Tanks of the Soviet Union

• 1. Introduction

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  Tanks of the Soviet Union tells the story of how a nation with almost no tank-building tradition became the most heavily armoured power on earth. In the early 1920s, the Red Army's entire tank fleet consisted of captured French Renault FTs left behind by the retreating allies and a handful of British machines. Within two decades, the Soviet Union possessed more armoured vehicles and tank units than the rest of the world combined. How did that transformation happen, and what did those tanks actually do when war came? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

  The short version involves an unlikely partnership with Germany, a shopping trip to Britain, prototypes bought from an American eccentric, and a massive industrial push that survived purges, defeats, and occupation. The longer version runs from the Russian Civil War all the way to the Iraqi desert in 1991, where Soviet-designed tanks met their final reckoning against American thermal sights and sabot rounds.

• 2. Learning From Others

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  Britain and France were the intellectual leaders in tank design after the First World War, and nearly every nation that built tanks in the 1920s and 1930s followed their lead. The French Renault FT set the pattern for almost all tanks that followed: lower track profiles, compact hulls, and weapons mounted in rotating turrets. British designs from Vickers-Armstrong took that template further, and the Soviets were paying close attention.

  In spring 1930, a Soviet buying committee under Semyon Ginzburg travelled to Britain to select tanks, tractors, and cars for the Red Army. At the Vickers-Armstrongs Company, the committee chose four models. Under a contract signed on the 28th of May 1930, the company delivered fifteen twin-turreted Vickers Mk.E tanks to the USSR along with full technical documentation for series production. Soviet engineers participated in the assembly of those tanks at the Vickers factory. The Vickers-built machines received the designation V-26 in Soviet hands.

  At the same time, American inventor J. Walter Christie had developed a series of fast tanks using a suspension system of his own design, combined with large aircraft engines for exceptional speed. The Soviets purchased some of his prototypes. Those purchases would eventually develop into the BT series of fast tanks and, on the eve of the Second World War, the T-34.

  The Soviets also learned from the French approach to manufacturing. France had pioneered the use of very large castings to form gun mantlets, turrets, and eventually entire tank hulls. The USSR copied the widespread use of cast turrets, and applied the same logic of rationalising designs for fast production, eliminating manufacturing steps that added little value. That lesson would matter enormously when the factories had to produce tanks in the tens of thousands.

• 3. Building the Arsenal

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  Joseph Stalin's enthusiasm for industrialisation and mechanisation drove a military development programme that was aggressive even by Soviet standards, and it produced by far the largest and broadest tank inventory of all nations by the late 1930s. The Soviets spent tens of millions of dollars on American equipment and technology to modernise dozens of automotive and tractor factories, which were later converted to tank and armoured vehicle production.

  The T-26 light tank, based on the Vickers 6-ton and officially entering service on the 13th of February 1931, became the main tank for close support in combined-arms units. More than fifty different modifications and experimental vehicles were built on its chassis in the 1930s, with twenty-three modifications going into series production. Flame-throwing tanks formed around twelve percent of the T-26's series production run. These were not called flame tanks at the time; documents from the 1930s designated them KhT (Khimicheskiy Tank, or Chemical Tank) or BKhM (Fighting Chemical Vehicle).

  The heavier end of the spectrum produced the T-28 medium tank, manufactured at the Kirov Factory in Leningrad starting in 1932 and officially approved on the 11th of August 1933. It carried one large turret with a 76.2 mm gun and two smaller turrets with 7.62 mm machine guns. A total of 503 T-28s were manufactured over eight years. The massive T-35 heavy tank followed the design premise of the experimental Vickers A1E1 Independent, a large multi-turreted British vehicle built in 1925 that Britain itself had not adopted.

  By 1935, according to one assessment cited in the source, the Red Army possessed more armoured vehicles and more tank units than the rest of the world combined. Then Stalin's Great Purge gutted everything. From 1937 to 1941, approximately 54,000 officers were repressed. The armour design bureaux and factory leadership were decimated. Military knowledge stagnated, production dropped drastically, and training fell to very low levels. The purge continued until the eve of the war.

