World War Two's most common tank
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- čas přidán 1. 08. 2023
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What click-bait title should I have used for this? "The tank that gave the Germans nightmares"? "The Commonest Communist tank?" "The tank of the teeming red hordes"? As I describe here, they made ever-so many of this type of tank, and that fact alone makes it an important tank.
Picture credits:
Sturmtiger image, also T-34 images
Alan Wilson from Stilton, Peterborough, Cambs, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/..., via Wikimedia Commons
T-34 image with German markings
Methem (Mikko J. Putkonen), CC BY 3.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/..., via Wikimedia Commons
T-34 war memorial
Photo by a href="pixnio.com/transportation-veh..."Couleur on a href="pixnio.com/"Pixnio
Craig Nagy from Vancouver, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/..., via Wikimedia Commons
T-34s on the way to the front
By RIA Novosti archive, image #1274 / RIA Novosti / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
T-34s captured by Germans
By Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-277-0836-04 / Jacob / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
T-34s giving rides in winter
By fotoreporter sovietico sconosciuto - scan da T.Bean and W.Fowler, Russian tanks of World War II, Ian Allan 2002, Public Domain, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
Burning T-34
By Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F016221-0016 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
Polish hex-turret T-34
By Radomil talk 14:33, 26 March 2007 (UTC) - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
T-34/85 with re-enactors
By Cezary Piwowarski - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
Angolan Civil War T-34
User:Katangais, CC BY-SA 3.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/b..., via Wikimedia Commons
T34 at Warsaw Museum
Ferran Cornellà, CC BY-SA 3.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/..., via Wikimedia Commons
Panzer I image
By Ashley Pomeroy - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
Panzer II image
By Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-265-0003-18A / Moosdorf [Mossdorf] / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
37mm ATG images
By Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-127-0391-21 / Huschke / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
By Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-299-1831-26 / Hähle, Johannes / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
Panzer II image
By Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-318-0083-30 / Rascheit / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
PIAT image
By Ranger Steve - Own work, CC BY 3.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
Bomb image
Greg Goebel, CC BY-SA 2.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/..., via Wikimedia Commons
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Lindy proving his point even further by running World of Tanks on the PC equivalent of a T-34
wow 20-40 fps XD
I'm shocked WoT marketing people let him show gameplay that choppy.
someone who knows computer pls build something and donate so lindy can whoop ass
@@evancenac4467I'd love to see Linus Tech Tips building beige tank PC.
He is recording which puts more pressure on the system than just playing the game would. But he’s for sure not on a beastly PC, nor is one needed for WoT.
Funny thing about tanks is that ANY tank works if the enemy has nothing to deal with it. Imagine a tiny little Panzer 1 rolling along a street and all you have is your rifle. It literally becomes an impervious machine gun platform just as deadly to you as an Abrams could be.
Mr. Molotov would like to diagree...
But yes, it works well enough against any non-anti weapons. That is the idea of a tank.
Well just imagine the results of a German Army on the Western Front, armed with Panzer 1, in say 1914? Because that's the kind of resistance they could have expected, ordinary riflemen, with no more than their trusty.303 rifles!!
That's the logic behind the militarised tractors in the Syrian civil war, who cares if it cannot withstand a real tank, if it won't ever see one?
@@steemlenn8797 Not Mr Molotov but the Finns who termed their bottle a 'Molotov cocktail' after the bombs that fell on Helsinki was called 'Molotov's breadbaskets' as the Soviets claimed that they were dropping bread to the starving Finnish masses when they bombed Helsinki in the Winter War. The cocktail was devised by a Spanish Nationalist Captain near Teruel during the Spanish Civil War, to stop the Soviet-supplied tanks that the Republicans were using.
@@EdMcF1 Yeah, I know, but writing "The Finns that used...." was a bit too long ;)
Another WW2 Lecture, just like old times, we are in for a treat
Better than Ukraine stuff, IMO.
@@his-dudenessit will be interesting 20 years from now with corroborating accounts but for now it's just here-say
The historical content is why I subscribe anyway
WW2 andy’s are eating good
I miss the lectures and the stories. His 2 hours in one take about gladiators is still one of the most impressive youtube feats I've ever experienced
Lindy still scammed all the backers on his kickstarter. took the money and ran and it's been what, 7 years now? real piece of sht
As the Chieftain (Nicholas Moran) pointed out, the Americans came across tigers just three times in the drive from Normandy, and, in his words, "The first time, the Shermans won, the second time the Pershings lost, and the third time the Tigers were being loaded onto flatcars, so it wasn't really a fair fight".
Note that the main reason for this is that all the German Heavy Tank Battalions were stationed in the British and Commonwealth designated area of Normandy.
Which was just as well considering they had the better AT gun in greater numbers, the 17pdr
@@kirotheavenger60 Or maybe if they'd been more mixed across the front the American field officers would have started shipping 76mm armed Shermans from England (where they had a few thousand waiting to go) earlier than they actually did.
The British encountered the Tiger I quite a few times; the first few in North-Africa, where the first intact capture of one was achieved by a A22 Churchill III.
The Sherman Firefly though has the - as far as I know - unique achievement of just one Firefly killing Multiple Tigers in one battle.
(three Tiger I'm and a Panzer' IV to be specific, before the Germans finally managed to take out said Firefly)
thats because the British fought them all lmao
@@impguardwarhamerstupid British
The most important bit is that the shermans crew probably survived, would be given a factory replacement.
In the spring of 1945, just into Germany, a friend of mine told me of seeing a Sherman crew go through 5 Shermans in one day. They got hit, bailed out, hitched a ride to the depot, drew another Sherman and headed back into the fight. They made that trip 4 times that day until they wiped out the german anti tank guns. The US had a very good salvage system. There is a good video about the US salvage system during WWII in Europe here on YT. Good Luck, Rick
Yep, strip everything of use and use them for parts, to be used
Germans couldn't afford to lose their tanks, but probably also not to lose their tankers.
Americans could afford to lose their tanks, but not their tankers.
Russians...they just replace both.
@@truelightseeker I've been listening to a lot of WWII German diaries. It seemed that they lost many of their machines and crews due to a lack of fuel and ammo.
@@wobblysauce The Army calls it cannibalization. My hobby is antique cars and tractors. I still cannibalize cars and tractors to keep things going.
WOW! That "knock the pins in" plate is the most Soviet tech I have ever seen! It does the job and is so primitive, it borders on genius. And every idiot from a place without roads can repair it.
That was part of the point. It was designed to be simple and easy to operate and maintain. Especially important for a conscript army of men of which many had very little experience operating any machinery of any kind.
@@MrManBuzz were US side more trained? Ive seen lectures that still in 1939-40 US army was in similar shape but they quickly upped game but even pilots had little experience and training everywhere.
@@effexon Yes but you have to remember the Soviet Union was a very different beast to the US. It was a melting pot of different languages and cultures, without an overarching monoculture that the US has. It's a very different beast, so it needed to be simple to operate and maintain by a crew that may not be culturally or ethnically familiar with each other.
@@effexon The thing for American pilots was that they barely ever saw actual air combat anyway, while their German counterparts were facing enemies daily and honing their skills. There's only so much you can do with training alone. Towards the end of the war they could match and surpass the Germans as their pilots got more experience and the Germans were losing more and more of their best pilots and didn't have the time to train the replacements properly.
