Swallows of Death:
France’s Tank Destroyer
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
May 2023

Even before the German offensive against France opened in May 1940, French officers attached to the General Staff recognized the crucial weakness of their anti-tank defense. The 25mm anti-tank gun could defeat the armor of most panzers, and the new 47mm APX anti-tank gun outmatched anything in the German arsenal. But these weapons were, for the most part, drawn by horses. Once the German tanks made it past the first line of resistance, the French anti-tank batteries had no hope of chasing them down and destroying them.

Louis Keller, the Inspector of Armored Troops, issued a request in October 1939 for design of a tank destroyer mounting the 47mm APX anti-tank gun on an all-terrain vehicle, with armor protection sufficient to keep out small-arms fire. Laffly, a manufacturer of trucks and heavy vehicles, proposed their new W15 light artillery tractor then in production. The six-wheeled W15 had been designed specifically to tow the 47mm APX, and several dozen of the new vehicles were at the factory at any one time awaiting delivery to front-line units – French practice called for all batteries in a division to upgrade at once rather than send the tractors (or other new equipment) piecemeal to the end users.

Design work began immediately, and the Laffly team had a draft ready by early December, which Keller accepted. The manufacturer built a prototype on a modified W15 chassis, with an armored body enclosing the anti-tank gun including a roof. The 47mm gun was mounted on the truck bed, firing directly over the rear of the vehicle. By late February the prototype was ready for testing; crafting the armored enclosure had taken slightly more than a month.

Field tests began in early March at first Mont-Valérian and then the Mailly camp. The vehicle performed well in off-road driving and as a gun platform. Keller inspected the vehicle on 13 March and observed still more tests, approving what he saw despite (or perhaps because of) the bad weather. More work with actual anti-tank troops brought suggestions for several modifications, chiefly an intercom system allowing the driver and gun crew chief to communicate directly. Laffly declared the vehicle ready for production on 10 May, the same day the Germans erupted out of the Ardennes to begin their offensive.

The W15 TCC prototype, fully armored.

The tank destroyer – officially designated the Laffly W15 TCC (Tracteur Chasseur de Chars) – seems to have been forgotten in the chaos of those first days. On the 17th, with German panzers rampaging through the French Army’s rear areas, Keller phoned Laffly’s director, Georges Guérard, and asked how quickly the new tank destroyer could be placed in production. Guérard told him that he would begin immediately, hung up and started making tank destroyers.

To rush production, the Laffly team discarded the complicated armored shell for all vehicles except the prototype (which does not appear to have been issued to a battery). The Laffly factory had tractors and 47mm guns on its grounds awaiting delivery to the troops, and the workers sped production by removing the guns’ wheels and fitting it to the chassis with its standard gun shield extended by additional armor plates welded to either side. The first W15 TCC tank destroyer rolled out of the factory on 25 May, eight days after Keller’s request.

Working around the clock, the Laffly factory turned out the new vehicle at the insane pace of five – enough to equip an anti-tank battery – every two days. New crews arrived at the factory for familiarization conducted by the Laffly test team, and after a few hours of driving and firing they would set off for the front. Keller had asked for 50 tank destroyers; Guérard delivered 70 of them, only halting production when he ran out of complete tractors.

The new tank destroyers went to independent batteries called BACA (batterie d’anti-chars automoteurs) with five guns each. They usually deployed directly from the factory to the front and immediately ran into supply issues – while the Laffley works had plenty of 47mm APX guns on hand, they didn’t have much ammunition for them, not being an arsenal. The W15 TCC was fitted to carry 95 shells, but most of the tank destroyers went into action with a load of about one-third that total. The W15 TCC also had an anti-aircraft machine gun, and the crew were issued Thompson submachine guns for last-ditch defense.

The tank destroyers would be joined in action by the rest of their battery: a command vehicle (usually an unmodified W15 with a radio), three ammunition carrier with 200 more rounds between them, and a platoon of three 25mm anti-aircraft guns mounted on Laffly S20 six-wheeled all-terrain personnel carriers. The crews seem to have come from artillerymen, including coast-defense batteries now rendered obviously less than essential by the crisis on land.

The 47mm APX, made by the Atelier de Construction de Puteaux (thus the APX), gave the W15 TCC the best anti-tank gun available on either side in 1940. It could defeat the armor of any tank on the German side, and the Germans eagerly pressed captured guns into service as the only weapon that could stop the French Char B1bis heavy tank.

A production model of the W15 TCC, with very little armor.

The first two batteries (51st and 52nd) joined Charles de Gaulle’s rapidly-assembled 4th Armored Division and immediately went into action in the French counter-attack on the German Abbeville bridgehead. The 53rd went to 2nd Armored Division, which had just re-formed with new tanks and re-entered the battle along the Somme.

The 54th helped constitute the new 4th Mechanized Division, formed from the remnants of other units and several reconnaissance groups. The incomplete division formed its best units into the De Langle de Cary group, named for the commander of the 7th Cuirassiers (a tank regiment) which would be the core of the combat group. On 6 June, the group commander placed the tank destroyer platoon across the Abbeville road to block the advance of 7th Panzer Division. A regiment of Moroccan Tirailleurs dug in behind them.

The 54th BACA knocked out 18 of Erwin Rommel’s panzers in a single day; when the German crews bailed out of their machines and tried to attack the tank destroyers on foot, the French crews sprayed them with their Thompsons and killed most of them. The French suffered no casualties.

The W15 TCC proved enormously effective in battle, enough to have been a potential game-changing weapon had it been delivered in quantity six months earlier. One of the overlooked aspects of the 1940 campaign is that of French industrial production. After a slow start in the fall of 1939 while the factories adjusted to changes in the work force as reservists put down their tools and picked up rifles, output started to surge just as the Germans unleashed their offensive. Most of the tank losses of early May were made good by early June, and new weapons like the W15 TCC began to appear.

You get to play with the W15 TCC in 1940: Swallows of Death, ambushing the bad guys and then running away. It’s a tremendously effective unit despite the rapid organization and deployment. With time for its crews to train and prepare, and higher commands to work out doctrine for its use, it would have been even deadlier.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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