T-34

“The finest tank in the world.”—Generalfeldmarschall Ewald von Kleist

The arsenal of armour in the Soviet Union by mid-1941 included more than 22,000 tanks—more tanks than in all the armies of the world combined; more than four times as many as the Germans had. But the majority of these tanks were obsolete and the supremely confident Germans knew it. What they apparently didn’t know was that the Russians had designed, built and tested two new and considerably better tanks: the KV heavy and the T-34 medium. They also didn’t know that a number of these new tanks were already operational and serving in front-line Soviet Army units. These new tanks were very good fighting weapons, well-designed, each mounting a big gun and protected with thick armour. They were good, but they were not miracle weapons, and they had their faults. They were both relatively simple, lowtechnology vehicles. Their crew habitability and visibility was on the poor side, and their rates of mechanical breakdown on the high side. But the T-34, for its faults, is now often referred to by tank experts and historians as possibly the best tank of the war.

Of the T-34, noted author / historian / tank expert Douglas Orgill wrote: “… the effectiveness of a weapon is directly equal to its ability to get itself properly into position to deal decisive blows without being harmed by the blows it is itself receiving.” When the German invaders entered the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, they would have been amazed by the T-34 tank then being fielded in large numbers by the Russians. Flushed with their successes in the Battle of France, they came into the Eastern Front expecting to roll over the opposition as they had already done with relative ease in the Low Countries, Poland, and France. Nazi doctrine had been working overtime to instill in them the notion of German superiority. Now, in the new T-34 weapon system, they were facing up to the fact that the Russians—a people they had been led to believe were Untermenschen, or subhuman, were capable of producing an armoured fighting vehicle more advanced in some ways, and more threatening than their own panzer tanks.

How did the Germans react to their experience of the T-34? Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist: “… it was the finest tank in the world.” Major-General F. W. von Mellenthin: “We had nothing comparable …” And Colonel-General Heinz Guderian: “Very worrying … up to this time we had enjoyed tank superiority, but from now on the situation was reversed. The prospect of rapid, decisive victories was fading in consequence …”

Initially, the surprise attack by the Germans was quite effective. With all the great numerical superiority of the Russian tank force, only about twenty-five percent of their tanks were in good operating condition. The bulk of their operational armoured units was then being reformed; their service equipment and spare parts in short supply. And the majority of their officers and men were short on experience of driving and operating their tanks.

On the German side, there was disagreement about the approach to take with the Soviets. Guderian, Erich von Manstein and some of the other army leaders strongly advocated using powerful force to quickly destroy the Red Army as the chief obstacle to their achievement in the campaign. But Hitler and others in the German government believed it vital to begin by paralyzing the Russian government through the seizing of poilitical and economic objectives. Ultimately, Hitler agreed to the “destruction of the Red Army in western Russia by deep penetration of armoured spearheads.”

The German forces began the operation with rapid panzer attacks which appeared to result in somewhat sluggish, though brave, and rather uncoordinated responses from the Soviet armoured units. The essential policy of the German armoured corps was, at all costs, to keep up their momentum and the pressure on the enemy force with speedy thrusts culminating in effective encirclements to seal off the other side in defeat. Manstein: “The farther a single Panzer corps ventured into the depths of the Russian hinterland, the greater the hazards became. Against this it may be said that the safety of a tank formation operating in the enemy’s rear largely depends on its ability to keep moving. Once it comes to a halt it will immediately be assailed from all sides by the enemy’s reserves.”

At the start of the action the panzers rolled swiftly through the shocked Soviet tank and artillery units, doing great damage. Quite soon, though, the German tanks, which were apparently superior in quality and capability, were faced with the harsh reality of their dependency on the vital re-supply of fuel, munitions, and rations, their security and ability to keep fighting depending heavily on their preventing the enemy from interferring with the German supply routes. The other main fear was the weather; if heavy rain came the German supply trucks would wallow in the great sticky swamps of Russian mud.

In the earliest days of the campaign, the Germans had momentum and the priceless advantage of better organization. What they discovered almost immediately, however, in their early encounters with the heavy KV tank and then with the T-34 medium, was the genuine and terrible threat posed by the 76mm gun mounted in those vehicles. The big distinction between the panzers and those two Russian tanks was the ability of the KV and T-34 to lie back beyond 1,000 yards, shoot and penetrate the thickest German armour with those 76mm rounds, while the Germans had to close to within 200 yards before firing to kill a T-34 or KV.