@@MrManBuzz as if the US wasnt a melting pot???
but I guess the US had roads and an existant literacy rate unlike the USSR at that time.
I hadn't realized how much I miss WW2 content like this. Great stuff!
yes please more ww2 vids
gives excellent perspective and at the same time stark reminder what sayings like "quantity has quality on its own" mean....
then you might enjoy the youtube channels @PremierHistory and @jmantime
The only wunderwaffe that would have turned the tide of the war was luckily invented in allied territory and not in axis. I'm sure many Germans and Japanese were thankful that the mighty Bob Semple never saw full production
lmfao that thing is _amazing._ Based, even. Home defense god Bob Semple.
it's the only tank ever that never failed any mission it was given. it was built to deterre the japanese from invading new zealand and they never did. perfect track record.
It struck fear in the hearts of all who saw it.
TOG no doubt terrified them. Not to mention Char C.
New Zealand has always been a joke
The US also produced almost 23 thousand stuart light tanks which were pretty decent light tanks.
The reason the US produced so much is not necessarily that they simply had a larger workforce to do everything, but also that they were safe from attack and also had superior efficiency. The Germans and the Americans had roughly the same number of workers producing military aircraft, but the US produced roughly double to that of Germans. Also, these included the quite expensive and large heavy/strategic bombers like the b-17 and b-29. The US also slapped 50 cals to everything which was not cheap.
The US slapping M2s on everything that moves was honestly crazy. I think they produced over three million of those bad boys. Really the culmination of John Browning's genius which still stood the test of time a century later in a plethora of roles.
@@baraka629 Will probably stay 'till we settle Mars at this point, lol.
And _still_ won't go out of service.
I still wonder why not all of the US planes got 20 mm cannons, but only few designs, like P-38, F4U1C, early P-39s sent to Britain and USSR through Lend-Lease.
@@SamuraiAkechi aint that WW2 equivalent of A-10? plenty of destroying power and horror, and antiair wasnt with AI autoaim automatized.
@@effexon Not really. Maybe in Pacific 20 mm was good enough to penetrate tanks, but not in Europe. There 20mm was insufficient for tanks. Soviets switched Il-2 weaponry to 23 and 37 mms, germans tried various designs from reasonable 30 or 37 to unreasonable 75 mm tank cannon on Hs-123, brits had 47mm cannons on attack planes.
In Europe 20 mm was considered an anti-aircraft caliber mostly.
21:06 “I wonder if you can tell me what this is?”
Certainly! That’s a tank!
- If I got two beans, and then two more beans, what do I have?
- Some beans, sir!
@@SamuraiAkechiNothing gets past eagle eyed viewers such as ourselves!
5:25 I read a memoir of a Soviet tank captain during World War Two, and the escape hatches were a big problem. He said that because the driver had a procedure to follow to get that hatch open, if he didn't finish by the time the flames reached him, the panic would make him unable to complete it, and he would die. And as you say, the machine gunner/radio operator had it much worse, having to wait on the loader or driver to get out first.
There was actually an escape hatch in the floor of the T-34 that the bow gunner could access by dropping the back of his seat, butf it was very awkward to get to and casualties in T-34s were certainly very high.
This versus the M4 Sherman......I think the ratio of fatalities to serious hits was the lowest.... .6 I believe and mostly due to a hatch design that let the crew escape much easier
Excepting that the crews were even more expendable than the tanks
@@mandowarrior123that's a stupid misconception
*World of Tanks PR team:* Lloyd, would you be interested in advertising our game?
*He of the Beige:* Yes, absolutely, I'd love to run this ad for you!
*World of Tanks PR team:* Excellent - we just need to check, your PC has high-level specs to show the game in all it's glory, right?
*The Beige Bloke:* .......Yes, absolutely, I'd love to run this ad for you!
I remember this absolutely shocked me as a kid, how few they built.
Probably the biggest misconception about WWII that most people have is that it was in any way an even match.
It was until the industrial capacity of Russia and US was thrown against the Germans.
A smart leader would have ask for peace the moment the US entered.
To be fair to the Germans if not for the Western Allies they honestly would have beaten the soviets, mainly because the soviets were absolutely rubbish when it comes to logistics (and moscow still is entirely useless at it) and without Lend-Lease and the bombing of German factories/supplies the Germans most certainly would have at least taken Moscow like Napoleon did.
While the soviets needed the West, you can't say the same in reverse. The Luftwaffe could not beat the RAF, and the Kriegsmarine was absolutely never going to be able to even contest the English Channel let alone provide a corridor for a landing (and then keep it open to supply the landing) and with the US Navy/USAF joining up the Brits weren't going to be knocked out of the fight. The African theater and Italian fronts went rather poorly for the Germans already, and while the guy who ruined Charlie Chaplin's look likely would have lasted longer it would just be long enough for him to eat the first nuke which was going to come about regardless of if the soviets were active or not. If the Germans were still in the fight at that point they'd be getting a face full of atomic fury instead of Hiroshima.
This misconception is amazingly common, and we can probably guess it is because entertainment loves the tiger. In any WWII story, it serves as the bad guy's Goliath to the good guy's David. Whether we are talking about games like Call of Duty and Men of War or movies like Saving Private Ryan and Fury, Tigers feature as the gigantic, relentless Goliaths that strike fear into the hearts of our heroes. Because of this, they often feature in media as much as the far more common tanks of the war like Shermans and completely outshadow other more common rare tanks like M18 Hellcats or Hetzers. Even if in the real world, these various heroes are more likely than not to never have seen a moving enemy Tiger over the course of the entire war.
@@demomanchaos Agreed
@@Alex_Fahey The Nazis also did a good job during, and after the war of playing everything of theirs up. As the great quote goes, "Look at you, you have horses for god sake. what were you thinking?"
Panther's gun being fairly good. Now that is Lindy's understatement of the year.
The armor of the panther was also miles ahead of the t34
@@De_Futura The front armor, anyway.
Good gun, good armour, good mobility _to a point_ . That point stopped when you look at the issue of reliability. The Soviets didn't bother with reliability, because they had a Zapp Brannigan approach to tanks. The Americans _did_ bother with reliability, because everything they made had to cross an ocean to get into the fight, so they made sure every tank worked.
An understatement only in the context of tank-on-tank combat. Against soft targets that you'd shoot explosive shells at, it's no more powerful than the shorter 75mm guns of other tanks, and turns slower and has optics with a narrower field of vision. The Panther arguably over-emphasized long-range tank-on-tank combat, but arguably that's what it needed to effectively complement the Panzer IV.
@@GoranXII
I do wonder if the reliability issues of the panther were totally the fault of its design, or the fact that the Germans didn’t have the logistics or the production of spare parts to keep their tanks maintained in the field. All tanks are unreliable if they can’t be maintained.
I wonder how much of the German focus on making highly survivable tanks was down to their resource & oil limitations. No point trying to mass produce tanks if you lack the energy & resources to manufacture them, and subsequently the oil to run them
Very much so.
A lot of people miss this fact.
