Stand-off distance works great against spin stabilized HEAT rounds, since the jet disperses before it has a chance to penetrate the armor. Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck grenades probably would have benefited from the stand-off distance. However they also used different types of fuzes. While the Panzerschreck warhead had a nose fuze with striker like a tank shell, the Panzerfaust had a bottom fuze that probably worked with inertia. Since these screens were most likely intended to protect against infantry carried HEAT rounds, they probably disrupted the fuzing mechanism in some form. The wire mesh probably bends under imapct, thereby potentially deflecting the Panzerfaust shell without fuzing it. Or making it tumble so that the fuze wouldn't function on impact.
Thank you. Interesting to hear about the British/American turretheads having difficulty with screens hitting Bailey Bridge panels. We trained at SME, Linton, NZ during our Corps training in 1984, building and dismantling both the Extra Widened Bailey Bridge (EWBB) and the Medium Girder Bridge (MGB), an aluminium-alloy box-section bridge that superseded the Bailey Bridge for assault purposes. The EWBB has wider transoms, wider decking and longer-turnbuckle-braces but is otherwise identical to the Standard Bailey Bridge (SBB).
Scale model companies often try to give their kits snappy names. Sometimes these marketing decisions live a life of their own.
9 หลายเดือนก่อน +3
Thank you for the extra Info on some of the additional armor solutions in WW2. I was just recently asked by a viewer if stuff like sandbags worked. All in all an intersting topic that reappears a few times in Tank history
I read a Canadian report that said sandbags plus metal screens worked. The report author wondered if either sandbags or metal screens on their own would work, but this was not tested.
9 หลายเดือนก่อน +1
@TankArchives the chieftain has talked about american fields Tests in 1944 which showed sandbags and simlar fiel modifications didn't Really work and "only" increases weight and negative affected mobility. But I don't know where he has got that info from.
@ I want to say the Chieftain uses mainly data from testing at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, from the US Army archives, but he sometimes branches out from it.
Greetings Peter, first of all, great job at informing the public about soviet tanks without bias. I have one question: is it true that soviets counted tank losses vastly different than germans? I heard that the first counted tanks a loss when it was needed to send back for repairing, and germans counted a loss when their tanks were completely destroyed and unable to be repaired.
I wish I knew more about Soviet APCR during the war, it seems fascinating but I’ve hardly seen anything about the subject, any chance you might talk about it sometime? Thanks for another informative video.
It's a quite interesting story, I translated some stuff on it many years ago. That's a good idea for a video someday for sure. www.tankarchives.ca/2013/05/45-mm-apcr.html www.tankarchives.ca/2013/11/45-mm-apcr-part-2.html www.tankarchives.ca/2016/07/45-mm-apcr.html
@@TankArchives Anything about 57 mm or 85 mm APCR? I've often heard about how big a real it was yet I can't really find anything super detailed about it.
@@901Sherman 57 mm APCR comes up a lot in diagrams and manuals. I haven't read much about 85 mm APCR, I can only recall one mention in a memoir off the top of my head.
@@TankArchives Thanks for the response, Peter. I first read about 85 mm APCR/HVAP in a few books about the T-34/85 and Panther and how it gave the former at least a chance of penetrating the latter's tough front hull. It also comes up in the story of Alexander Oskin, who knocked out 3 King Tigers which just his one T-34/85. Apparently, he and his crew mistook the new heavy tanks for 'Panthers' and despite facing their flanks, made sure to let loose the APCR first, which seems to hint that these rounds were saved just for these kinds of threats (IIRC, a single tank would have like 5-7 of these things and the rest standard AP).
I've never seen such a figure given. Rolled armour (welded or stamped) was 45 mm thick, cast armour was nominally 52 mm thick to provide the same degree of protection.
Something I've been curious of: you've posted of a Valentine armorer that fixed the hull and you've posted similar modifications at the armorer level for other LL tanks, but almost none for T-34. Were they just less strict about LL tanks? Was repairing a T-34 to send back out just that uncommon? Also, the forged Ural turret for the 75mm gun is famous, but I'm unaware of any forged T-34-85 turret. It was well known that forging did increase the toughness and hardness of the armor compared to the normal standard casting (and I think the Ural turrets were slightly thicker regardless). Was the casting and carbeurizing process just considered good enough to replace forging? Why don't we see forged 85mm turrets?
