Inside the Chieftain's Hatch: FCM 36

FCM 36 or attractor rn3 as FCM called it was something of an outlier in the race to replace pretty much the entire French tank fleet which was started by Hotchkiss back in 1933 over a dozen companies submitted bids to build the replacement tanks and only formated as far as building a pilot the orders for a Renault and Hotchkiss students started coming in and the submission from batsha never really made a pass to pilot stage FCM however did actually get built albeit for quirky reasons not in great numbers we're in somewhere to check those out as you look at the vehicle they obviously in the shouts at you is the angled welded nature compared to the other tanks that were entered into this series two of them were round and cast and the third one from Bath sure was a nice angular but also still cast the reason behind the welded structure is FCMs background they primarily made ships although they had achieved some notoriety or fame depending on a point of view for building the massive to see tanks earlier welding provided a number of advantages but there was a significant problem from the perspective of the French government buying these things welding was a practice that only skilled workers could do and they got paid more plus FCM also had to divert their workers resources towards building ships as well as building tanks as a result although the FCMs were built very quickly due to the production advantages of welding not many orders came in in the first place [Music] [Music] as you can see the slope is from all sides and it's sort of irritates me that when people look at the t-34s a it develops smooth sloped Armour so well no the FCM 36 would like a word in fact a lot of other earlier tanks would like a word but that's beside the point now one of the limitations with sloping in words is they have a smaller turret ring which means you have a smaller turret however in the case of the French tanks that actually wasn't so much of a problem because they specifically wanted one-man turrets for a couple of reasons that actually made a at the time a fair bit of sense one very easy advantage was that if you had a turret light enough for the same turret ring he just plugged it onto an F T and that was much cheaper a bigger problem though was manpower remember the France is still recovering from the massive dearth of manpower suffered after the end of the first world war so they didn't really have many men to put in too many tanks so you could either have a few three-man tanks or a lot of two men tanks it was decided that having more two-man tanks is better the other advantage is that a smaller two-man tank uses less metal it's faster to produce is cheaper to produce all these things are very important to the French government at the time so a one-man turd it was it was the benefit of hindsight this can be said to be penny wise and pound foolish but at the time there was a certain logic behind their actions [Music] the four centimeter thick front hole is dominated by the large three-piece drivers hatch it opens in a certain sequence firstly the upper visor then the right hand door and then the left hand door now in order to get in and close it behind you the catch is that the hydraulics are on the outside so as you're about to climb in you push down on the release and then you get in through the unsupported very heavy armored door and then you close it all up around you not ideal other components on the front of the vehicle where you have the typical French shredded headlight of the time the horn is on the far side and you can see also one of the vision states easily enough the advantage of the angled superstructure on the FCM compared to the cast holes of the others is that the vision slits give you a wider field of vision than they gave you moving back from the idler you pass by the track tension system it's a simple large nut on a screw nothing unusual there you go to the first roller which is near as I can tell it's just to fill in the gap between the idler and the first road wheel the road wheels themselves they are for bogies each bogie has a pair of wheels if you look at them they look almost like they are two different wheels paired together but it seems that it's just one wheel with a groove cut in between the two to lubricate them you have these little access ports here behind wing nuts just open up the wing nut pull off the panel and you can access the grease points and the pipes will go to wherever it is on the system that the grease needs to get to up above you can see the large mud shoots mud clogging was a perpetual problem with this tank was never entirely solved and I'm not entirely sure why because looking up underneath it there is nothing but track the word various proposals made such as remove the rollers and replace them with skids that would give more room for the mud to fall out or simply remove the side skirting entirely and make the inner wall thicker obviously it didn't happen last thing I mentioned is just on the upper hall there's plenty of room for the Pioneer kits and there is a marker right does on top [Music] you [Music] in common with the FT that started it all the entire para train for this tank is at the rear the large sprocket wheel so only have one set of teeth unlike the more typical pair these machine with the single pin short pitch track links the only bolts on the entire tank are those which are necessary to get at the engine compartment and you can see that the compartment itself has a long sloping tail with the exhausts that divert forward underneath these hatches back here you're gonna see the steering system one large component on each side of the differential and here's one I prepared earlier as you can see this engine is undergoing a bit of a restoration right now the top half is missing but you can see that it is a burly a ricardo four-cylinder diesel water-cooled engine what's that about ninety one or a hundred and five horsepower depending on which source you want to use the choice of a diesel was a little bit unusual for the time I had a couple of advantages though one of which was he could go about 200 kilometers on a mere 217 litres of fuel another advantage was that it was less likely to catch fire at least that was the perception however the was a two kilometre fire extinguisher installed in the system on the other hand the downside was that you had to have a separate fuel logistics train just for this type of time because pretty much everything else that the French were using was petrol this led to a few problems later on [Music] access to the turret for the commander is by way of the