page_title: Renault R35
section_title: Romania
hierarchical_section_title: Renault R35 / Operational history / Romania
caption_attribution_description: English: A Renault R35 tank on display at King Ferdinand National Military Museum, Bucharest.
context_page_description: The Renault R35, an abbreviation of Char léger Modèle 1935 R or R 35, was a French light infantry tank of the Second World War.
  Designed from 1933 onwards and produced from 1936, the type was intended as an infantry support light tank, equipping autonomous tank battalions, that would be allocated to individual infantry divisions to assist them in executing offensive operations. To this end it was relatively well-armoured but slow and lacking a good antitank-capacity, fitted with a short 37 mm gun. At the outbreak of the war, the antitank-role was more emphasized leading to the development and eventual production from April 1940 of a subtype with a more powerful longer gun, the Renault R40. It was planned to shift new production capacity to the manufacture of other, faster, types, but due to the defeat of France the R35/40 remained the most numerous French tank of the war, about 1685 vehicles having been produced by June 1940. At that moment it had also been exported to Poland, Romania, Turkey and Yugoslavia. For the remainder of the war Germany and its allies would use captured vehicles, some of them rebuilt into tank destroyers.
context_section_description: As part of a rearmament program of the late 1930s, Romania sought to obtain a license for the local manufacture of two hundred French Renault R35 infantry tanks.  By early 1938, negotiations for establishing a factory for the production of R35 tanks had reached an advanced state.  By this time France's own demands for rearmament prohibited further development, however. In August and September 1939, as a stopgap measure, forty-one R35s were supplied to the Royal Romanian Army.  These tanks served as the principal tank of the newly formed 2nd Armoured Regiment.  At the end of September 1939, an additional thirty-four brand new R35s passed into Romanian hands when the Polish 21st Light Tank Battalion (Batalion Czołgów Lekkich, or BCL) chose internment over capture following the German conquest of Poland and fled over the Romanian border. With seventy-five tanks on strength, the 2nd Armoured Regiment expanded into two battalions.
  After the Battle of Stalingrad, the Romanians decided that the R 35s required significant improvement of their anti-tank capacity. At first, the turret of an R 35 of the 2nd Tank Regiment of the 1st Tank Division was swapped for the turret of a captured Soviet T-26. Ultimately, at the beginning of 1943, it was decided to keep the thicker armor of the French turret. Thus, the 45 mm gun of the T-26 was adopted as a replacement for the original 37 mm gun. The Soviet gun was attached to the French turret with the help of an extension which contained the recoil mechanism of the 45 mm piece. The downside to this was that, following these modifications, there was no longer enough space in the turret to keep the coaxial machine gun, which was thus removed. The upgraded tanks were adopted as tank destroyers under the designation Vânătorul de care R35, with thirty R 35s converted until June 1944 by the Leonida factory in Bucharest. The Soviet 45 mm guns were taken from captured T-26 and BT-7 tanks. They were refurbished at the Army Arsenal in Târgoviște while the new gun mounts containing the recoil mechanism were made at the Concordia Works in Ploiești. These vehicles served until the end of the war. A significant amount of the original French-made parts, from both the original and converted R-35 tanks, was replaced by Romanian-produced spares in 1941-1942. Romanian factories produced drive sprockets, drive shafts, tracks, new metal-rimmed road wheels and cylinder heads. The wheels were designed locally to be ten times more durable. Added to these were the gun mounts for the 45 mm guns, added as turret extensions, which contained the recoil mechanism. Thus, the Romanian-converted R-35 had significant Romanian-manufactured parts in its hull, transmission and turret.
  There were sixty R35 tanks in the Romanian inventory on 19 July 1944, thirty of which had been rearmed with 45 mm guns.
caption: Romanian R35 at the Bucharest National Military Museum with the metal-rimmed wheels
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