Germany didn't have enough men to fuel or crew the tanks it did have, imagine if they tried manufacturing 2x as many (and even then they still wouldn't hold a candle to Allied numbers).
I know the Allies tactics in overwhelming use of numbers won out, but when you read some of the stories about the beating some of the big German machines could take & still be in fighting condition its astounding. We were pretty lucky that so many did break down or ran out of fuel.
Always remember reading about TIGER PzKpfw VI № 231 that took 252 hits in a six hour engagement near Rostov, Russia, February 11-12, 1943. Though the hits from 227 hits from anti-tank rifle rounds, 14 hits from 5.7 cm and 4.5 cm anti-tank guns, and 11 hits from 7.62 cm guns. The right suspension was heavily damaged by shelling. The connecting pieces for several running wheels were ruined, two torsion bars were broken. A rear idler wheel bearing was damaged, many of the welds where split by impacts & heavily leaking fuel it managed to drive 60 KM & its crew to safety.
@@kirotheavenger60. 20 million men in the axis armies in Europe. I think they had enough to crew twenty times as many tanks as they produced.
Fun fact: the Germans invaded the USSR with only about half their tanks because they knew they didn’t have fuel to run all of them. Shortages still caused many delays. The channel TIK does a great job talking about their fuel and logistics problems during the invasion...
@annoyingbstard9407 that's really not how that works.
They need men for all sorts of roles beyond being just tankies, including infantry and other support/logitistics roles.
You don't press old men and boys into service if you've got plenty of manpower to go round...
For years I have watched your videos and dreamed of one day visiting Bovington. Last week, on the last day of my graduate program study abroad to London, I was able to make it out to the Bovington Tank museum before returning to the United States. It exceeded all expectations and I brought home a Tamiya to remember the trip by. Your lectures are joyful and interesting, and for that I am very grateful.
Something that I had considered before (and how silly of me!) people often compare the T34 and Sherman but the circumstances they are born in is incredible. The Sherman is a feat of engineering, but the T34, with its factories being relocated and being produced in such numbers is truly an enormous feat. Incredible to have been produced during a war on home soil.
7:23 this is the first time i see Lindy utter such a prominent and emphatic "I don't know" 🤣. These drive wheels like they're easy to repair.
the drive wheel of the t34 uses rollers to interact with the teeth on the track and because of that produces much less friction than a conventional sprocket wheel. that is great because it's much more efficient on the engine power, the same amount of horsepower will move the tank faster. the problem however is you concentrate much more force on a smal bit of metal (the pins he mentioned). so in practice the t34 was really at the upper end of weight you could move with that system, that's why it never caught on.
If only the T-34 could actually *reach* those speeds. The transmission was a major weak point for the majority of T-34s and took a feat of strength to shift to third gear, and herculean effort to go into fourth, assuming the lever didn't break from the strain.
@@zachrich7359 i think it's manly a leftover from the bt series, those were more along the lines of what christie imagined. including running without the tracks on, which i think they got rid of as a feature by the time of the t34.
@@saladiniv7968 perhaps, doesn't change the fact it was a shit transmission
The Sturmtiger was doing its best.
The real underdog of WWII
Given it was an artillery piece designed for taking out bunkers or buildings, and not tanks at all, it was indeed.
@@nctpti2073and it even did take out Tanks at Ludendorff Bridge!
Blame Hitler if he hadn't of wanted bigger and more complicated tanks the German's would have been able too produce more panzer 3&4's and stugs.
I am Polish, and this reminds me of an old TV series from my childhood, "Four Armoured and a Dog", in which four nice guys (Poles) had adventures during the Second World War as the crew of a Russian T-34. My childhood was still at the end of the years when official history only remembered the alliance at the end of the war, not mentioning that in 1939 the Russians attacked us together with the Germans. To this day, there are quite a few of these T-34s (with Polish markings) standing on pedestals in our villages and small towns as souvenirs of the war.... EDIT: I see you even shown at least two of them, 22:24 and 23:39 :)
As the old filmmaker saying goes: Never let the truth [or inconvenient details thereof] get in the way of a good story.
I'm Latvian, I do recall how it was portrayed, that bunch of Poles were just happily sort of ''vacationing'' in Siberia and they made an army out of them, similarly to our own movies of the era which even if they touched the subject of Stalin deportations, it was happy people going to Siberia where old and kind babushkas were greeting them with their steaming hot samovars for tea and took them in their homes as family :D
But yes the Four Tank Men and the Dog was shown here even in the 90s still, I have fond memories of watching it in the countryside on grandpa's old black and white tv
@@lkrnpk well, the propaganda movies of the present show you poor being deported under a bore of a gun of an evil Russian accompanied by a frenzied german shepherd - which is way further from the truth than the old soviet movies are.
After seeing mid war T-34s, it's amazing they didn't fall apart just going into battle. Absolutely astounding that they made something so ingenius with a bunch of farmers and old factory tools while the German spend so much time and effort building a single perfect tank to counter and most of those tanks just break down anyways.
"Four Tank-Men and a Dog" Made between 1966 and 1970, the series is composed of 21 episodes. It is set in 1944 and 1945, during World War II, and follows the adventures of a tank crew and their T-34 tank in the 1st Polish Army. The book and TV series have achieved and retain a cult series status in Poland, the former Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries. Full series with English subtitles czcams.com/video/Qs3SO7tVx84/video.html&pp=iAQB
Thanks for the tip - I just watched 3 episodes (and forgot about subtitles).
does the dog survive?
@@jimbob3332 I dont remember Szrarik dying.
It's a classic. You just have to remember that there is a lot of communist propaganda there. Russians soldiers are shown very, very positively.
@@iplaygames8090 Wonderful!
It actually amazes me that, when the amount of tanks each side produced is put into perspective, the war actually lasted as long as it did. I understand that from 1941 onwards the USA and Russia had to ramp up production after entering the war but the scale just absolutely astounds me
A lot of it has to deal with logistics, getting weapons and supplies to the people who need it, dealing with poor roads, dealing with destroyed infrastructure, dealing with insufficient transports, dealing with the weather, and the difficulty of attacking into fortifications frequently made it a lot of waiting, with a relatively little amount of heavy fighting until an offensive starts.
Just an example, the US was the only country which really tried to be completely mechanized. Pretty much everyone else had to also use pack animals a lot.
Russia was *ALWAYS* in the war. It's funny how ppl like to ignore the fact they helped the Nazi's START it, invading Poland from the East.
The scale is out of proportion: he showed figures for tank models that Germany produced the least of. The Tank models Germany produced the most of are not shown at all. This are Stug III (over 10 000), Panzer III (over 5 000) and Panzer IV (over 7 000) and Panther (over 5 000). Together already around 27 000 units. In total, all tank models together around 35 000. If you compare that to the 49 000 tanks the US produced with a much bigger economy, the difference is not that astonishing.
What wasn't touched on here were the number of tanks (and tankers) lost on the Soviet side, which were absolutely insane.
Because the t-34, while being good on paper, was actually difficult to use, since the sights on the guns were bad, and the visibility was poor. To make matters worse the commander was also a gunner (on the 76 variant), so their perception of their surroundings was lackluster.
You see the soviet reports and most t-34 were destroyed by 50mm projectiles, and as far as i understand it, that could only be the case if they were hit on the sides.
