650 Tanks per Day - Soviet Tank Losses in WW2
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- čas přidán 20. 05. 2024
- Soviet Tank Losses in World War 2 were very high with more than 96 000 armored fighting vehicles (tanks and self-propelled guns) lost from 1941-1945. At one point in 1941 the losses reached the staggering amount of 650 tanks per day, which was several tanks divisions. Thanks to Dr. Jens Wehner for providing me with his script and data.
Link to Jens’ Video: • Wie hoch waren die Pan...
Link to Jens’ Channel: / @mtgjw
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Гриф секретности снят: Потери Вооружённых Сил СССР в войнах, боевых действиях и военных конфликтах: Статистическое исследование / Г. Ф. Кривошеев, В. М. Андроников, П. Д. Буриков. - М.: Воениздат, 1993.
Töppel, Roman: Die Panzerschlacht bei Dubno 1941. In: Kast, Bernhard (Hrsg.); Bergs, Christoph (Hrsg.): Achtung Panzer? Zur Panzerwaffe der Wehrmacht. London, UK. panzerkonferenz.de
Zaloga, Steve: SU-76 Assault Gun. Osprey Publishing: Oxford, UK, 2019.
Kroener, Bernhard/Müller, Rolf-Dieter/Umbreit, Hans: Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg 5/1: Organisation und Mobilisierung des deutschen Machtbereichs - Teilband 1: Kriegsverwaltung, Wirtschaft und personelle Ressourcen 1939 bis 1941. Bd. 5/1. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt: Stuttgart, 1988 (Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg 5/1).
Boog, Horst u. a.: Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg 6: Der Globale Krieg. Bd. 6. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt: Stuttgart, Germany, 1990 (Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg 6).
www.tankarchives.ca/2015/07/c...
00:00 Intro
00:13 Total Numbers
01:07 Soviet Production vs Losses 1941-1945
02:10 Soviet Losses over the course of the War
02:39 German Captured Vehicles - Beutepanzer
04:30 1942-1945
05:43 Losses vs Production Numbers
06:54 Replacements from 1942 onward
07:31 Total Tanks does not equal tanks at front
07:57 Change in Quality & Type of Tanks
09:14 Losses by Type
09:57 Losses per Day
10:38 1941 Losses
11:31 Summary Soviet
12:25 Conclusions
#SovietLosses #TankLosses #tanks
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🙃🙃🙃🙃
glad to see they havent learned much.
Soviet Union were the only ones with the balls to challenge 80% of Nazi power. And destroyed them. The reality of other allies in west front was a joke compared to what soviet faced to crush Hitler.
i would like to see the entire data of all tanks not just ussr
Super video Bernard. At 13:04 you say "whilst tanks were lost in large numbers, this was not necessarily the case for their crews". I'm not sure about that. Two numbers that I remember, but will have to find the sources - when a Sherman was destroyed, usually one crew member DIED, but when a T34 was destroyed usually one crew member SURVIVED. Also of the 400,000 who served as Tankistas in the Great Patriotic War, 300,000 died.
My granduncle was a red army tanker during ww2. He lost 4 tanks during his career. One due to malfunctions, one due to mine and other 2 to enemy fire.
Tanks were really disposable tools.
Your granduncle must be very lucky to have survived 2 separate accounts of combat knockouts, the average survival rate of T34 crews after being hit was less than 20%
@@irishkiwi477 well is2 was actually stronger than most German tanks it was even able to kill tiger 1 so i think he survived the war because of advanced Soviet technology
@@dude926 advanced soviet technology? Lol
@@ToAstYNaChO Soviets indeed had more advanced tech than 90% of people give it credit for
@@irishkiwi477 Those kinds of numbers are usually very unreliable because they might take in such a broad range of data that they essentially become useless. Things like survivability would change over the course of the war due to both changes in design as well as other factors. The design of the T-34 changed very drastically throughout the war and improvements in armor as well as ammo layout and ergonomics and the addition of more hatches made it safer. At the same time changes in the fortune of war would impact survivability, tankers would often be forced to take cover behind their tank if it got knocked out and in such a scenario if your side is advancing you'll eventually be safe but if the enemy is advancing you wouldn't be. And since we're talking about the Nazis they were pretty likely to just murder the crew rather than take them prisoner or kill them in a PoW camp. Then there's also things like changes in organization and so on and the list goes on. A number like this is basically useless unless considerable context is given for it and if it's just using data for the entire war then it really says nothing about how survivable the T-34 is and is just a loss number for Red Army tankers. Not to mention in this specific case the chance wouldn't be the same every time, if you've survived one tank being knocked out you obviously have experience and are more likely to survive the next one and so on. This also illustrates how training can change the number and Red Army training did change throughout the war.
Always appreciate a little jab at the "Tank is dead" crowd. They've been spouting the same nonsense since early 20th century and they don't seem to get the message
They have limited use if the other side has air superiority. Its like the battleship would have limited use today but still some use.
@@rogersmith7396 Not at all. A battleship doesn't do anything that either smaller ships or aircraft (launched by carrier or by land) cannot do better and cheaper.
There is no alternative to tanks yet.
@@moritamikamikara3879 You just said it, aircraft.
@@rogersmith7396 You want to make a ground-aircraft to replace tanks??? We have helicopters, but helicopter dont like traffic lights, trees and confined spaces
@@rogersmith7396 wait!!! I know what you want… you want an AEROGAVIN!!! How could I have forgotten the aerogavin? An aircraft that can replace tanks!!!
Another interesting thing to note from the many articles and books I have read is that during 1941 - 1944 many of the tank crews that survived after losing their tanks were sent into the infantry if no replacement was available. This misuse of specialized troops was stopped in mid 1944 due to the number of inexperienced tank crews that were causing a disproportionate loss in tanks and AFV's during combat operations. According to Douglas Nash when going to the Russian Archives to get information on the 1st Belorussian Front under Rokossovsky he noted several communiques and an order from STAVKA that all surviving Tanks crews that did not receive replacement tanks were to be sent back to help train new crews until they received new vehicles.
That makes as much sense as Herman Goering creating Luftwaffe Infantry Field divisions from excess Luftwaffe staff. Much can be said about the lack of infantry training the Luftwaffe field divisions had...I assume the tank crews didn't have much infantry training before being re assigned as infantry.
@@sirxavior1583 The personal within those Luftwaffe Field Divisions should have been transferred, along with the equipment (especially trucks), to the Heer as replacement troops and from there, after training, they could be used by the existing infantry divisions of the Heer. The trucks in particular, could have been used to form additional motorized infantry divisions (Heer) from existing infantry divisions. It was obvious those Luftwaffe personnel were no longer going to be needed and Georing should have been forced to hand them over to the German Army, instead of making his own personal army. United we stand...divided we fall.