You can get away with anything you want as long as no one notices ;) It is much more likely that a superior officer would notice an unauthorized mod on a common tank like the T-34 than an uncommon one like the Valentine. As for different types of turrets, each factory adapted their process to fit the tools they had available, that is why each factory's T-34 is slightly different.
This is one of those ones where I can see the logic, but still feel that the higher-ups in the USSR didn't think it through very well. Heavier armour on the front wouldn't have been a panacea, but even 60mm sloped at 60 degrees would have made the T-34 a lot more resistant to the most common battlefield threats all the way until the end of the war. There was a strange emphasis on 'if it's not perfect, then we don't want it' which only extended to this one thing - they were happy to tinker with lots of other things (especially if the changes made the tank quicker and cheaper to produce).
Sounds like something they did with the T-43, which was meant to be the replacement medium tank for the T-34. Of course, these plans didn't come into fruition because, as you may have expected, the additional frontal armor protection (not sure about the exact numbers but it was most likely 70-75 mm) severely hampered the mobility without providing good enough protection against the standard 88mm guns let alone long barreled 75 mm and 88 mm guns. Providing at least decent enough protection would've put these kinds of AFVs into the heavy range, which the Soviets already had in the form of ISs and ISUs Apparently, I've read in When Titans Clash that German anti armor firepower actually degraded in a way. Since they weren't able to equip all their anti tank battalions with standard 75mm PAK 40s, the older 50 mm PAK 38s and sometimes even more antiquated or captured guns were very often retained and in this, the T-34s could still be well protected against.
@@tedarcher9120 Yup, but I suspect that the development only got finalized because the war was over and by definition there were no new German guns to obsessively try to protect the whole vehicle against.
@@sangomasmith 10 years later a T-54 would drive into the british embassy in budapest and brits spilled their tea because it's armor was too thick for the Centurion's gun at the time (and no doubt the 90mm american guns), spurring the development of L7. So soviets were right on the money in that respect.
How much technical information (if any) is available about the T34-M? Not the T34M 85 but the original replacement for the T34-76 which was cancelled at the outbreak of WW2
Quite a lot. This article has some blueprints of the tank that would have entered production in the fall: www.tankarchives.ca/2020/05/pre-war-potential.html
-- Thank you, Peter. I just want to through, yet another important subject, that you touched briefly, but maybe it deserve more in depth look... i.e. T-34 weld seems before and after Eugene's Patton automatic flux submerged welding. There are a numerous pictures of earlier models of T-34 hull falls apart, before the lightest of all models turret becomes "airborne"... Maybe look at some other contemporary tanks of the time, what did they had for welds(if not rivets), whatcha think? How about late German heavy tank welding struggles towards the end of the war....
There were detailed penetration tests done of hulls and turrets found to be defective and rejected by QA before the war. Existing cracks in the welds would widen as a result of heavy attack. New cracks would form, but this was rare. www.tankarchives.ca/2020/06/waste-not-want-not.html If there is an internal explosion like an ammunition rack detonation, whether or not the hull cracks is largely immaterial since the tank would be a total loss anyway.
At least for me, pretty interesting is upper side hull armour of T-34. According some sourcer, T-34 (with 76,2 mm gun) had 40 mm upper side hull plate instead 45 mm upper side hull in T-34-85. But at least for me, even many T-34 (T-34-76) utilises 45 mm upper side hull armour. As example, according British data this T-34 which was send to Great Britain, had 45 mm upper side hull armour.
I have a feeling that production was simplified to reduce the different thicknesses of plates required to build the tank and this was only officially approved with the T-34-85. The T-34 grew from less than 27 tons to more than 30 from 1941 to 1943 and we can't just blame the new turret for that.