The rate of fire was also unreasonably low, and actually driving the thing required a hammer to change gear.
Still, it was the best tank for the soviets at the time, as their main plan was to overwhelm the enemy with superior numbers.
The great thing about the tens of thousands of Shermans and T34s is the allies got to use tanks against Germans who had no tanks. Forget Sherman vs. Tiger. The real matchup was a Sherman against a bolt action rifle.
The Germans might have had those wonderful machine guns, but the Americans mass-produced radios and artillery. And everything short of nuclear weapons, to be perfectly fair.
So the allies were doing it right then, never get into a fair fight if you can avoid it. To balance this argument the Germans were fairly good at this themselves, especially earlier on in the war, Pz I, II, III etc against an SMLE.
nah, rather Sherman vs a PaK 38 or PaK 40. the germans were on the defensive so the shermans had to overcome german defensive lines which were certainly filled with AT guns.
The americans and the british lost like 6000 Shermans on the Western front near half of all ther Shermans that were deployed there. They didn't lose the to bolt actions thats for sure
@@BjornTheDiman mg34 is great but 2 .30 cal 1919’s and a .50 cal m2 is better.
The issue for the Germans wasn’t the number of tanks they could build, but the number of tanks they could field.
Making expensive tanks made sense for the Germans because they couldn’t actually get many of them to the front, so they ones they could were made to be as good as possible.
Making 20,000 mediocre tanks would have been useless because they couldn’t even send them to the front and supply them at the front.
The Soviets might have been better served with fewer, more user-friendly tanks. I’ve seen many instances of T-34s and KVs being underutilized (driven right into the sights of an 88mm gun) due to poor usability. The Americans didn’t really need to compromise, as the Sherman was numerous, capable, and fairly ergonomic, but they had 90 divisions with 200 divisions worth of equipment.
And they gettin' only in 44 in Europe against nazi.
Interesting take, but makes sense tho
@@his-dudenessyou probably think the Soviet Union won the war alone
Another issue was fuel. The Allies had plentiful access to fuel from the oil fields in the US, the middle East and elsewhere. The Germans were blockaded and only had a few oil fields mostly in Romania. Having huge swaths of cheaply made tanks would’ve depleted Germany’s tiny reserves, so making fewer better tanks was probably the right choice. Of course the Germans did screw that up by making huge gasguzzling monsters which were prone to being lost due to mechanical failure rather than enemy action.
@@josephattwell1006 Yeah, that’s actually right on the nose, in my opinion.
The root cause of Germany’s military failure was bad logistics, and the root cause of the bad logistics was the lack of oil, and the root cause of the lack of oil was the British (and later American) blockade.
That was, in my opinion, actually the main contribution Britain made in defeating the Nazis and it’s something that is often overlooked and taken for granted.
When Germany lost in 1942, it had plenty of tanks and manpower… but they were all back in Central Europe when the fight was in the Caucasus and Don-Volga area. In fact, they couldn’t even supply the troops they had at Stalingrad adequately before they were surrounded.
Lindy's back talking about WWII, what a great day to be on youtube!
The idea with the drive wheel/sprocket is that there are rollers that engage with the teeth on the track. The advantage of this is that there is no friction between the sprocket the track. The reason it's no longer used is that there is a limit to the weight that can be propelled by this system, being that the whole strain of weight of the tank is taken by the track teeth.
Regarding the renaming of the tank: the Finns, who often fought and sometimes operated T-34s, called then Bluebills, because the tank's silhouette resembles a bird. I played around in a captured T-34 once as a kid, it was fun.
22:10 The teasing reveal of the real number of sherman was genius. It had me dieing of laughter and awe. I was considering the implications of having 5 shermans to 1 tiger... but then he showed the real number. Wow.
You missed that there is an escape hatch for the hull machine gunner in the floor, you can squeeze out of that without waiting for the driver to bail
Yes but check out a few videos on the escape hatch in the belly of a T-34, it's awkward to get to, small, and you're dependent on sufficient clearance under the hull.
"One way of looking at it is it's like a hand grenade, it's a disposable item." -- Presumably a point which was rather glossed over during the training of the men who would be crewing them, I would think.
everything is consumable in war. :(
It went without saying in the soviet union.
The sad part about treating a tank as a hand grenade is that your tank crew is going into battle in a hand grenade. Even sadder is that this approach doesn't work most of the time.
i suspect leaning into making lots of not very good tanks was alot about factory bosses meeting quota's and staying alive :/, and they probably did go too far into cheaping out, but some of the roughness doesnt really matter - but some very much does.
Russians don't care about the crew. They were as disposable as the tank. Doctrine that seems to continue to this day.
damn, if only the Soviets had your wisdom we wouldn't be speaking german right now
Well, it worked well enough to get those tanks into Berlin.
@@zmajooov technically yes, but it took 5 years, 20 mil losses and a lot of allies help. Despite the fact that USSR was defending and had numerical superiority in like everything.
The only T34 in the United States used to be just a few miles down the road from my house. It was at the Military Veterans Museum in Oshkosh. Still operational - it used to participate in the WW2 reenactment down in Rockford. But the Smithsonian Institute took it for their Museum a few years ago.
I remember seeing what I thought was a wrecked T34 when touring Israel. It was sold to a Muslim country (I think Syria) and lost in Israel's independence war to a village militia with Molotov cocktails.
The village later welded it shut and basically just left it there as an ornament.
There might have been two such tanks there, I don't remember.
The T34 wasn't designed in 1934. It started being designed in 1937 and finished around 1940 and was immediately put into production. The number was actually arbitrary and chosen by the lead engineer after some soviet decree that expanded the armor corp of the red army in 1934.
On point for soviets
There is a very good reason that the Sherman always gets qouted as taking 5 Shermans to take out ........ A US Army armored unit had 5 Shermans per platoon. The smallest unit that tanks operate in is a platoon. Plus US units could always whistle up batteries of 105mm and 155mm artillery.
And P 47s.
Yeah, I'm no expert but I always kind of imagined with how pitiful the cannon is & how paper-thin the armor is on the (default unmodified) Sherman, they were useful for infantry support & armored cavalry due to their speed but weren't much use in a fight against anything bigger than enemy light tanks. More of a 'distraction swarm' to draw fire from the enemy while the real heavy lifting tended to be done by the tank destroyers (or SPGs, motorized assault-guns, field guns, or anything else you had lying around that could be used to put holes in things in a pinch...)
@@Coconut-219for the purpose it was designed for- supporting infantry assaults- the US 75mm gun was probably the best of the war. Accurate, easy to service, and firing HE and smoke bloody good at it. The armour on the Sherman was rather good, crew comfort and the pinnacle of second world war fighting vehicles (yeah, that's a VERY low bar true) and it had good optics and good radios. Plus against most targets the 75mm was a threat at normal combat ranges. Even the mighty king tiger would be penetrated more often than not in the side armour. If you specifically needed an anti-armour gun, then there was the long barrel 76mm for the yanks or the Sherman firefly for the UK. But as tanks were so rare in the German army on the western front just months after d day, us army staff actually at the front overruled the planners back home so that the 75mm gun tanks were sent in preference to 76mm. They needed tanks to support infantry s lot more, and they had enough anti-armour tanks in theatre that were struggling for customers after the strategic bombing, interdiction strikes against railway junctions, CAF by the various fighter-bombers, massive artillery barrages and the organic anti-tank guns of every infantry battalion.