It is true that the Soviets lost mainly light tanks like the BT's or T-26's at the beginning. But it's also worth remembering that the Germans were attacking with light tanks as well, like Pz I & II, and Pz 38 (t). The Pz III & IV's in their early versions were also lightly armored. Great vid as always, thank you!
What relevance does that have exactly?
Also by the time of Barbarossa there absolutely were not any Pz Is being field anymore and most Pz IIs had been withdrawn. One of the things blamed for Soviet tank losses in the early war was that their tank fleet was extremely bloated with tons of pretty useless tanks like the T-26 and T-35 bogging down supply and logistics for the more useful tanks like the BT-7s and early T-34s. The reason why the Germans didn't suffer the same fate was specifically because they had streamlined their tankfleet mostly around the Pz III and IV with occasional gaps being filled with other tanks. There's a reason why afterwards the Soviet Union standardized almost exclusively around the T-34 and almost completely scrapped the heavy tank concept until the IS-2 proved useful.
@@hedgehog3180 The relevance was that those 650 tanks-a-day were lost to their peers, developed in Odessa less than 10 years earlier, not to M1 Abrams or Leopard 2's.
Makes the subject deeper, interesting, as to why or how happened, perhaps refloat Historical bits taken for granted, when there could be a generation that haven't heard or learnt about what went on and how it did.
And even when "History repeating itself" may seem to be unavoidable these days, I'd still put my money in hope.
Unless you want to be _"blitzkriegeg". You want people to be blitzkriegeg? 'Cause _*_that's_*_ how you get blitzkriegeg!_ 😂
@@hedgehog3180 On the contrary, the Pz.2 was still in widespread service, you can see them in almost every picture taken of panzer divisions of that time.
@@hansvonmannschaft9062 no tanks developed in Odessa.
@@dmitryletov8138 German tanks were developed and tested in whatever the Soviet Union was composed of in the early '30s. Did I get the wrong city? Makes no 'effing difference to the subject at hand.
a lot of tanks in the battle of dubno were lost in the march to the battle field, poor air filtering systems and such often meant a russian tank of the period was a done duck by 100-150 miles, so may get into battle , but the chance of it making it to another battle was extremely low, as we know many of the tanks were racing all over the place with very poor command and control
This is reflected in the chart @7:50 comparing the total inventory vs what was the strength of frontline units. However, this reflect the "flux" of vehicles forward, just like a tide isn't just the water that is at the shore at the moment, but the huge mass behind it as well. It didn't matter that the average Soviet tank was only good for 1 battle, there were 10 more to replace it.
not having radios in their tanks really hurt the soviets in the beginning of barbarossa
So what? With our Slavic Nikola Tesla the world would have shit. And without Russia Nazis would dictate over Europe now. And as Russia proves against fascist western Ukraine it is time for us Slavic Partizans to clean Europe from the fascist scum for good.
@@XpVersusVista they have radios but only The comandant tank of The unit
Very interesting video, I think the losses per day for each year is an insightful statistic.
thinkin bout that one time when a German veteran took his Panther take out of his garage in 2015 to use it as a snow plow during a snowstorm
Bro also had a torpedo and a flak 88 in his basement 😭😭
It would be interesting to see a stat on how many Soviet tanks were lost in actual combat vs. breakdowns or running out of fuel. In the early weeks of the war I believe the numbers would be staggering.
By looking at the numbers "captured" by the Germans, it's at least 10k, probably higher.
According to Lazerpig, a very funny historical channel, the T-34 was garbage in terms of maintenance, cost, ergonomics and every other soft factor you can think of.
@@Vandelberger Well, high quantity comes at a price. I think the only nation who could afford high quantity and quality was America. The Germans were starting mass production of tanks in their Nibelungen Werk in Austria, but I dont know what quality that industrial complex could offer.
@@Ixtzalit Again, I refer to Lazerpig. According to his sources the price of a T-34 was not much cheaper than say a Sherman which is a much more reliable and versatile tank. Remember that a lot of our current hobbyists/ historians buy into bullshit propaganda of whatever country inventory they enjoy… it’s why most people thought Russia was still competent without really looking at their last two wars in Chechnya. WHY try and save money anyway instead of making something that is better? Two T-34s can’t be cheaper than one of something more reliable and cost effective.
It is very unusual for a tank to be totally destroyed not in combat, break down yes but you are conflating apples with oranges, it is quite different to be in the shop for the gearbox breaking and being exploded by a STUKA for example.
Wow, I'm surprised by the high losses in 45. Just 4 months fighting, while Germany was a total mess with few quality men left, that is weird
Lots of urban fighting against Volksstrum militias using Panzerfausts quite liberally.
Germany wasn't a total mess yet by the start and also in 45 most of the fighting happened on German ground so the troops were much more willing to hold their ground. As well as the German high command specifically deciding to commit what remained against the Red Army because they were hoping the Western Allies wouldn't prosecute them for their crimes. The other commenter was also correct.
@@cm275 That would actually offer a big answer then. Urban environments are hell on attackers and especially tanks. Combine that with the Panzerfausts which were quite deadly for the period and the Soviets pushing hard and fast to beat the Americans, that adds up to much higher than normal attrition rates.
Jeez, these numbers are staggering.
Thank you for the video and for all the hard work!
Great stuff! Excellent work!
My speculation on 1945 Soviet losses is that many damaged vehicles in the repair pipeline may have been written off and scrapped once the shooting stopped.
Meney probably deemed obsolete as well.
Not a candidate for repair.
I didn't think of that. Repairability of Soviet WWII tanks is another topic to study. Given the chronic shortage of drivers in the Red Army, compared to the American Army -- where many, maybe most recruits already knew how to drive -- the Red Army might not have repaired tanks with more than relatively light damage, like a damaged track or broken road wheel.
Awesome presentation. Love to see comparison of crew survival for German vs. Russian 👍
Thank you for the video. ^^
My favorite was the mass loss of German tanks at Stalinegrad, to mice. Seems due to a shortage of fuel and amunition, the Germans dug holes, drove the tanks in to them, then covered them with straw. Making cozy winter mouse homes. When they went to start them, the mice had stripped all the wiring, gaskets, and anything else they could chew. I suspect that was not just a problem at stalingrad.
Soviet mice ate my tank, can't have shit in Stalingrad
Wow, I never heard this one. It does make sense though.
Maybe the Wehrmacht should have recruited some cats.
That happened with tanks of 22nd Panzer Division . When the division tried to move the "parked" tanks to support the Romanian army at river Don in Nov. 1942 , they learned that many of the tanks were disabled my mice .
Well also thing is, fhe Soviet tank rarely had a radio, maybe 1-2 tanks per platform was equipped with radio. Most crews still used flag signals for coordination wich is kinda crazy to do under fire or in heavy fog or heavy raid.
