Are history books wrong?

[desertrat1943]

I know this issue has already been discussed in detail, but I am still baffled.

In every book you read about the copernican revolution of the T34 and how it created huge problems to the Germans, swarming around in droves.

Now, like most fools, I went about starting a series of PBEM battles buying T34s in large quantities. OK, my mistake to get T34/76s and set the date to July 1943 only to see them slaughtered by German armour but, still, the numbers are unbelievable.

I probably lost all together 25 T34s in three battles, never had a shell rococheting on my hull, always knock outs, alsmot first shot, no matter from what distance. Moreover, I almost never got the target and when I did it was useless. So far, no kills for me. T34/76s have a skin almost as frial as that of Stuarts and a gun worst than the worst Sherman.

Is there something wrong in historical accounts or modeling in CMBB is so realistic as to be "unreal"?

[Guest Mike]

Nope - the books are right.

The T34 was a super weapon on 1941 and the first part of 1942, but then, shock horror, the Germans did something about it - put bigger guns in their Mk 4's, bought out Tigers and Panthers, made bigger AT guns.

Damn those sneaky Germans!!

Unfortunately for Russian tank crews producing large numbers of T34/76's was more important atthe tiem than speedily developing new tanks, and so the Russians stayed with the rapidly-becoming-obsolete T34/76 probably 1 year or mor elonger than it was worth before teh /85 apepared.

How could they get away with that and still win??

Mainly because 90% of tank battles are against infantry with nary an enemy tank in sight! Adn even when there was a tank in sight if the Russians weer attacking the Tanks might well be some out-classed Hungarian or Italian or Roumanian vehicle.

And of course upgraded guns and tanks took time to get onto the battlefield - they couldn't be everywhere at once, so there weer still large numbers of relatively obsolete German equipments in use - but not many CM players willingly fight with obsolete gear!!

[Abbott]

They were a shocking surprise in 1941.

[WWB]

Consider the fact that a german infantry battalion holding 1500m or more of front had exactly two 37mm ATGs supporting it and no mobile AT assets backing it up and the fear of the T34 makes much more sense.

Note the above figure presumes the infantry battalion was up to full TO&E, which few in the winter of 41 when the T34 earned its reputation.

WWB

[Nippy]

OK, my mistake to get T34/76s and set the date to July 1943 only to see them slaughtered by German armour...

Try stopping a company of rampaging T-34's in July of 1941 without the benifit of 88mm Flak guns. "The Gate Keepers" will give you an idea of what the T-34 could really do in it's prime.

[busboy]

Remember one rule of thumb...

People can debate both ways over whether the T-34 was superior to the M4 Sherman.

T-34s were well designed, but once the Germans cought up, they were still always slightly less powerful in firepower and armor than the German state-of-the-art.

Sloping armor helps, but it also helps to have more than 45mm of it.

[Carl Deppen]

Hey, I found similar weaknesses in the T-34. In a game scenario placed in 1941 I found the T-34s were being beaten by the German Pz 3s and 4s tanks, face to face close up and at some distance, 600 meters. I've read many accounts from the war and in 1941 only a lucky hit or a hit close from the side or rear were the then German tanks able to take out a T-34. Something in the game modeling of the T-34 is wrong, because the results just aren't historical.

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Try Kalinin Road in 1941 as Russian and watch your T-34s be knocked out by the 1941 German tanks. In it the German tanks are more than a match for the T-34s, and that is not historical for that time period.

[Silvio Manuel]

The T-34/85 was a nice toy...decent gun, nearly as good as the U.S. 76mm. A nice toy except that they only up-armored the turret, so the rest of the beast still has the "the last time I was not obsolete was 1942" armor on the rest of the tank.

[walpurgis nacht]

Something to consider is the turrent speed of the T-34. 1 stugIIIF against 2 t-34s (1941) is toast if you use the russian armor correctly. So numbers is key, and by december 1941, lend/lease was beginning to have serious impact. The russians were to have the numbers . . .

[Sitzkrieg]

Didn't we already go through this with the Tiger and Panther tanks in CM:BO? We found out they weren't nearly as "Uber" as the history books made them out to be.

Guess the same can be said about the T-34. No one vehicle is ever going to completely dominate the battlefield. It has to have a weakness somewhere. I think with the T-34 more often than not it is the crew.

Keith

[Carl Deppen]

Yeah, well try the CCBB scenario Jaegermeister and find out how "Uber" the big German cats are.

[Abbott]

Originally posted by Carl Deppen:

Yeah, well try the CCBB scenario Jaegermeister and find out how "Uber" the big German cats are.

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I was able to knock out all of the Tigers and all but one of the Panthers. Won a minor victory, it was tough.

[busboy]

The 85mm surely had a higher HE content than the U.S. 76mm, but other than that I have seen that those two guns were very close in performance. (With U.S. HVAP ammo, the 76mm would be superior.)

[V]

Not only was the T-34 a great tank. It was produced in great numbers. The Germans nearly always had the tactical edge over the Soviets by having more experienced crews and great tanks themselves. But the Soviets won the war on the operational level and the Germans just could not match the tank armies the Soviets were fielding later in the war.