@@Coconut-219 The Shermans armor was comparable to a T 34. It was the best tank in the world when it came out. Its 75 mm gun was much larger than the 20 and 37 mm used in other tanks. It was especially useful against fortifications. By 1944 it was going to a 76 mm gun which could penetrate Tigers at 500 yards. Colonel Creighton Abrams wiped out a column of Panthers using Shermans. Hellcats with the 76mm did the same. Chieftan states it had one of the lowest casualty rates of any tank. German heavy tanks were made in very few numbers and were seldomly encountered. The British Sherman Firefly could destroy any German tank. The standard Sherman was overwhelming to the Japanese.
From what I remember the Chieftain saying, discounting stuff like light tanks which don't have anything really like an AT gun, what generally determined who won a 1v1 tank duel came down to who shot first more than size of gun or armor scheme.
He mentioned how the Pershing was designed to take out Tigers with the theory that it was impervious to Shermans. And the US had three engagements with a Tiger: in the first the Sherman won, in the second the Pershing lost, and the third had the Tiger on a flatbed (or otherwise in a transportation system) so it wasn't a fair fight.
Oddly enough, the Soviet philosophy on tank design, make it last (for them) 3 months, also has been applied to Formula 1 cars which used to be designed to last around 200 miles for a race just short of 200 miles, so that the optimal compromise between speed and endurance could be achieved.
Not quite the same logic though. The soviets were cutting corners to keep their production quotas up, producing sub-spec, poorly built tanks that proved to be deathtraps for their crews. The whole “it’ll probably be knocked out in 3 months so why bother making it better?” was a pretty poor excuse given that the Americans achieved similar production levels without compromising on quality. A F1 car by comparison, may not be built to last, but they certainly don’t cut any corners while making it.
@@CharlieNoodlesThe Yanks weren’t constantly being bombed and didn’t have their entire industrial base occupied like the Soviets did. The fact that the Soviets built more tanks than the Americans in temporary shacks on the other side of the urals is a testament to the strength of planned economics and socialism.
@@comrade_commissar3794 It really isn't. The US is even better at logistics than that.
@@comrade_commissar3794 Right, so the Lend-Lease from the USA and the Arctic Convoys were unnecessary then? The Soviets started the war with 6 times as many tanks as the Germans, as they had been planning for war since the early 1930s.
@@EdMcF1 Yes, lend-lease was largely unneccesary.
“Hilariously bad” is something you definitely want to hear when you’re talking about the structural integrity of your tanks armor.
But it doesn't does it.
The t34 was incredibly effective and genuinely a competent force. The weird casting defects aren't making the tank weaker 90% of the time, they're just "ugly".
And... who cares.
@@eloryosnak4100 you’re right the literal gaps in the armor wouldn’t effect its survivability at all
@@eloryosnak4100Unless you're dealing with a fuel bomb (Molotov cocktail). Then not only is the tank ugly, the whole situation is.
@@battlebrothertifesrolilios4423 yeah I’ve seen pictures of T-34s with gaps so large between the welds that you can very easily imagine a regular small arms bullet flying through which certainly wouldn’t be too pleasant.
@@eloryosnak4100ive seen a few t-34s front fell off due to bad welding techniques
Some of the memorials are still driveable as far as I know. I have one in my town, standing proudly almost a century after it's production, with children climbing on it and people laying flowers in front of it.
I like it that it's easily to find videos on T-34, and every now and then you can find a new one with another T-34 being resurrected by some village mechanic who found one sunk in the swamp.
I wonder, how many automobile hulls can be made out of one T-34 hull melted into steel.
One of the most famous drivable memorials was used during protests in Budapest in 2006.
makes me impressed with nearly 100 year old vehicles now, compared to bleeding edge fancy tanks which may turn into a brick when electronics fry.
yeah and some heavy tanks turned into memorials are drivable too. For example in the donbass war the separatists got a IS 3 working and used it against ukranian forces.
@@effexon The US still has a lot of 100+ year old pieces of infrastructure in use. Probably the most famous of those is the Centennial Bulb which is basically what happens when you don't manufacture for planned obsolescence.
There was a guy I knew when he was a manager at a US electric company who told me the monetary only reason they have to replace a lot of the old infrastructure is because of how inefficient it is. The stuff is inefficient because it has lasted being in more or less in constant use since WW1 and is still in the same condition as it was when it was installed. The modern replacements have to be replaced every decade or so.
Interestingly enough, both Shermans and T-34's were used in the Croatian Homeland War and in the Bosnian War, right through the end of the wars.
Croats also had some Hellcats as well.
The 90s in the Balkans featured a load of ww2 stuff in many regards.
We might see some T-34s pulled out to replace all the T-72s/T-80s/T-64s/T-55s moscow has lost in their failing unprovoked invasion of Ukraine relatively soon, most certainly a lot sooner than we will see a T-14 make a cameo there that's for sure.
@@demomanchaos TBH T-34s are old enough that I'd be impressed that they'd maintained them well enough for them to still run.
My uncle drove Panthers on the eastern front. One of the few stories he told was that his tank was once knocked out. He slipped out, crawled all over the battlefield, and then reported to his headquarters.
"We have been knocked out, commander and gunner are dead" - "And? Is the tank still able to run?" - "I think yes" - "Then what are you doing here? Go and get it!"
And so he crawled back onto to battlefield, crawled into the tank, and drove it in reverse from the battleground.
They made the tanks as tough as the men back then.
@@olliefoxx7165tanks are tougher nowdays, even if you want to romantice it
@@taistelusammakko5088
The things they shoot at tanks are bigger today.
@@taistelusammakko5088 The tanks better be tougher bc the men aren't. Western men specifically.
@@olliefoxx7165 every generation says this to the next generation. Nothing new. Except our tanks are better
7:30 According to what I have learned from (Lt.?) Col. Moran, a.k.a. The Chieftain, and other sources, the toothed track with pinned drive wheel design was simpler to manufacture and more tolerant of manufacturing errors where the toothed sprocket that grabs onto track pins has to be a lot more precise to function. It didn't catch on because the toothed track design has a lower limit of acceptable torque than competing designs thus limiting the power one can deliver to the tracks from the engine.
I could be wrong as I am merely going by rote, but that is what I recollect about that subject.
Just fill this man with extra caffeinated tea and stick a microphone to him, let him talk for hours about world war two.
Interesting that in German, the word for "Tank" was "Panzerkampfwagen" (armored war car), and in French it was "Char d'assaut" (assault carriage) but it Russian it was plain old "Tank", which if you think about it, is one of those big things that holds water.
Neither the English nor Russians over promising anything more than a vaguely lead resistant glorified barrel.
The t34 didn't even live up to the water part.
One thing to consider is that the germans barely had enough fuels for the tanks they did have, and that only got worse, so even if they had gone for a quantity over quality design it wouldn't have had much of an impact.
Finally, a historical video!