In the beginning of the offensive, the Germans faced far fewer examples of the T-34 and KV tanks than the sort of numbers that they would soon be up against. They were able to destroy the Soviet armour with relative ease for a while, thanks to that limited number of opposing quality weapons, the better German training, organization, leadership, and, of course, the aerial reconnaissance which gave them ample early warning of likely Soviet attack, strength and positioning of the enemy forces. In those early days of the campaign, there was little indication of the enemy being able to compile the elements needed for successful opposition to the German onslaught. The enemy the Germans were up against then seemed greatly disadvantaged by incompetent leadership, inadequate training, and tank crews inept in handling their vehicles. The Soviet tanks seemed to be plagued with breakdowns, due at least partly to the way in which the tanks were handled. The Soviet tank crews then were exhibiting poor tactics, inconsistent shooting accuracy and, because it was still early days in the offensive, an insufficient supply of the formidable T-34 and KV tanks to make an appreciable difference on the battlefield. In the period beginning with the opening of the German offensive in the Soviet Union in June, through December 1941, the Soviets lost more than 15,000 tanks and one million men to the German invader.

Soon, however, the Germans were up against the reality of war with the Soviets. The losses they were experiencing were half again as great as they had been in their earlier campaigns in the west. Perhaps more significantly to the future of the offensive, Guderian and the other German panzer leaders were plagued with re-supply and repair problems, radically diminishing the level of success they had been accustomed to in their previous, spectacular blitzkrieg adventures. After the initial months at war in the USSR, the German panzers were being slowed dramatically by logistics, the mechanical realities, the actions of the enemy, and soon, by the arrival of the horrific winter months. With the coming of the cold, the effectiveness of the tanks of both sides was lessened considerably, resulting in greatly increased pressure on the infantry units to consolidate the gains of the tank units and to fight off enemy tank actions.

The German plan for Operation Barbarossa required that the southern-most sector of the Southern Front be under the watchful eyes of the Hungarian and Rumanian armies while the Army Group South, under the command of Field Marshal von Rundstedt, and led into battle by Kleist’s panzer division attacked Kiev. Field Marshal von Bock’s Army Group Cental, meanwhile, was meant to bring a primary attack aimed at Moscow, via Smolensk and Minsk, utilizing the two most powerful and effective panzer groups, those of Guderian and Hoth, and Field Marshal Leeb’s Army Group North, including Hoepner’s panzer group, was to attack and take Leningrad. Lesser emphasis appears to have been placed on the capture of the key Soviet industrial areas and the destruction of the Russian field armies, this despite the view of the German military command that by far the most important objective was the destruction of the Russian Army by the panzer groups.

From the outset of Eastern Front activities, Hitler wanted and expected the prize of Moscow to be in hand by the end of October. With the autumn his already exhausted armoured units were expected and required to mount a new campaign aimed at taking the Russian capital. Guderian’s armoured and infantry forces did pile up sizeable gains at Vyazma and between Sevsk and Bryansk, but then they became bogged down on the new front with the coming of the great rains. Road surfaces there had been poor and inadequate for tank operation to begin with, and with the heavy rains became virtual quagmires.

From the Soviet standpoint, General Georgy Zhukov, by far the most powerful and successful Russian commander of the entire war, was attempting to rebuild the crews and equipment of his armoured forces to make them into the sort of fighting force able to perform on the same level as that of the German adversary. In his favour, the seemingly endless rains created masses of thick, glue-like mud which increasingly prevented the Germans from advancing any closer than 150 miles from Moscow. These troubles for the Germans that came with the mud allowed Zhukov time and opportunity to fight a delaying action and reinforce his own armour units, both of which added appreciably to the problems of the Germans.

By this point, the creeping, rather ineffectual movements of the German forces displayed their loss of momentum and, when they finally came within sight of the capital, they simply could go no further.

J. Kugies was a panzer platoon leader and tank commander on the Russian Front in the Second World War: “At Tilsit in East Prussia I led a section of five tanks. In the lead tank we were only able to advance at about 12-14 km/h over the soft, marshy roads. Our riflemen marched ahead of us in a wide front to deal with any resistance that I could not break through. Just behind the Russian-Latvian frontier, we encountered Soviet soldiers. Our section had been ordered to halt, but, due to my defective wireless set, I did not receive the order in our tank and continued to drive on alone. The road soon became blocked by Soviet trucks and my driver had to take us through open terrain. He couldn’t stop because of the marshy ground. The Russian truck convoy was escorted by many of their tanks and, before they could turn their turret toward me I began to fire on them. Their aiming was bad and I managed to shoot nine of them out of action. With their tanks burning, and the crews fleeing, I was then able to destroy an anti-tank battery and an artillery position. I crossed a bridge and then closed my hatch-cover to prevent any enemy shells from coming in. By this time my cannon ammunition supply was exhausted and I could only shoot with my machine-gun. We now stayed where we were, alone, for about thirty minutes until our following tanks reached us. After such a dangerous situation, we all had a sip of vodka which, unfortunately, was warm for having been under our gear. Later, we learned that the tanks behind us had stopped often, as ordered, on the marshy ground. They incurred many losses.