Irgendwas war da mit Wiederholung und Lerneffekt! Gerne auch mal wieder in Kombination mit Herrn Dr. Wehner :) Ich genieße Ihre Videos sehr gerne Herr Kast :)
Another great video, thanks! 🙏🏻 You mentioned only briefly the lend-lease programme. How many tanks, self propelled guns etc were included there? And what were the losses? It was a long time ago but I remember reading that the soviets received an enormous amount of vehicles from the UK and the US. Anyone knows?
I made a spread sheet of monthly Russian tank numbers of availability, production and losses. It's been 10 years so I'm not sure the source of the data but may be partially from Zaloga's data. What I found is almost all the highest availability numbers were in January of each year. So the numbers at that point are not representative for the year. My number are different than this video so I will have to look into what are the differences.
US tank losses in the ETO June 44 to May 45 were around 7000. British tank losses during the same period were about 4500 for a total of 11,500. From Bernard’s data if one takes 7/12 of the 1944 Soviet losses (a rough estimate of June to December 44) and add the 45 losses the estimated total of Red Army losses equals 18,700 tanks over that same time period. Given the survivability particularly of the Sherman I would have preferred to be an Allied tanker on the Western Front.
One important thing is to consider what is considered a lost tank. For Germans a lost tank is a so called irrecoverable loss aka burned out or detonated ammo. For the Red Army it was a tank that is not combat capable including temporarily. So a German tank can be considered lost only once , a Soviet tank can be lost, repaired and lost again.
@@ivanmonahhov2314 I heard of that theory but never found a proof tbh. Also, when the Germans were retreating a damaged tank was generally a loss, simply because it was impossible to recover it. It is worth mentioning that Soviet tanks were difficult to repair, which is one of the reasons why they were cheaper to make.
@@Ixtzalit Soviet tanks were difficult to repair ? Source of this "fact?" I have handled or climbed into a fair bit of Soviet military gear and none of it was complex. Lack of complexity generally lend itself to ease of repair. Think of the AK-47. Many of its parts could be turned out on a Third World village lathe.
@@amerigo88 A German youtuber called DasPanzermuseum said it once in a video about tanks. According to him, repairing the engine of a western tank takes between 1 to 3 hours when the repairing services are available while fixing a Russian one can take between 1 and 2 days.
@@amerigo88 Third world village lathe, like Khybar pass?
Wow, wonderful video!
It's crazy how low Soviet tank loss percentages are once you look at exclusively combat losses.
It's not really a separate you know. Your tank never gets to be shot at if it breaks down on the way to an assaulted area, if you're on the retreat and you have to abandon an armored vehicle because of a minor mechanical issue it's still a combat loss. Even if it never got in sight of an enemy.
Just goes to show how much of a giant mess war actually is.
If you calculate Soviet losses the way the Germans calculated there, based on an average of several fronts in 1943 you get about 15 % of the Soviet total as irrecoverable combat losses.
@@TheStephaneAdamYeah but in many cases those abandoned tanks can be salvaged, repaired, resupplied in many cases.
@@dragonstormdipro1013 those abandoned tanks are usually destroyed by the crew to prevent them from being taken by the enemy.
@@JohnSmith-lf4be If you are retreating yes, like in the first half of the war. But when making succesful offensive advances like in the later part of the war you can easily recover the vehicles.
Great video - very informative. Would love to see a German equivalent (and a Brit & US one too) - especially if you can give context to the "every tank is a Tiger" thinking by showing relative numbers of each type - i.e. what % of available tanks were Tigers (or Panthers or Tiger II) in the later months and years. Thanks 🙃
I think he’s already done some tiger videos which would give you that sort of info
13:00 In particular, many of the losses are just breakdowns in circumstances that prevent repair or recovery, which would not be expected to kill crew very often, to say nothing of different mechanisms of combat loss.
The loss of tanks is based on what was produced and what was left. If a tank is lost and you cannot recover or repair it then you are behind enemy lines, or soon to be behind enemy lines, and so the tank crew is also probably lost.
Thank you.
Super video Bernard. At 13:04 you say "whilst tanks were lost in large numbers, this was not necessarily the case for their crews". I'm not sure about that. Two numbers that I remember, but will have to find the sources - when a Sherman was destroyed, usually one crew member DIED, but when a T34 was destroyed usually one crew member SURVIVED. Also of the 400,000 who served as Tankistas in the Great Patriotic War, 300,000 died.
Compare it to infantry.
You do realize that those two numbers directly contradict each other right? The T-34/85 had a crew of 5 so in order for your casualties per tank number to be true then 350k would have to have died.
Also the total number of deaths doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how many died per tank loss, since it could both be caused by a crew losing several tanks with a low number of casualties per tank or by losing few tanks with many crew casualties per tank.
In the end though those kinds of numbers are worthless without considerable context. The T-34 went through many changes and the early versions only had 4 crew members for example, not to mention changes in the fortune of war and crew training would affect these numbers. You really can't find a number for crew losses per tank loss for the entire war unless that number just so happens to have been consistent over the entire war. You can only give numbers for specific periods and specific variants. Like I'm pretty sure I know what source you got your number for the Sherman for but that number was specifically for the European theater in the 3 or so months immediately after Normandy, and only for the US Army and specifically the "Sherman 2" upgrade package which included applique armor and wet stowage. It is not a number for the entire war, it's only for one very specific period that didn't even see the most intense fighting the US Army would see during the war.
And as MHV pointed, out compare it to almost any other branch and 75% is a surprisingly low number. The losses for US bomber crews was closer to 95% for example.
@@hedgehog3180
Yeah it's true.. this US statistic is from a very favorable time frame.
They rarely engaged strong German tank units and most of their losses were to hand held At weopons.
The Canadian and the British forces had much higher crew losses in their m4s in the same time frame going against much better equipped german forces, like during operation goodwood.
To my knowledge the serviceman with the highest loss ratios are british bomber crews, especially lancaster crews, German Uboot men and Russian tankers.
About 50,000 T34 were produced so for the 300,000 dead tanks serviceman claimed you would need six dead crewman per tank which was impossible given that they were either three or four crewman depending on model.
Cool video.
You kind of show how this kind of analysis could be broken up into to parts. Barbarosa and post-Barbarosa. Or maybe "peak German advance" vs. its recession. Many of the early losses were from entire Soviet divisions worth of armor being cut off and abandoned/surrendered. Likewise German losses accelerated as they were pushed back after '42.
Also, and i did not bother to go look it up, but the total losses I believe included vehicles that were combat losses, that were later put back into service either by recovery and repair by own side, or captured and put back into service against them. So this kind of inflates the total, especially when you consider this opens the possibility that the same tank could be "destroyed" more than once.