Been waiting for this for 9 month
At last a pause from interviews with foreign fighters in Ukraine. There's plenty of that all over the Internet so this is really nice. 👍
The tank hammering it's own tread pins back in is peak Russian engineering
because then you don't have to separate the russian mechanic and his vodka!
I was so happy to see this kind of content again on your channel. I love this and also the long stories like the Calcutta light horse (hope I've remembered the name correctly) type of content. Thank you.
So.... T on the T34 stands for "Tank".
Mind blown.
Which is Russian for...tank!
So glad to know that you still are alive and well. Thanks for the video.
In military service I was trained as gunner on leopardII. the first time ever I got into the tank and checked around trying all positions, I was shocked about the amount of space an relative comfort. I had expected it to be much more cramped and rougher. you can do everything inside a leoII, cooking, eating, sleeping, partying... (it's got a phantastic radio).
btw, "analysing" the world with that killer-IR while standing around (I mean holding position) waiting for orders was the best thing ever. whoever has ever experienced good PASSIVE IR...: rabbits! 😀
6:35 I think the reason for the shoddy bolts and gaps was because that back plate was supposed to be able to hinge open if you needed to do maintenance on the engine/transmission
No, it was because the workers building it were cutting corners in order to maximise production.
@@CharlieNoodles "No, it was because the workers building it were cutting corners in order to maximise production."
You can see the hinges. Even if the tank was supplied with a full set of bolts, if the crew had to fix the engine often enough they would certainly 'lose' a few of the bolts.
Germans: "our tank is the best, it will take 5 of your tanks to match one of ours."
Americans and Russians *laughing in ,
Great to see Lindybeige back onto WW2 and tanks, his passion and sense of humour make his military history videos compelling viewing and are why I subscribe.
Just wanted to say...
I normally fast-forward through adverts to get on with the content of most CZcams vids but....
After 30s I stopped and paid attention. Your ad was actually so interesting and informative that I rewound and watched it all the way through, paying attention throughout! I hope they appreciate your added value and offer you a better rate next time!!!
'Why paint something that's likely to be a flaming wreck within half-an-hour?' That's a bit of a harsh way to talk about electric cars.
Especially Chinese ones. :D
Takes 5 Sherman's to kill a Tiger... Yes, because they trained and operated in platoons, tigers, getting a platoon operating together was pretty much a miracle on its own.
6:26 with the huge hinges on the back plate you would think he realised that its supposed to be able to be opened when needed and not welded shut
For my taste, Lindybeige took too many shortcuts in this film, I mean, mental shortcuts.
He did not mention the Stug III and IV assault guns (and others, almost 13,000 in total), which destroyed the majority of Allied armored vehicles. What about the German tank destroyers, of which around 6,000 were produced?
As for the T34s - they were built in at least 4 or 5 factories, from various components (there were even those with aircraft engines), in addition, each factory modified its T34s mostly independently of other factories. According to the memoirs of Soviet tankers, the worst problem with the first T34s was insufficient ventilation, which made the entire crew intoxicated with toxic smoke after a few shots, to the point of preventing further combat. The best thing about the T34 was the simplicity of repairs. Even heavily damaged tanks could be restored to full working order in 6 hours. Thanks to the soft steel (mild steel? don't know the correct term) armor (which was coincidental, as the Soviets had trouble producing large quantities of high-grade hardened steel), it was very rare for German shells to explode inside the T34 (except when the shell hit the ammunition) - they simply went into the T34, making one hole, and out the other. Tankers who stood in the way of such a shell were killed or wounded, but rarely the entire crew was killed. And the repair of the tank was just patching up the holes (and cleaning up the corpse).
As for the Panther, Polish historian of World War II, Norbert Bączyk, wrote a book about it entitled "Panther, WW2's Worst Tank" (unfortunately, available only in Polish). And before anyone starts throwing stones at me - this man, instead of repeating war myths stemming from Soviet propaganda, as thousands of other historians have done over the past 80 years, has spent years studying Wehrmacht and factory reports, which are available in the Bundesarchiv. And from them it was clear that the Panther was the most disliked tank by German tankers and staff officers, and in addition it caused the collapse of tank production in the Third Reich at the climax of the war, which greatly shortened the war.
At 22:34 you can see T-34 that is knocked out.
The hulk of metal on the back is in fact a SPARE gearbox and braking system I believe. The friction materials were so bad on the first production tanks that they just carried a spare strapped to the engine deck.
This is a myth, it would be impossible to change the transmission within a crane to move it around, the one (1) picture of a T-34 with an extra Transmission is a T-34 carrying a spare during the evacuation of a facility.
ahaa yes, the ancient Roman tanks were impressive machines indeed
If Lloyd has any interest in the Civilization games, Roman tanks are a distinct possibility.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testudo_formation#/media/File:Testudo_formation.jpg
Now that I think about it, I would vote for him as the narrator of a Civilization 7.
Great video! its a very graphic way of explaining why "military grade" is not the same as good quality, but closer to cheap and effective
One of the best adverts I've seen. I actually watched it all the way through. Petition Lindy to start playing War Thunder and giving commentary about tanks as he plays.
The reason germans had to go hard on quality over quantity with tanks is lack of fuel, also had mass produced models at beginning of the war but had to scale down their production after it became clear that they wont reach oil in causasus
One important thing to mention is that the T-34 was made in a hurry, contrary to other Soviet designs from that time. They rushed many things and couldn't refine it properly before the war started. It would be interesting to see a comparison between the T-34 and the KV-1, two tanks designed more or less in the same period, but the KV was more better finished.
By the way, the Panzer III looked better than the Panther. Way more sport tank, it looked almost as if it was possible to go rallying with the thing. Lancia Stratos of the tanks. And in terms of hand weapons, the Steyr Scout.
My understanding was that in practice the T-34 and KV-1 tanks actually performed about the same. Which was actually a bit of an issue for the KV-1's as they had a more intense production cycle and needed more resourced to produce. Which is partly what led to them being phased out in favour of the IS series instead (also the official the official the tank was named after had fallen out of favour since its inception).
@@zaleost both tanks had many significant differences in design, despite the fact they shared the same engine, and may have had the same process of armor tempering and things like that.
The KV had torsion bar suspension which the T-34 wasn't able to get in time. Torsion bar is superior to Christie suspension. The KV also had a three man turret, the T-34 had only two. Not only that but the first versions of the T-34 76 not even had vision port slots turned to the rear side of the tank. T-34 vision was very poor. That's not quite the case with the KV. It didn't have a cupola like German tanks did, but it had many slots where the crew could see around. And also a machine gun to the rear as well.
In the case of the suspension, given the fact that the KV was a much heavier tank, it may have performed somewhat similar to the T-34. In terms of the overall vision around, I don't know. I think it may have helped the crew inside the KV more perhaps.
@@TheStugbit I wasn't talking at all about their designs, I know they were very different tanks. I was mostly saying that it was my understanding that in practice the KV-1 series didn't seem to outperform the T-34's nearly enough to justify the extra cost that came with producing them.
@@zaleost the KV was a fair tank that did its job during the time. It performed well, better than the T-34 in 1941, got outdated when the Germans deployed the long 75mm gun, but then gave birth to the IS-2 tank, which was another important vehicle in armor development. The IS-2s complemented the T-34 85s late in the war.
