And now, Ten Utterly Useless Facts About.... Russian Tanks 1. The Russians tested dozens of armored vehicle designs during the First World War (we dont know how many - Imperial records are not complete, but some estimates put them in double or triple digits.) Czar Nicholas and the Imperial General Staff were fascinated with tanks. All that said, the Russians did not produce a true tank of their own during the Great War. Their most heavily produced armored vehicles during the period were the Garford-Putilov Armored Car/Truck (with enough firepower to defeat any contemporary tank)and the Filatov Armored Car, a three wheeled, armored motor cycle. Both were used, alongside several much smaller production series models, during the First World War and the Russian Civil War. The last Garford-Putilov was destroyed by German invaders in 1941. That said, despite short production runs, most every Russian armored car built during the war saw combat during the Great War or during the Russian Civil War. 2. Certainly the largest tank of the war to be completed was the Russian Tzar tank - a gigantic, three wheeled vehicle three stories tall. The vehicle moved about fifteen feet, got stuck in mud, and never moved again. 3. The Russians also developed a very interesting tank destroyer, based upon the body of a box car with two tracks installed and a heavy artillery piece in the prow. This is known by several names - sometimes called the Mgberov; it was never mass produced. 4. The first indigenously produced Russian Tank was a Russian copy of the FT-17, which first saw service during the latter stages of the Russian Civil War. Aside from differently shaped fuel reserves, it was identical to the French FT-17. 5. The Russians and Germans trained -together- and developed joint armored tactics prior to the Second World War. Russia was excellent proving ground for armored crews, and the Russians were willing to conceal German armored operations, not being particularly fond of the League of Nations, and hence, unwilling to report German violations of Versailles or Locarno. 6. The Russian T-34 was perhaps the most successful tank of the war. The first production tank to incorporate fully sloped armor, it was designed to be easy enough to be operated and repaired by farmers. Build quality varied dramatically- some were rushed into production so quickly that rivets used to hold them together were quite literally hammered in, while others were built with high quality welding. The T-34 surprised the Germans when it was first encountered in large numbers, in 1942, and caused the Germans to completely revise their armor development strategy. 7. The Russians were obsessed with Land Battleships, up until the end of the 1950s, when such projects were deemed impractical. These included multiple turrets on huge hulls, and were usually failures because of their high ground pressure to weight ratios, very primitive communication facilities, and a quirk of the inferior steel built in Russia at the time: the longer a plate was rolled, the less structurally sound it became, even when rivets were used to join plates together. As a result, the larger the Russian vehicle, the less effective the armor was, from a ballistic protection standpoint. The early model T-26, which had two machine gun turrets, the T-28, which had a main turret and two machine gun turrets, and and the T-35, which had two main gun turrets and five to six machine gun turrets, all saw combat either before or during the Second World War. The T-35 saw its last action in 1942, but T-28s continued to be used at least until 1943 or 1944. T-26s were used throughout the war, but the multi-turret configuration was dropped very early on. 8. The heaviest Russian land battleship project was the T-100, with two massive turrets. It was intended as a possible replacement for the T-35 and a single example was used during the 1939-40 invasion of Finland. The tank got stuck in mud, and the Russians could not retrieve it before they were beaten out of the area by the Finnish Army. The Fins attempted to capture the vehicle, but there were no engines in Finland heavy enough to tow it! When the war ended, the Russians simply carted it away. 9. The single most commonly produced tank in the history of warfare is the T-55 Medium Tank, introduced in 1954, and while production ceased in the early 1990s, replacement parts are still manufactured, and some countries still build licensed (and unlicensed) copies. More than 50,000 had been completed by the time the Russians officially stopped building them. The T-55, armed with a 100mm gun, is (despite its age) still one of the worlds best medium tanks. It was the first Soviet vehicle to attempt the use of an auto-loading mechanism, but this failed horribly due to an unfortunate flaw: the original auto-loader could be placed in semi-automatic mode. This meant that a tanks commander could disable the full auto-loading mechanism and allow his crew to load shells and aim the gun more effectively. However, the rapid loading mechanism did not shut down when the rest of the auto-loader was switched off, meaning that more than one loader had his arm ripped off and loaded along with the shell... 10. The Russian T-72, the most common of post T-55 designs, is not nearly the disastrous tank that it was painted to be after the First Gulf War, but it has several flaws, even in non-export versions. These include an auto-loader which has a tendency to slow the overall rate of fire, and the necessity for the gun barrel to elevate fully upward for the auto-loader to work, requiring the re-laying of the gun barrel each time a shot is fired. In addition, the T-72 has very poor gun depression capabilities (making it impossible to fire from a hull down position, and export models were built with very poor quality steel and supplied with very poor quality ammunition. After the First Gulf War, it was found that many T-72s had in fact struck their targets, but that the shells had simply disintegrated upon impact.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 06:06:27 +0000
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