Why did they not try to protect t-34 front against the most common 75mm aphe shells? Increasing the front to 60mm and reducing hardness to 300brh would make it basically invulnerable to German paks
Increasing the front plate to 65 mm, I believe, was Stalin's suggestion. And yes, I'm with you, 65 mm would offer very good protection (nearly invulnerable, in fact) against 75 mm Pak40 APCBCHE rounds, by far the most common anti-tank gun the T-34/85 would face (its 90 mm turret was already pretty well protected against those, when the effects of rounding were factored in). All I can suggest is that the Soviets, having been burned once by designing armor just good enough to resist current guns but not future guns in 1943, didn't want to be burned again. As it turned out, there were no masses of new German AFV sporting 75 mm Kwk42 or 88 mm Kwk43 guns after 1944, the Pak40 remained the most common anti-tank gun the T-34/85 would have to face for the remainder of the war. I do believe that thickening the front plate to 65 mm would have saved a lot of Soviet tankers. I've seen a cite claiming a large percentage of T-34/85 tanks were lost to 'one-shot' kills in 1945; this is probably not due to any tank quality or design issues but to the fact that the reduction of frontage on the Eastern front, which allowed for more defense in depth, coupled with the more built-up terrain created more lethal close-range ambush opportunities. Having armor that might deflect a hit at 100 meters which the 45 mm armor wouldn't, might have allowed the stricken tank to shoot back or scoot back and survive. Soviet 400+ Brn armor made in the summer of 1944 was actually quite good. If you've gotten Peter's book on the IS-2, you'd see that they calculated that 100 mm of high-hardness armor sloped at 18 degrees to vertical would resist the Kwk43 88 mm rounds past 1500 m. Moreover, they did tests against such high hardness plate involving repeated hits from the Kwk43 gun, and this plate held up well without cracking or spalling. Medium hardness armor provided much less protection.
The addition of 15 mm applique plate in early 1942 was supposed to be temporary and quickly replaced with monolithic 60 mm plate. However, it turned out that actually manufacturing and cutting plate of this thickness was going to be very difficult, so the project was cancelled entirely. It's possible that the scales could have tipped the other way if the Red Army knew that high velocity 75 mm guns were going to be common by that time next year, but they did not know this at the time.
@@stewartmillen7708 On the contrary, there weren't really enough 75mm PAK 40s to go around and they often had to make due with older models or captured guns, which the T-34s armor could still protect against. Admittedly, very few media actually portrays this and instead, PAK 40s are shown in abundance (Steel Division 2 is the exception).
@@901Sherman Ok, on that point, I admit you're correct. David Glantz mentioned this, in fact, that there weren't enough Pak40s in German infantry divisions, that the bulk of their weapons were 37 mm and 50 mm were really inadequate to penetrate the T-34/85's frontal armor. This left unsupported German infantry divisions weak against Soviet tank attacks. But my point remains that of the lethal weapons potentially confronting the T-34, the Pak40 remained at the top of the 'most likely to face' by a large margin. Even following Stalin's suggestion and uparmoring the front plate to 65 mm would have rendered the Pak40 nearly useless save maybe at near point-blank range, while allowing such "T-34/85Ms" to maintain their original bottom armor thickness (useful against mines). Any needed weight savings could have come from shaving thickness off the rear plate. As it was, mounting the tracks on the front did add about 20-30 mm of effective armor (after considerations for doubled plates, with any slope effects negated by overmatching). If you assume the T-34's front plate to have a multiplier of 1.25 (high-hardness rolled plate) it results in a resistance of about 98 mm of vertical plate to capped, 75 mms round that "normalizes" the slope from 60 degrees down to 55 degrees. Adding tracks would make that from 118 mm - 128 mm, which would mean that the areas on the T-34's hull covered by tracks should be impervious to at least medium-range Pak40 rounds.
@@stewartmillen7708 True, but even with the reduction in other parts of the armor, there's still the question on how much it'll affect the overall mobility (both strategic and tactical) and reliability of the tank. Keep in mind that the Red Army by that point was almost entirely on the offensive, with operations across vast distances in various parts of the Eastern Front (Belorussia, the Baltics, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, etc.). I recall the Soviets taking concerns of the effect of increased weight very seriously much like the Americans and their Shermans. Besides, given the combat ranges on the Eastern Front (with few urban combat exceptions), the actual protection provided by the 45 mm armor seemed good enough as long as the tankers remembered to remain out of perforation range (which given what I've read about an engagement between T-34s and Panzer III/IVs at Stalingrad, they were already aware of). IMO, the issue is that we're getting into theory vs practice and alternate history/'what if' scenarios here. Even if the Soviets uparmored the tanks as you suggested and that they did work against Pak 40s, the Germans aren't gonna just stay put and take it. They already responded quiet quickly when the shock of the 'unstoppable' T-34s hit the first time with regards to antiarmor and tank firepower upgrades. If anything, these uparmored tanks would just give them even more of an incentive to bust out more powerful guns and better ammunition, in spite of the obvious strain on the war economy and industry that would cause (the standard 75 mm guns being good enough is most likely why this was never really attempted). And the Soviets have already reached the upper limit of medium tank armor protection with the T-43 (without reaching IS/ISU levels of armor of course). So while it would've been a big help at first, more armor wouldn't do much in the long run.
