French Light Reconnaissance Tank AMR 35 ZT2

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The Automitrailleuse de Reconnaissance Renault Modèle 35 Type ZT (AMR 35 or Renault ZT) was a French light tank developed during the Interbellum
and used in the Second World War. It was not intended to reconnoitre
and report as its name suggests but was a light armoured combat vehicle,
mostly without a radio and used as a support tank for the mechanised
infantry.

The AMR 35 originated from a project in 1933 to improve the earlier AMR 33
by moving the engine from the front to the back. In 1934, a stronger
suspension was fitted and the type was chosen to replace the AMR 33 on
the production lines that year. Three orders were made by the French
Cavalry, totalling two hundred vehicles in five versions, including two
machine-gun tanks, two tank destroyer
types and a command tank. Later, ten were ordered of a radio
communication variant, the Renault YS, and over forty were built of a
tropical version, the ZT 4. 

ZT 2

The Renault ZT 2 was a tank with a larger octagonal welded steel Atelier de Construction de Puteaux
(APX) 5 turret equipped with a shortened 25 mm SARF gun, which had a
penetration of forty millimetres at five hundred metres. Despite the
name, which reflects that it had been designed by the Atelier de Puteaux forge, the one-man turret, with a weight of 650 kilogrammes, was fabricated by the Atelier de Rueil (ARL), an APX offshoot based at Rueil. It had also been intended to equip the AM 39 armoured car (the Gendron-SOMUA), and the colonial version of the Panhard 178,
but apart from the ten ZT 2 vehicles was only fitted to five Panhards,
so the planned production of at least 259 remained limited to fifteen.

The plan to produce a ZT 2 was first conceived in June 1935. On
12 December 1935, Renault had been ordered to produce a ZT 2 prototype
on a chassis to be taken from the first order of a hundred, but this was
annulled when five ZT 2s were made part of the second order. On 27
October 1937, the Renault factory estimated that all ten ZT 2s could be
produced simultaneous to the second order production run and on 14
January 1938 it was thought that ZT 2 production could be ended in June
1938. Perhaps this was indeed accomplished as regards the first series
of five, N° 95860 - 95864. The last five, N° M 3031 - M 3035, would only
be assembled in December 1938. This just pertained to the hulls: none
of these had yet been fitted with a turret. A wooden mock-up of one had
been delivered on 13 July 1938. Only at the end of 1939 were enough
funds made available to produce the turrets and finish the tanks at
Rueil, a process that probably extended well into 1940.

The hull of the ZT 2 was largely identical to that of the "ZT 1".
Apart from the 25 mm gun, having a stock of fifty rounds, the turret
was fitted with a 7.5 mm machine gun, with 2,250 rounds. The turret had
both a large roof hatch and a smaller hatch in the back right facet. It
had been intended to equip at least one ZT 2, in a ZT 2/ZT 3 platoon of
four, with a radio set, but it is uncertain whether any was so modified.