“While trying to aid a German infantry reconnaissance patrol which was fighting in a lost cause on 13 August 1941 at the Luga bridgehead, I was wounded. I was nearly out of ammunition and a Russian machine-gun was only five metres ahead of us. I ordered us forward to try and save the reconnaissance patrol. Standing in the hatch, I was pointing in the direction of the Russian machine-gun, which was now firing at us. I was shot three times through my right hand and forefinger and got a graze on the side of my head. My cap was torn to pieces but I was hardly bleeding. As I sank into the tank, I was fired on from a nearby house. I was hit in the right shoulder by splinters and my uniform jacket was torn up. My chief took me immediately to the doctor at a nearby field unit where my wounds were bandaged. I was then flown by Ju 52 aircraft to a field hospital near Dünaburg followed by a two-day train trip to a military hospital in Germany. I always remember hearing infantrymen say to us again and again: ‘I wouldn’t like to go in your deathboxes’, and we always answered: ‘And we don’t like to walk.”

Now the German tank commanders were within sight of Moscow and the weather was becoming substantially worse. The temperature was falling like a stone and a deep, unyielding freeze was setting in, paralyzing the battle-weary panzers. Their oil froze as did the grease in their guns, and the heavy, sticky mud froze and had to be chipped away with pickaxes.

As bad as the conditions were, for both sides in the conflict, the rather small but very effective T-34 and KV tank force of General Zhukov was outperforming Hitler’s tanks in the appalling conditions to this point. While Zhukov lacked sufficient numbers of those excellent tanks to actually overwhelm the German opposition, he did have a large, highly-effective and efficiently positioned concentration of anti-tank obstacles which gave him an important capability in defending Moscow. This was proving to be the worst winter in 140 years, and as it continued, the German troops suffered horrifically in the bone-chilling cold. The sucking, clogging mud suppressed all movement, mechanical and human, to a bare minimum. In the punishing conditions, the Russians seemed both more fit and better able to contend with the brutal weather. The normally flawless standards of performance and serviceability of the German forces began to falter as the snows and bitter cold intensified.

The German armoured and infantry forces had entered Russia believing that they would simply fight a brief, efficient summer campaign to victory. They were utterly unprepared and ill-equipped for fighting and surviving in the extremes of winter in the region. They had brought summer-weight uniforms. Their tanks and other vehicles were not properly winterized and were soon suffering frozen engine blocks. The men were suffering frostbite, trench foot, shock, exposure, and exhaustion on a nearly unimaginable scale. Each day the German units were achieving less; the initial successes virtually forgotten in their dismay. Worse, their commanders were quickly losing confidence in and respect for the directions coming to them from Berlin.

In spite of the suffering and problems they had to endure, the Germans somehow were able to regroup and recover to the extent of effecting a partial re-supply, repair, and re-organization. They had not recovered their initial momentum, but were now able to repel most of the Russian penetrations they were receiving, and to promptly hit back with short, rapid tank and infantry assaults which, though they failed to gain them much, enabled them to retain their positions. This reaction—action approach was to become their operating policy for most of the remaining campaign on the Russian Front.

As the offensive ground on, by early 1943 the German tank force in Russia was in very bad shape. Their deteriorating morale, operational inefficiencies, confusion, and indecision at the command, supply and manufacturing levels were rampant. For both the Russians and Germans, the efficient, effective use of tanks was key to success in the offensive. Tanks provided the ability to penetrate the enemy front line and bring vital support to one’s overextended infantry, and they could powerfully defend against penetrations by the enemy forces. The Germans were losing the battle to field, fight and maintain tanks in this unrelenting, unforgiving situation. They were forced to continue their reliance on the PzKpfw III and IV tanks, of which the III was utterly outclassed by the Soviet T-34, a fact not lost on the panzer commanders in the field. When the commanders then prevailed upon the German Ordnance Office to quickly design produce a copy of the T-34 for their use, the designers instead went to work on an entirely new general purpose tank, the forty-five ton Panther.