large hatch door in the turret we're pretty common to most of the French tanks of the hero interestingly the turret seals up sufficiently that this is the first tank to have an NBC overpressure system and it's worth remembering the use of gas quite frequently barely two decades prior the FCM stern is considered to be more roomy than the apx is found on the Renault and Hodgkiss and although it is a relative statement I can easily see why this is significantly better and it's still bad vision is provided by way these little slots there are either low ones if I'm down Manning the gun or higher ones if I'm standing up and it's absolutely atrocious I can hardly imagine even finding my friends let alone finding enemies to shoot who might be trying to kill me I am kneeling down on the base of the floor there was a folded down seat an actual seat which was attached to the firewall soundly detached from this particular tank and that certainly beats the little sling thing that would be on the the Renault at Hotchkiss and in fact I'm not even sure how I would use that because the interior is absolutely horrendous the sa-18 is the same gun as found on pretty much everything else it is the world war 137 very short gun does all about two centimetres worth of armour penetration with an AP round and was simply a matter of economy there was ready plenty of ammunition and stores there were the guns that you can simply take off the FT if you didn't want to put new turrets on them or what-have-you interestingly although this going shares the shoulder pad and hand grip elevation system as you would imagine with the sight here it also has a level of Traverse independent of the turret this is fairly unique and very handy when it comes to aiming there is of course a regular Traverse hand wheel although it does go in Reverse so you would expect if you crank clockwise the turret would turn clockwise it doesn't it goes backwards the Eclair applies the turret turns left as you can see [Music] there was an attempt to mount a larger gun the 37 millimeter si 38 could be found or maybe the Hodgkin Sorrento as well however the welds on this turret couldn't take the incredible force of this devastating weapon so the solution was actually had to make an entirely new turret the problem was that although one was made and had internal mantlet that worked they built it just before France surrendered and well that was the end of that story not much else to be said here on the right hand side would be the seven point five millimeter machine gun with the drone magazines I do note that in this turret they have found room for a ready rack of three rounds of ammunition on the right hand side the cupola is effectively an extension of the turret sides has probably made manufacturing very simple it's no worse than the other options with the little dome cupola on the other tanks but that's basically the blind leading the blind it's it's horrible I can understand why folks would open the back hatch and just stick their head out that way until people actually start shooting at them it's the only way you'd be able to see anything so that's it for the commander's position I shall now move a forward [Music] and this was doing so well as well so what the big advantages to having the engine and transmission at the back of the tank is that unlike say there are no you don't have to leave the powertrain on the right hand side it's not taking up a room inside the hole this is great you got more room for the driver you got more room for the ammunition you've got more room for the radio you can actually put in the r54 into this if you had one sadly the drivers position lets it all down I'm not quite sure where to start I am on a cushion on the floor of the hole it does have a backrest the backrest is absolutely murdering my back because the only way I can fare right now is by evening you know in a somewhat supplying position now my first question is how big people's feet were back then because you can see my toe on the brake is kind of blocked by the lever for the hatch which is I would argue a bit of a problem the clutch I can operate on the left hand sorry that's not too difficult the two levers for steering well okay and I can get to the accelerator easy enough five-speed manual transmission on the right it's pretty conventional so reverse is forward then one two three it's it's clearly marked and the drivers dial is similarly on the right hand side of the hall my first thought actually for all of these two men tanks that I've been in over the last couple of days is these guys had more guts than I do now granted probably be walking into machine-gun fire but I my words fail me this is an astonishing way to go into battle and unfortunately although this may be the best of the infantry tanks that the French had I don't think that counts for enough anyway I gotta get out of here before my back decide so I need to go see a chiropractor and I'm not your help oh my god the tank is on fire the help [Music] I've got another nine [Music] Oh [Music] take the microphone with me ah Jesus [Music] overall 400 tanks who ordered although only 100 were ordered early enough to actually be built they quitted themselves reasonably well as perhaps the best of the two-man tanks however they did have the misfortune of being at Saddam which should not go well for the French regardless of what kind of tanks they had in either case it may or may not say something for the FCM but the vast majority were not lost you to mechanical defect but were instead lost to either combat or supply issues those which are captured by the Germans ended up being converted into artillery pieces either indirect or anti-tank so that's it this is a short video because it's a very simple two main tank with not much should be said about it I'll see you in the next one [Music] and for the battalion Santini but but I got them batting no chanting no fire I'll call a badger I thought you guys might like to have a better view from the front just in case the view from the rear didn't give you the exact experience of just how crowded I am I mean I feel like I'm now in an egg all curled up ready to hatch and be thrown into the world yeah no besides that's far too poetic for me [Music] just let me get out of here please okay [Music] you

Channel: The_Chieftain

Views: 107,587

Rating: 4.9743261 out of 5

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Id: YFYsy3gomac

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 28 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/similar_observation]

man, all these interwar tanks are so interesting

[u/petard_destroyer]

Oops