T-34 Shockingly Reassessed (Strong Language!)

[Sgt.Squarehead]

10 hours ago, Erwin said:

It would be interesting to have each of the points evaluated by someone who knows about this stuff.

This is generally considered one of the better references for the T-34:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/T-34-Mythical-Weapon-Robert-Michulec/dp/0978109104

Kinda pricey these days though. 

[lcm1947]

On 1/7/2022 at 11:49 AM, danfrodo said:

There's lots of good assessments of T34s out there, but for all the negative features it did something that none of the british tanks were doing in 1941 -- causing serious trouble for the germans (despite all the things wrong with it) -- note that the panther was not designed based on matilda, it was based on T34.  It was the best thing (w KV1) the russians had and as it improved over time it was more and more a factor on the battlefield.  Those of us here, I think, mostly already know the T34 negatives.

But some of the claims, as Erwin notes above, are ludicrous.  They all break down after 50km??  Then how did they drive the Germans back over 100km at a time, over & over & over?  I bet a lot of them broke down in 1941, but I also bet that number decreased significantly over time.  So this might be cherry picking the data from 1941 and extrapolating that forward in time.  Heck, in 1941 there was a serious shortage of soviet 76mm ammo which very significantly reduced T34/KV1 effectiveness, probably as much as anything else. 

We know the poor crew ergonomics & lack of commander were an issue -- this reduced efficiency but it didn't render the crew catatonic.  And top speed is often less important than mobility, and the wide tracks did have better mobility than the germans.  And it was waaaaaay faster than the matildas.

The steel quality was often poor -- yet we know this same armor was very resilient against the main german gun of 1941 -- the 37mm.  And pretty good against the 50mm.  Yeah, hit it with a high velocity 75mm and it's in trouble, but those were non-existent in 1941 and still a minority in 1942.

And 2 rounds per minute??  Does that sound correct to anyone?  That sounds more like SU122 or SU152 firing rate.

Anyway, whether the video is over-hyped or not it's always fun to see tank discussions

 

 

[chuckdyke]

Sighting was easy, open the breach look through the barrel and if you see a German Panzer at the end load AP otherwise HE.

[Probus]

Curses @John Kettler! You've gotten me addicted to LazerPig YouTube videos now!  

So I was watching one about the Panther Panthar Paradox and it has some footage in it from what I think is a Russian movie, but I have no idea which one.  Does anybody know which movie this is from:

I've started it about the time the footage starts.  The way they depicted the tank rounds going through armor is very novel.  Kinda funny, but kinda cool at the same time.

[lcm1947]

Whew! It was tough but I managed to listen/watch the entire video.  It could have been cut in half if all the off the wall stuff hadn't been included but anyway it was 

extremely interesting and telling if of course any of it were true.  I am willing to think that if even a quarter of it true that would change my opinion of that tank, but I have always wondered how anything Russian built could have been so awesome to begin with.  

[FlemFire]

Agreed with the video, but I've long held the belief that decades of pop history TV shows and the like treating the T-34 as if it's some sort of unicorn of tank design really propped up crazy myths about the tank. It's really the 'soft factors' mentioned that make it such a miserable vehicle. Things that don't show up on specs sheets, like bad to nearly nonexistent communication, a cramped turret with crew sharing duties, horrific sightlines, etc. And as the war wore on, even the vehicle's hallmark traits plummeted. By 1943, when the Eastern Front became upgunned, a whopping 90% of hits on T-34s at typical combat ranges were penetrating shots.

But it's hard to analyze any tank in a vacuum. Most of them are projections of the very exigencies that brought them to reality in the first place. The reality in 1941 was that the Russians were getting quite literally annihilated and suffering absolutely absurd defeats and by the end of the year had lost 40% of their population, industry, and similarly significant chunks of many raw materials. Their locomotive industry was on the verge of collapse and the civilian economy evaporated into thin air in such a way that it's hard to even conceive. People were starving to death and taxes were through the roof just to pay for a war they were clearly losing. The second the harvests are completed, you yank all those farmers out of the fields, give them a few weeks training at best, and dump them in front of the Germans. In times like that, you take a T-34 and you say "This as good as we got," you shave its costs down as much as possible, size its crew to min-max man-to-material requirements, shrink tooth-to-tail ratio by simply producing two tanks instead of one, take the saved manpower costs of "supply and logistics" guys and give them a rifle instead to go catch bullets, and roll all that crap straight to the frontlines. The Russians weren't dumb about this. They knew the combat effectiveness of a T-34 was about a dozen to fourteen hours before it broke down. But the point was to have something that at least slowed the Germans down, and then take that something and make as many of it as you can while shaving off as much manpower possible so it can be diverted to other areas of the front.

The real strength of the T-34 is not the tank itself, its more like that tape of Hitler talking to Mannerheim and basically going, "So we killed Russia, and then 20,000 tanks and a bunch of new armies showed up anyway."

[Sgt.Squarehead]

He's not really saying anything new, he's just saying it an a slightly more amusing way. 

That said, his information does generally seem to be spot on.....Although he gets a pit confused about Pierre Sprey IIRC.

[Traitor]

Apologies for reviving a dead thread, but I found this essay disputing and refuting many of the claims in that video with detailed sources and references. Here is the original post, which is split into 5 parts and here is the entire essay in one place.

It's a long read, about 30,000 words, but it is very detailed and does seem to show that the original video contained quite a number of misconceptions even when it tried to debunk other misconceptions. I think it's an interesting read for anyone interested in WW2 tanks, even outside of the context of it being a rebuttal to the video as the essay draws upon the analysis of multiple respected historians such as Zaloga, Michulec, Glantz and others, which @Erwin might be interested in.

Edited August 10, 2023 by Traitor