Even before the war was over, it became the symbol of the Soviet military, a sloping steel juggernaut, usually crowded with machine-gun armed troops, relentlessly driving westward. It was rugged, simple to build, easy to operate, and crewed by men who had never even driven a car or a tractor, let alone a tank. Yet it led advances of as much as 450 miles in five weeks, defeating equally legendary armor and generals.

Its opponents had high praise for it: Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist called it the "finest tank the world." Col. Gen. Heinz Guderian said it was "very worrying," when he first met it. It was the T-34, the primary Soviet battle tank. It won World War II.

Prototype

The prototype T-34 weighed 27 tons, and was 21 feet 7 inches long, measured to the front of its overhanging 76.2mm gun. It stood eight feet high, with tracks 19 inches wide, and had a ground clearance of 16 inches. The crew was four men, driver, hull gunner, loader, and commander, who doubled as a turret gunner. Requiring the commander to man the main gun was common in 1930's tanks, and proved to be a design mistake, as commanders who had to man their guns in battle could not also make decisions. The American M-4 Sherman, for example, had a five-man crew.

The T-34's driver operated a 500-horsepower 12-cylinder V-2 engine, with a capacity of 38.9 liters, and drove his tank not with a steering wheel but with a series of levers. The hull gunner manned a 7.62mm Degtyarev gas-operated machine gun, fed by a 60-shot drum magazine.

The turret was extremely cramped, hindering the tank's performance. The gun crew's seat was attached to the turret ring, which did not revolve when the turret traversed, so they had to squirm in their chairs. But that 76.2 mm gun could spew out AP shot at 500 yards that could penetrate 54mm of armor, or high explosive. The gun could be fired by hand or foot.

T-34 commanders had to give orders to the driver, shout to the loader to get ammo loaded, duck down the telescope to lay the gun, work out the range, and back away in time to avoid getting hit by 14 inches of recoil. That made it difficult for tank commanders to know what the other tanks in the unit were doing. And the original T-34s didn't have a radio. Signals were transmitted by flags.

There were other problems in the design. T-34s had large access hatches, which revealed tank commanders to sniper fire. The turret had a pronounced overhang at the rear, and particularly determined German infantrymen could slip onto a tank from behind, attach a teller mine to the rear, and jump off. This was about the only way to blow off a T-34's turret when they first appeared.

But all these faults were minor in character. The T-34's strong points were many. It was fast - 32 miles per hour on her American-designed Christie suspension, and had very high horsepower­ to weight ratio, 17.9. The German Mark III had 14 horsepower per ton, the British Matilda 7.2, the American M-4 Sherman about 14. That made the T­34 strong.

The T-34 had welded, sloped, and angled, armor, putting it ahead of German and British machines.

And the 76.2mm gun had a muzzle velocity of 2,172 feet per second, ahead of the German Mark IV's 1,300 feet per second, superior to the German Mark III as well, From the start it was ahead of its rivals.

Start

The start came in the 1930s, when the Soviets, like everyone else, began playing with new tanks to replace the World War I machines. Stalin's generals ordered and studied British and American vehicles and were most impressed with the American T3, with an unusual suspension designed by J. Walter Christie.

Christie wanted to build a chassis that "will protect the man who is to risk his life by facing the enemy, and to provide a machine by the use of which he can defend himself and destroy the enemy. Therefore we built a chassis with frontal lines and slopes that will make it almost impossible to penetrate the chassis with any type of projectile. Next we constructed the chassis as low as possible, making it as inconspicuous as the power plant permits. We then turned to the next problem of defense, which is speed. With speed you can surround the enemy, you can flank him, you can reach points quickly and take up positions to stop the advance. If you meet an overpowering force you can quickly evade it..."

The T-3, armed with a 37mm gun and three crewmen, was the world's first fast tank. The Soviets were impressed. They made arrangements to produce a Russian copy at Kharkov, and the first bystrokhodnii (fast-moving tank), the BT-1, appeared in 1931. The Soviets went through the BT-2, BT-3, BT-5, BT-7, and BT-8. They all had Christie suspension. By 1935, there were 3,500 VT tanks in service, and the T-28 and T-35 was coming out, too, the former armed with a 76.2mm gun, superior to Britain's Matilda. which carried a 2-lbr.