I kinda doubt that the 50mm Pzgr. 40 would be able to penetrate a T-34s front armor from any reasonable distance. The only time the APCR rounds had any real purpose was when trying to penetrate thick vertical armor plates. Against a T-34, APCR was practically pointless unless it was the 37mm which would struggle to penetrate a 45mm plate with regular AP unless the impact was near vertical. But the lower the caliber the lower the effective range of the APCR round.
Western allies came to the conclusion that in order to neutralize the jet you needed at least 75cm distance between the screen and the main armor. The Soviet mesh screens were close enough to the tank to have the exact opposite effect; giving the warhead a better arming distance. Why you claim that the panzerfaust's charge somehow did not benefit from standoff distance and where exactly you read such a thing I don't know, but then again I am dealing with TankieArchives here, the same buffoon that claims 122mm HE could crack a Tiger II's armor apart. The only way the Soviet mesh screens could protect against shaped charges was by causing a charge with a bad fuse to softly bounce off the screen instead of hitting the hard armor and guaranteeing ignition.
Yes, I am sure that an internet expert can make a better judgement than contemporary specialists actually analyzing battlefield damage. You are more than welcome to actually read the article I linked where I discuss the tests by Western specialists at great length, but of course it is much easier to sling insults in the comments.
Stand-off distance works great against spin stabilized HEAT rounds, since the jet disperses before it has a chance to penetrate the armor.
Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck grenades probably would have benefited from the stand-off distance.
However they also used different types of fuzes.
While the Panzerschreck warhead had a nose fuze with striker like a tank shell, the Panzerfaust had a bottom fuze that probably worked with inertia.
Since these screens were most likely intended to protect against infantry carried HEAT rounds, they probably disrupted the fuzing mechanism in some form.
The wire mesh probably bends under imapct, thereby potentially deflecting the Panzerfaust shell without fuzing it.
Or making it tumble so that the fuze wouldn't function on impact.
Thank you. Interesting to hear about the British/American turretheads having difficulty with screens hitting Bailey Bridge panels. We trained at SME, Linton, NZ during our Corps training in 1984, building and dismantling both the Extra Widened Bailey Bridge (EWBB) and the Medium Girder Bridge (MGB), an aluminium-alloy box-section bridge that superseded the Bailey Bridge for assault purposes. The EWBB has wider transoms, wider decking and longer-turnbuckle-braces but is otherwise identical to the Standard Bailey Bridge (SBB).
Like I've said many of times, brilliant video; well done!
"Bedspring armor is the wrong term"---- looking at you Dragon Models T34-85 in my shelf :D
Scale model companies often try to give their kits snappy names. Sometimes these marketing decisions live a life of their own.
Thank you for the extra Info on some of the additional armor solutions in WW2. I was just recently asked by a viewer if stuff like sandbags worked. All in all an intersting topic that reappears a few times in Tank history
I read a Canadian report that said sandbags plus metal screens worked. The report author wondered if either sandbags or metal screens on their own would work, but this was not tested.
@TankArchives the chieftain has talked about american fields Tests in 1944 which showed sandbags and simlar fiel modifications didn't Really work and "only" increases weight and negative affected mobility. But I don't know where he has got that info from.
@ I want to say the Chieftain uses mainly data from testing at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, from the US Army archives, but he sometimes branches out from it.
Greetings Peter, first of all, great job at informing the public about soviet tanks without bias. I have one question: is it true that soviets counted tank losses vastly different than germans? I heard that the first counted tanks a loss when it was needed to send back for repairing, and germans counted a loss when their tanks were completely destroyed and unable to be repaired.
Yes, I have a video about this with MHV: th-cam.com/video/ff0vHoEikq0/w-d-xo.html
I wish I knew more about Soviet APCR during the war, it seems fascinating but I’ve hardly seen anything about the subject, any chance you might talk about it sometime? Thanks for another informative video.