96500 is the total of tanks and SPG destroyed and captured, and not repairable. If you count temporary losses, then the total losses were probably above 200k tanks buy I never saw figures about that.
Keep in mind that tanks and planes were back then significantly cheaper, and faster to produce. It would be utterly impossible even for the USA in its prime to turn out the same production numbers of semi modern jets or tanks than the ones they produced during WWII!
Cheap to,us now
Expensive then
@@tomhenry897 same goes for knights in armour and muskets, or battleships in the age of sail.
They were cheaper and faster to produce BECAUSE they were made in the thousands. Take the cheapest mass produced car on the market and hand build it like we do modern tanks and the cost will go WAY up.
@@jmackmcneill Modern tanks are built in factories, not by hand, but I get your point.
The Soviets could afford to allocate more resources to tank production and less on auxillary vehicles like trucks. They got the majority of their trucks from Lend Lease or by assembling trucks using componets from Lend Lease. The Germans did not have that luxury in WW2 and had to spread their resources.
Great video
this really gives perspective when people say that ukraine is a "meat-grinder" war, just shows the massive scale of ww2 that has been lost for the general public in the last few decades
How on earth did they even manufacture this many tanks in such a short period of time? That could never be done today..
If you'd ever have pleasure to see some of the still existing examples of those tanks, you'll see how poorly manufactured they were. For example some look like welders were on VERY short deadline so welds are made "just to hold long enough". Not talking about other things that were skipped to reach quotas
The most important reason is the complexity of tanks. In ww2 the where lighter, made with much more cheap materials and almost not electronics, war economy also helped
@@karlez7664 Yeah nah, seen many and even got inside many. Their manufacturing is superb.
The welds were made in an excellent fashion which allowed Soviet tanks to outlast their lifespans.
Generally speaking Soviet manufacturing ensured maximum reliability at the cost of comfort.
Infamously bad production quality, as said before, most of them fell apart before they even reached the battlefield, then were captured as the front line moved back. Surviving examples are almost all post-war export machines made to higher standards.
However, "you couldn't do that today" completely ignores the existance of modern car and truck factories that produce completed vehicles every few minutes. We don't make tanks that way at the moment because we don't NEED to have a hundred thousand tanks ready by the end of the year, we need fifty in 10 years from now, and any time someone invents a new toy to strap on, production stops and the hull is redesigned for the new widget.
Oh, you know... socialism is ineffective, cannot produce anything...
I just rewatched the "Battle of the Bulge" last night. It was'nt as cartoonish as I remember. It did show what a massed tank attack did to lightly equiped infantry. In the movie they were shooting rifle grenades at them which surely was a joke. Very little light infantry can do to a tank other than run.
Not these days. Nowadays Javelins, Stingers, and other shoulder fired weapons can take out tanks, even planes. If you had the right explosives you could throw them in a tanks path or if you can get close enough put on the side or tracks and take them out that way. Lastly is napalm and tank traps, you stop the tank and cook the crew inside alive with napalm.
On the other hand during the real Battle of the Bulge the 99th Battle Babies and the 2nd Infantry Div converted some belgian towns into graveyards for german tanks
@huwhitecavebeast1972 you are missing the point. He said light infantry. Dedicated AT teams etc are not light infantry. Light infantry is light equipement, maybe one AT weapon for the section, and only rifles and mgs. You won't see light infantry in frontline duty anymore but light infantry is as weak as ever to armor. I mean a wargame done by the us is an example. Redfor vs bluefor. Bluefor were chilling and laughed when they were told the new wave they faced was t-55s and similar junk... Until they were told by that time they ran out of AT stuff.
Running up to the sides of them and tossing grenades in the turret or stuffing a molotov in the engine pipe might be an option, Finland used that to great effect and it´s what WW1 soldiers did against tanks, but this is really dangerous as you might imagine and not necessarily effective.
Historically, by the Battle of the Bulge US infantry and support units were equipped with numerous 57mm bazookas, a weapon little featured in popular WWII movies of the 60s.
And the loss of life among tank crews.
I suspect a great deal of them got out safely and retreated/scuttled the tank. But sometimes the ammo explodes and that is 3-5 people...
Thanks!
thank you!
Early in the war the German Air Superiority would also lead to heavy soviet tank losses, while the air strikes might kill less tanks but their fuel and ammo trucks being killed meant those tanks were abandoned and lost
I have read repeatedly that mass of mounts of Soviet tanks were either broken down or in ill state of health before the germans attacked. Plus that 17,000 lite tanks wete easily destroyed in the first few months. And then heavy tanks came later. Every book,documentary,exc are so different. Its hard to get accurate picture. Plus I have read that at least 400,000 Russian tankers became casualties. This is a really good video and fascinating to watch. Thank you for making this.
I can't remember who it was from, but I watched a video someone made about Soviet tanks, really going into detail about it. From what I've underdtood, soviet tanks were overall pretty shit, like really shit. The designs were sub par and the quality of the manufacturing as they pushed them out en masse without proper qaulity cobtrol. Most of the positive stuff you hear about Soviet tanks turns out to just be Soviet propaganda
@@Dial8Transmition i have heard very similar but accounts from German veterans in memoirs tend to tell a different story. T 34 tanks get good and bad reviews. The main issue is that Soviet tankers never really communicated with each other. Radio's in tanks were not common. I also believe the tactics they used sucked, i could be wrong on that one. Plus sometimes the people who made the tanks were the ones who operated it in battle. Horrible strategy on that one. And we also have to remember everything that the Soviets did was really crude. German tankers hated the way that most Soviet tanks loaded the barrels. And I always try to remember that millions of veterans on all sides had different experiences. The heavy Soviet tanks were also sometimes a problem for the germans and sometimes not. I believe it grinds down to how they were used and what that particular front section looked like. And finally always remember attacking armour always takes heavy casualties, and the Soviets could care less who died at any point.
@@Dial8Transmition most of the issues people talk about are sampled from a particular time period in the early war, usually before 1943. As it went on quality control and finish were improved as numbers rose higher and higher. The crudeness was mostly just expediency, as a bad or suboptimal tank is better than no tank. The same tank model made in 1945 vs 1942 was leagues better with all sorts of improvements that the manufacturers felt they could now make.
And if you're referring to lazerpig's t34 video, you really shouldn't as it's full of errors and misinterpretations. There's a huge and fully sources series of posts on r/badhistory pulling apart all the stuff he got wrong in his video, mos of which turned out to be him overly chastising the t34 using misinformation
I think TIK stated that most of the USSR tank's in 1941 where lost/destroyed by German infantry after the had managed to surround them and created a pocket.
