T34: The Queen of Tanks Decisive Weapons

Dawn, July 12th 1943.

Near Kursk, on the Russian Steppes, 500 Soviet tanks prepared to charge their German enemies.

The T-34 tank is about to change the course of history.

The Red Army's T-34 was a war winner.

It represents for the Russians achievement, sacrifice, heroism, diligence -

all the qualities which they called forth from themselves in order to win this war.

For four years, Hitler's panzers have reigned supreme on the battlefields of Europe.

But in the T-34, they meet their match.

They just rolled over us. I thought it was the end of my life.

The Soviet Union had fought its way back from the brink of extinction.

At Kursk, it would turn the tide of war in the east.

This is the story of the tank that led the fightback.

IN RUSSIAN:

In the summer of 1941,

Western Europe lay at the feet of Hitler's all-conquering armies.

Poland, Belgium, Holland, France: all humbled in lightning campaigns.

The lexicon of war had a new word - blitzkrieg.

Blitzkrieg combined planes, artillery and infantry.

Central to the strategy were tanks:

the German panzers.

Blitzkrieg worked as the term itself expresses -

lightning war, war at high speed.

The tank provided both firepower and mobility.

That combination was crucial.

The panzer corps attacked in huge numbers on narrow fronts.

The massive panzer onslaughts gave rise to a new phenomenon -

tank terror.

Panzers were invincible and unstoppable.

Europe was theirs.

Henry Mettelman was a young panzer driver in occupied France.

It became a kind of habit to believe it almost.

Where Germans attack, they succeed.

In one of the speeches Hitler said,

"Wo der Deutsches Soldat seinen fuss hinsetzt, da geht keine andere hin."

Where the German soldier puts his foot down, no other can go there.

In spring 1941, Germany aimed its panzers at the biggest target yet - the Soviet Union.

It was to be Hitler's biggest prize.

The Red Army was the world's largest force - two million men.

But the Army, like the country, was dominated by Joseph Stalin.

Throughout the '30s, he had purged the Red Army of its best generals

and signed a peace pact with Hitler.

In 1941, Stalin dismissed warnings that Hitler planned to invade.

Stalin's policy in a nutshell was this -

to postpone the possibility or the prospect of war as long as possible.

He refused to institute mobilisation, even when the evidence of the Germans' imminent attack was there.

And so on June 22nd 1941, Operation Barbarossa began.

Hitler's largest blitzkrieg met an unprepared Red Army.

The plan was simple - to reach Moscow in six weeks and destroy the Communist state.

The panzers went on their crusade.

The Nazis, they had the ability to bring some holiness into it all.

That we are fighting a holy war

and it is the duty of us to defend Europe against threat.

I, personally...I did believe it!

To my shame, I honestly believed that not only were we the greatest nation on earth, the Herrenrasse,

but it was also our God-given duty to defend Europe against the threat.

The surprise was total.

The Soviet forces were overwhelmed.

Hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers died or were taken captive.

It was a catastrophe for the Red Army.

There wasn't enough of anything - no adequate trained reserves, no tanks, NO tanks,

no ammunition, no artillery, no air cover, no manpower.

It is a gigantic story of deficit.

-MORSE CODE BLEEPS

-It seemed nothing could halt the panzers' drive on Moscow.

But unknown to German intelligence,

a secretly developed weapon was about to make its entrance.

The T-34 tank.

For the first time, it was German soldiers experiencing tank terror.

The first sighting was 17 days after the start of Barbarossa,

when a single T-34 appeared

and began attacking a German armoured column

and before it was through, it cut a nine-mile swath of destruction,

before, finally, the Germans got a 100mm gun behind it and destroyed it.

But it destroyed roughly 40 armoured vehicles.

I pulled up with my tank next to it

and I looked at the T-34 and I looked at my...

what you'd call a cigarette box as compared,

and I thought, "If I have to confront that tank,

"I haven't got a chance!"

Russian engineers had worked in secrecy on the T-34 for six years.

The Germans were caught unawares.

Wartime T-34s can be seen in a tank park outside Moscow,

where they were first tested.

This is what gave the Germans such a fright in July 1941.

This particular model is a 1943, 76mm gun-armed, early variant.

It was this tank's predecessor that met the Germans on the battlefield.

What surprised the German gunners is the shells they were using -

the standard 37mm and 50mm shells - would bounce off this tank's armour.

There's a heavily sloped arrangement of armour on the hull and turret.

