"

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Well all right, at least we are getting some debate on the subject.

Paul Siebert - The main contribution of the FCM 36 was the sloped armor on all sides, with the slope of the hull continuous with the turret, so that the tank ended up with a pyramidal shape and a very small turret.   This was exactly the same shape of the T-34 which appeared some 3-4 years later than the FCM 36 and yet the T-34 gets all the credit and accolades as a ""revolutionary design"" for its sloped armor.   Well, the French came up with that idea first (p. 247-248 in T-34 Mythical Weapon).    Michulec goes further and points out that the pyramidal shape was highly impractical as it resulted in a tiny turret that was all but nonfunctional as the two crewmen could barely aim, load, and fire the gun.  This was why the initial ""flat turret"" with the steeply sloped sides was replaced by the slightly larger, and less steeply sloped ""hexagonal turret"" (p. 245).   The later T-34-85 turret was hardly sloped at all in order to maximize space to fit the larger gun.

As for your point about the dysfunctionality of the T-34-76, the early T-34-76 models were the most dysfunctional because of their tiny, steeply sloped turrets and the weak L-11 gun.  The larger hexagonal turret, which was designed to allow for installation of the more powerful F-34 gun was much more functional, but it was still a two man turret lacking a commander.  That problem was not fixed until early 1944 when the T-34-85 finally rolled off the production lines with a three man turret.  The T-34-76 models thus ALL shared this problem of having nearly blind crewmen trying to fight on the battlefield.  The Germans found it very easy to pick them off like ducks because the tank crews had a very limited field of vision, and no way to communicate with other tanks.  There is a description in Healy's Zitadelle  of an episode at the Battle of Kursk where the Soviet T-34s were charging in  and the Germans would just leisurely pick off the T-34s one by one, with all the surviving T-34s completely oblivious to the mass destruction around them.  That was in July 1943.   Michulec's book does show that the Soviets started installing a commanders cupola on the hexagonal turret in the summer of 1943 (p. 123).  Probably learned something from the heavy losses of the Battle of Kursk that the tank crews needed to be able to see what was going on around them.  

Michulec points out that the tank that the Germans most likely did fear and have a lot of trouble with was the KV-1.  The KV-1 had the really tough armor that was resistant to the early German guns (the T-34's thin side armor could be penetrated by the weak guns of the German tanks of 1941) and it had the three man crew that made it a formidable fighting machine on the battlefield.    The T-34-76 crews could simply not see well enough and function inside that tiny turret well enough to be a serious threat to German tanks.    The problem with the KV-1 of course was twofold - it was very slow and sluggish and did not travel through bad terrain very well, unlike the T-34.  And it carried the name of the later discredited Kliment Voroshilov.   Which is probably why in the Soviet retelling of history, the KV-1 gets only a very brief mention.  All the glory gets heaped on the T-34s, which the Germans had no reason to fear because it was not much of a threat to them on the battlefield, due to its dysfunctional tiny two man turret.  Michulec points out that the German generals, especially Guderian, in all probability confused the KV-1 and T-34 in their memoirs.  

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DMorpheus - I think you are being a bit harsh with Michulec's book.  But at least you recognize the huge amount of work that he put into this thing.  Yes, the photos and drawings are INCREDIBLE.  I think rather than calling the text ""awful"", it would be more accurate to describe its two major problems:

1. The book was translated by somebody for whom English was a second language.  Not quite as bad as the translation for the movie ""Alexander Nevsky"", but a bit difficult to understand sometimes.

2. Michulec goes overboard with his obvious anti-Soviet ranting.  Somebody should have just edited all this out, and it would have made the book more professional.

But, if you are able to slug through the difficult translation and filter out the anti-Soviet bias, what you find is that Michulec has packed his book chock full of facts, and he does reference most of his major facts.  Unfortunately those references all seem to be in Russian or Polish or German.   But I think that is where this book shines over books by Zaloga.    

Here's an excerpt (p. 161): 

{{quote|The relocation of the production, the starting of new assembly lines, usually in great haste, and the loss of many sources of raw ma