The KV-1 was a giant with feet of clay. Kotin’s mismanagement of the heavy tank program in Leningrad in 1937–39 wasted too many resources on creating alternate designs, rather than focusing on perfecting a single design. Compared to Koshkin’s management of the T-34 medium tank program, Kotin’s effort resulted in a heavy tank that fell far short of the Red Army’s expectations. Instead of building the best heavy tank his team could design, Kotin simply piled ore armor plate onto an already overloaded chassis but failed to ensure that it had sufficient motive power to accomplish its mission.
Despite the demise of the KV-1, Kotin proceeded with development of a new heavy tank, which eventually emerged as the IS-2 in December 1943. While the IS-2 was a significant improvement over the KV-1 in terms of firepower, mobility and protection, the Red Army leadership decided to leave them in the separate guards tank regiments and use them primarily in the infantry-support role. German late-war PaKs and Panzerfaust-armed infantry would prove a formidable opponent even for the IS-2s, and thus eavy tanks never regained the battlefield dominance that the KV-1 had enjoyed in the winter of 1941/42.
In an odd footnote to the Soviet heavy tank program, the engineer who designed the KV-1, Nikolay L. Dukhov, transferred to the KB-11 design team in 1948 and became the deputy chief designer of the first Soviet atomic bomb. Later, Dukhov worked on the first Soviet hydrogen bomb as well. Although almost unknown in the West, Dukhov’s engineering talent was clearly of great value to the Red Army, stretching from the KV-1 to the hydrogen bomb.
On the other side of the hill, the German Panzerjäger experience of being outgunned by the KV-1 for nearly two years speaks volumes about the Third Reich’s lack of preparedness for total war. The fact that German industry lacked the resources to replace the 3.7cm PaK with better 5cm and 7.5cm weapons also is a telling weakness. While Allied tankers would later complain about the “Tiger scare” on the Western Front for a few months in the summer of 1944, they still had potent 17-pdr antitank guns available to deal with the occasional German heavy tank. Unlike the Panzerjäger experience on the Eastern Front in 1941–43, Allied troops were not regularly forced to fight enemy heavy tanks with flaming petrol bombs and hand-delivered antitank mines.
The Hornisse tank destroyer, equipped with the 8.8cm gun, began to reach the Eastern Front in spring 1943. The Hornisse could destroy a KV-1 at 2,000m, as demonstrated during the defense of the Orel salient. (Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-279-0950-09, Foto: Bergmann, Johannes)
After mid-1943, German Panzerjäger capabilities evolved rapidly. The Panzerfaust 30 was introduced in August, followed by the Panzerschreck in October, both of which used HEAT warheads to provide the infantry with an inexpensive but reliable antitank capability. Once the infantry began to receive HEAT-equipped weapons, the need for PaK guns at regimental level declined and Panzerjäger units focused on wielding heavy PaK guns to defend increasingly wide divisional sectors. In addition to the Hornisse, the towed 8.8cm PaK 43 began to reach the front in November 1943, providing the Panzerjäger with a weapon that could defeat all Soviet heavy tanks, even the KV-1’s successor, the IS-2. As 1943 ended, German antitank capabilities at division level had increased by an order of magnitude over those of 1941, even though the war was as good as lost.
The towed 8.8cm PaK 43 arrived on the Eastern Front in fall 1943. Although a potent answer to the KV-1, the PaK 43 was a repudiation of previous German Panzerjäger doctrine since it had little mobility and was difficult to conceal. When the German Army retreated – as it was always doing after Kursk – heavy weapons like this were likely to be abandoned. (Author)