From its introduction in 1940, the T-34 was a tank with exceptionally well-balanced attributes: mobility, protection, firepower, and ruggedness. On the downside, it lacked good crew habitability characteristics, had a scarcity of radios in the early production runs, and was limited by a two-man turret capability, requiring the commander to aim and fire the gun (an arrangement inferior to that of most German panzer tanks of the day). Still, when the technicians at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland evaluated a T-34 that had been sent over by the Russians, they found it to have, among other very positive aspects, the best optics of any tank they had analysed there to date in 1942.

Over the course of its production, 84,070 T-34s were built between 1940 and 1958. Operated by a crew of four, the 26.5-ton tank mounted a 76mm main gun and two 7.62mm machine-guns. Its twelve-cylinder diesel 500hp engine powered it to a high speed of 33 mph and it had an operating range of 250 miles.

Through the war years, the T-34 was gradually and continously refined to improve its capability and effectiveness and lower its manufacturing cost, which enabled the Russians to build it in greater numbers and deploy ever more on the battlefield. Its versatility, capability, and cost-effectiveness meant that it could replace many light and heavy tanks then in service. The tank was initially produced by the KhPZ factory of Kharkov, Ukraine, and was the standard tank of the Soviet armoured forces throughout the war. It was, by any measure, the most-produced tank of the Second World War and the second most-produced tank ever, after its successor, the T-54.

When the T-34 first came out, it was considered by many to be one of the best tank designs ever achieved. It boasted a range of impressive characteristics, from the greatly increased protection of its sloping armour, to its new V-2 diesel engine (much safer than previous and highly flammable petrol engine), to the Walter Christie suspension allowing it to roll fast over rough ground, and its wide tracks and low ground pressure for excellent mobility in snow and mud. True, it did have some reliability and manufacturing issues that would take a long time to resolve. But, overall, it certainly proved to be the right tank at the right time for the Russians.

The design of the T-34 began in 1937 when an assistant engineer, Mikhail Koshkin, was assigned by the Red Army to head a design team working on a replacement tank for the old BT model. In the course of the project, Koshkin was able to convince Joseph Stalin to leapfrog to the development of a newer tank design he had in mind, which would become the T-34. He called it T-34 after the year in which he first started planning the revolutionary design.

In the beginning, T-34s were produced at the Stalingrad Tractor Factory and, immediately after the German invasion started, production began at the Krasnoye Sormovo Factory in Gorky where major problems soon plagued the assembly process. Defective armour plating was discovered and a shortage of the new V-2 diesel engine was slowing the assembly line there. A critical shortage of the costly radios for the T-34 required that the sets be allocated to the tanks built for the company commanders only, thus all other tank commanders were required to signal to one another using flags. Problems with the main gun led to a new 76mm gun originating from the Grabin design bureau at Gorky, but no official production order was actually issued until after Russian troops used the weapon on the battlefield and praised it, after which the Stalin State Defense Committee gave official permission for its manufacture.

With the German invasion in June 1941, the Soviets froze further development of the T-34 and dedicated its assembly lines to full production of the tank at its current stage of evolution. As the German armies rapidly advanced into Soviet territory, their presence forced the evacuation of the major Russian tank factories to relocation sites in the Ural Mountains, a huge undertaking that had to be achieved in great haste. Main manufacturing facilites were quickly set up at Dzherzhinski Ural Railcar Factory in Nizhny Tagil, which was renamed the Stalin Ural Tank Factory. The Kirovsky Tank Factory and the Kharkov Diesel Factory were relocated to Chelyabinsk which was soon nicknamed ‘Tankograd’ and the Voroshilov Tank Factory of Leningrad was incorporated into a new Ural factory at Omsk. A number of small ancillary supply factories were absorbed into the Ordzhonikidze Ural Heavy Machine Tool Works in Sverdlovsk. By the end of this whirlwind set of relocations, some forty percent of all the T-34 production was occurring at the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, and during the heavy fighting in the Battle of Stalingrad of 1942, material and spares shortages developed causing critical manufacturing problems and resulting in some quality-control difficulties and in some tanks being rolled out and delivered to the battlefields unpainted. Even through the turmoil of battle in and around Stalingrad, however, full production was maintained through September 1942.

Throughout the inevitable shortages, disruptions, and difficulties of the lengthy combat periods of the German offensive in the east, the Soviets maintained a policy of no significant product changes on the assembly lines apart from measures to reduce and simplify production and the associated costs. Certain innovations did figure in the manufacturing process, including a plate-hardening procedure and the introduction of automated welding. The design of the 76mm main gun for the tank was refined to produce the weapon from 614 parts instead of the 861 previously required. And over the course of two years’ manufacturing, the unit cost of the tank was reduced from 269,500 rubles to 135,000, and the actual production assembly time was reduced fifty percent by the end of 1942; this in spite of major changes to the workforce building the tanks. Roughly half the workers had been sent to fight on the battle front and they had been replaced by a mix of women, boys, older men, and invalids. The manufacturing fit-and-finish standard dropped some from what had previously been “beautifully crafted machines with excellent exterior finish, comparable or superior to those of Western Europe or America.” Now the T-34 was more roughly finished, but its quality and reliability was not compromised in the process.

