodate three crew members: a commander, a gunner, and a loader, who can split these duties.

A one-man turret, on the other hand, sees all of these duties performed by one crew member, increasing the inefficiency with which all three roles are performed. If Renault had incorporated some clever workaround to minimise the impact of this design choice, as they had with the Char B1’s traversing system, we could at least say it was a minimised detriment… but alas, no. There was no clever workaround, and there are no qualifiers to present—it was simply a bad design choice that led to the tanks performing poorly compared to their three-man-turreted counterparts.

And with that, our overview of the Char B1’s development history and technical specifications is complete, and we are one step closer to answering the question we posed at the start. So now, let us delve into the challenger for the title: the Tiger I.

The “Real” Tiger

Before we get into this, we must stop and ask ourselves: which Tiger are we comparing the Char B1 to? By this I don’t mean which mark of the Tiger, or even which specific Tiger we are comparing it to, but as the Tiger I is such a contentious tank, we first must decide how we view it ourselves. And please note—we have no interest in spoonfeeding you one particular position; this article is intended to encourage you to come to your own conclusions, not to force ours upon you. So with that in mind, we will now cover both positions, then you can choose for yourself which sounds right.

Tiger I detractors, or the Tiger haters as we will now call them, argue that tales of the Tiger I’s awesome exploits are grossly exaggerated, and that these isolated exceptional events are not representative of the typical Tiger. This is best demonstrated by Michael Wittmann, arguably the most famous tank commander of World War II, who supposedly destroyed the entire British 4th County London Yeomanry Regiment on the 13th of June 1944 while in command of a Tiger I, in a daring act of derring-do which many claim is grossly exaggerated.

Firstly there is the question of how one accurately counts “kills,” because since combat tends to be quite the chaotic affair, self-attributed “kill counts” are often heavily contested; is that tank just smoking, or is it actually knocked out, etc., etc. This, of course, assumes that tank commanders generally, and Michael Wittmann specifically, were being honest in the first place, because when German “kills” were self-recorded, what glory-hungry commander wouldn’t be tempted to fudge the numbers a bit? Michael Wittmann’s attack on the 13th of June was certainly an impressive feat, make no mistake—but did he really knock out 13 tanks and 15 other vehicles, and all by himself at that?

To deconstruct Michael Wittmann’s legend further still, many will point to what made it spread: the Nazi Propaganda Machine. See, Wittmann himself didn’t survive the war, and his famous figures actually come from Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who leapt on Michael Wittmann’s success as a golden opportunity to convince the German public that actually, contrary to the horror stories they had heard from returning soldiers, and what the state of their bombed-out house would lead them to believe, the war was actually going marvellously! No need to stress—please keep turning up to work and feeding your sons into the meat grinder! Now, we are no scholars of Nazism here, but we feel confident enough to say that the Nazi Propaganda machine might have actually been a bit dishonest from time to time—an earth-shattering revelation, we know—therefore, if we are to assume that Michael Wittmann’s exploits are exaggerated, be it from him or his superiors… is the Tiger in fact legendary?

Those who do believe in the Tiger I legend, the Tiger enjoyers, build their argument around the hard factors of the tank: its big gun, its thick armour, and its surprisingly agile top speed. This view, which also makes it much easier to compare tanks to one another, forms a solid foundation of a belief in the Tiger as a most excellent tank, because it has big numbers! This foundation is then built upon by individual tales of excellence such as the aforementioned Michael Wittmann legend, legends which they typically believe to be by and large correct.

To be fair to the Tiger enjoyers, it is certainly easy to argue that many critics of the Tiger I can go too far in their critiques, to the point of completely dismissing the importance of armour that can take a beating and a big gun that can deal big damage. But equally, one can certainly see the argument that focusing too much on these ultimately rather arbitrary statistics naturally lends one to a more simplistic understanding of the vehicle, as such base measurements simply don’t lend themselves to understanding the nuance of its true situation.

