![]() ![]() Stalin himself climbed onto the tank IS, SU-152 and SU-85 (for the first time comrade. People's Commissar of the tank industry V.A.Malyshev wrote September 8, 1943: "Today, Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Beria, Shcherbakov examined in the Kremlin new tanks and artillery ships of the IS, KV-85, SU-152, SU-85, C-76. Then, in August 1943, the Soviet's 5th Guards Army and 5th Guards Tank Army, once again under front control, defeated the German LII Army Corps northwest of Belgorod. The Soviets followed Stalingrad with the introduction of a new Front Mobile Group at Kursk in July, 1943 - again with great operational level success. The heavy tank Joseph Stalin, with its 122mm gun was clearly superior to the German Tigers. A small number of new JS-1 (named for Josef Stalin) heavy tanks were built. In 1943 the work on the new Soviet heavy tank Iosif Stalin were completed. The competion with new German armor and the lessons of Kursk stimulated the designing of the new modifications of KV, which finally resulted in IS family of tanks. And they were fitted with the same 76mm gun as T-34s. But the KV's were very heavy, immobile, suffering from an incredibly poor transmission, and that meant un-manuverable. The tank was heavily armored, impenetrable by any German anti-tank gun of that period. The KV-1 Soviet heavy tank took the Wehrmacht's soldiers and officers by surprise. The KV-1 weighed 47.5 tons, had a five-man crew, and carried a 76mm cannon and four 7.62mm machine guns. The T-34-85 weighed 32 tons, had a five-man crew, and carried an 85-mm cannon and two 7.62mm machine guns. The main Soviet tanks of World War II were the T-34-85 medium tank and the KV1 heavy tank. These over-equipped tanks did not survive the early days of World War II. Even the Soviet T-28 medium tank carried a 76.2mm cannon and four 7.62mm machine guns. As a result designs for tanks and other armoured vehicles only feature "a single traversing turret". When faced with Russian T-34 and KV-1 tanks, whether in the advance or in and encirclement, the Germans found themselves outgunned and insufficiently armored.ĭuring World War II, it was determined that tank designs incorporating two or more traversing turrets were impractical. ![]() While in 1941 the Germans swept across the Russian countryside, individual Soviet units had put up stubborn defenses. But the Russians learned quickly, modeled their organizations after those of their assailants, and came roaring back in some of history's most spectacular armor exploitations. Based on Germany's success with armor units, the Soviets realized they had drawn incorrect conclusions on the employment of armor, and set about trying to rectify the situation by frantically rebuilding their tank force. The blitzkrieg tactics used by Hitler's forces were thought to herald a new form of warfare. The Soviets did not stress the use of armor until after they had fallen victim to a devastating German blitzkrieg in the early years of World War II. The tank corps were then replaced with smaller motorized divisions and a shift in doctrine favoring smaller and more easily controllable formations followed. The set-backs suffered by large tank forces in Spain (1937-38) and the Soviet Army's difficulty employing large formations of mechanized forces in eastern Poland in September 1939 resulted in the elimination of the large corps. The KV1 weighed 47.5 tons, had a five-man crew, and carried a 76mm cannon and four 7.62mm machine guns. There were very small numbers of older medium and heavy tanks, including the archaic T-28 (600) and T-35 (40). The remainder of the 1941 tank force included light amphibious scout tanks, including the T-37 (2,400 produced) T-38 (1,200 produced) and the new T-40 (222 produced). This followed the British and French pattern of developing two distinctly different tanks for two roles - a slow infantry tank for close support of foot soldiers and a fast tank, variously called a cavalry tank or cruiser tank, for exploitation and other maneuver missions. In total about 8,300 BT tanks and 12,000 T-26 tanks were manufactured from 1933 to 1940. ![]() The bulk of the Soviet tank force was made up of two basic types: the T-26 light tank and the BT fast tank. The German tank force in June 1941 had 5,262, tanks of which 3,671 were committed to the invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941. As was the case 50 years later, the Soviet tank inventory of 1941 was larger than that of the rest of the world combined, numbering some 23,106 tanks (the US tank force at this time was about 2,000 tanks). The Red Army possessed the world's largest tank force in 1941. ![]()
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