@@Lunkwow i really like tik history as well. That may very well be the case. Especially since mass confusion reigned supreme in the first few months. Excellent point.
Man I'm loving the "vihikil"
Staggering numbers indeed. What makes me sad is that every tank loss is probably a couple or more crew men killed as well.
So Russian losses were 73% for tanks, 56.3 % losses for SPG's...yikes they truly were a consumable item under Red Army deployment but just remember the GErman losses were 100%
We know the loss numbers from the polish soldiers serving in the red army for the T-34/85. 1.85/5 per tank(CORRECTED TO 1.8 i posted 2.8 first my mistake)
The highest of any ww2 nation. Especially the driver and hull gunner were in deathtrap positions.
What is the source for this?
@@MilitaryHistoryVisualized Its in one of the chieftains videos! I cant remember wich one i think about the M4.
@@MilitaryHistoryVisualized Okay CORRECTION it was 1.8, memory was faulty
its the video "Myths of American Armor. TankFest Northwest 2015" time stamp 38:50.
Not so sad, they'd have just lived to breed more Russian goons bent on enslaving their neighbors. Okay, that's not fair...I guess.
7:25 production numbers for the years in that graph would have been very useful
Probably in 1945 Soviets did not bother to repair all damaged tanks.
Interesting point.
I know by mid 1945, the USN determined that aircraft stock was becoming too large to be effectively managed, so they put a hard cap on the number of airframes and ordered all sqaudrons to expend even lightly used aircraft in favor of factor replacements so that is entirely possible
@@MilitaryHistoryVisualized In second half of 1944 front already passed Carpathian mountains and logistics were not any more fun for Soviets then they were for Germans in previous time. And all truly skilled workers were critical for war production. And as spring 1945 approached, it became clear that tanks temporary left on battlefield with modest damage will not be repaired in time to see war again.
They actually probably did and then sold them to other people while keeping all the new tanks for themselves.
@@hedgehog3180 Maybe after war. When fight was on, rate of progress mattered far more then material losses.
Is there any Info on losses of U.S and British lend lease Tanks and vehicles? Including losses to U-boats? and what impact if any did the U.S and Britain have in the Aid that made it to the Soviet Union. IE had they not sent what they did when they did to plug the Gaps maybe Germany would have overrun the oilfields or other tank factories. Great informative video as usual. Thanks mate,
Es hat mich echt überrascht, dass die Verluste pro Monat für die Rote Armee 1945 höher als 1944 waren, obwohl man es 1944 noch mit einer relativ stärkeren Wehrmacht zu tun hatte. Woran liegt das?
Edit: Vielleicht waren es einfach die Kombination aus mehr Stadtkampf und längeren Nachschublinien, weshalb beschädigte Panzer eher als Totalverlust abgeschrieben wurden statt zur Reperatur in die Heimat zu verlegen.
Soviets almost exclusively on offense, plus fighting to the death on the part of the Germans, plus Stalin's desire to push as hard as possible given the US/UK advancing from the west. To me it's plausible.
Gute Frage.
Agressiveres Vorgehen? Schwierigeres Gelände? Ausgebaute deutsche Verteidigungslinien? Mehr Stadtkämpfe?
1945: No rasputitsa.
@@MilitaryHistoryVisualized
Rasputitsa is only one season, that doesn’t account for the other three quarters of the year.
Also rasputitsa affected the Soviets as much as it affected the Germans, it’s not like the Soviets are suddenly immune to mud and terrible road conditions, especially considering they were on the offensive for almost all of 1944.
IIRC the Soviets also counted their losses differently than the Germans - being a lot more willing to write their vics off than the Germans.
Soviets counted any vehicle that left the unit for repair - being sent to the front repair yard or subsequently the factory - as losses, besides those which were irrecoverable of course. Only vehicles disabled and repairable by the unit were not written off.
The Germans on the other hand only counted tanks as lost when they were irrecoverable or irrepairable - so tanks that took up to 6 weeks to repair were not written off yet.
That means a German tank that was disabled, sent back for repairs, and then entered service again was not counted as a loss - while for the Soviets it did.
The Soviets pulled something remotely similar on their gun penetrations btw.
The Soviets measured their penetration in Range and Angle with 75% chance of penetration - the Nazis and Allies used 50% instead, which meant that on paper their rounds had more penetration, but when put to a test, a soviet round with the same penetration on paper would generally have had a tad better performance in practice.
What is with all the butthurt comments of people doing mental gymnastics to try and minimize Soviet losses?
@@huwhitecavebeast1972it's the same people that think Lada was the best car ever built, and the same people that still think Russia is winning in Ukraine.
The source for all these loss figures specifically says these figures are irrecoverable losses, so by your logic the soviets actually lost more.
@@tux8000 You are wrong, German penetration criterias were the strictest of all.
"To qualify as a successful penetration the projectile was required to penetrate the plate in a condition fit to burst and not to deform in any manner which would prevent detonation. Depending on the shell size a series of consecutive penetrations must be made to qualify the limit velocity that which the armor is penetrated. Below are some crucial factors in determining the limit velocity for German shells. Unlike the other army's tests the series of test shot must begin counting successes again if one shell should fail to penetrate."
Source: German Steel Armour Piercing Projectiles and Theory of Penetration by British Intelligence Objectives Sub-committee i.e. the BIOS report.
War... war never changes.
No s***
The methods of war undergo radical changes, the reasons to wage it also change. Where one day a king fights for a fertile floodplain with slings & bronze kopesh, his descendants fight for national independence with bolt action rifles made of metals & composites that ancient king had no knowing of.
@@andrewreynolds912 language
Boss…. Is that you?
@@Shvetsario f*ck another penny in the swear jar Oh damn another one oh shiiiit one more
Man the logistics and man hours of work is just insane.
Can you do the same and 'weight' it? Aka 1 heavy tank equals x light tanks?
The available - front line distinction requires some explanation. What does 'front line' mean - does it mean the number in active units, or the number within a certain distance of the front, or what? There's no point having a stockpile if you don't eventually burn through it, but it appears from these figures that the opposite happened.
In soviet literature, it means "tanks in active Fronts". Fronts being the soviet equivalent of western army groups. Active means fighting the enemy.
Interesting video I love German and Russian think designs particularly the Russians. I know that they weren’t like good necessarily but the t-34/85 and Kv1 where monsters. Interesting I didn’t know they were losing 650 tanks a day I wonder how many of those tanks included the crews that drove them.
A large number - Soviet POWs were > 2mm in Operation Barbarossa - the large majority of these were starved to death in German camps, as the Germans made no provision for them, so Soviet POWs were herded into large open enclosures and allowed to starve (and eventually freeze) to death. Ultimately, over 3mm Soviet POWs died in German hands.