The tank was built like that in front.

If you hit it like that,

your shooting just went off.

You had no chance to penetrate it.

The T-34's sloping armour was revolutionary, but that wasn't all.

Russian designers had scoured the globe for the best ideas -

the speed and mobility of American tank design, ironically dismissed by the US military as too eccentric.

The great thing about the tracks on the T-34 was their sheer width.

For a tank weighing 34 tons, it had very wide tracks, with waffle plates

which allowed the tank to traverse over snow and soft ground

that German tanks would sink into.

The T-34's mobility and armour made it a rapier even for novice drivers.

Alexandr Fadin was 17 when he drove his first T-34.

IN RUSSIAN:

The T-34 had a 76mm gun -

in 1941, by far the biggest gun mounted on a tank.

IN RUSSIAN:

Spent shell cases drop into the back of the turret and fall to the floor.

So shells fall about inside the tank while your other hand tries to bring in new shells.

Tank to tank, the T-34 could crush the panzer.

But in 1941, the Soviet Union had fewer than 1,000 frontline T-34s.

All were committed to a desperate fight for the Soviet capital.

As winter fell in 1941, the German advance on Moscow had been halted.

The long war began. Tank factories and workshops were the battleground.

The German army in 1941 not only caught the Russians unawares,

but made inroads into the industrial heartland of western Russia.

The only alternative was to move all these factories.

It was the largest ever industrial migration - over a thousand factories bodily uprooted,

put onto railway trucks and sent into the eastern hinterland.

Faced with certain destruction, tank factories moved to a new base hidden behind the Ural mountains.

The giant tank factory, Chelyabinsk, came to be called Tankograd -

the tank-building city.

It was more - several cities in fact.

Here in Tankograd, the Soviets set out to rebuild their tank army from scratch,

drawing on their largest single resource.

'Throughout the USSR, thousands of meetings were held at the outset of the war,

'to call upon every woman to make herself available for war.

'Thousands of Soviet women stand steadfast at the front.

'Defence is not enough.

'Hit back - that's the answer.'

Ekatarina Petlyuk was one of the first women to train in the T-34.

IN RUSSIAN:

There were altogether some 800,000 women serving in operational combat roles in the Red Army.

Women in the tank forces were as important as they were in the artillery regiments.

They had an important part to play.

They were not there simply for show or for propaganda purposes.

They were there to fight.

Berte Mendeleeva was an instructor

in one of the tank schools that had sprung up to mould the new army.

It was in the heart of Tankograd.

IN RUSSIAN:

The school had no textbooks.

What it has was an endless supply of men and women...and T-34s.

A new Red Tank Army was taking shape.

They'd see their tanks being built through the whole production process.

As the tanks were being built, they were given tactical training. It was on-the-job training with the tank.

So as the tank rolled forward on flat cars to the battlefront,

trained crews went with them.

Throughout 1942, T-34s poured out of Tankograd

and were sent straight to the front line.

Inside Tankograd, life had only one purpose -

to turn out more tanks.

IN RUSSIAN:

'Here, in the calm and quiet, sleeps young Ivan,

'while his mother works as a welder in the hubbub of a tank factory.'

Women and children on starvation rations slaved to turn out T-34s.

Most Russians realised if they didn't work, they would die.

They would die in a horrible way -

under German occupation or maybe even under Soviet coercion.

So it was work or die.

Meeting production targets became more than a duty: it became a way of life.

High producers became Soviet heroes.

The effort was gruelling,

but it worked.

In Tankograd, T-34 production times had been slashed in half.

IN RUSSIAN:

Ever more T-34s rolled off the assembly line -

15,000 in 1943 alone.

German soldiers in the front line realised what they were up against.

We always had been told the Russians are no good.

They are not great fighters. Their weaponry is not as good as ours.

We are technologically the superior nation.

In many ways, that was true.

But like the T-34 and other weapons, they were the weapons of simplicity.

You just could use a tank for what you wanted to use it for -

not for beautiful manoeuvres.

In that, they were superbly effective.

The troops, when they were visited by the technical representatives,

urged the German technical community and the German staff

to get a hold of a captured T-34,

copy it, and produce it as quickly as they could.

However, that was far from what happened.

The German technical community was too arrogant to believe

that these Russians had produced a tank SO advanced

that there was no need to carry the technology any further.

Just duplicate and produce the tank.

Instead, the Germans designed a series of complex, sophisticated and difficult-to-produce tanks.

