ARL 44 The ARL 44 was a French heavy tank produced just after World War II . Only sixty of these tanks were ever manufactured and the type was quickly phased out . Development . During the German occupation some clandestine tank development took place in France , mostly limited to component design or the building of tracked chassis with either a pretended civilian use or with a German Navy destination . These efforts were coordinated by CDM ( " Camouflage du Matériel " ) , a secret Vichy army organisation trying to produce matériel forbidden by the armistice conditions , with the ultimate goal of combining these components into the design of a possible future thirty ton battle tank , armed with a 75 mm gun . The projects were very disparate , including those for a trolleybus , the Caterpillar du Transsaharien ( a regular cross - Sahara track and rail connection ) and a tracked snow blower for the " Kriegsmarine " to be used in Norway . Firms involved were " Laffly " and " Lorraine " ; also a military design team in occupied France , headed by Maurice Lavirotte , was active . When in August 1944 Paris was liberated , the new provisional government of France did its utmost to regain the country ' s position as a great power , trying to establish its status as a full partner among the Allies by contributing as much as possible to the war effort . One of the means to accomplish this was to quickly restart tank production . Before the war France had been the world ' s second largest tank producer , behind the Soviet Union . However French pre - war light and medium designs had become completely outdated and there was no way to quickly make up for the time lost and immediately improve their component quality . It might be possible though to compensate for this by sheer size . A large and well - armed vehicle might still be useful , however obsolescent its individual parts were , especially as the British and Americans seemed to be behind Germany in heavy tank development , having no operational vehicles that could slug it out with a Tiger II . An important secondary goal of the project was simply to ensure that France would in the future have a sufficient number of weapons engineers ; if these couldn ' t be employed now , they would be forced to seek other occupations and much expertise would be lost . Consequently it was decided to produce 600 heavy tanks , to be designed by the " Direction des Études et Fabrications d ' Armement " ( DEFA ) in which engineers from the former APX ( the army " Atelier de Puteaux " ) and AMX ( the " Atelier de Construction d ' Issy - les - Moulineaux " state factory ) design teams were concentrated , and built by the " Atelier de Construction de Rueil " ( ARL ) , the army workshop . The type was named " ARL 44 " . The specifications were not at first overly ambitious and called for a thirty ton vehicle with 60 mm of armour and armed with a new 75 mm Long 44 gun , rendering a penetration of 80 mm steel at 1000 metres and developed by engineer Lafargue from the 75 mm CA 32 gun , conforming to the earlier CDM intentions . As France had been rather isolated from engineering developments in the rest of the world , the designers based themselves on types they already knew well , mainly the Char B1 , the Char G1 and the FCM F1 — contrary to what some sources state the ARL 44 was not directly derived from the earlier ARL 40 project . It was tried to use the components developed between 1940 and 1944 , though most soon proved to be incompatible . As a result of the reliance on older types , the ARL 44 was to be fitted with a very old - fashioned suspension system with small road wheels , using the same track as the Char B1 , limiting maximum speed to about thirty km / h . The suggestion to use a more modern foreign suspension system was rejected as it would have compromised the tank ' s status as a purely French design . A Talbot 450 hp or Panhard 400 hp engine was envisaged . Progress was very slow as there was a lack of resources and much infrastructure in the Paris region had been destroyed . Even finding paper and drawing materials was difficult . In February 1945 a meeting took place between the engineers and the Army . The tank officers quickly pointed out that building a tank according to the original specifications was pointless as such a vehicle would be inferior to even an M4 Sherman , a type that could be obtained for free from the Allies in any numbers so desired . It was therefore decided that the ARL 44 would be fitted with 120 mm of sloped armour , bringing the weight , which even in the conceptual stage had already grown to 43 metric tons , to 48 tons . The armament should consist of the most powerful gun available ; sadly this would probably be the American 76 mm or with some luck the British 17 - pounder ; 90 mm guns had not been made available by the Allies . Only a wooden mock - up had been completed by an engineering team headed by Engineer General