Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (31 page)

The provenance of the T-34 is rather murky. Most military planners of the interwar years had studied the British Army’s use of tanks on the Western Front in 1917–18 and subsequently tried to keep abreast of both the technical advances and the futuristic literature on this weapon. Many developments were proposed, despite the global fiscal crisis and strong disagreements inside militaries as to what exactly a tank’s role in future conflicts might be. It was in these confusing times
that the legendary American inventor and manufacturer J. Walter Christie produced his new M1928 design. Since the U.S. Army had different specifications in mind and the unorthodox Christie refused to change things, he turned instead to foreign clients, such as Poland, Britain, and the USSR. Thus it was that two of his new tanks (without their turrets, and documented as “farm tractors”) were sold to the fledgling Red Army. This was not as unusual as it may seem, since the Russians were also buying British Vickers tanks, and the British themselves purchased a Christie design and turned it into their own Cruiser Mk III tank.
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Several aspects of Christie’s invention intrigued the Red Army. It was the first to use sloping armor (40 percent incline) on the front of the vehicle, which vastly increased its resistance to enemy shells. Second, Christie was a genius in designing more sophisticated suspension systems—vital for cross-country ops—and he gave his M1928/M1931 vehicles a variable or coil-spring suspension. Despite delays caused by Stalin’s purges and disagreements among the Red Army generals about the purpose of tanks, Soviet designers began to combine Christie’s ideas with the Vickers designs, formulating their own hybrid models, the A-20, the A-32, and then the T-34.

By the late 1930s the lead design team was housed at the Kharkiv Komintern Locomotive Plant (KhPZ), under the leadership of engineer Mikhail Koshkin, an unusually gifted inventor and manager who also gained the ear of Stalin in the internal Red Army fights about light cavalry tanks versus heavier battle tanks. Despite all these disputes, modifications were made to the nascent T-34. The gasoline engine was replaced by a new V-12 diesel; whether it really was less flammable than a gasoline engine and thus less dangerous if a tank was hit remains open to question, but from postwar testimonies the alteration certainly seemed to make the Red Army crews more confident. Second, sloped armor was provided all around, and in retrospect one can see the shape of the modern battle tank emerging. Finally, the main gun was now bigger (76 mm). Very long-range testing drives of the prototype T-34s in the winter of 1939–40 (during which Koshkin caught pneumonia and died shortly afterward) persuaded the Stavka to increase production.
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That decision did not give the Red Army any kind of wonder
weapon during the first two years of the war. There were still far too few T-34s, and they were badly deployed (scattered rather than concentrated). The great bulk of the crews were raw novices, pulled from the farm and the factory, forced through the most basic military training, then pushed into a weird contraption that was hard to operate. They were often ordered to attack difficult targets, and they came under ambush from all sides. It is hardly surprising in these circumstances that the T-34’s advantages over contemporary German tanks (such as better armor and better maneuverability in mud and snow) were neutralized. Yet in that early part of the war, almost every other armed service in the world was also grappling with teething problems with their own tanks, torpedoes, high-altitude bombers, and long-range fighters. It was precisely the task of the middlemen in the Second World War to solve these many problems.

Remedying the technical defects of the T-34 took a very long time. One might think that the problem was over by mid-1943, the time of Kursk and eight months after Stalingrad, but it was not. Had things been fine, why would the people’s commissar for the tank industry, V. A. Malyshev, have visited Tank Factory No. 112 just a little while
after
the battle for Kursk to rail at the poor performance of the T-34s against the German armor and bewail the disproportionate loss of Russian tanks and their vital crews whenever they were required to take out a single Tiger or Panther?
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Clearly, in his view at least, the T-34, even those arriving from the factories in mid-1943, was still not good enough.