So now that we have a thorough understanding of Tiger’s legend, let us now focus back in on the Char B1, and see if it has what it takes to match this legend.

The Real Tiger?

The high point of the Char B1’s service came on the 16th of May 1940. It was the opening stage of the Battle of France, which had only just begun a few days earlier. The French Army had yet to collapse, morale was at an all-time high, and as far as anyone was concerned, victory in the Battle of France was still well within the Allies’ grasp.

The as-yet-undecided nature of the battle was no better summarised than in the ongoing situation in Stonne, a French village that sat 10 miles from the Belgian border. The village had changed hands multiple times the day prior, and was still anyone’s for the taking. 90,000 German soldiers, supported by 300 tanks and three squadrons of Ju-87 dive bombers were determined to hold onto the village and push their advance further; 42,500 French soldiers and their 130 supporting tanks opposed them. Despite being outnumbered and pushed out of the village, the French clung on, determined to retake what was theirs.

The French began the day with a counterattack, which began shortly after 5 a.m. Every man and machine available diligently did their part to retake Stonne, and then, God willing, push the Germans back to the border. In opposition was the 8th Panzer Regiment, which had brought their best hardware to the fore to resist the French effort—Panzer IIIs, the primary anti-armour tank, and Panzer IVs, the primary infantry support tank of the German Army. The men of the 8th Panzer Regiment were no doubt feeling confident: they were dug in, their hulls were down, and they knew exactly where their enemy would be coming from—the winds of fortune appeared to be blowing in their favour.

That confidence quickly disappeared thanks to the efforts of a single French tank, a Char B1 named Eure of the 41st Tank Battalion. In a masterfully executed move, the tank’s commander, Captain Pierre Billotte, ordered his hulking 31.5-ton beast to hold position 100 or so feet away from the German column. Then, without hesitation, the driver, Sergeant Durupt, fired the 75mm howitzer at the rearmost tank of the German column, and Captain Pierre Billotte unleashed the 47mm turret gun on the lead tank. At such a short range the German tanks never stood a chance: the rearmost tank immediately exploded into an enormous fireball as its ammunition racks detonated, knocking its supporting infantry off their feet and immediately killing all crew on board; the leading tank meanwhile suffered a critical hit to its engine block, immediately knocking it out and causing its few surviving crew to abandon their tank.

This masterful move had completely boxed the German column in, leaving them nowhere to run. They did the only thing they could do in response: try to turn their front armour to the attacking Char B1 and empty everything they had into it. 37mm rounds from the Panzer IIIs and 75mm rounds from the Panzer IVs began to rain down on the Char B1’s hull in a torrential downpour of tungsten-cored steel—but it was to no avail. With the 37mm rounds lacking the mass, and the 75mm rounds lacking the velocity to penetrate the Char B1’s thick armoured hull, nothing happened. Over 140 rounds hit the B1 without a single penetrating hit being scored.

The crew of the Eure naturally responded in kind, and one by one picked off the entire column. By the time the last German cannon fell silent, 11 Panzer IIIs and 2 Panzer IVs had been destroyed. This was not enough for the crew of the Eure, however; they further pushed their advance and added two Pak 36 anti-tank guns and their crews to their day’s kill tally. This action caused a complete tactical-level collapse of the local German forces, and by 7 a.m., only two hours into the counterattack, Stonne was returned to French control.

What is even more impressive is that this wasn’t even the only example of outlandish successes won by the Char B1 in Stonne on that day. Later in the day, at around 5 p.m., the German 64th Rifle Regiment was attempting to push the recently reinstalled French defenders out of the village once again. Their effort proved surprisingly easy and was largely unopposed until they were 800 metres or so from the perimeter of the village, at which point they were intercepted by another Char B1 named Riquewihr, of the 49th Tank Battalion. The Germans lacked any heavy ordnance, but nonetheless did all they could to repel the oncoming tank, peppering the Riquewihr with mass volleys from their Karabiner 98k rifles and attempting to immobilise it with precise fire from their Panzerbüchse 39 anti-tank rifles. This achieved little except attracting the ire of the Riquewihr’s commander, Lieutenant Doumecq, however, who ordered the Riquewihr to advance on the Germans and perform a 360-degree traverse, crushing the attackers under the tracks of the tank. The subsequent sight of the Riquewihr’s gore-covered tracks caused mass panic among the remaining German attackers, who all immediately routed from the scene in terror, leaving Stonne still in French hands… at least for now.