The new generation of German tanks were designed to counter the T-34.

Hitler himself demanded ever larger and heavier designs,

culminating in the 55-ton Tiger...

nearly twice the weight of the T-34.

The Tiger was the tank Hitler believed would smash the Red Army

and break the deadlock in the east.

But the fine engineering required by the new tank,

slowed down overall tank output.

Germany fell behind in the numbers game.

In 1943, it produced 6,000 tanks.

Hitler was eager to get them into battle.

A bulge in the front line around the town of Kursk

was targeted for a fresh blitzkrieg.

The 250-mile Kursk salient was the stage for a titanic confrontation -

as much between two production philosophies as between two armies.

The Battle of Kursk, in early July 1943,

was the largest armoured engagement in World War II,

indeed, perhaps the largest armoured engagement ever.

For the first time, the Red Army had a prepared strategic defensive,

which meant building up the largest strategic reserve ever in World War II on the eastern front,

mobilising their armour, building up massive defensive lines and waiting for the German assault.

IN RUSSIAN:

This was a different Red Army from 1941.

They understood the enemy. They were ready and trained.

The T-34 was the weapon they needed.

Stalin committed over 3,500 tanks to the front line.

IN RUSSIAN:

The Russians set huge, massive and deep mine fields

and prepared what amounted to a killing zone

for the Germans to go through.

The Germans, on the other hand, had massed much of their best armour -

about 2,500 tanks - into this salient,

and prepared to just burst through as they had on many occasions before.

The uneasy peace around Kursk was broken at dawn on the 5th July 1943.

A rain of high explosives announced the blitzkrieg.

But from the outset it was clear -

the Soviet defences were formidable.

The Russians had put up barbed-wire barriers, rolls of barbed wire.

Somehow my tank caught some of them,

and I shouted back to my commandant that I could not steer any more.

We had equipment, tools, on the tank and he said,

"Stay here and jump out and we'll stay in position."

They were in the turret and still shooting.

I went underneath and I saw Russian tanks moving around from where I was.

That sound was a horrible sound.

There was a T-34 something like 50 yards away.

There was a feeling in me...

It can blow up any time! And it did.

And I felt the heat of the flame of my tank

and that, too, is a horrible feeling.

You look at it and try to get away from the flame because it's so hot.

You realise your mates are in there and you realise they haven't got a chance in hell to get out of that.

They are your good friends.

For seven days, the Germans pounded the Russian lines.

Hitler had over 2,000 tanks there.

Eventually, the panzers breached Russian defences near Prokhorovka.

It was a highly critical situation

because the Germans had in fact succeeded in making a breakthrough and Prokhorovka was vital.

So what the Russians had to do at all costs was to stop a breakthrough.

How they stopped it was by throwing in a tank army.

The Red Army now had more tanks than the Germans.

The T-34s rolled forward to confront the mighty Tigers.

Hopelessly outgunned by the Tigers,

the T-34s had no choice but to charge.

To penetrate the Tigers' armour, T-34s had to get in close.

It was a lethal battle. Yet it wasn't only unusual in the scale,

but also the ferocity of fighting.

The tanks charged at one another

and fought at point-blank range.

The idea of taking prisoners was absurd.

It was a fight to the death.

The battle raged for 12 hours.

Over 700 German and Russian tanks

lay smouldering over an eight-mile front.

Hitler's last blitzkrieg was smashed by the T-34.

The result was simple.

After Kursk, in 1943, the German army was condemned to retreat.

The German army never advanced again in the east.

Within weeks of the Battle of Kursk,

a Soviet counteroffensive began.

T-34s spearheaded the attacks that retook Russian cities one by one.

Now, Russian guns fired in celebration.

IN RUSSIAN:

For two years, the T-34s harried the retreating Germans.

On April 30th 1945, Adolf Hitler heard the T-34s roll into Berlin.

Hours later, he took his own life.

For the Russians, the T-34 was a war-winning weapon.

It was superb in battle but it represents much more.

It represents the fact that they won a stupendous victory over fascism.

That it was so well handled by their troops, is a source of pride in the capability of their Army.

The fact that it was there, in so many thousands and thousands,

is a tribute to the diligence,

to the devotion, to the patriotism, to the self-sacrifice,

not only of the soldiers, but of the population as a whole.

It represents triumph in enormous adversity -

adversity we've never even imagined.

Subtitles by Marie Campbell BBC Scotland - 1996

THEY SING IN RUSSIAN