ARMAMENT
The early T-34 Model 1940 was armed with the short 76.2mm (3in)
L-11 Model 1938 rifled gun with a length of 30.5 calibres. During 1941 a very
small number of T-34s were fitted with the 57mm (2.24in) ZiS-4 long-barrelled
high-velocity weapon, which was intended for engaging lightly armed vehicles at
longer ranges. The high velocity of this weapon compensated for the loss of
calibre, and the L-11 remained the standard gun on the Model 1940 production
run, although it was not exactly up to the standard that the Soviets were
seeking for a gun, and the T-34 designers were not totally satisfied with the
weapon.
Fortunately there was a better gun available, although
Soviet bureaucracy and the interference of Kulik, the head of the GAO, did much
to hamper its introduction. Grabin and his team at Zavod Nr 92 already had a new
76.2mm (3in) gun in production. The F-32 was being fitted to the new KV heavy
tank and was achieving much better antiarmour performance than the T-34 Model
1940s L-11, due to its longer barrel.
By the end of 1940 a member of Grabin’s team, P. Muraviev, had
adapted Grabin’s F-32 gun for the T-34 and produced a weapon (the longer F-34
with 42 calibres) considerably superior to the L-11. In a move showing
considerable initiative and courage, Grabin and the director of Zavod Nr 92, A.
Elyan, began producing the F-34 alongside the L-11 and shipped them to the
Kharkov plant which was building the T-34. The initial F-34 guns were completed
in January 1941 and the first T-34s, usually classified as the T-34 Model 1941,
armed with the F-34, rolled out in February 1941.
They were mainly used as platoon and company commander
tanks, and proved very popular in combat after the German invasion, due to
their increased hitting power. Stalin became aware of the new version through
front-line correspondence. So as units involved in the fighting demanded more
tanks equipped with the F-34, rather than the less effective L-11, the Main
Defence Committee finally authorized the F-34 in the summer of 1941.The 76.2mm
(3in) F-34 Model 1940 (42-calibre length) gun equipped all subsequent models of
T-34 until increases in German armour protection led to the adoption of an 85mm
(3.34in) gun in late 1943, though tanks armed with the F-34 remained in service
until the end of the war.
IMPROVEMENTS
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.
1941 INVASION
By the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union on
June 22, the KhPZ and the Stalingrad Tank Factory had built about 1,226 T-34/76
tanks for the Red Army, which was roughly an equal mix of Model 1940 and Model
1941. However, at the start of Operation Barbarossa, only 5 percent of the Red
Army’s tanks were T-34s and 2 percent were KV heavy tanks, meaning that the
bulk of Soviet armored forces were still composed of obsolescent light tanks. Approximately
982 T-34/76 and 466 KV-1 tanks were deployed in the Western military districts
at the start of the invasion. Yet despite all its technical promise, the
initial combat debut of the T-34/76 in 1941 was a disaster due to inadequate
training and skimpy logistics. The T-34’s baptism of fire occurred m Lithuania
near Rassinye, when about 50 T-34s from the 3rd Tank Regiment/2nd Tank Division
mounted a clumsy counterattack against the spearheads of the 1st and 6th Panzer
Divisions between June 24 and 25. Although the T-34s caused a brief panic when
37mm AT guns failed to penetrate their armor, the Soviet attack was stopped by
a few 88mm flak guns.
General Pavlov had left GABTU to command the Western Front
just before the start of the war. Pavlov’s command included the 6th Mechanized
Corps, one of the Red Army’s strongest armored formations with 238 T-34 tanks.
Unfortunately for Pavlov, the 6th Mechanized Corps had no armor-piercing (AP) rounds
for the T-34s and only one load of fuel per tank. Due to security concerns, few
T-34 crewmen had actually been trained. The best-designed tank in the world is
merely scrap iron if it does not have ammunition, fuel, or a trained crew, and
that was the condition of virtually all the T-34 units in the summer of 1941.
The 6th Mechanized Corps and all its vital T-34s were annihilated in the first two
weeks of the war without accomplishing anything of consequence. By early July,
about half the available T-34 and KV-1 tanks had been lost as the Soviet border
armies were destroyed, and most of the remaining pre-war T-34s were lost in the
Kiev Pocket. When Pavlov’s command was wiped out in the Minsk Pocket, he was
recalled to Moscow and executed.