But the BTs performed with mixed reviews in Spain and Manchuria, and badly in Finland. Better tanks were needed.

The head of the Soviet design team was a man forgotten in the West, Mikhail Ilyich Koshkin. But his life parallels that of Britain's Reginald Mitchell, designer of the Spitfire. Koshkin, a graduate of the Leningrad Institute of Technology, moved past the BT designs to create something new: a tank that was driven by track locomotion vice a steering wheel.

Koshkin said that a tank driven by track locomotion was what Russia needed. Tanks with wheel locomotion moved faster on roads and didn't chum them up. But Koshkin pointed out that most of the Soviet Union's roads were dirt anyway. Warfare in Eastern Europe would take place off­road. And it would be easier to build a tank that was steered by its tracks, without a steering wheel.

With his colleagues Alexander Morozov and Nikolai Kucherenko, Koshkin designed the T-34 in the late 1930s. By then he was a sick man, dying of chest disease, that killed him by 1941. Like Mitchell, who never lived to see his beloved Spitfires defeat the Germans, Koshkin died soon after his prototype T34s were accepted by the Soviet army. And like Mitchell, Koshkin had fathered a legend.

Design work on the T-34 was completed by the end of 1939, and two prototypes quickly followed. Early in 1940, the two machines were sent on a test drive from Kharkov to Moscow and back, via Smolensk and Kiev, a 2,000 mile testmn in the dead of winter. The tanks did well. Stalin ordered them into production.

Invasion

But when the Nazis invaded Russia in 1941, the T-34s weren't ready. Hitler's Panzers faced the BTs and T-28s, and sliced through them with skill and AP shot. The only tank that could equal them was the KV-1, a 46-ton machine with the T34s engine and gun. The KV-1 was slower than the T-34, and could have done well. But the combination of the KV-1's slow speed, a Soviet command structure still a wreck from the Stalinist purges, and German skill rendered the KV-1 useless. The steppes were soon littered with the wreckage of Soviet tanks and hopes, all dutifully recorded by German propaganda newsreels. Army Group Center alone had captured more than 300,000 PoWs, destroyed 2,500 tanks and 1,500 guns by 8 July. The Soviet army was collapsing, and it seemed nothing could stop the Germans from taking Moscow and Leningrad.

The remedy for the Blitzkrieg appeared amid the potato and cornfields of Senno, near the Dniepr River on 8 July, 1941. The 17" Panzer Division was edging forward amid intense heat, burning Soviet T-26s, and extended supply lines.

Suddenly a single Russian tank with a new unfamiliar silhouette popped out of the corn. Several German Mark III tanks engaged it, and their shots ricocheted off the turret. The Russian tank swung along a farm track, at the end of which stood a German 37mm anti-tank gun. The Germans fired shells at the tank until it reached their position, pivoted on its wide tracks, and crushed the gun into the ground.

Leaving a German Mark III burning behind it, the lone intruder rumbled into the German rear for nine miles, until it was finally destroyed by a shot from a German 100mm gun. All along the German advance, this scene, in many variations, was repeated. German tank crews, flushed with victory, ran smack into a new and mysterious tank that refused to die.

But there weren't enough of them. And Soviet tank forces were still poorly led and organized. But the remedy was in place.

As the Soviets reeled back, they reorganized their armored forces. Gone were the tank divisions and brigades of 1939 and 1940, replaced by tank and mechanized corps that controlled the brigades directly. The armored division would not exist in the Soviet Army. Factories were evacuated en masse to the Urals, where workers performed Herculean feats of production amid safety conditions that frightened visiting American industrialists, driven by fear of the secret police and hatred of the German invader. And German production, hobbled by Nazi bureaucracy and consumerism, fell behind. In 1941, Soviet factories produced 3,000 T-34s. Production for the German Mark II was only 159 machines.

By 19 October, 1941, the last batch of workers left the Kharkov plant where the T-34 had been born bound for "Tankograd" near Chelyabinsk in the Urals. There the Kirov plant from Leningrad had also been relocated. Massive efforts put the factories on line. On 8 December, the first T-34 rolled off the Tankograd production line, and headed for the Moscow front, where the great counterattack to save the Soviet capital had started two days before.