It's a quite interesting story, I translated some stuff on it many years ago. That's a good idea for a video someday for sure.
www.tankarchives.ca/2013/05/45-mm-apcr.html
www.tankarchives.ca/2013/11/45-mm-apcr-part-2.html
www.tankarchives.ca/2016/07/45-mm-apcr.html
@@TankArchives Anything about 57 mm or 85 mm APCR? I've often heard about how big a real it was yet I can't really find anything super detailed about it.
@@901Sherman 57 mm APCR comes up a lot in diagrams and manuals. I haven't read much about 85 mm APCR, I can only recall one mention in a memoir off the top of my head.
@@TankArchives Thanks for the response, Peter. I first read about 85 mm APCR/HVAP in a few books about the T-34/85 and Panther and how it gave the former at least a chance of penetrating the latter's tough front hull. It also comes up in the story of Alexander Oskin, who knocked out 3 King Tigers which just his one T-34/85. Apparently, he and his crew mistook the new heavy tanks for 'Panthers' and despite facing their flanks, made sure to let loose the APCR first, which seems to hint that these rounds were saved just for these kinds of threats (IIRC, a single tank would have like 5-7 of these things and the rest standard AP).
Have you any data regarding the thickness of the stamped,Uralmash turret for the model 1943? There are sources that say 60 mm thick.
Thanks.
I've never seen such a figure given. Rolled armour (welded or stamped) was 45 mm thick, cast armour was nominally 52 mm thick to provide the same degree of protection.
@TankArchives Ok thanks👍
Something I've been curious of: you've posted of a Valentine armorer that fixed the hull and you've posted similar modifications at the armorer level for other LL tanks, but almost none for T-34. Were they just less strict about LL tanks? Was repairing a T-34 to send back out just that uncommon?
Also, the forged Ural turret for the 75mm gun is famous, but I'm unaware of any forged T-34-85 turret. It was well known that forging did increase the toughness and hardness of the armor compared to the normal standard casting (and I think the Ural turrets were slightly thicker regardless). Was the casting and carbeurizing process just considered good enough to replace forging? Why don't we see forged 85mm turrets?
You can get away with anything you want as long as no one notices ;) It is much more likely that a superior officer would notice an unauthorized mod on a common tank like the T-34 than an uncommon one like the Valentine.
As for different types of turrets, each factory adapted their process to fit the tools they had available, that is why each factory's T-34 is slightly different.
V 😊
This is one of those ones where I can see the logic, but still feel that the higher-ups in the USSR didn't think it through very well. Heavier armour on the front wouldn't have been a panacea, but even 60mm sloped at 60 degrees would have made the T-34 a lot more resistant to the most common battlefield threats all the way until the end of the war.
There was a strange emphasis on 'if it's not perfect, then we don't want it' which only extended to this one thing - they were happy to tinker with lots of other things (especially if the changes made the tank quicker and cheaper to produce).
Sounds like something they did with the T-43, which was meant to be the replacement medium tank for the T-34. Of course, these plans didn't come into fruition because, as you may have expected, the additional frontal armor protection (not sure about the exact numbers but it was most likely 70-75 mm) severely hampered the mobility without providing good enough protection against the standard 88mm guns let alone long barreled 75 mm and 88 mm guns. Providing at least decent enough protection would've put these kinds of AFVs into the heavy range, which the Soviets already had in the form of ISs and ISUs
Apparently, I've read in When Titans Clash that German anti armor firepower actually degraded in a way. Since they weren't able to equip all their anti tank battalions with standard 75mm PAK 40s, the older 50 mm PAK 38s and sometimes even more antiquated or captured guns were very often retained and in this, the T-34s could still be well protected against.
Well they did develop t-54 in 1945 which was protected against all German anti-tank guns
@@tedarcher9120 Yup, but I suspect that the development only got finalized because the war was over and by definition there were no new German guns to obsessively try to protect the whole vehicle against.
@@sangomasmith 10 years later a T-54 would drive into the british embassy in budapest and brits spilled their tea because it's armor was too thick for the Centurion's gun at the time (and no doubt the 90mm american guns), spurring the development of L7. So soviets were right on the money in that respect.