The T-34’s Overall Combat Results in 1941
The combat results for 1941 show the Soviets lost an average
of over seven tanks for every German tank lost. If all German fully tracked
AFVs (assault guns, tank destroyers, SP artillery, etc) and losses from
Germany’s allies are included in the German figures, then the ratio drops to
6.6 to 1 in the German favour.
Of the total of 20,500 Soviet tanks lost in 1941,
approximately 2,300 were T-34s and over 900 were mostly KV heavy tanks. Even if
the T-34’s loss ratio was better than seven for every German tank, it was still
most likely in the region of four or five to one. Frankly, if 2,300 of any new
Wehrmacht tank type had been lost within six months of its first deployment,
even with a loss ratio of one to one (let alone 0.2-0.3 to one), then most WWII
historians would have described the tank’s combat record as an unmitigated disaster.
More informed commentaries relating to the T-34’s combat
performance in 1941 consider factors such as: the T-34 tank crews had little
time to train on their machines, they had major ammunition supply problems, and
the support infrastructures were not in place to recover damaged machines.
These arguments have a lot more merit than the ‘only small numbers available’
or the ‘committed in small packets’ arguments. There is no doubt that a large
proportion of T-34s in 1941 fell victim to operational type losses, especially
in the situations the Red Army found itself in during the summer of 1941. Many
T-34s had little or no armour piercing ammunition in June 1941, although they
did in the months that followed. Many T-34s were abandoned and lost due to
breakdown, being bogged down or simply out of fuel. The Red Army’s tank
divisions, already short of tractors, had little to no recovery vehicles or
even time to recover these tanks. However, even if we assume a staggering
40-50% of T-34s were operational losses (which is probably too high an
estimate), then the T-34’s loss ratio in tactical combat is still around
two-three to one in the German favour.
The T-34’s Design Weaknesses
When one considers the apparent superiority of the T-34, the
question has to be asked: why did the T-34 consistently suffer at least a
two-three to one loss ratio against ‘inferior and obsolescent’ enemy tanks in
tactical combat, i.e. when actually shooting at each other? Either the German’s
combat proficiency was supernatural, the Soviet’s combat proficiency was
unbelievably incompetent, or there were design flaws inherent in the T-34 as a
complete weapon system which are not apparent in a cursory analysis of combat
power based on armour and gun penetration. I believe the latter to be the case.
The T-34/76’s one great weakness was its fire control efficiency. It suffered
from the same two-man turret syndrome as other Soviet tanks in this period,
namely that the tank’s commander, gun aimer, gunner and platoon commander (if a
platoon leader), were all the same person. Exacerbating this was the fact that
the T-34/76 had relatively poor main gun optics quality, no turret basket, a
very cramped and low turret (the gun could not depress more than three degrees
severely restricting use on a reverse slope or at close range), poor turret
drive reliability, no radios, and generally poor target observation and
indicator devices (including no turret cupola and only one vision periscope for
the tank’s commander). All these factors are considered in detail in
calculating a tank’s Fire Control Effect (FCE). The T-34 is discussed here as a
case history. In summary, the T-34/76’s inherent fire control efficiency was so
bad that even well trained and experienced tank crews were put at a severe
disadvantage. For inexperienced tank crews, with no radios and probably no
organised combined arms support, it was a disaster.
So what was the result of the T-34/76’s two man turret, weak
optics and poor vision devices (that is a poor overall FCE factor)? German
tankers noted “T-34s operated in a disorganised 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 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”. The Germans noted the T-34 was very slow to find and engage targets
while the Panzers could typically get off three rounds for every one fired by
the T-34.
A combat account from Operation Barbarossa highlights the
problem with the T-34/76’s fire control systems and also why its overall combat
power is so overrated. “Remarkably enough, one determined 37mm gun crew
reported firing 23 times against a single T-34 tank, only managing to jam the
tank’s turret ring”. In this engagement T-34 proponents will highlight the
impunity of the T-34 to the 37mm Pak 36 AT gun. However this is hardly
surprising against a gun that can only penetrate 29mm of 30 degree sloped
armour at 500metres with ordinary AP ammunition. What is really important in
this story is that the AT gun managed to get 23 shots off, and it turns out
that the T-34 in this report didn’t even manage to hit the AT gun. Once better
AT guns appeared, which they rapidly did, T-34s would be lucky to survive 2-3
rounds. Contemporary German tank crews would have been be appalled if they let
enemy AT guns get more than two rounds off before they took defensive action.
This example highlights the difference between tanks designed to optimise all
their fire control related systems and hence maximise their firepower, and
those that weren’t.