Around Moscow some of the most vicious fighting of the war was taking place, with the Soviets and Germans battling frigid temperatures as much as each other.

Counterattack

Early in October, the Soviets had only 383 tanks on the whole of their Western Front. South of Moscow, the 4th Tank Brigade, under Col. M. Katukov, scraped together with 50 T34s from various places, faced the 4th Panzer Division, under Gen. Freiherr von Langermann. 4th Panzer had overwhelming strength, but was close to the end of its supply tether, short of boots, shirts, socks, and 100,000 gallons of gas.

Katukov hit 4th Panzer in the flanks, and chewed up 30 German tanks in the mud before retreating. Three days later, Guderian himself inspected the battlefield and the wrecks, and said, "The damage suffered by the Russians was considerably less than that to our tanks ... they are learning."

4th Panzer had to pause for two days to regroup and repair the damage. It moved forward on 11 October, through mud and cratered roads, stringing the division out for 15 miles, when Katukov's ochre-­colored tanks attacked the division's flanks, shattering 4th Panzer. "The Russian tanks are so agile, at close range they will climb a slope or cross a piece of swamp faster than you can traverse the turret. And through the noise and the vibration you keep hearing the clang of shot against armor. When they hit one of our Panzers there is so often a deep long explosion, a roar as the fuel bums, a roar too loud, thank God, to let us hear the cries of the crew..."

The Panzers could be beaten. Katukov received the Order of Lenin, was promoted major general, and his brigade renamed 1st Guards Tank Brigade, the first tank outfit to receive that designation.

But Soviet valor wasn't enough. The Germans kept advancing, their armor slowly pushing through liquid mire of the roads. Days became short as winter approached, hampering the Luftwaffe. German panzer crews had no winter kit or glycerine for anti-freeze, so they had to light fires under their laagered tanks to keep the engines warm.

Logically, the Soviets hit the Germans by night, with T-34s in hit-and­run raids, slicing through the Nazis. The only thing that could stop them was the mighty 88mm anti-aircraft gun, already being used as an anti-tank weapon in North Africa.

When Gen. Georgy K. Zhukov launched the massive Moscow counter-blow on 6 December, 1941, his 17 armies included 15 rifle divisions from Siberia, and eight tank brigades. Zhukov's order said, "Pursuit must be at a high speed and the enemy not allowed to break contact. Widespread use must be made of strong leading detachments for seizure of road junctions and bottlenecks, and for disorganizing enemy march and combat formations. I categorically forbid frontal attacks against enemy-fortified points. Forward echelons should bypass these without delay, and leave them to the following echelons."

Zhukov's orders were obeyed. T-34s led the assault against German infantrymen in the snow, hurling the Nazis 45 miles back away from Moscow. Army Group Center nearly disintegrated, as its panzer divisions could not cope with the T-34. The offensive ran out of steam when the Russians overran their supply lines, and ran out of both T-34s and trained crews. But Moscow was saved, and perhaps the war.

Now the Germans struggled to come up with an answer to the T-34. On Adolf Hitler's birthday, 20 April, 1942, they unveiled the Mark VI tank, which had 100mm of armor on its turret front, and packed an 88mm gun. This vehicle was named Tiger I. But despite its punch and name, it was too slow - 12 mph -and used too much gas. Tigers were prone to breakdown, and a broken Tiger needed another Tiger to haul it off the battlefield.

The Germans tried another design, the famed Mark V Panther, a 45-­ton tank with 120mm armor, and a 75mm gun, with a powerweight ratio of 15 horsepower to the ton. But it wouldn't be ready until 1943. Until then, upgraded Mark IV tanks would have to do.

T-34 Improvements

The Soviets were not idle, either. In 1942, Soviet factories spewed out 5,000 T-34s, but it was clear the machine had defects.

First to be remedied was the turret, which was expanded to three men, so the commander didn't have to fire the gun. That gun was upgraded to an 85mm weapon, which fired a 21.5 lb. shot at a muzzle velocity of 2,600 feet per second. The Tiger's 22.25 88mm shot flew at 2,657 feet per second, while the Panther's 75mm weighed in at 15 lb. and 3.068 feet per second.