Maurice Lavirotte , when the war ended . However , the end of hostilities did not mean the end of the entire project . To maintain some continuation in French tank design and bolster national morale , it was decided to build sixty vehicles , even though there was no longer any real tactical need for them . In March 1946 the first prototype could be tested . The " Atelier et Chantiers de la Loire " built the ACL1 turret , fitted with the American 76 mm gun ; this was later replaced by a Schneider turret based on the one designed for the Char F1 and fitted with the 90 mm DCA naval AA - gun which had a muzzle velocity of 1000 m / s ( AP ; 1130 m / s HE ) and a muzzle brake — the ARL 44 was thus the first French tank to feature this item . Firing trials began on 27 June 1947 ; the gun often proved to be more accurate than that of a Panther used for comparison . Mainly due to the change in armament , the development and production of the turret would be drawn out ; it was not until 1949 that turrets could be fitted to hulls produced in 1946 and placed into storage . Forty hulls had been completed by FAMH and a further twenty by Renault . They were fitted with captured German Maybach HL230 600 hp engines ( real output 575 hp ) , brought back by a mission headed by General Joseph Molinié in the summer of 1945 , repeating the course of events with the Char 2C , which after the previous war had also received captured Maybach engines . Description . The ARL 44 clearly shows that it is based on earlier French heavy tank design . The hull is long , over nine metres , but relatively narrow , just as a vehicle meant to cross wide trenches . The covered suspension , with its many small road wheels , that had already been outdated in the thirties , is the most obvious sign of its basic Char B1 ancestry ; it is in essence identical to that of the Char B1 ter . The type has often been compared to the many " Super Char B " projects from before the war . Its speed is likewise limited , the lowest of any fifty ton tank built after the war . This was also partly due to the lack of a sufficiently strong engine ; it had originally been intended to compensate for this by using a more efficient petro - electrical transmission . This kind of transmission has as a major drawback that it very easily overheats and the ARL 44 as a result was fitted with an impressive and complex array of ventilators and cooling ducts ; the engine deck was made to extend behind the track to accommodate them all . The hull glacis plate is 120 mm thick and reclined at about 45° , giving a line - of - sight thickness in the horizontal plane of about 170 mm . This made the ARL 44 the most heavily armoured French tank until the Leclerc . Within the glacis , low on the right side , a 7 . 5 mm machine - gun is fitted in a fixed position . The turret was the most modern looking part ; it was also an obvious makeshift solution , somewhat crudely welded together , made necessary by the simple fact Schneider as yet couldn ' t produce complete cast turrets large enough to hold a 90 mm gun . The turret front , however , was a cast section . As the turret was positioned near the middle of the tank , even when pointing to the back the gun would have a large overhang ; to facilitate transport it was therefore made retractable into the turret . The turret was rotated by a Simca 5 engine . In all , the ARL 44 was an unsatisfactory interim design , afterwards often called the " Transitional Tank " , the main function of which was to provide experience in building heavier vehicles . The main lesson learned for many engineers was that it was unwise to construct too - heavy types , and this opinion was reinforced by the failure of the tank project to which the ARL 44 formed the transition : the much more ambitious heavy AMX 50 . Only after a gap of sixteen years would France , in 1966 , again build a main battle tank , the AMX 30 . Operational history . The ARL 44s equipped the " 503e Régiment de Chars de Combat " stationed in Mourmelon - le - Grand and before the end of 1950 replaced seventeen Panther tank s used earlier by that unit . In service the ARL 44 was at first an unreliable vehicle : the brakes , the gear box and the suspension were too frail . A special improvement programme remedied most of these shortcomings . The ARL 44 made only one public appearance , ten vehicles participated in the Bastille Day parade on 14 July 1951 . When the American M47 Patton became available , which type also had a 90 mm gun , they were phased out in 1953 and used as targets . The rumour that most ARL 44s were exported to Argentina is unfounded . Three ARL 44s survive today . An ARL 44 can be seen in the Musée des Blindés in Saumur ; another one at the 501st - 503rd Tank Regiment , Mourmelon - le - Grand , a third is a wreck on the technical zone of the base of the 2nd Dragoon Regiment at Fontevraud . It is relatively complete but the gun is dismounted from the turret .