• 4. The T-34's Origins

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  In 1937, the Red Army assigned engineer Mikhail Koshkin to lead a new design team at the Kharkiv Komintern Locomotive Plant in Kharkiv. His brief was to produce a replacement for the BT fast tanks. The first prototype, the A-20, was specified with 20 mm of armour, a 45 mm gun, and a new model V-2 engine running on less-flammable diesel fuel in a V12 configuration. Its all-round sloped armour plates were designed to deflect anti-armour rounds more effectively than perpendicular armour.

  Koshkin convinced Stalin to let him develop a second prototype alongside the first. This heavier design, named the A-32 after its 32 mm of frontal armour, carried a 76.2 mm gun and the same V-2 diesel engine. Both were tested at Kubinka in 1939, and the heavier A-32 proved just as mobile as the lighter A-20. A still heavier version of the A-32, with 45 mm of front armour and wider tracks, was approved for production as the T-34.

  Resistance from military command and concerns about production cost were overridden by two events: the poor performance of Soviet tanks against Finland in the Winter War, and the shock of Germany's Blitzkrieg campaign in France. The first production T-34s were completed in September 1940, immediately replacing the T-26, BT series, and T-28 at the Kharkiv plant.

  At the outbreak of war with Germany in June 1941, the T-34 and KV-1 together accounted for only 7.2 percent of the total Soviet tank force, roughly 1,861 vehicles. The remaining inventory was made up of older types whose thin armour was vulnerable to German anti-tank guns. The backbone of the Red Army's armoured forces in those first terrible months was the slow-moving T-26, designed for infantry support and proof against small arms but not much more.

• 5. Operation Barbarossa

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  On the 22nd of June 1941, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa with approximately 3,350 tanks committed to the invasion out of a total of around 5,200. The Red Army had 23,106 tanks, of which about 12,782 were in the five Western Military Districts. The numerical ratio favoured the Soviets by roughly four to one. None of that mattered.

  Maintenance and readiness standards were very poor across Soviet armoured units. Ammunition and radios were in short supply. Many units lacked the trucks needed for resupply beyond their basic fuel and ammunition loads. Units were sent into combat with no arrangements for refuelling, ammunition resupply, or personnel replacement. After a single engagement, units were often destroyed or rendered ineffective.

  The reorganisation of Soviet armour into large armoured divisions and corps, modelled on what they had observed in Germany's campaign against France, was only partially complete at the dawn of Barbarossa. Not enough tanks were available to bring the mechanised corps up to organic strength. The officer corps and high command had been decimated by the Great Purge just years earlier.

  During the winter of 1941-42, the T-34 did demonstrate one clear advantage: its wide tracks and diesel engine allowed it to move over deep mud or snow without bogging down, where German tanks using narrower tracks and leaf-spring suspension could not. By the time the T-34 replaced older models in large numbers, however, newer German tanks including the Panzer V Panther had appeared and outperformed it. In early 1944, the upgraded T-34-85 gave the Red Army better armour and mobility than German Panzer IV and Sturmgeschütz III, but could not match the Panther in gun or armour. To the Soviet advantage, there were far fewer Panthers than T-34s. By war's end, T-34 variants comprised at least fifty-five percent of the USSR's massive tank output.

• 6. Allies, Lend-Lease, and the IS Series

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  Within weeks of the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941, the first British aid convoy set off along the dangerous Arctic sea route to Murmansk, arriving in September. It carried forty Hawker Hurricanes along with five hundred fifty mechanics and pilots of No. 151 Wing. By the end of 1941, early shipments of Matilda, Valentine, and Tetrarch tanks represented only 6.5 percent of total Soviet tank production but over twenty-five percent of medium and heavy tanks produced for the Red Army. Lend-Lease tanks made up thirty to forty percent of heavy and medium tank strength before Moscow at the beginning of December 1941.

  Under the full Lend-Lease programme, 4,102 M4A2 medium tanks were sent to the Soviet Union, of which 2,007 carried the original 75 mm gun and 2,095 the more capable 76 mm. The Soviet nickname for the M4 medium tank was Emcha, a diminutive of Em chetyre (meaning M-four). Soviet tank crews valued the Sherman's reliability, ease of maintenance, and the auxiliary power unit that kept the tank's batteries charged without running the main engine, something their own T-34 required. The total of Sherman tanks sent to the USSR represented 18.6 percent of all Lend-Lease Shermans. By 1945, some Red Army armoured units had standardised around the Sherman rather than the T-34, including the 1st, 3rd, and 9th Guards Mechanized Corps.