But why? The 7.5 kwk 40 could not pierce either the T-34 or the M4 frontal upper hull armor at 500 meters
How much technical information (if any) is available about the T34-M? Not the T34M 85 but the original replacement for the T34-76 which was cancelled at the outbreak of WW2
Quite a lot. This article has some blueprints of the tank that would have entered production in the fall: www.tankarchives.ca/2020/05/pre-war-potential.html
@@TankArchives excellent! 👍
Excellent video!
-- Thank you, Peter. I just want to through, yet another important subject, that you touched briefly, but maybe it deserve more in depth look... i.e. T-34 weld seems before and after Eugene's Patton automatic flux submerged welding. There are a numerous pictures of earlier models of T-34 hull falls apart, before the lightest of all models turret becomes "airborne"... Maybe look at some other contemporary tanks of the time, what did they had for welds(if not rivets), whatcha think? How about late German heavy tank welding struggles towards the end of the war....
There were detailed penetration tests done of hulls and turrets found to be defective and rejected by QA before the war. Existing cracks in the welds would widen as a result of heavy attack. New cracks would form, but this was rare.
www.tankarchives.ca/2020/06/waste-not-want-not.html
If there is an internal explosion like an ammunition rack detonation, whether or not the hull cracks is largely immaterial since the tank would be a total loss anyway.
At least for me, pretty interesting is upper side hull armour of T-34. According some sourcer, T-34 (with 76,2 mm gun) had 40 mm upper side hull plate instead 45 mm upper side hull in T-34-85. But at least for me, even many T-34 (T-34-76) utilises 45 mm upper side hull armour. As example, according British data this T-34 which was send to Great Britain, had 45 mm upper side hull armour.
I have a feeling that production was simplified to reduce the different thicknesses of plates required to build the tank and this was only officially approved with the T-34-85. The T-34 grew from less than 27 tons to more than 30 from 1941 to 1943 and we can't just blame the new turret for that.
Why did they not try to protect t-34 front against the most common 75mm aphe shells? Increasing the front to 60mm and reducing hardness to 300brh would make it basically invulnerable to German paks
Increasing the front plate to 65 mm, I believe, was Stalin's suggestion. And yes, I'm with you, 65 mm would offer very good protection (nearly invulnerable, in fact) against 75 mm Pak40 APCBCHE rounds, by far the most common anti-tank gun the T-34/85 would face (its 90 mm turret was already pretty well protected against those, when the effects of rounding were factored in). All I can suggest is that the Soviets, having been burned once by designing armor just good enough to resist current guns but not future guns in 1943, didn't want to be burned again. As it turned out, there were no masses of new German AFV sporting 75 mm Kwk42 or 88 mm Kwk43 guns after 1944, the Pak40 remained the most common anti-tank gun the T-34/85 would have to face for the remainder of the war.
I do believe that thickening the front plate to 65 mm would have saved a lot of Soviet tankers. I've seen a cite claiming a large percentage of T-34/85 tanks were lost to 'one-shot' kills in 1945; this is probably not due to any tank quality or design issues but to the fact that the reduction of frontage on the Eastern front, which allowed for more defense in depth, coupled with the more built-up terrain created more lethal close-range ambush opportunities. Having armor that might deflect a hit at 100 meters which the 45 mm armor wouldn't, might have allowed the stricken tank to shoot back or scoot back and survive.
Soviet 400+ Brn armor made in the summer of 1944 was actually quite good. If you've gotten Peter's book on the IS-2, you'd see that they calculated that 100 mm of high-hardness armor sloped at 18 degrees to vertical would resist the Kwk43 88 mm rounds past 1500 m. Moreover, they did tests against such high hardness plate involving repeated hits from the Kwk43 gun, and this plate held up well without cracking or spalling. Medium hardness armor provided much less protection.
The addition of 15 mm applique plate in early 1942 was supposed to be temporary and quickly replaced with monolithic 60 mm plate. However, it turned out that actually manufacturing and cutting plate of this thickness was going to be very difficult, so the project was cancelled entirely. It's possible that the scales could have tipped the other way if the Red Army knew that high velocity 75 mm guns were going to be common by that time next year, but they did not know this at the time.
@@stewartmillen7708 On the contrary, there weren't really enough 75mm PAK 40s to go around and they often had to make due with older models or captured guns, which the T-34s armor could still protect against. Admittedly, very few media actually portrays this and instead, PAK 40s are shown in abundance (Steel Division 2 is the exception).