The T-34's weight rose to 32 tons, and its effective range fell from 280 miles to about 190.

In 1943, Russian factories turned out 10,000 tanks, 6,000 of them T­34/76s. In 1944, the Soviets produced 12,000 tanks, 65 percent of them T-34/85s. The Germans turned out 1,780 Panthers in 1943, 3,740 in 1944, and about 1,350 Tigers from August 1942 to August 1944. In both numbers and efficiency, the Soviets had overtaken the Germans.

Meanwhile, the war went on. The Soviets had about 20 tank brigades of T-34s by the beginning of May. Brigades were too small for much beyond raiding and infantry support, and the Soviet armored corps structure was not yet in place. Even so, Stalin wanted action.

He got it in the Barvenkovo Salient near Kharkov, where Marshal Timoshenko hurled 14 tank brigades against General Friedrich Paulus's 6th Army. The attack went well until the Germans showed their mastery of mobile warfare in a stunning counterattack by Marshal Ewald von Kleist's two panzer divisions, which cut off the advancing Soviets, and encircled them piecemeal. There weren't enough T-34s to do the job. The 14 brigades were wiped out, and 250,000 Soviets went in the bag.

With the Kharkov gap opened, the Germans raced southward, lunging for Stalingrad and the Caucasus oilfields. The Soviets counterattacked desperately, and T-34s burned in charges against German 88s. The centerpoint of the campaign became an industrial city on the Volga, and the battle of Stalingrad had begun, a nightmare struggle between infantrymen amid a blasted city, no place for armor.

The Stalingrad campaign was a triumph for Soviet planning and offensive skill, and marked the debut of the tank corps, a powerful mass of 300 T-34s in three brigades, backed by a brigade of motorized infantry. They swept through weak Rumanian and Italian infantry to surround the German 6" Army in Stalingrad, and stood off German counterattacks led by packets of new Panther and Tiger tanks. 6" Army collapsed and surrendered.

But after the battle, Erich von Manstein's armor bogged down further Russian advances, stopping the Soviets in a bulge west of Kursk. In this bulge was the elite of the Soviet armor.

Kursk

German Chief of Staff Kurt Zeitzler had a new plan, to eliminate the bulge (and Soviet armor) with a massive pincer attack. For weeks the Germans argued amongst themselves on how to launch the attack. When it went in on 5 July, it was late, and the Soviets (warned by good intelligence) were ready.

Defending was Marshal Georgy Zhukov and 3,600 tanks, giving the Soviets a favorable ratio of 1.3 to 1. Zhukov also had 20,000 guns, 2,400 aircraft, and 1.3 million men. But the Germans were committing the new and powerful Tiger and Panther tanks, massive tank destroyers with 200mm an-nor, and using new tactics.

When the Germans jumped off, they ran into a wall of well-concealed anti-tank defenses. The Central front alone had 3,000 miles of trenches and 400,000 mines. The Germans made slow progress. After five days, the northern drive petered out. But the southern drive, with 700 tanks in nine panzer divisions, including three SS outfits, made deep holes. After five days of fighting, the Germans started pushing on the small town of Prokhorovka. The 5th Guards Tank Army was sent in to meet the Germans.

The Guards moved 150 miles in 48 hours and reached Prokhorovka in the nick of time, and hurled 850 tanks and self-propelled guns against the Germans, in the largest tank battle the world had yet seen.

At 8:30 am on 12 July, Gen. Nikolai Rotmistrov gave the codeword "Steel" to his 5' Guards Tank Army, and his T-34s raced from their hiding places into the advancing Germans. Two vast armored forces slammed into a head-on collision amid a three-square mile patch of cornfields and villages. Tanks battled at point-blank range. When Soviet tankers ran out of ammo, they rammed the Tigers and Panthers. At close ranges, the T34/76s could punch holes in Panthers and Tigers. The battle raged on for eight hours, with both sides reinforcing. It went on into the night, illuminated by the fires of burned-out tanks, until both sides withdrew, the Germans for good.