My grandfather taught me how to jump out of a tank and escape. They had a special rescue kit and tactics to get out of the tank attack line. They trained very carefully to jump out and specially modified their clothes. By the way soviet tanks often acted as field guns and were often disassembled for spare parts, this increased the consumption of tanks but not crewmen.
My grandfather was a mechanic of a motorized armored van MBV-1. He was wounded near Vyborg. Now there is a war and his lessons are the best memory, MBV-1 is in the museum in Kubinka.
They were good for what they were needed for by the soviets. The t34 at least
@@cv990a4 this isn’t really relevant to his comment. Most of the troops on both sides were infantry so most of those Millions were infantry even if all tank crews were captured and none died in combat the infantry would still be a very big majority
The t-34 was trash, don't know much about the Kv1 comparatively, but the t-34 was a badly built, very unreliable, hardly survivable vehicle that I would never want to be in.
Question: How long did it take for the USSR to build a tank?
How many refinery did the USSR have?
**An oil refinery or petroleum refinery is an industrial process plant where petroleum (crude oil) is transformed and refined.
Glad to see something’s never change
Looking at what was lost in the fighting in 1941 is very revealing, most of their "heavy" losses were actually light and obsolete tanks that were poorly organized, backed by a handful or T-34's and some KV models. Once they moved factories in 1942 and then got into counteroffensives in 1943-44, their losses again climbed, but not unduly when you consider the scale of those conflicts and that they were facing a foe that invested heavily in 43-44 in high velocity anti-tank guns, infantry portable anti-tank, and tanks that's excelled in long range defensive firepower with heavy armor to protect themselves.
The Soviets deployed 3000 t-34 in 1941, which is not a "handful".
@@RouGeZH ah, I could have been clearer there, I'm referring to how many were available at the front line during the first months or so of Operation Barbarossa. Given the length of that combat line, tank density, and what was deployed where, German forces predominately were facing light tanks that their PZ III/IV and Panzerjagers could handily defeat, along with their standard AT guns, which were 37mm and 50mm (Pak 36, 38).
At 22 June Germans actually had more medium tanks that Soviets did
1523 light for Germans vs 10424 light for Soviets
1389 medium for Germans vs 1373 medium for Soviets
0 heavy for Germans vs 504 heavy for Soviets
~300 SPGs for Germans vs 17 SPGs for Soviets
@@RouGeZH Where in the world do you have that number from, and are you including the entire year in it? Because that's very different from what was actually at the front.
@@hedgehog3180 The source is Operation Barbarossa: the Complete Organisational and Statistical Analysis, and Military Simulation Volume IIIB, p.689.
I took 1941 (June - december) because it shows that the Soviets didn't deploy a "handful of T-34" during that time. Actually they deployed more T-34 (3017) than the German deployed StuG III/Pz III/Pz IV (2688).
These vehicles *were* at the front.
Yeah br 5.00 - 6.7 is pretty rough
😂
Isn’t it more 2-4?
@@MilitaryHistoryVisualized The highest IS-2 is 6.7 and I think the T-34s (that aren't prototypes) end at 6.0.
There is a major point not mentioned here. The recovery ratio and the fact soviets counted tanks rebuild as losses/new tank.
In 1941/1942 recovery was low due the massive German offensive, but later soviets were able to recover tanks in large quantities. Tanks were consumable, crews were more worth. Tanks were sent back to rear campaign workshops or sent back to factories were they were repaired using spares or canibalizing parts or rebuilt anew and counted as a new tank.
When Germans were on retreat they lost this capacity, so the attrition hit them hard losing more machines than they could produce per day and strategic materials they didn't had.
Love this! could you do a similar one on german ones? Or perhaps some planes or Idk.
NUMBERS
"The Germans were able to capture a lot of factories that were used to produce tanks" - which ones? As far as I am informed, the Germans captured nearly no factories that were still in use, because the Soviets had dismantled and reloacted most of these factories to siberia/east of the Urals. This also includes the deportation of about 35 million soviet citizens.
The areas and mentioned the evacuation. Also Kharkov, the Germans did a lot of work there.
@@MilitaryHistoryVisualized *Kharkiv
@@MilitaryHistoryVisualized What was done there? Were these factories used to repair captured tanks? You would need the personell there and I read that the experts had been deported. Interestingly, Vladimir Putin's father was in a NKVD-"destruction battalion". They took care that nothing of value - including "unreliable" people - could be captured. I also remember that in his recorded conversation with Mannerheim, Schicklgruber spoke of a huge tank-factory that was captured. The question is if this factory could be used, or if machines and expert personell were gone
It would be interesting to also include the tank losses for Russia in 1939/40 when they were invading other countries before themselve go invaded
it would be interesting to know your mother's breast size too
Good video
Really like to see a comparison of American tank losses per day.
Not in the trend now, we must make the russian army look bad by somehow miraculously finding some statistics never shown before
@@Cormano980 Those are actually pretty well known numbers for anyone who doesn't just watch videos on this topic. They are literally official numbers from Russia, for the first time published in 1993. And it doesn't really make them look bad actually, it shows how incredible efficient the USSR was in comparison to the German industry which was actually LARGER than the Soviet industry.
Also, Red Army =/= Russian Army.
@@HistoryGameV Finally, someone spitting facts. Equating the Red Army to the Russian is plain insulting for people from all the other Soviet Republics apart from RSFSR.
You and I might have to disagree on the casualties in tank crews. Do I think they lost a significant experience core of tank crews? No I don't. Do I think they lost some experienced tankers? I think they lost more than it's perhaps realised. T-34 wasn't exactly friendly to a Oh Bugger, the Tank is On Fire test.
A loader could be argued to be the easiest to replace, nominal shared skills between the artillery and the tank crew, loader.
Some of their SPG's do seem notably more survivable in that regard. At least if the Inside the Hatch series is anything to go by.
I'd be interested to see a more detailed breakdown not just over the 41 to 42 period, but the late 44 to 45 period. The ruthless drive towards Berlin has notable casualties that I think skew this somewhat. There may be a spike in the loss figures, especially in the immediate actions before the attacks on Berlin.
If my history is correct with how Stalin was playing the marshals against each other, infantry, tanker or artillery, it would not have been a good time.
I think I need to check a few sources and break down the data myself. I don't know how to explain this one. It feels right on some level, it's a good fit to Soviet behaviour and doctrine. I still feel that it's missing an element, there's something under the surface that bugs me. At least as a thought if they were losing less tanks, is that because they were facing less tanks, less direct fire AT and/or is that because the institutional knowledge of the tanks corps were improving.
Or the bombardment just flattened everything for a nice spring drive west.
This feels like we need some very specific criteria and definition. Perhaps even to the point of deliberately splitting up the T-34 by the calibre of the guns.
