Greetings all! There are a number of misconceptions commonly in people's minds about the Soviet T-34. And though those of you paying attention probably are now aware of them, I thought it would be handy to have a quick reference video that you could link to. For the next time, some of the lesser-informed folks come up with some of the following statements. T-34 introduced sloped armor to tanks. This is obviously silly. Go back to World War I and you will see angles on the A7V, the FT, the Sashomon. Then you move forward to the 30s, the Christie tanks like the BT, the American M2 Medium, Matilda II. T-34 wasn't even the first time to introduce sloping from all sides. The FCM-36 from 1930s France would have a better claim. Stoke armor was a known thing. The question was whether or not making the slope was considered worth the disadvantages. Often times the answer was no. And this was the German position until 75 and 76mm guns started being encountered. Prior to that, 10 degrees was considered reasonable enough. As an example of how too much slop can be a problem, look at how Sherman's head there sloped decreased in later production. Christie's suspension was fantastic. The Soviets weren't actually quite so sure of this. The T-34M, also known as A43, was developed just before the war to replace the Christie's suspension with torsion bars. It was estimated that the switchover would save about 20% on interior volume, take about a third of a turn off the weight of the vehicle, and add about 50% to the field capacity before other advantages, such as easier repair. The Americans took a long look at it and abandoned the idea. The question isn't really why didn't more nations use the design, but more why did the British move to it when nobody else did? Even the British eventually realized the error of the ways though, by the end of the war they were back to building cruisers with bogies. It's not like Christie's suspension system was inherently bad. The big wheels with their large individual range of motion provided a good capability at speed, especially given the alternatives in the early 1930s, but by the onset of World War II, other better systems were out there. The needs of war production were such that the T-34 had to continue being built with Christie's springs. The T-34 was invulnerable to German guns, the 37mm was called the Dornocker. Well obviously no tank is invulnerable and T-34 is no exception. When the Germans invaded, the Red Army had 935 T-34s on hand. Six weeks later, they had lost 1303, with only 106 years so with the 525 replacements still in service. Something was obviously killing them. The data for that time period cannot be found, but an assessment of the causes of all losses until September 42 shows that over 20% of T-34s were knocked out by 5cm guns, the short ones, and smaller, and about 50% were knocked out by the longer 5cm guns, which could be either the tank might type, which appeared in December 41, or the toad type, which was present from the very start. And don't ask me how they were able to determine what kind of gun the 5cm round was fired from. I don't know with us what the paper says. How is it possible that these tanks were being knocked out by these small guns? Well, it's not as if T-34 and KV was the first time that the Germans had encountered heavily armored vehicles. The Germans had run across them in France, and it certainly didn't require an 88 to do the job on them, and the Germans knew this. That the Soviets had such capable tanks was a shock, yes, but once that was realized, the Germans were settled down to business as usual. To start this, the Germans had prodiged some ams at tungsten-chord ammunition. To kill nearly 1,000 KVs and 1,934s in 1941, they fired almost a third of a million tungsten-chord rounds. Secondly, they didn't shoot from the front. Under 20% of impact, success by repair facilities were to the front hall or turret. That the Germans were assisted by the fact, similar to French tanks, that Soviet tanks were limited by poor visibility from the turret overworked crew, didn't hurt matters either. The Germans advanced easily until T-34s started being fielded. Well, this one is supported by the fact that the various German reports don't start talking about T-34s until later, and the Soviets blamed the German successes on the lack of T-34s. For example, Guderian's memoirs state that the T-34 appeared in late July. Yet the German 7th Panzer Division, equipped manual Panzer 38T's and other 37mm guns, had encountered T-34s within 9 hours of the invasion, and during a difficult fight to cross the river at Alitas, had knocked out 27 of the 40-40-34s of the Soviet 5th Tank Division. Together with an additional 46 other tanks, 4th reported loss of 11 tanks. There were two theories as to why this should be so, this whole misreporting of the T-34. Firstly, the reporting of tough Soviet tanks normally referred to KVs. To the point that photographs of T-34s being sent back were labeled as KVs. Since both the KV and the T-34 were new types of the Germans, there was no way for a typical German to know if it was looking at the T-34 or KV, which was a big tough tank. For whatever reason, knowledge of the KV spread more quickly, so the Germans did not give the T-34 anywhere near as much credit for its participation. Secondly, both the Germans and the Soviets needed excuses. The Soviets couldn't go and openly admit that they had let the Red Army's quality totally collapse, but factory limitations were very convenient to excuse for the German successes for which nobody could be blamed. On the German side, the Germans went from doing fantastically to suddenly being slowed down, and the arrival of a new capable tank made up pretty good excuses for that. T-34s were poorly built. Like some other tanks, yes, early T-34s had issues with reliability, but this comment normally refers to the standards of construction throughout the course of the production run of all the variants. It probably is better to say that the T-34 was brutally or efficiently built, where components had to be of high quality they were, where we didn't matter, they weren't. Castings were rough, welds weren't pretty, tracks were crude, but the armor was tough, the guns were accurate, and the welds were strong, and the tracks, well, I guess they lasted about as long as they needed to. Features like fast power traverse and a combination of direct and periscopic gunner sites, even on the earliest T-34s, indicate an appreciation of where to prioritize efforts for effectiveness, the two-man turret on the 76mm tanks notwithstanding. The tank was not sophisticated, but what the red army needed and the Soviet state could produce at the time it met requirements quite nicely as the Germans found out. Granted though the driver's gearbox could probably have stood for some improvement in design. So there you go, the next time somebody over the dinner table says one of the above things just point them to this video and smile. I'm Nicholas Moore in the Chieftain, and I'll see you on the next one.