In addition to building up the Red Army’s inventory of the tank and replacing battlefield losses, a prime goal was the improvement of tactical efficiency of the weapon. The main emphasis was put on quickly increasing the rate of production. A new, larger, more user-friendly turret was designed and added to the production line in 1942, along with the addition of a commander’s cupola for 360 degree visibility. At the same time, the desirable rubber rims for the road wheels had to be sacrificed in favour of steelrimmed road wheels due to rubber shortages in the Soviet Union. The engine and five-speed transmission were improved and a new clutch was added. By 1943, production of the T-34 had reached 1,300 a month and, like the Spitfire fighter to Britons, the T-34 had become iconic for the Russians, symbolizing the power and effectiveness of the Soviet counterattack against the Germans.

In its manufacture, particularly in the war years of 1942-1944, various innovations were gradually introduced to the design and the assembly process of the T-34. By 1944, the tank had evolved into the T-34-85 version, with a larger turret that mounted an 85mm gun. The new turret overcame the twoman limitation problem of the earlier T-34. Many of these tanks were also fitted with appliqué armour made from scrap steel of differing thicknesses and welded onto the hull and turret.

The soldiers of the German Army by this time had come full circle in their peception of the Russian tank. In the T-34-85 especially, they came to a collective recognition that they were dealing with technical superiority and a genuinely formidable weapon that they respected and feared. That respect was shared at a higher level in the person of Germany’s most renowned tank leader, Heinz Guderian. So impressed was he by the qualities he saw in the T-34 that he ordered a special commission with representatives of the army ordnance office, the armaments ministry, the tank designers and manufacturers, to visit the front lines in Russia to examine, evaluate and study captured T-34s. Part of his reason was to determine what would be required in the high-priority design and manufacture of a new anti-tank gun capable of destroying the state-of-the-art Soviet tanks.

The then-planned improvements to the design / manufacture of the existing Mark III Panzer tank would, Guderian knew, achieve little towards making it comparable to the T-34, and the German tank designers and builders were greatly concerned about the challenge. The only possible quick solution was the Mark IV, which was also not equal to the Russian tank, but would be improved with a better gun over the course of the war. The aim of the Germans was, clearly, not just equality with the T-34, but a tank which would be reliably capable of destroying the Russian tank. The pressure on the German tank industry was significant and it responded by rushing a new design into production, the Mark VI, which had been tested with promising results. The big Mark VI weighing fifty-six tons, was armed with an 88mm gun. Its turret had 100mm armour on the front, which made it virtually invulnerable to the gun of the T-34 except when at close range. Its manufacture was hurriedly begun in July 1942. They called it the Tiger.

Basically, the Tiger was mainly a defensive weapon, an assault tank to be employed in support of infantry. In performance it did not compare particularly well with the T-34, having an open-country speed of just over twelve mph and a range of less than sixty-five miles. Its great size and weight would make it a handicap when it broke down—as it frequently did—for it would normally require another Tiger to tow it off for repairs. To the German commanders on the Eastern Front, and their tankers, the Tiger was not the anwer to the T-34. To the irritation of the German tank designers, the field commanders wanted them to essentially copy the T-34 and give the result better armour protection and a better gun. When their proposal reached those in authority for German tank production it was soon rejected, primarily because their industry was not then equipped for the rapid mass production of an aluminium tank engine like that of the Russian tank. That rejection led immediately to the start of design work on a new tank, the Mark V Panther, a weapon more like the T-34. The Panther weighed forty-five tons, had a road speed of twenty-eight mph and was designed with sloped and angled armour, like the Russian tank. It was armed with a high-velocity version of the 75mm L70 gun and had turret armour extended to 120mm in thickness. The Panther may well have been the best German tank of the war, but by spring 1943, when it was being introduced in German armoured units, like nearly all new weapon systems, it arrived with problems.