The problem lay with the tank’s design and operational weaknesses, which for obvious reasons were kept secret at the time. Recently the Russian historian A. Isaev has summarized in English a set of postwar recollections and interviews with former tank drivers, commanders, and other crew members of the T-34s.
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All these men were clearly fond of their armored steed but were also quite candid about the vehicle’s defects: its stiff controls, its tendency to leak water, its cramped spaces. Their testimonies are confirmed by a very different source: a Soviet summary of a detailed report by the designers, engineers, and tank men at the famous U.S. Army Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Maryland. The Russians had provided Aberdeen with a T-34 at the very end of 1942, presumably to get feedback. The Americans were all engineers, and
their summary is clear, clinical, and balanced. The Main Intelligence Department of the Red Army, which translated and summarized the findings for the Stavka, had no time to quibble—they were, after all, in the middle of the Battle of Stalingrad and needed all the useful information they could get.
^h
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The American testers admired the T-34’s sloping silhouette (one wonders if they knew that their predecessors had turned down Christie’s proposal fourteen years earlier), which was “better than that of any American tank.” They loved the “good and light” diesel engine, and bemoaned the fact that the U.S. Navy monopolized access to diesel factories in America. The T-34’s gun was simple, dependable, and easy to service, and the aiming/backsight device was “the best in the world.” It could climb an incline much more swiftly than British and American tanks, thanks to the wider tracks. But then comes the Main Intelligence Department’s summary of the much larger list of defects spotted by the Aberdeen analysts.

The air filters were lamentable, so a large amount of dirt very quickly got into the engine, which overheated and then damaged the pistons. The armor was mainly soft steel and could be better strengthened with alloys that included zinc. Because of poor welding, the T-34s leaked badly in heavy rains and water crossings, thus disabling the electrical equipment and even the ammunition. The American testers in the repair factories also pointed to the weakness of the track (the holdings and pins were too thin) and the poor performance of the engine air cleaners—leading to more clogging, probably because the exhaust tubes blew directly downward and created massive clouds of dust for the tanks following. The transmission was terrible and probably disabled many more T-34s than did the enemy. The radios worked poorly until a British design was copied en masse, and there was no internal means for communication among the crew, apart from the commander tapping his foot on the driver’s shoulder. Finally, the poor commander’s compartment itself was a horror, for he had far too many jobs to accomplish when a battle erupted, in a cockpit that was too cramped and
with levers and pedals so stiff that altering them often required a smart blow from the supplied sledgehammer.
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The list was taken seriously, for the Russian summary concluded with nine recommendations, every one following the Aberdeen assessment. The dilemma was that to make these changes, production would have to cease at major tank factories at a critical point in the Great Patriotic War. The newer versions might also bring out new problems, and certainly the crews would have to be retrained. So should the Russians seriously reduce current output to gain a longer-term advantage, or should they just continue with the existing flawed machine, since any and all weapons were needed for the current fight? Between early 1942 and late 1943, the Red Army felt it had no choice. It just had to keep sending T-34s to the front, even with disproportionate losses, in order to stem the Nazi tide and to begin bleeding the panzer armies. Design improvements could come only when the spring and autumn muds reduced the level of fighting. It is therefore not surprising that Russian tanks were still losing heavily at Kursk and that Malyshev was bewailing the kill ratios—but what were the production managers to do when they had not been allowed to push through the necessary design changes right after Stalingrad? And the Kursk battles revealed a fresh problem: even the T-34’s newer 76 mm gun was inadequate against the Tigers and Panthers. A three-man turret was really needed, along with torsion-bar suspension for rough terrain. But, realistically, all that the T-34 factories could do over the winter of 1943–44 was to keep on producing lots of leaky tanks.

The real successes of the T-34s came only in early to mid-1944—in curious parallel to the introduction of the P-51 Mustangs into the air war over western Europe. The newer Russian tank models had much better, tighter construction, a far heavier 85 mm gun, a roomy three-man turret with a radio in it, better air filters and overall air flow, a vastly improved periscope for all-round view, and stronger and broader tracks. Moreover, the support systems, the greater efficiency of the recovery crews, and the faster truck-transported fuel supplies all added to the Red Army’s effectiveness. Here again, as with other Second World War weapons systems of this middle period, the changes were all incremental and could be realized only when circumstances allowed it and
when the harsh experiences of the earlier fighting had been learned. In this case, the desired improvements could be made in the repair shops and factories after the German retreat from Kursk. Output of the older T-34s slowed in the fall of 1943 but was not stopped entirely, while production steadily shifted to the impressive newer types of armored vehicles, in preparation for the great advances of the year ahead.