I really don't see why scrapping it.
And when it comes to 1941, it was a better tank than the T-34 there, as I said. It caused a psychological impact on the Germans. Its massive armor influenced into different arrangements for the future tanks like the Tiger and Panther.
Man this has to be the most honest world of tanks ad ever made.
Its hard to express how much I love these jolly videos.
I remember a russian guy telling me a story about how the soviet tanks were superior to the Germans, because (according to him) the Germans made the effort to grind flush all of the welding seems whereas the Russians did not bother to do that - and that meant that when the German tank got hit all of the armour would fall off. I am not quite sure how true that is 🙂
Gigantic generalisation
Entirely and completely not true at all, just sheer unfiltered nonsense from someone who probably thinks the T-34 invented sloped armor and was the best tank ever made because it was made from pure Stalinium.
It isn't, it's true that German tank armour suffered quality control issues later in the war so it would sometimes shatter when impacted, but Russian armour had similar problems due to the awful quality of some of the welding.
@@gwtpictgwtpict4214not to mention the fact that the Russians over cooked the steel when heat treating it which made it brittle and caused it to shatter when hit.
About as true as all the other bullshit they push. Like how they won the war on their own. How they were so hard done by. It's always funny how they always forget to mention they were Nazi allies who helped START the war, invading Poland from the East. And it's even more pathetic how many ppl let them get away with it.
A few things to note about the T-34;
For one thing, that little slab to knock the pins back in wasn't added until after world war II.
and another, one might look at stats on places like wikipedia or the tank's official specs, thing is that no T-34 during the war was ever built to those standards, a combination of corruption, and corner-cutting to get them out as fast as possible.
Also, not all of the T-34s were actually built during the war, almost a third or so of them were built after the war.
Another is the problem with the heat treating involved in making the steel plates for their armor, a method of strengthening steel to improve its toughness without needing to add more. Trouble was the Soviets heat treated their steel to over 600 Brunel (more than twice that of all other nations that did that), and this had the effect of making the steel, yes tough, but also very brittle, meaning sudden shocks like, say, a shell hitting the armor hard enough, even without penetrating, could easily cause the steel to snap and fracture. Which is why you can find a lot of photos of T-34's with large chunks of their armor missing in places.
And despite what is said, the Germans weren't *that* shocked by the T-34's appearance during Barbarossa. A lot of their standard lighter tanks like the Panzer I and II and their early tank hunters did have issues fighting them, but the Panzer III could reliably knock it out (most T-34's destroyed in combat were destroyed by Panzer III's, in fact.). The Germans encountered and fought T-34's and KV-1's en masse from day one of Barbarossa, the idea that it was some new war winner that surprised the Germans is a product of the memoirs of German officers after the war, where blaming soviet "Superior" technology was an easy scapegoat to cover for their consistent tactical, operational, and logistical failures once they lost the initiative.
It had awful speed, It also had a horrible gearbox that required massive amounts of force to move to third gear, and fourth gear was basically impossible without the aid of a hammer (yes, that's an actual thing. No, it's not a myth, this has been proven)
Also, despite that bit about the Panther Comparrison, another issue with the T-34 was that Soviet logistics was a complete and total nightmare, spare parts were few and far between, almost half of the T-34s lost during battles were breakdowns prior to the battle even starting. Which is one of the reasons Germany managed to capture so many.
As for the 'driven straight into battle', there's a handful of anecdotal stories claiming something to that effect with a couple of tanks, not nessecarily T-34's, but even if it is true (which seems unlikely) Tractor Factory 183 in Stalingrad (Which produced over half of all the T-34s during the war) did not produce ammunition, so the idea that they'd go into battle right from the factory seems absurd.
And while the 76mm and 85mm guns were good, it's ammunition proved not to be. It was proven to be low-quality, not as accurate as it should've been, and in cases had a nasty habit of cooking off early if the gun wasn't left to cool first after firing too many times.
Some sources even state that, given its comparatively narrow tracks, it gave off ground pressure not dissimilar to that of the Tiger despite the weight difference, T-34s often got stuck in the mud if they had to cross it, despite what pro-Soviet shills will tell you, there's photographic evidence to prove it. I don't pretend to be an expert on how ground pressue works, mind you, and historians can't really agree on that. So grain of salt on that one.
Lazerpig's video on the T-34 is quite informative (though by his own admission he's not very happy with that video because of various production and quality reasons, but the major majority of his points are valid and accurate) I highly encourage anyone interested to check it out.
It's called 'The T-34 is not as good as you think it is'
I heard that gearbox took out more T-34s than all German tanks combined, which is... well... just Soviet quality. And why they had no escape hatches? Because leaving your tank was seen as treason and could get you executed.
Anyway, if one side can get, let's say, ~3200 tanks to battlefield and the other one can get there ~7300 tanks, even if a quarter of them break down because of gearbox, it is still unfair fight. With a bit of luck (and making sure that always at least 3 can shoot at the same enemy), victory will come.
Another thing I heard, T-34 was pretty easy to take apart with basic tools like wrench and hammer, so it was possible to rather quickly take apart 100 non-operational tanks and make ~40-60 operational tanks from them in two days, while German tanks were much harder to take apart and not all parts were really the same, so even if you had 100 Panzer III, you could after much longer time have ~15 operational tanks. Now about the parts not same, I think it was the gearbox (I might be wrong, it is long time since I heard it, so parts might get mixed up) that was not same from all factories and they were made so well, that they had to fit perfectly. With T-34... you had some kind of "artist interpretation" let's say (if it doesn't fit, hit it with hammer few times and try again).
I believed what you wrote until you referred to a lazerpig
@@simonspacek3670 The Panthers didn't exactly have great reliability either. and getting at the gearbox and final-drive with those started with _removing the turret_ .
@@GoranXII I might be wrong, but removing the turret doesn't sound like something you can do in three guys somewhere in fields :D
Lazerpig is an intellectually dishonest liar and a fraud. Look up Red Effect’s video debunking almost all of his claims on the T14.
Love the shift in content... Ty for the hard work
new lindybeige video always makes my day , thank you so much man
4:20 i heard that a big problem with french b1 tanks was that having space just for 1 crew member in the turret made it hard to aim and navigate simultaneously.
WWII pretty much defined that, until the arrival of the auto-loader, you needed a three man turret crew. A tank commander to oversee what was going on, ie fight the battle, a gunner to engage the targets indicated by the commander and a loader to keep feeding the gun with rounds while the gunner traversed madly to find the next target indicated by the commander. In a one man turret the commander just had to much to do, a two man turret was better but either the commander or gunner still had to act as the loader so not ideal. The three man turret hit the sweet spot.
^ That; and the 3 Man Turret is still better, because human loaders are easier to patch up or replace completely than an autoloader mechanism 😉 .
A human loader can also if needed fill in for the TC or Driver if either are incapacitated or dead, meaning the Tank has a chance of getting back home.
@@jimtaylor294 I'll agree with that, though I think general opinion is still divided. From memory British army doctrine has the loader as 2ic and progression for tank crew is driver, then gunner, then loader, finally TC.
They gave the tank commander his own small gun, no reason to overbuild the tank because of that.
