- Tech Tree
- Event (either as solo vehichle or with a squad)
- Premium
- Shouldn’t be added
- 1
- 2
- 3
The Char B1 Bis was one of France’s most common heavy tanks of WW2 by the time WW2 broke out, with around 370 examples made before France’s capitulation. After France’s capitulation, some surviving examples, 161 in total, were placed into German service for their heavy armor , and some saw modification from their original state.
This tank had 2 primary armaments, in addition to it’s coaxial 7.5mm MAC machine gun, quite similar to the M3 Grant’s layout, which is what I will be comparing it to as it is the closest example in game. This tank was designed at a time when the anti tank capabilities of the Wermacht’s panzers were much worse, mostly consisting of 20 and 37mm cannons, making the 60mms of hull armor and 55mms of turret armor invulnerable against most everything front of the time except for dedicated TDs like the Flakbus and Panzerjäger I, which historically were some of the only things that could combat this tank at the time. Comparing this to the Grant, with it’s 51mm hull and 76mm turret armor, it has slightly better hull armor in exchange for a less armored turret. In exchange for the heavy armor though, it lost a lot of speed due to the armor’s weight, only going 28 km/h max, whereas the Grant is decently faster at 39 km/h max speed.
The first cannon on the Char B1 was the 47mm SA35 L/32 cannon, which loads each shell 4 seconds. It’s performance isn’t really that great, loading slower than the 37mm M5 cannon (4 vs 2.9 seconds), and having lower penetration in it’s solid shot AP shell (62mm at 10 meters vs 79 at 10 meters). This would likely not be too much of a big deal if it goes against enemies with average, but could face difficulty with some tanks in the BR 1-3 range.
Shell pen stats
Ammunition Type Armor penetration (mm) at a distance:
10 m 100 m 500 m 1000 m 1500 m 2000 m
Mle1935
APC 62 59 47 36 27 20
Next is the main cannon of the 2, the 75mm SA35 L/17 howitzer, located in the hull of the tank. This is where you would expect this tank to really shine, but unfortunately isn’t really that great. One of the major problems it has is only TWO degrees of total horizontal traverse, making even StuGs seem great with the swivel space this thing has, compared to the Grant’s 30 degrees total horizontal traverse. This is a very obvious downside as you have turn the entire slow tank around for basically any horizontal movement of the main gun. Another thing is that it’s AP shell, while you would expect it to have better penetration than the 47mm cannon, has worse actually, only 58mms (the Panzer 3J’s APCBC penetrates 80mms). While the M3 Grant’s cannon lacks HE filler, it has much more adequate penetration at 84mms at 10 meters. In addition, the reload is quite longer, 8.6 seconds per shell compared to 4.8 seconds. One upside though about this cannon is that is has more HE filler than the HE shells of German short 75mm cannon and Grant’s cannon at 740g of explosive mass vs 666g (German short 75/Grant).
APHE and HE Shell stats
Ammunition Type Armor penetration (mm) at a distance:
10 m 100 m 500 m 1000 m 1500 m 2000 m
Mle1910M (90g filler)
APHE 58 57 50 43 37 32
Mle1915 (740g filler)
HE 11 11 11 11 11 11
I think this would make for a good event vehicle since it’s a buetepanzer, but I’ll leave that up to the voters to decide how it will be introduced. As for the BR, it seems like it would maybe be a little too strong for BR1 with fairly thick armor and the cannon having good HE, but it also seems like, due to it’s weaknesses, it wouldn’t excel on BR2 either as it would suffer in upteirs, but will probably end up there. Below this, there are some photos of the Char B1 in German use.