I need to watch this through again, at least twice.
great video as usual, could you do one similar about german tank losses?
All numbers besides production of course involve lend lease? It seems so by the summary but I just want to clarify
Yes, LL tanks are included in losses.
60 tanks per day is impressive.
How about comparing German and Russian Logistic chain (number of trucks, tractors, trains and density of road and rail in those countries). I would like you to destroy that myth that the 3rd best logistic chain in the world was bad just cause it didnt stretch endlessly. Logistics is only good when your magazines are full of war material. Lack of fuel isnt a fault of a logistics but of strategic planning.
I kinda covered that a bit here: czcams.com/video/3n0BpQj9jqc/video.html
Logistics are based on industrial capacity.
One notable difference was that at the start of the war Soviet tank divisions were huge while having roughly half the trucks that their smaller German counterparts had. This has been blamed for the high losses at the beginning of the war.
guys, these tanks didn't break down. They just activated sentry mode.
Quality is a Quantity of its own🤫
Conclusion: Being in the USSR Army was probably a death sentence.
So did in the Wehrmarch after the failed operation .
The eastern front was a death sentence to anyone, hungarians, romenians, italians, germans, soviets and etc.
The ARMIR( italian army in a Russia) suffered 90,000 KIA and MIA from a original force of 235,000 and a total of 140,000 casualties.
around 2% survival rate for those who were in the army since the 22.06.1941
CZcamsr user is shocked at the fact that wars tend to be deadly affairs.
@@kampfer91Much less so in comparison to Red Army tactics.
Early war the majority of Soviet tank losses were caused by mechanical breakdowns and a lack of logistics due to their supply lines being overrun. Late war it was primarily anti-tank guns and handheld weapons like the panzerfaust in heavy urban combat. The life expectancy of a T-34 was only usually 1-2 battles which is why they were so crudely put together and their engines were built only to last about 100-200 hours. Due to the nature of the eastern front the quantity > quality approach was ultimately what ended up winning at the expense of the tank crews.
That 1-2 battles was actually around 3 months of deployment.
T34s were manufactueed so superbly and why the transmissions would last over 300km while even the M4 could not get above 250km. And their engines would have such long lifespans that they would function even decades after manufacturing.
Due to the nature of the eastern front the quality > quantity approach was ultimately what ended up winning.
@@dwarow2508 the t34 transmissions were utter garbage, it was very hard to change gears
@@2003AudiS3 you are talking with a sovietboo m8
@@2003AudiS3 Transmissions and gears are not the same lmao. T34 transmissions were excellent. Post 1942 models outlasted literally every other transmission of the war.
@Kyrios You are talking with a freeahboo
I remember seeing some where were the Soviets counted Breakdowns as destroyed even if they were repaired. Not sure how true that is.
That's just tankies coping. These numbers are for destroyed tanks, not damaged.
Those numbers..
Losing over 70 % of your armor was a terrible price for Russian Victory. But, for the Germans, their losses were even harder to replace so it even up in the end.
0:40 That KV-1 with gun depression, Impossible! Russian tanks have very little depression Russian tanks are happy tanks.
What a horrific number
Quite interesting. I always believed soviet tanks were superior to their german counterparts during later stages of the war. But the numbers say otherwise
Excellent video. It always irks me when people suggest the German Army "wasn't better" than the Red Army when all statistics like this clearly show otherwise. And this was despite them losing the war too.
The German army certainly proved it was better at committing atrocities and murdering POWs/civilians.
But people also forgot that German tanks also plagued with mechanical problems , especially the heavy tanks with bandage fix . Tank casualty is another thing but German in the long run unable to produce many tanks that they can position everywhere they want .
@@artificialintelligence8328 ehhh somewhat. it's a pretty close tie.
Competent industrial production is part of being “better”. The Soviets made massive investments in tanks and heavy industry in the inter war years, and adopted mass-production as everyone else did. The Germans refused to use mass-production since it was American and therefore it was somehow Jewish. It didn’t help that one of their biggest factories was run by Herman Goering’s brother, who actively worked against the Nazis and got away with it. It’s a miracle they made as many tanks as they did despite repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot.
@@kampfer91 They really weren't though. The heavy tanks had some issues, but they were a small minority of the total tanks produced by Germany. The Soviet T-34/76 had just as many, if not more, mechanical issues than the Panther, it's just that no one talks about them.
So much for the reliable T-34 myth.
wait, is it stereotyped as "reliable" in the west?
Does being lost in combat make a tank unreliable somehow? Isn't that like literally the point of a tank?
The tanks loses, were those total loss or was a percentage of those recoverable and repaired?
96500 is the number of tanks/SPG completely destroyed or captured by the enemy. They were not repairable.
The Germans at least in the early victories often recovered & repaired tanks that where classified as kills.
Has this been factored in?
Don’t forget Britain and the USA provided the soviets large numbers of tanks ,
Britain produced more tanks in 1942 than any other country according to Tom Holland in his book war in the west .
Many of those vehicles were transported by British merchant vessels to the Soviet Union
No they didn't. They provided a small number at best. In 1942 the USSR produced the most tanks according to Glantz and Zaloga.
In 1941 the USSR recieved only 24 operational British tanks.
Watching the video clearly helps, I mention the number. Lend-Lease was likely far more important due to the fact that the Soviet could concentrate on tank production, whereas the Western Allies provided other goods, e.g., radios, trucks, etc. more in this video: czcams.com/video/IJ9PiDvI4pY/video.html
@@dwarow2508
You coming to push the Russian propaganda another time? 40% of Soviet tanks were British at one point.
And no, neither Glantz nor Zaloga backs you in claiming at least 144% of all Soviet tanks were super-Russian super-tanks. Stop misusing sources.
@@nvelsen1975
You comming to push the westoid propaganda once again?
At no point did foreign tanks exceed 5% of total Soviet tank strength.
And no, literally none of the historians listed here back you up on the nonsense about 200% of all goods manufactured in the USSR being western. Stop faking sources.
@@nvelsen1975 at no point in time was "40% of the soviet tanks british". It's utter and complete b.s.
Now Putin is pulling them off of podiums and memorials and sending them into Ukraine
Because they once won the war against United Europe in 1945.
Nothing personal, just a tradition😊
@@Anton_Frey you wish lol
@@Anton_Frey Keep coping.
@@RoundBaguette Didn't they?
What tanks? Russians only fight with shovels!
Oh, so 1944 Soviets had 5800 tanks frontline. Of those they moved 1000 to the Finnish front, where they were to a large degree lost (about 800 by Finnish account). So I was wondering why the 1944 summer assault in the Finnish front halted the Soviet assault in the German front. As it only included a bit over 600 000 men + reinforcements + 1000 plane airforce. That isn't so big hole to total Soviet numbers. But that would be a significant cut to the actual operational front line tanks.
can you do the same for airplane?
is there any data about the losses of the land leased soviet Tanks in ww2?