Nowadays the 40mm grenade launcher is often held by the firing team leader, overloading the poor guy in weight, function and with absence of a loader in time, some would say a certain receipt for failure.
If you think that was difficult, then think the driver which was also the gunner because you had move whole tank when you use the main gun.
The oft neglected tank attribute: ease of production
That a tiger could probably defeat a Sherman or T34 in one-on-one combat is almost completely meaningless when they were being outproduced a hundred to one
Even a crappy weld is still better than having a shell bounce off the riveted plate and still endanger the crew inside by popping the rivets.
The T-34 is also lucky to be known as 'T-34' all the experimental vehicles that never fully made it to production that a lot of people love nowadays, were only ever called "Obiekt (number)" Like Obiekt 279, the UFO tank designed to survive nuclear war.
A classic Lindybeige video, it's been a while! What a treat.
Anyone else want to watch a whole video of Lloyd playing world of tanks?
Looking at the craftsmanship of T34 you could say that recently sunk titan was a military-grade vehicle.
This is why when some ad says that their product is "military-grade" it doesn't sound very good to me
'The Best is the enemy of Good Enough'
@@petesheppard1709 I always heard that being told as "perfect is the enemy of good"
@@AlleonoriCat 😎
Thank you so soo SOOO much for balancing the volume of the outro. I'm so tired of getting jump-scared by the outro music
The old thing about it taking 4-5 Shermans to take out whatever enemy armour, my understanding is that that comes from US doctrine at the time was that any armour contact would get a response team of 3-5 tanks to flatten it and roll on to the next or handle however many it turned out to be once the report had made it up and down the chain and the team had actually gotten to the contact point
As for the masses of tanks(German KDr on T-34s would have won the war without Lend Lease), sloped armour, LazerPig has a very good video on the T-34s that I enjoyed enough that I have it on my phone to watch whenever I don't trust hotel WiFi... so fairly often
The Shermans would drive round the Tiger until it ran out of gas and the crew bailed.
Lazerpig is an intellectually dishonest liar and a fraud. Look up Red Effect completely dismantling the pigs video on the T14
Lloyd: have you seen LazerPig's video on the T-34? Would have been potentially useful to watch before you made this. He covers the properties you discuss like sloped armour, mass production, hard vs soft stats, quality of steel etc.. I feel like you're in for some blow-back
Also, the whole story about T-34's being crewed and driven straight into battle from the factory... I'm concerned for the level of research done for this video.
Not the same audience.
I think he's probably safe. He wasn't gushing over it and he never actually said anything refutable (apart from perhaps the bit about tanks running from the factory to the battlefield). My only real complaint would have been that crew survivability wasn't specifically mentioned but that's about it.
@@Krusesensei I watch both. LP has referenced Lindybeige at least once. What makes you think there's negligible overlap?
Lazerpig is an intellectually dishonest fraud and a liar, watch Red Effect’s video debunking almost all of Laserpig’s claims on the T14
Also having so many tanks at your disposal meant you had the means to work on tank doctrine as well and quickly improve there while the germans had to look after theirs
I think you greatly overestimate the competence of the Soviet command.
Splendid! Love your work Lindybeige 👍
great video . I love to hear you go on about ww2 and tanks
The T34's armor was very hard, but brittle. This would result in spalling inside the crewed area of the tank if it was hit, and caused many casualties on its own. The external gas tanks were opposed to it's other version of fuel storage, which were housed inside the crew area, causing massive survivability issues. The T34 was also only decently fast on paper. Like you mentioned, the transmission was notoriously difficult to manipulate, which meant it rarely ever got out of second gear. And just the sheer number T34s caused enormous supply chain issues. Yeah there were a butt load of tanks, but very few had sufficient fuel, spare parts, ammo, and supplies for the crew.
Quite often repair crews would disassemble damaged T34 for spare parts. Its was such a massive source of parts that during Soviet operation in Manchuria repair crews were constantly short on spare parts. That's because tank loses were very low and no one brought enough parts to compensate for that.
Well to be fair the germans did produce some 8500 panzer IVs and 10.000 StuGs and it's not like they had the building materials to match the allies.
I always admire your energy and enthusiasm. 👍🏻
Three things
1) great advertisement!
2) your joke about metric vs imperial was 🔥
3) please please please please please deliver on your T-55 tease (followed by t-64)
Love you bby.
The panther was not similar to the T-34 it was vastly superior in every conceivable way, I mean it was specifically designed as a counter to it. This is especially true once they ironed out some of the reliability issues from the early models, although of course every German tank was mired by such issues.
"it was vastly superior in every conceivable way" Cost?
I mean, if the T-34 had actually been built to specifications then it would probably have cost the same to construct as a Sherman. It was an expensive tank built cheaply, not a cheap tank by design.
@@WG55 I mean you can deliberately miss the point if you want.
@@WG55 what does cost mean in a command economy? you can't compare what something cost when you have capitalist countries on one side and economically socialist (yes, I know that's an oxymoron, but there you have it) countries on the other side that dictate large parts of the economy (with a few benefits and many, many drawbacks). Then there's the slave labour question.
To be fair to WG55, I'd say it's reasonable to talk about cost in terms of work hours and materials. Any of those that you're spending on one project can't be spent on another. In that regard the T-34 almost certainly beats any equivalent allied or axis tank. However, something that's cheap isn't always better.
I'm earlier to this than the Russians to Berlin
Took them 4 years I wouldn’t say early
The Soviets*
Lindybeige, tanks and 20m+ video? You just made my day Lloyd
Thanks Lindy. Hope you'll be back to posting more frequently!
I don't think that the Germans would have any more success if they did the low-quality high-quantity move because they didn't have so much disposable manpower to throw to the enemy. Both Russians and Americans considered the Sherman and T-34 as deathtraps for the crew. Germany paid a lot of attention to crew safety, for example the Pz4 has 1 door for each crew member.
That is blatantly false. The Sherman was not considered a "death trap" The survival rate for Sherman's were disproportionately high when When compared to other tanks of the war.
Correction: One guy(who was not a sherman crewmate) wrote a book about the sherman being a death trap, and now wehraboos and soviet fan boys worship the book as if it was factual. In reality, the Sherman tank had one of the highest crew survivability rates of ww2
Looking forward to part 2 of Brandon's interview!
Slava Ukraini 🇻🇳❤️🇺🇦
Why do you support a fascist regime that tortures journalists ?
Tanks very much Lindy 😊
Another way of looking at it is that in a "normal"tank track you have a more carefully crafted sprocket with a specific tooth design and a more rude tooth on the track.
The Russian T. tank has the opposite the "sprocket(which isn't a sprocket) has the more rude roller/pins and the toothdesign has to be put on the tracks.
The obvious disadvantage of this design is that the tooth on the track will be damaged more easily
That was a lot more gaming in a LindyBeige video than I thought possible. Amazing
Jolly good. I have this man to thank for a) not having a DJ at our wedding in July and b) having the confidence to start the proper dancing and c) not doing a bad job of it either. Cheers Lloyd!
Sounds like that day deserves its own video. :D
@@mapesdhs597 actually... we do have one in the pipeline but it will never be as good as Lindybeige himself
Excellent points, well made.
Great stuff, Lindy