ARL 44

ARL 44
Type	Heavy tank
Place of origin	France
Specifications
Weight	50 tonnes (55 short tons; 49 long tons)
Length	10.53 m (34 ft 7 in)
Width	3.40 m (11 ft 2 in)
Height	3.20 m (10 ft 6 in)
Crew	5
Armor	120 mm (4.7 in)
Main armament	90 mm DCA45
Secondary armament	3 × 7.5 mm MAC31 Châtellerault MG
Engine	Maybach HL 230, gasoline 575 hp
Power/weight	11.3 hp/tonne
Suspension	vertical coil spring
Operational range	350 km (220 mi)
Speed	30 km/h (19 mph)

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.

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 Kriegsmarine 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. On 9 October 1944, the Ministry of War decided to start production of a char de transition, "transitional tank".

However, French pre-war light and medium designs had become completely outdated and there was no way to quickly make up for the time lost and immediately improve their component quality.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 were equal to the Tiger II in its combination of firepower and armour. 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 could not be employed now, they would be forced to seek other occupations and much expertise would be lost.