  On the Soviet heavy tank side, the KV series gave way in 1944 to the IS (Josef Stalin) series. The IS-2 saw combat late in the war, notably against Tiger I, Tiger II, and Elefant tank destroyers. The IS tanks were designed with thick armour to counter German 88 mm guns and carried a main gun capable of defeating those same German heavy tanks. They were built primarily as breakthrough tanks, firing a heavy high-explosive shell useful against entrenchments and bunkers. The IS-3, the next in the series, later served on the Chinese-Soviet border, in the Soviet invasion of Hungary, during the Prague Spring, and on both sides of the Six-Day War.

• 7. Cold War Battlefields

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  The Korean War was the first major test of Soviet tank design after 1945. North Korea's invasion of South Korea in June 1950 was spearheaded by a full brigade equipped with roughly 120 T-34-85s. The ROK Army facing them was armed with World War II-vintage 2.36-inch bazookas, effective only against the forty-five mm side armour of the T-34-85, and ninety-one 105 mm howitzers, most of which were lost to the invaders early in the conflict. American forces arriving from occupation duty in Japan were equipped with light M24 Chaffee tanks that proved equally ineffective against the heavier North Korean armour.

  The T-34 tanks of the North Korean army rolled south and brushed aside opposition with ease, including their contact with elements of the 24th Infantry Division at the Battle of Osan on the 5th of July 1950, the first battle between American and North Korean forces. The American force known as Task Force Smith could not penetrate the North Korean tanks' armour, and the tanks passed through their lines. Two weeks later, at the Battle of Taejon, the North Koreans advanced with more than fifty T-34 tanks, and the Allies fell back into the Pusan Perimeter. UN reinforcements eventually included M26 Pershing, M46 Patton, and British Centurion tanks that proved effective against North Korean armour, ending that early dominance.

  In Vietnam, Soviet-designed PT-76 tanks played a different role. The first significant NVA armour action was against the Lang Vei Special Forces camp on the 6th and the 7th of February 1968, when thirteen PT-76s of the NVA 202nd Armored Regiment spearheaded an assault against roughly twenty-four Green Berets and five hundred irregulars. Later in the war, during the Easter Offensive of 1972, helicopter-launched TOW anti-tank missiles were used in combat for the first time. On the 9th of May 1972, the 1st Combat Aerial TOW Team destroyed three PT-76s attacking the Ranger camp at Ben Het, breaking up the assault. The war ended on the 30th of April 1975, when a T-54 tank of the North Vietnamese Army bulldozed through the main gate of the presidential palace at 10:45 in the morning.

• 8. The Final Reckoning

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  During the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, Arab forces using Soviet T-55 and T-62 tanks crossed the Suez Canal with some 850 tanks prepared for the Israeli counterattack. The Arab coalition's T-54/55s and T-62s carried night vision equipment that Israeli tanks lacked, giving them an advantage in darkness. Israeli tanks countered with a structural advantage in the hull-down position: the main guns of Soviet tanks could only depress four degrees, while the 105 mm guns on Centurion and Patton tanks could depress ten degrees. Arab coalition losses totalled 2,300 tanks destroyed or captured.

  The Soviet-Afghan War began on the 27th of December 1979, with the initial Soviet force comprising around 1,800 tanks, 80,000 soldiers, and 2,000 armoured fighting vehicles. The war dragged from the deployment of the 40th Army in Afghanistan on the 24th of December 1979 to the final troop withdrawal, which started on the 15th of May 1988 and ended on the 15th of February 1989. Tank losses over the course of the war amounted to 147 vehicles.

  During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Iraqi armoured forces relied on Soviet-designed T-54/55, T-62, and T-72 tanks. At the Battle of 73 Easting on the 26th of February 1991, American and British armoured forces encountered Iraqi Republican Guard tanks in poor weather. Superior American thermal sights and night vision equipment turned the conditions into a coalition advantage. The 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment's G-Troop alone destroyed more than twenty tanks and other armoured vehicles. Post-war analysis confirmed that the majority of Iraqi armoured forces still had old Soviet-made T-55s from the 1950s and 1960s. Their steel penetrators proved ineffective against the advanced Chobham armour of American and British tanks, and Iraqi crews could not engage coalition vehicles at anything near the range at which coalition thermal sights could destroy them.