The second major improvement between 1943 and 1944 was not technical but tactical. The T-34 units had not been well used against determined German defenders. Even the more powerful T-34-85 versions were likely to lose a one-on-one battle against the Tigers and Panthers, and despite the overwhelming Soviet superiority in numbers it was no fun for commanders or crews to watch four of their own tanks destroyed to kill off a single enemy. In addition, by late 1943 the Wehrmacht had the extremely fearful
Panzerfausts
(bazookas), which were more effective than any Soviet portable antitank weapon. And there were always mines. Grinding into German-held cities, especially as the Nazi lines shrank, significantly reduced a T-34’s mobility. So why not set it free, or at the very least create some free-roaming brigades that could run around the enemy and strike in unexpected places? Why not take a leaf from Guderian’s book and give the newer, faster T-34-85 units their head? One might then break a hole in a weaker part of the enemy’s lines and let “deep battle” unfold—a term with special meaning in the Red Army. During the last full year of fighting on the Eastern Front, as armored divisions pushed through Bessarabia, Romania, southern Poland, and Hungary and on toward Austria, this was what was to happen.

By the time improved versions reached the battle-hardened Soviet tank armies in early 1944 and a much more experienced and confident Stavka orchestrated the great sweep toward Berlin, the T-34-85 could justifiably be called the most all-round battle tank of the Second World War. It still could never outgun a Tiger in a one-to-one shoot-out, but it had a better mix of maneuverability, range, and gun power. By 1944, in fact, everybody’s tanks—American, German, and Russian—were more lethal and effective than they had been a mere two years earlier. But then, so were everybody’s aircraft.

So the historian seeking to explain the Red Army’s growing effectiveness
against the Nazi blitzkrieg between 1942 and 1944 will need to look elsewhere,
not
rejecting the important role played by the T-34 tanks but acknowledging that this much-improved tank was only one of a mix of Soviet weapons systems on this critical and hellish battlefield.

When Montgomery and Zhukov met in Berlin in early May 1945, amid their celebrations and mutual award-givings, it is not too fanciful to suggest that they might well have chatted about their respective campaigns against their common Nazi foe. The campaigns the two field marshals had directed had much in common, first in their containment of a ferocious German ground attack and then, when the time was right, in how they struck back. Both had placed immense faith in situational warfare, which meant employing the “small warfare” weaponry of antitank missiles, minefields, ditches, and other field obstacles to blunt the assault of the panzers, and only then moving forward.
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El Alamein and Kursk were different in time, space, and numbers, but they were not so different in essentials. In both cases, the defending side stopped and irreparably damaged the German attackers before starting a steady advance that would never be thrown back.

The attention Zhukov paid to massive minefield investments equaled and possibly surpassed the care devoted to the weapon by Rommel and Montgomery (no American general, so far as I can tell, bothered with mine warfare). Mines were cheap and easy to produce in vast numbers, easily transportable to the battlefield, capable of being readily hidden in the ground and covered up, and able to be arrayed in all sorts of checkerboard formations. They did not need to be powerful enough to destroy an oncoming tank or jeep; just damaging a wheel or breaking a track was enough. And then there were the antipersonnel mines, with a lighter detonation but still sufficient to kill or wound the
German infantrymen running alongside the tanks. Finally, as the battles around El Alamein demonstrated, minefields—or, rather, the attempt by the attacker to break through them—gave the defender valuable time to prepare his own moves.

This was demonstrated once again, and in a much larger form, in the Battle of Kursk, which can lay claim to being the greatest minefield battle of the war. Like Montgomery eight months earlier, Zhukov and the Stavka supporting him were well prepared. The layout of the battle lines of the Eastern Front in June 1943 suggested that a renewed and massive Wehrmacht offensive, which everyone knew was coming, would attempt to envelop the Kursk salient and offer another example of a German
Kesselschlacht
. The task of the well-trained and ferocious Wehrmacht divisions was to execute the pincer movement. The task of the hardened Red Army was to frustrate that maneuver. And nothing frustrated swift panzer attacks like deeply sown minefields.