The second incident was certainly less tactically impressive than the Eure’s exploits, as in all frankness, dramatic though it may have been, opponents with nothing meaner than a 7.92×94mm Panzerbüchse to bring to bear were never going to pose a risk to any Char B1. But this matters little to us today—we are discussing the legend of the tank, and mythical stories such as this are key to understanding that legend.

But these stories raise some questions. If the Char B1 was so great, and potentially “the real Tiger,” why are incidents like this exceptions to the norm, and not the norm itself? If the Char B1 was capable of such outstanding victories, and the French Army had 369 of them in inventory, in addition to significantly outnumbering the Germans in overall number of tanks—why was the Battle of France such a disastrous loss for the Allies? Why didn’t Char B1s drive the Germans back through the Ardennes and back to Berlin itself?

In a word: tactics. The French Army did indeed have more tanks, and on paper higher quality tanks than the German Army, but they had absolutely no refined and modern doctrine of Combined Arms Warfare—different military branches all working together in an integrated and efficient hierarchy, and therefore able to act as a sum greater than the total of their parts.

This inability to carry out coordinated actions was the real reason that the Char B1 and indeed French tanks more generally completely failed during the Battle of France. Notice how in the two accounts previously discussed we made no reference to supporting infantry or aerial support of the tanks; that was not an omission on the author’s part—both tanks were operating essentially on their own, with little communication beyond their own squadron. This left the heroic actions of people such as Captain Billotte and Lieutenant Doumecq and their consequences as amazing openings that were completely unable to be exploited on the strategic level.

The problem did not rest just in doctrine, however. Even if the revolutionary will existed within the French military hierarchy to pursue new tactical ideas, the French Army’s equipment simply wasn’t up to the task. Few French tanks had radios, with the Char B1 coincidentally being one of the few tanks that could be relied upon to have a set. The few radios that were in circulation were of dubious quality; they frequently failed even before they were exposed to the rigours of combat. This left French tank commanders in a position where they were barely able to coordinate themselves even on the tactical level, much less so on the strategic level where they needed to communicate effectively with units of infantry and aerial units. Compare this to German tanks, nearly all of which had modern and reliable radios, and consequently were able to achieve a level of cross-service coordination that the French could only have dreamt of. When problems arose or resistance was encountered, German tank commanders were able to reliably relay the situation to their senior officers and receive revised orders relevant to the developing flow of battle. The occasional time a radio did fail, German tank commanders had the well-established principle of Auftragstaktik, mission-type tactics, which kept disruption to a minimum.

But does this flawed reality actually matter to our question today? A flawed reality has done little to dampen the legend of the Tiger, so should we view the Char B1 through the same lens? With such parallels, maybe it is another Tiger rather than the real Tiger?

Historians may help us to come to an answer here. They certainly have a wide range of opinions, and both hate and love the Tiger as much as any enthusiast. On the former side we have historians such as Michael Green who firmly believe that the Tiger I was the greatest tank of the war—an all-but-flawless design which wreaked havoc on the battlefield, sowed fear into the enemy, and was a sound investment on the part of the demonetisable Austrian painter that proved to be worth every Reichsmark, with Green dubbing the Tiger “the most potent armoured weapon of the Second World War.” On the latter side we have historians such as Christopher Lawrence who stated that many had “already made absurd statements that grossly overrated the Tiger’s contribution to battles.” But then we also have another position, those who reject such explicit frameworks altogether, a position held by historians such as Anthony Tucker-Jones, who in his book Tiger I & Tiger II attempts to rationalise the tank, frankly discussing what it did right, what it did wrong, and putting both in their appropriate context.