As good as the T-34 had proven itself to date, the Soviets were well aware that it had serious problems of its own which needed resolution. The chaos of having to relocate factory production of the entire Soviet tank industry to the Urals early in the Barbarossa campaign had meant the deferral of the more important changes planned for the T-34. The changes had to wait as they could not be allowed to interrupt the vital tempo of massive production. With the appearance of German tanks armed with a superior long 75mm gun on the battlefield in 1942, the Soviet Morozov design bureau started a priority project to develop an advanced T-43 tank, a weapon with greatly improved armour protection, a three-man turret, and torsion-bar suspension. Their goal was a relatively universal design intended to replace both the T-34 medium and the KV-1 heavy. It would be developed in direct competition with the KV-13 project, a Chelyabinsk heavy tank design.

By 1943 Soviet tank crews had gone up against the new German Tiger 1 and Panther tanks and believed that the 76.2mm gun of the T-34 was now inadequate. The Soviets had an existing 85mm anti-aircraft gun that could be adapted for tank use against the new German tanks. The armour of the new Soviet T-43, however, was found to be less effective than anticipated against the 88mm gun of the Tiger and, even before installation of the 85mm gun, the T-43’s mobility was less than that of the T-34. These factors, together with the slowed production that would have resulted from a commitment to manufacturing the T-43, led to its cancellation. That decision then caused the Soviets to retool the production lines of the T-34 to upgrade the tank. The primary changes for the new model were an enlarged turret ring to accommodate a three-man turret with radio (prior to the upgrade the radio had been located within the hull) and the 85mm gun, a truly significant improvement. A quick adaptation of the T-43 turret design for the T-34 was made at the Krasnoye Sormovo Factory. This enabled the tank commander to command, with operation of the gun left to the gunner and the loader. A further addition to the T-34-85 was the Mark 4 observation periscope mounted on the turret roof (a copy of a British design), giving the tank commander a 360- degree viewing field.

When the Soviets decided to add these improvements to the T-34 to create the T-34-85, rather than retooling from scratch to build an entirely new tank, the saving in time enabled them to manufacture the new T-34-85 in huge numbers, thereby negating the qualitative differences between it and the Panther (which still had the edge, but an edge that was not seen as greatly significant). By May 1944, the Germans had produced only about 300 Panthers, against the Soviet T-34-85 production which had risen to 1,200 a month.

In comparison with the Panther, the 85mm gun of the T-34-85 could fire a 21.5 lb shot at a 2,600-foot-per-second muzzle velocity, while the Panther 75mm gun could fire a 15 lb shot, but at a much higher muzzle velocity of 3,068 feet-per-second. The overall weight of the T-34-85 rose from the twenty-seven tons of the T-34, to thirty-two tons, reducing its operating flexibility somewhat and its range from 280 miles to about 190. The top operating speed of both the T-34-85 and the Panther was virtually the same at about thirty mph. When full production of the T-34-85 began during the winter of 1943, it was generally believed that, while it was probably the best and most formidable tank then being produced and fielded by any Allied army, the Panther was, in fact, marginally better. Russian tank crews operating the T- 34-85 on the front lines, however, when given the opportunity to evaluate and compare captured Panthers, preferred the Soviet tank, seeing it as an effective adversary for the newer German tanks, and it achieved that capability without its makers having to reduce the numbers or production rate of the tank. The Panther, by contrast, was rapidly gaining a reputation for its tendency to catch fire easily.

German tank production was much less numerous. With roughly 5,400 Panthers built by the end of 1944, and only 1,347 Tigers by the end of August that year, the Russians had a substantial production lead. With more than 9,000 Mark IVs alone built by war’s end, clearly, the Mark IV, in its many upgunned variants remained the basis of German armoured forces throughout the war. The German tank manufacturing industry was never able to keep pace with the Russians.

In a new-found confidence and their pride of accomplishment in creating and fielding the Tiger and Panther tanks, the German High Command requested in early 1943 that all tank production be halted, except for that of the Tiger and Panther, in order for the industry to focus entirely on those two machines. Guderian: “This new plan contained only one major weakness: with the abandonment of the Mark IV, Germany would until further notice be limited to the production of twenty-five Tigers a month. This would certainly have led to the defeat of the German Army in the very near future … the Russians would have won the war even without the help of their Western allies. No power on earth could have stopped them.” As it happened, Hitler then appointed Guderian to be Inspector General of Armoured Troops, giving him the responsibility for organizing and training the panzer forces, and Guderian immediately set out to build up the quality and quantity of the panzers.

The T-34-76 had proven a tremendous challenge to destroy on the battlefield in 1941. The conventional anti-tank equipment of the Germans was simply not up to the task. The Soviets deployed a considerable number of the medium T-34s in five of their twenty-nine mechanized divisions at that time, along with the heavy KV tanks.