The USSR got 11,900 tanks and SPG from lend-lease. 7k from the US, 5k from the Brits.
8,258 were destroyed/irrecoverably lost, as follows:
176 Mk-4
1,804 M-4A2
696 M3 Stuart
783 Mk-1/2/3/5/7
2,301 Mk-9/11
691 M3 Lee
+
1,807 SPG.
@@RouGeZH Wow thanks for your awsome detailed reply. Do you know were you have these Informations from by any chance?
@@sigmaman_ultra The 11,900 number comes from "Soviet casualties and combat losses in the 20th century" by Krivosheev p. 258. It's MHV main source for this video.
The losses numbers come from russian forums. I have a high confidence in their reliability because they correlate perfectly with Krivosheev's data.
It's interesting how the tabk loss rare more closely mimics the tabk production rate and availability rate than anything else. This makes a lot of sense considering that using a tank will inevitably lead to its highly likely loss. The more you use it, the more you lose it. Not losing ut, means you're nit using it and that means you're wasting it. In 1942 when production is hampered by the displacement of the factories and stocks a reblow from the 1941 losses, there's fewer tanks around and so fewer tanks are lost per day. We can also see this as an indicator for the intensity of fighting. Extrenely high loss rates per day for 1941 and 1945 indicate lots of fighting in relatively little time.
It would be interesting to look at the losses/day over the course of a year like 1943. Assumedly they would be significantly higher in the summer, during the major operations and slow down towards winter.
i think most important number is how many of those tanks were repaired becuase that would show how many were lost in battle or captured and how many were lost in atrition
I would love to see a video about the capacity of the german war industry.
Maybe do a similar video for German tanks if the data is available?
Are the German losses calculated in all fronts? Or only in the east front?
It's eastern front only from june 1941 to november 1944.
Is this counting losses that were fixed and returned to the front?
No.
13:00 the T-34 was the deadliest for its crew of all the tanks of the Second World War
There's a grim reality to all of those numbers, as you mention at the end of the video. Bill Mauldin, ww2 cartoonist who served in the US infantry, could make light of almost any dark situation, but he said he never drew a tank battle, basically because it was too ugly. The closest he came was two cartoons with single tanks in them, one had a caption of "No thanks. A moving foxhole attracts the eye." I think everyone knew they were targets. All tanks, all sides.
Imagine if the USSR had quality control. I think the spike in losses 1945 is due to fighting urban combat in Germany where there were panzerfausts in every bush.
When they started commitment to T-34 and KV production, did they completely stop spare parts production of some older tanks? I see that type of claim in books here and there.
108k tanks? Even in a modern war that massive of an amount of old tanks would have to have a huge effect on the battlefield against most militaries.
What about the “Lend Lease “ tanks?
they didnt make a big part of the tanks
@@void1n At times they did, I think Hill mentions British Valentine and Matilda II made up about 10% of the Soviet tank forces in the Battle of Moscow, and during the Battle of Stalingrad a lot of the Soviet tank motorized forces rode in British Universal Carriers. But yeah, even with all the US tanks delivered, they don't make up a lot in total. Just were probably one of the things that tipped the balance towards a Soviet victory.
@@HistoryGameV yeah, the most important things given to the ussr with the lend lease program would be the trucks, as they were vital for troops and tanks
The T-26 might be the least fortunate tank of all time. It was probably the most common tank in 1941, then most of them get wiped out in a matter of weeks, either never being used in combat at all or under the worst possible tactical conditions; and then this becomes practically the entire history of it.
A former Red Army Ukrainian mechanic/tanker (living in Pittsburgh back in the 70s) told me a story one day about being drafted in the Red Army. His group of students (averaging 15-17 years old) was marching back from Kiev to another location to get on a train back to safety. They noticed a brand-new T-34 tank blocking their path and asked if they needed help to get it moving (there were about 40 students in his group). He figured out really quick that they were flooding the carburetor, and the spark plugs weren't torqued in properly. About 20 minutes he (and another student) had the tank running and the crew moved it. A Red Army tank officer asked him how he knew how to fix it and he explained that his father and uncle repaired tractors and the T-34 used the same basic engine design. The officer wrote his name and school, and they headed back to the train and went to another city in Eastern Russia. A few days later Red Army recruiters drafted about a dozen of his group, he and the other student who'd helped that day got sent to a Tank School just south of Moscow, the rest went to infantry. He spent the next three months learning to operate a T-34 and engaged in his first battle during the defense of Moscow in late October 41 thru January 42. He somehow survived the battles around Moscow, though his original tank broke down several times for transmission and steering issues, plus got hit several times. He was eventually promoted to Senior Sergeant by late 42 and was the only survivor of his tank class by that time. He survived the war when he was badly hit at Kurst during a tank fight and spent the next year recovering. Eventually he became an instructor at a tank school. He emigrated (read escaped) to the US just after the war after his family in Ukraine was accused of collaborating with the Germans by a local NKVD informant. It wasn't true, but it was a common way to settle scores against neighbors or rivals or take their property. He said that tankers and snipers both had very short life spans and luck had more do with survival than skill or training.
Im very curious the amount of lend lease tanks as the American History Association claim 6000 tanks and TDs were sent to the USSR and curious how many of those were destroyed/captured
The USSR got 11,900 tanks and SPG from lend-lease. 7k from the US, 5k from the Brits.
8,258 were destroyed/irrecoverably lost, as follows:
176 Mk-4
1,804 M-4A2
696 M3 Stuart
783 Mk-1/2/3/5/7
2,301 Mk-9/11
691 M3 Lee
+
1,807 SPG.
What were the losses from among the tanks supplied by the allies?
As I remember roughly 10% of Soviet tanks were Lend-Lease.
@@Paciat Varied by theatre (Lend Lease were mostly concentrated in the Caucus/Ukrainian front and in Leningrad while domestic soviet tanks were prioritised for Moscow and central fronts), also the Soviets primarily manufactured light/medium tanks which resulted in up to 40% of the tanks in heavy tank regiments being of lend lease origin.
The USSR got 11,900 tanks and SPG from lend-lease.
8,258 were destroyed/irrecoverably lost, as follows:
176 Mk-4
1,804 M-4A2
696 M3 Stuart
783 Mk-1/2/3/5/7
2,301 Mk-9/11
691 M3 Lee
+
1,807 SPG.
@@RouGeZH That doesn't include tanks made by the British Empire - 5,218.
(Source: Hansard 16/04/1946).
@Gardener42 it does, they are included in the 11,900. Many types listed in the losses are British