With that, we finally have all the information we need to answer today’s hypothesis. So now, all that is left to do is to decide.

Verdict

Personally, the author veers towards Anthony Tucker-Jones’s position, and believes that on one hand the Tiger I probably doesn’t deserve all the love it gets, but equally it doesn’t deserve all the hate it gets either. Sure, on one hand the exploits of Michael Wittmann were grossly exaggerated for propaganda purposes before entering common legend, resulting in the Tiger I having a rather unjustified position in popular imagination. But on the flipside, sure, German kill/loss ratios have been chronically misunderstood by historians, but this does not necessarily mean the Tiger I was an abomination of a tank, and it is probably reasonable enough to say that it was “fine.” Not great, not terrible, but “fine,” and it performed the role it was intended to fill perfectly adequately. But equally, so did the Char B1—it too was a flawed tank whose capabilities have been grossly exaggerated by a few choice stories, but it was “fine.”

This, for me, is the answer. The Tiger and the Char B1 parallel each other in so many ways that I can only conclude that the Char B1 is not the real Tiger, but it is another Tiger.

But what if this line of thinking itself is flawed? What if it doesn’t actually matter how good or bad a tank was when discussing its legacy? Has the legacy of the Tiger I really been decided by historians like us, who analyse over the minute details of a story and come up with these nuanced frameworks regarding legacy to contextualise tanks?

Or has it been decided by the millions upon millions of fans it has in the popular history community? The people whose love of the Tiger ensure its inclusion in any big-ticket war movie? The people whose love of the Tiger guarantees that TankFest is booked out every year thanks to Tiger 131?

Certainly their input is as valid as our own, or any scholarly input on the topic—we aren’t ones to gatekeep history. But they invariably outweigh us by a significant portion, and thus have much more power to dictate what the legacy of a tank actually is in the public zeitgeist.

So what do they think? To answer this question the author headed to the pub and made a beeline straight for the middle-aged men who love tanks to see what they thought of the Char B1. The verdict? Most of them hadn’t even heard of it, and if they had, it was a cursory knowledge at most. Consequently, according to this perspective the Char B1 is not the real Tiger I. The Tiger I is bigger, cooler, meaner, and has been in more war movies than the Char B1; therefore, by the weight of public opinion which dictates legacy, it wins.

Closing Remarks

As we stated at the beginning, our aim today was not to convince you of any particular position on either the Tiger I or the Char B1. Rather, we wanted to encourage you all to have a good think—to think about what actually makes a tank good or bad, and what actually constitutes a legendary tank, and come to your own positions about both of the tanks we have examined today as well as the way we think about them. It is important to stress that there is no right or wrong answer here; history is far from an objective science, and all of our opinions are moulded by the sources we have been exposed to and our prejudices and experiences that dictate how we interpret them. So long as you have a well-considered view backed up by sources and evidence, you have a valid opinion, and you have every right to shout that view from the rooftops with pride.

So then, all that is left to do is to ask you, the reader, a question: Was the Char B1 the real Tiger?

Key Takeaways

• The Char B1, despite criticisms, demonstrated significant combat effectiveness during the Battle of France.
• Both the Tiger I and Char B1 have contentious reputations, with historians and enthusiasts divided on their effectiveness.
• The Char B1’s design, while unconventional, included thick armor and powerful armament that made it formidable in combat.
• The French Army’s lack of combined arms tactics and reliable communication hindered the Char B1’s strategic impact.
• Public perception and popular culture significantly influence the legendary status of tanks like the Tiger I.

Sources

• Original MegaProjects video: The Char B1: The ‘Real’ Tiger Tank?
• Hero image source by The photo is tagged as Public domain by the National Library of Norway. / openverse, by-sa.

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