[Eden Smallwood]

Originally posted by Abbott:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Carl Deppen:

Yeah, well try the CCBB scenario Jaegermeister and find out how "Uber" the big German cats are.

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I was able to knock out all of the Tigers and all but one of the Panthers. Won a minor victory, it was tough.</font>

[Wild Weasle]

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Kalinin Road. I agree with the above. Everything I've heard about the T34's of 1941 led me to believe that they could go head to head and long range with any German Armour. To lose heaps of these tanks to the 75mm L24 by frontal penetrations at 600-800m seems too easy. I thought the German tactic was to keep them busy then hit them in the flank or from the air...

Still, its a hellova game.

[rune]

Your thought is wrong. Stack Pz Is or Pz IIs against T34s and see how they fair. The 75mm can deal with the early t34s, remember guys, there are multiple versions of the things.

Rune

[Foxbat]

Originally posted by busboy:

The 85mm surely had a higher HE content than the U.S. 76mm, but other than that I have seen that those two guns were very close in performance. (With U.S. HVAP ammo, the 76mm would be superior.)

Too bad for the Yanks that the T-34s actually had HVAP/subcalibre and the Sherman crews had to bribe TD crews to get their hand on them

[Wild Weasle]

@ rune

Your thought is wrong. Stack Pz Is or Pz IIs against T34s and see how they fair. The 75mm can deal with the early t34s, remember guys, there are multiple versions of the things. .

I Guess a T34 is a scary beast to an early panzer jock... You've just inspired me to dust off some of my old books and read about barbarossa a bit more. I supose we have to remember that the German 75mm armed assets were still relatively rare in '41

[MikeyD]

Responding to the question in the header, yes history books are often wrong! In the last ten years the amount of original-source based WWII reference books have increased greatly, and a lot of 'accepted wisdom' printed over the previous 40 years has increasingly been proved wrong. Now we gasp as some of the goofs in early (even wartime) reports. It's not that the old writers were sloppy, They just didn't have access to Bundesarchives documents or recently declassified British papers.

A lot of what's in CMBB would be considered startling revelations to a military historian working in 1962... or 1985... or 2002.

[rune]

You got it, the Panzer IV was not that common. However, the tanks in that particular scenario are close to the real thing. The attack was stopped after tearing through columns, by a mix of airpower and some panzer IVs. Look how the early tanks do in The Iron Roadblock. Modify that one to a single T34, and see how it fares. [Hint: It does rather well, the T34 that is]. Also, the T34/76 was modified by lessons learned against the Germans. It is why there are like 7 versions of the thing. If i remember right, the T34s were the early versions in that scenario.

If you think that is bad, you should see the TO&Es I got. Tank amounts differ from unit to unit, no matter what the TO called for.

Rune

[EightInchArty]

Germans were most impressed about the mobility of T-34. Wide tracks and good transmission.

Stories goes around of times and times again germans anchoring their defences to "un-passable" terrain, only to find out, that T-34 could attack from semi frozen marshland, that would have bogged Mk IV down to turret ring.

Wasn't the suspension desingned by american named Christie?

In talks about M4 vs T-34, I can say that what M4 loses in crosscountry ability it wins in commander. Until the 3-man turret arrived in '43, the T-34's running in to ambush were usually gutted.

[Foxbat]

Originally posted by EightInchArty:

Wasn't the suspension desingned by american named Christie?

Christie designed the Christie Tanks, which could go really, really fast on both wheels and tracks. The soviets bought some, then made an armed version that became the BT-2. Ultimatly the evolution of this series inderectly lead to the T-34, which used a form of the Christie suspension (without the option of running on wheels). This was supposed to be dropped in favor of torsion-bar suspension in 1941, but the war intervened.

So yeah, Christie invented the suspension, or at least the godfather of the one found on the T-34.

[JRRRT]

But there is a close analogy re:the T-34 v. Sherman. They were both produced in enormous numbers, thus their masters could afford to lose some. I have seen a late-war T-34/85 close up and inside. The turret was a gigantic sandcasting, all rough and nubbly, and the gun barrel on the outside was very crude. I could just see some sleepy teenager at "Tankograd" drowsing over the lathe. But they cranked them out like mad (one month's production at some point equalling a whole year of German manufacture. Very noisy (metal tracks). Also, they could run in winter...had a compressed-air booster for the starting system.

[Da Beginna]

Originally posted by EightInchArty:

Germans were most impressed about the mobility of T-34. Wide tracks and good transmission.

You are right. The T-34 has also to be viewed from an operational level. It has a Diesel engine - its range was about 600 km (with drop tanks). The Christie suspension on the wider tracks proved to be superior under conditions where German tanks refused operation.

Especially, with the first snow in 1941 the Germans experienced that the T-34 kept going while their tanks got bogged or freez up. The Germans start to call the tank "Schneekönig" - king of the snow because of its great mobility in winter.