It must be recognized too, that the T-34 in those early days of the war was a very considerable challenge for its crews, who, when deployed on a lengthy road march, tended to lose many of their number to mechanical breakdown, an early problem that plagued the Soviets to a greater extent than it did the Germans. And the upside of the T-34 was diluted to some extent for the crews by its internal layout, poor crew comfort and vision devices.

Testing of the T-34 at the Aberdeen, Maryland, proving ground by the Americans resulted in their unconditional rejection of the Christie suspension system for tanks. The Russian tank utilized this coil-spring system, designed by the American engineer Walter Christie, which enabled considerably longer movement than conventional leaf springs systems and greater cross-country speed. The Christie system employed large, rubber-rimmed road wheels which, when less rubber was available due to wartime shortages, meant a reduced amount of rubber on the wheels. The contact with the tracks at high speeds set up noisy, unpleasant harmonics for the crews. The harmonics could also damage the tank by loosening parts. Certain deficiencies in the tracks resulted from the lightness of their construction. They were subject to damage by small-calibre weapons and mortar rounds. Basically, the pins used were made of poor quality steel and were poorly tempered, causing them to wear out quickly and the tracks to break. Russian crews often brought spare parts and tracks with them into combat situations. One Russian tanker recalled: “The caterpillars used to break apart even without bullet or shell hits. When earth got stuck between the road wheels, the caterpillar, especially during a turn—strained to such an extent that the pins themselves couldn’t hold out.”

Other conclusions from the Aberdeen evaluation were: In their tank production, the Russians were apparently not very interested in careful machining or finishing, or the technology of small parts and components, a negative aspect of what is otherwise a well-designed tank. In comparison to the then-current American tanks, it was found that the Russian tank had many good features, good contours in the design, diesel power, good and reliable armament, thick armour, wide tracks and more. But it was thought inferior to the American tank in manoeuvring, speed, ease of driving, firing muzzle velocity, mechanical reliability, and ease of maintenance. The Aberdeen technicians found many problems with improper radio installations and shielding in the 1941 T-34. Commenting on the turret design: “The main weakness of the two-man turret of the T-34 of 1941 is that it is very tight. The electrical mechanism for rotating the turret is very bad. The motor is weak, very overloaded and sparks horribly, as a result of which the device regulating the speed of the rotation burns out, and the teeth of the cogwheels break into pieces. We recommend replacing it with a hydraulic or a simple manual system.”

The uneven build-quality is called into question when considering the armour of the T-34, in particular on the plating joins and welds. The use of too-soft steel and the shallow surface tempering was also noted by the Aberdeen technical personnel. They noted too, that the various chinks and cracks resulting from relatively careless build-quality tends to admit a lot of water when it rains, which can disable the electrical system and negatively affect the ammunition.

What was operating the T-34 like for the crewmen? The driver sat either on a hard bench seat or on shell storage containers, an arrangement that adversely affected his operation of the tank due to the frequently severe vibration and shocks in combat situations over rough terrain for extended periods. Other negative aspects included poorly made transmissions that were prone to mechanical failure and whose operation could be nightmarishly difficult. The Russians’ use of low-quality, poorly finished steel side clutches further contributed to the breakdown rate of the tank. But the main complaint of those who had to take the T-34 into battle was the low-set, very cramped two-man turret. It could only accommodate the commander and the loader, thus making the job of the commander far more labour-intensive and distracting him from his primary role. A further restriction imposed by the design meant that the turret gun could not be depressed more than three degrees, creating a shooting problem at close range or on a reverse slope.

Another somewhat disfunctional arrangement in the T-34 was that of the ammunition storage for the main gun, making the job of the loader more difficult and less efficient than it should have been. The turret lacked a rotating floor that would move as a part of the turret when the turret was rotated. The small spare ammunition boxes were stowed on the floor under the turret and covered with a rubber mat. Nine rounds of ammunition were stowed on the sides of the fighting compartment and when these rounds had been used, the loader and / or commander had to pull up more ammunition from the floor boxes. The floor was then left littered with open boxes and and rubber matting, impairing the crew performance.