More than 300 German tanks had been destroyed, 10,000 tankers killed. SS Totenkopf Division was out of the game, half its tanks wrecked. 3rd Panzer Division had only 30 tanks left, 19th Panzer only 17. The next day, Hitler called off the Kursk offensive, as the Western Allies had invaded Sicily. The German war in the east was now purely defensive.

That day, as the Germans fell back, Zhukov went to visit Rotmistrov. The two walked out onto the plain, amid a gentle summer rain, past corpses and wrecked, blackened vehicles. Zhukov, visibly moved, removed his cap, and stood, for some moments, in thought.

The Kursk failure showed the superiority of the T-34/85 and its crews. By August the Germans could only muster 2,500 tanks against 8,200 on the Soviet side. The Nazis planned a timely retreat.

Instead, the Soviets opened Operation RUMYANTSEV on 3 August, hurling T-34s into the Ukraine. Within hours a 30-mile deep hole was ripped out of German lines. By Aug. 5', Belgorod was liberated. Two weeks later, Kharkov. By October, the Germans were pressed to the Dnepr. On November 6th, Kiev was liberated.

Even so, the Soviets had a hard time keeping up with losses. As late as December 1943, German troops near Zhitomir captured Soviet tank crews who had had little or no training. One tank commander told his captors he had been a factory worker only a month before. Stalin had sent a proclamation to that factory, calling for anyone capable of driving a tank to join the Red Army immediately.

As 1944 broke out, the Soviets delivered a converging pincerblow on the Korsun Pocket, to trap 1st Panzer and 8th Armies. Rotmistrov's 5th Guards Tank Army, re-equipped after Kursk, led this assault. His job: cut off the German retreat from the pocket.

5th Guards' T-34s advanced in waves crushing supply wagons and guns beneath their trucks as they literally drove over retreating Germans. Another assault slammed into the SS Wallonia Brigade and Viking Divisions. A Soviet major described it.

"It was about six o'clock in the morning. Our tanks and our cavalry suddenly appeared and rushed straight into the thick of the columns ... the Germans ran in all directions. And for the next four hours, our tanks raced up and down the plain crushing them by the hundreds. It was the kind of carnage that nothing could stop until it was all over. In a small area, over 20,000 Germans were killed. I had been in Stalingrad, but never had I seen such concentrated slaughter."

The victor in the piece was clearly the T-34. Only the T-34, with its broad tracks and hefty design, could move effectively through winter snow, spring swamp, and summer dust.

The Soviets brought in new tactics, massing formations 200 or 300 tanks on a front of one mile in three waves. Once the lead tanks had torn open the hole, T-34s would roar through to make the way clear for the next force. The tactics depended on mass, and were costly. The Germans adapted with panzerjager teams, ambushes, and more Panther and Tiger tanks. The Germans produced 8,400 tanks in 1944 and 1945, 3,965 of them Panthers, 623 Tiger Is and 377 Tiger Ils.

But the Soviets pushed out more than 20,000 tanks of their own per year, half of them T-34/85s, outnumbering the Germans in quality and quantity.

On March 5, the T-34s attacked again to Rumania, crossing the Dniester and Prut rivers. Gen. Hasso Von Manteuftel, commanding the Gross Deutschland Division, watched the Soviets advance, impressed with both the Russian numbers and tactical skill.

The next Soviet offensive was staggering, Operation BAGRATION in Belorussia and Eastern Poland. T-34s drove from Smolensk to Warsaw, 450 miles in three weeks, destroying Army Group Center and its 25 divisions. The wheel had turned full circle. The Third Reich had less than a year to live.

The T-34 was the perfect tank for the Soviet Union - rugged, dependable, simple. It had to be as it was driven by peasants and collective farm workers who had never driven a vehicle in their lives, unlike American and British youths. Soviet soldiers had to learn to drive from square one.

Not only did the T-34 provide the Soviets with the punch and firepower to defeat the vaunted Panzers, but it gave the Soviet troops confidence. When all seemed lost, the T-34 delivered a punch that knocked the Germans back on their heels. If the German blitzkrieg seemed like a spreading cancer, the T-34 was the simple and brilliant cure that destroyed the invasion. For the Soviet war effort, the T-34 was the remedy.