@@901Sherman Ok, on that point, I admit you're correct. David Glantz mentioned this, in fact, that there weren't enough Pak40s in German infantry divisions, that the bulk of their weapons were 37 mm and 50 mm were really inadequate to penetrate the T-34/85's frontal armor. This left unsupported German infantry divisions weak against Soviet tank attacks.
But my point remains that of the lethal weapons potentially confronting the T-34, the Pak40 remained at the top of the 'most likely to face' by a large margin. Even following Stalin's suggestion and uparmoring the front plate to 65 mm would have rendered the Pak40 nearly useless save maybe at near point-blank range, while allowing such "T-34/85Ms" to maintain their original bottom armor thickness (useful against mines). Any needed weight savings could have come from shaving thickness off the rear plate.
As it was, mounting the tracks on the front did add about 20-30 mm of effective armor (after considerations for doubled plates, with any slope effects negated by overmatching). If you assume the T-34's front plate to have a multiplier of 1.25 (high-hardness rolled plate) it results in a resistance of about 98 mm of vertical plate to capped, 75 mms round that "normalizes" the slope from 60 degrees down to 55 degrees. Adding tracks would make that from 118 mm - 128 mm, which would mean that the areas on the T-34's hull covered by tracks should be impervious to at least medium-range Pak40 rounds.
@@stewartmillen7708 True, but even with the reduction in other parts of the armor, there's still the question on how much it'll affect the overall mobility (both strategic and tactical) and reliability of the tank. Keep in mind that the Red Army by that point was almost entirely on the offensive, with operations across vast distances in various parts of the Eastern Front (Belorussia, the Baltics, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, etc.). I recall the Soviets taking concerns of the effect of increased weight very seriously much like the Americans and their Shermans. Besides, given the combat ranges on the Eastern Front (with few urban combat exceptions), the actual protection provided by the 45 mm armor seemed good enough as long as the tankers remembered to remain out of perforation range (which given what I've read about an engagement between T-34s and Panzer III/IVs at Stalingrad, they were already aware of).
IMO, the issue is that we're getting into theory vs practice and alternate history/'what if' scenarios here. Even if the Soviets uparmored the tanks as you suggested and that they did work against Pak 40s, the Germans aren't gonna just stay put and take it. They already responded quiet quickly when the shock of the 'unstoppable' T-34s hit the first time with regards to antiarmor and tank firepower upgrades. If anything, these uparmored tanks would just give them even more of an incentive to bust out more powerful guns and better ammunition, in spite of the obvious strain on the war economy and industry that would cause (the standard 75 mm guns being good enough is most likely why this was never really attempted). And the Soviets have already reached the upper limit of medium tank armor protection with the T-43 (without reaching IS/ISU levels of armor of course). So while it would've been a big help at first, more armor wouldn't do much in the long run.
I kinda doubt that the 50mm Pzgr. 40 would be able to penetrate a T-34s front armor from any reasonable distance.
The only time the APCR rounds had any real purpose was when trying to penetrate thick vertical armor plates.
Against a T-34, APCR was practically pointless unless it was the 37mm which would struggle to penetrate a 45mm plate with regular AP unless the impact was near vertical.
But the lower the caliber the lower the effective range of the APCR round.
Soviet tank design was determined by Russia's rail guage
No. That was Great Britain.
@@AKUJIVALDOboth.
USSR and now Russian Federation still affected by this in many ways
It was then Stalin took his Godly hand, and squished the T-34 flat and said "Now comrades, we got new tank" and the T-44 was born.
Western allies came to the conclusion that in order to neutralize the jet you needed at least 75cm distance between the screen and the main armor. The Soviet mesh screens were close enough to the tank to have the exact opposite effect; giving the warhead a better arming distance. Why you claim that the panzerfaust's charge somehow did not benefit from standoff distance and where exactly you read such a thing I don't know, but then again I am dealing with TankieArchives here, the same buffoon that claims 122mm HE could crack a Tiger II's armor apart.
The only way the Soviet mesh screens could protect against shaped charges was by causing a charge with a bad fuse to softly bounce off the screen instead of hitting the hard armor and guaranteeing ignition.
Yes, I am sure that an internet expert can make a better judgement than contemporary specialists actually analyzing battlefield damage.
You are more than welcome to actually read the article I linked where I discuss the tests by Western specialists at great length, but of course it is much easier to sling insults in the comments.