For the tank commander of the T-34, his vision of the field and his situational awareness was disadvantaged by the forward-opening hatch and the lack of a turret cupola, requiring him to view the field of battle through a small vision slit and a traversable periscope. This method was inferior to the German tank method where the commander fought in a heads-up position with his seat raised, giving him a full field of view, something not possible in the T-34. Russian crews took a dim view of the turret design with its heavy hatch that was difficult to open and, should it jam, would trap the crew inside. Their objections to this situation led to the manufacturer changing to a two-hatch turret in August 1942. In the matter of gun-sighting and ranging, the system of the T-34 was comparatively crude in relation to that of the Germans, which was particularly disadvantageous to the Russian crews when operating at longer ranges. One German commented on the combination of T-34 fighting characteristics, including the two-man turret, poor vision devices and weak optics: “T-34s operated in a disorganized fashion with little coordination, or else tended to clump together like a hen with its chicks. Individual tank commanders lacked situational awareness due to the poor provision of vision devices and the preoccupation with gunnery duties. A tank platoon would seldom be capable of engaging three separate targets, but would tend to focus on a single target selected by the platoon leader. As a result T-34 platoons lost the greater firepower of three independently operating tanks.” German tankers generally felt that T-34 crews were slower in locating and engaging their targets, while Panzers normally were able to shoot about three rounds for every round fired by the T-34.

Another impression of the early T-34s in a battlefield environment was that of the difficulties involved in arranging for repairs due to a crippling shortage of recovery vehicles and repair equipment. The impact of the Soviet tank on the enemy forces initially was one of poor Russian leadership, tactics, and crew training, which many attributed to the effects of Stalin’s purges of his officer corps in the 1930s, together with heavy losses by the Red Army in 1941 that took the lives of some of their best armoured personnel.

In the combat arena, by 1942 the T-34-76 was the Soviet main battle tank in the field. The key German tanks to that point were the Panzer III and the Panzer IV. By mid-year, the improving German tank armament had evolved to the extent of making the T-34 vulnerable to it and T-34 losses in that year were substantial, much worse than in the previous year. Of a total of 15,100 armoured fighting vehicles in the Red Army front line, 6,600 T-34s were lost to combat or mechanical problems. But through the difficult winter of 1941-42, the wide-tracked T-34 proved superior to the German tanks in being able to manoeuvre over deep mud and snow without bogging down; conditions in which the German tanks frequently were halted.

Into 1943, armoured battlefield momentum was with the Soviets. Soviet AFV losses were higher than ever, including those of 14,700 T-34s, but so was their tank production. And strategically, the Germans were mainly on the defensive and in retreat. Throughout 1943 and well into 1944, for the most part the T-34 with its 76mm gun was outclassed by the guns of both the Tiger and Panther, and even with the upgrade of the 85mm gun, the T-34-85 was really not the equal of those two German tanks, though the Soviet 85mm gun could penetrate the armour of both German tanks at distances up to 550 yards; the Tiger and Panther could still destroy the T-34-85 at 1,600 yards or more.

In the beginning of Barbarossa, the T-34 made up only about four percent of the Soviet armoured forces, but at war’s end it made up at least fifty-five percent. With the gradual progression of the Eastern Front campaign, the original design advantages the T-34 held over the German tanks were gradually overcome and the Russian tank became an ever easier target for the German tankers. Still, over the course of the war, and the greatly increasing manufacture of the T-34 (even with the increasing weight resulting from the many improvements made to it), its top speed held up, while both its turret frontal armour thickness and its main gun armour penetration nearly doubled.

While it cannot reasonably be claimed that the T-34 was the equal of the Panther or Tiger tanks of the Germans, its design simplicity, wide tracks, low silhouette, innovative armour layout, its ease and quantity of production— despite its faults and heavy losses—made it a strategic war winner. In all, 55,550 T-34s were produced during the war years. Of the 96,500 fully-tracked armoured fighting vehicles produced during the war by the Soviets, 44,900 T-34s were lost to combat and other causes.

Following the end of the Second World War, various client-states of the Soviets operated the T-34-85 in their armoured arsenals. When the North Koreans invaded South Korea in June 1950, the spearhead of their assault force was comprised of 120 T-34-85s and were joined later in the incursion by additional T-34s. In the early going, the American M24 Chaffee light tanks in opposition were hopelessly outclassed by the Soviet tank. By August, however, the United Nations forces opposing the North Koreans there were equipped with the M26 Pershing medium / heavy tank, the M4 Sherman, and the British Centurion, Churchill and Cromwell tanks, all of which inflicted major losses on the North Koreans. In September, the American landings at Inchon led to the U.S. troops cutting off North Korea’s supply lines, leading to the end of fuel, ammunition and other supplies and the retreat of the North Koreans who had to abandon many of their T-34s. The Chinese entered the conflict on the North Korean side in February 1951 bringing four tank regiments, mostly equipped with T-34-85s, but relatively few tank-to-tank battles occurred throughout the war. In such actions as did occur, ninety-seven T-34-85s were knocked out in engagements with American M26s and M46 Patton tanks. The Patton was a definite overmatch with the T-34, its 90mm high-velocity armour-piercing round able to penetrate all the way through the T-34 from front to rear.